Breaking up for the holidays

Posted on 1st April 2021 by Ian

The Easter holidays began this afternoon, two weeks and a day to sleep and to think and to prepare for the new term.

In primary school days, Christmas and Easter holidays in primary school days would be two weeks and two days. It never occurred to ask, “why?”

Any holiday was, of course, welcome.  Boys have much more interesting things to do than sit in the classroom learning about ancient civilisations and practicing cursive handwriting. Yet the consistency with which the time off was two weeks and two days never prompted curiosity, that was the way it was and why would we wish to question it?

Years later, the answer is obvious, the two extra days arose from the fact that the respective holidays both included two bank holidays. At Christmas, there was Christmas Day and Boxing Day (in those distant times New Year’s Day had not been granted the status of a public holiday in England). At Easter, Good Friday and Easter Monday were bank holidays. There were two weeks of school holiday supplemented by two days of public holidays.  Had it been explained at the time, a schoolboy would have understood.

Other things caused perplexity at the time and did arouse the interest of generally disinterested boys.

We had two classes in our school, the infant class was for five to eight year olds and the junior class for those aged from nine to eleven. Except everyone knew that when we went to secondary school, we would be in the junior classes, so how could we be in the junior classes three years previously? It was a matter of discussion and one boy insisted that we must be infant juniors as long as we were in primary school.

There was sometimes oddly arbitrary behaviour.

Most boys supported a football club, although knowledge of the team was generally scant in times when coverage was limited. One boy had a large printed cardboard sheet. It had twenty-two slots below the headings for Divisions One and Two and twenty-four below those for Divisions Three and Four. It came with ninety-two cardboard tabs, each with the name of a football league club and one could move the tabs up and down the tables as the season progressed. For some odd reason, there was an animus towards Charlton Athletic and they were always put at the foot of Division Four, no matter how well they were playing.

Girls were a complete mystery. They might sit beside us in class, but once in the playground, a wide space was observed. Some were pretty, but it was not a thought one would admit to one’s classmates. To ask questions about girls was a complete taboo.

Looking back over five decades, it seems younger people are not only better informed, but are wiser about most things than were their grandparents. although perhaps boys still need to make progress.

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Contentment under the Eiffel Tower

Posted on 31st March 2021 by Ian

It is the anniversary of the opening of the Eiffel Tower. On time and under budget, the tower opened on 31st March 1889. Its presence once allowed me to eat one of the most contented lunches I ever enjoyed.

“Walk five minutes down a side street – the best places will always be found there.”

My son’s advice had been perfect. Walking away from the River Seine and towards the Champ de Mars, a boulangerie had been found.

Perhaps it was the wrong choice, it was packed, its handful of tables occupied by people eating their lunch. It was only possible to join the queue by standing with the door open. A group of young women, who had emerged from a nearby office, had arrived at the bakery before me. They placed their orders with quick efficiency and stepped back.

“Monsieur?” smiled the lady behind the counter. I asked for a ham and cheese sandwich – a half baguette filled with Emmental cheese and Parisian ham. Not sure what drinks might be available, Orangina seemed a safe choice. Even if there had been somewhere to sit, it was too good a day to be sat inside, “à emporter”, I added.

As the prices were rung up, I handed a €20 note in at the till. The sandwich was €3, the can of Orangina, €1.80.

Walking to the Parc du Champ-de-Mars, there was a plentiful choice of green wooden benches. Placing the can beside me, I opened the bag containing the baguette, took a bite, and looked up with a feeling of contentment. Had I chosen a different park, had I gone to a different bench, had I sat facing the other way, I might have missed it, looming above me was the Eiffel Tower.

It had been a perfect morning. A day free in Paris, I had found my way to the Musée Marmottan Monet and had spent as long as I wanted sat pondering the lines and colours of Claude Monet. Leaving the museum, there had been a temptation to return to the Metro station, instead I had walked.

A long avenue had brought me to the Trocadero, I had crossed the Seine at the Eiffel Tower, and sitting on that park bench, there seemed few more perfect places that one might be. Where could match sitting in the sunshine pondering one of the most iconic structures in the world?

Even the industrious ravens, applying their efforts to tearing open one of the transparent turquoise litter sacks that hung nearby, could not disrupt a sense of the tranquil.

Contentment can be like that, it creeps up on you unawares, there are suddenly moments when you think, “this is a good time and place.” A €4.80 lunch eaten on a park bench, contentment can even come cheaply.

Eiffel Tower

 

 

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Sunflowers

Posted on 30th March 2021 by Ian

It was on this day in 1987 that Vincent van Gogh’s painting Sunflowers was sold for $39 million. The price paid was treble the previous record price paid for a painting. The price it might reach today is unimaginable. Vincent would have been bemused at such prices.

van Gogh was one of those names learned at primary school that did not sound as a primary class usually read it. Our best efforts usually sounded like the English name “Gough”, we never quite mustered Dutch gutturals. It is odd that Vincent remains in the memories of those times, long after kings and queens and inventors and explorers and soldiers and missionaries have faded beyond recall, he remains fresh.

Perhaps it was the striking colours of his pictures that impressed his name on a young mind, wouldn’t Mr Shield, our art teacher  who came each Wednesday afternoon, have frowned if we had spread our sheet of paper with great strokes of vivid brightness? Perhaps it was the odd things Vincent painted. There were flowers we might have seen, and sunflowers the like of which we had never seen, and unexpected things. There was a picture of a kitchen chair; it would have been baffling to a country primary school mind why anyone would have painted a picture of a chair. The oddest picture was of a man with a bandage tied around his head; this was the artist after he had cut off his ear. Why would anyone cut off their ear and then paint themselves? It was too much to take in.

Once I travelled to Auvers-sur-Oise in search of Vincent. The village had provided subjects for a series of his paintings. Not desiring to see the room where Vincent fatally wounded himself, there was a walk through the village and out to the fields beyond. At the cemetery, the graves of Vincent and his brother Theo seem as sad as the days on which they were buried: Vincent van Gogh 1853-1890 and beside him Theodore van Gogh 1857-1891.

Once, I talked about Vincent to two primary-aged children. “Why did he cut off his ear?” they asked.

“Perhaps it was the pain he felt inside himself,” I had shrugged.

One had looked mystified, “the pain would have been much worse after he cut off his ear.” One could not argue with the relentless logic of children.

No words could ever have captured the sadness of such a life. Perhaps I should have told the two young parishioners to look at a sunflower and to try to sense how much it might have meant to someone like Vincent.

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On being a teenager

Posted on 29th March 2021 by Ian

Being sixty, I am so far removed from the realities of the lives of the students at school that they will sit and happily talk about what they think. They are very careful to try to project the right image, to try to create the impression that they are wise beyond their years, to show their friends how mature and sophisticated they are.

I would never presume to judge, I can recall pretending similar things when I was their age.

I remember spending Saturday afternoons in 1975-1976 sat in the corner of a cafe in Torquay.  How it made much money was a mystery, it was never full and seemed content to allow the three of us to sit for an hour at the corner table with our 5p cups of coffee.

There was a gaming machine next to the table, still referred to as a one-armed bandit in those days, and we would feed the odd 2p piece into it.  Our stay in the cafe must have brought the owner a grand total of 25p, before we wandered down into the town to look at records we couldn’t afford in W H Smith’s.

I was a rustic, but my two friends were from the Midlands, they came from big towns and knew far more of the world than I ever would.

By the summer of 1976, I was 15 going on 16 and wasn’t averse to the odd pint of beer.  Not really having acquired a taste for the bitter or the lager drunk by adults, I would drink a foul combination of lager and blackcurrant. It was a drink served in bars in the little town in Devon where we went for our holidays, it was a drink I had not seen before, and mercifully have not seen since.  By the time I was 18, I would drink real ale if I went to a pub, but if I went to a disco I would drink a concoction I somehow imagined made me look sophisticated, vodka and lime cordial.

Of course, like the teenagers to whom I now talk, we thought that all we did was the height of sophistication.  Sitting in cafes over cups of coffee, drinking polluted lager while the locals drank their flat pints of bitter, throwing back miniscule quantities of green-coloured liquid, this was us being cool, or trying to be.

I don’t know about the teenagers now, but we hadn’t a clue.

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The Jolly Jogger

Posted on 28th March 2021 by Ian

It was once commented to me that one never saw a happy jogger. At face value, the comment was easy to accept. How many times had I passed runners whose expression seemed, at best, a grimace and, at worst, an expression of severe pain? Why would anyone endure such discomfort with enthusiasm?

One of the few benefits of the Covid-19 lockdown has been that those working from home have had more time for exercise. Leaving the house at 6.15-6.30 to drive to school, the roads used to be mostly deserted, the only people around were those heading off for their day’s work. In recent months, however, more and more people have emerged from their houses to make the most of the early morning hours. They have been walking, cycling, exercising their dogs, and not a few have been running.

So it was that one morning last week, I passed a group of three men who were running along with enthusiasm, they seemed to be exchanging a story or a joke and laughing aloud at what had passed between them. It was a scene that would have confounded a suggestion that one never saw a happy jogger.

The men would probably have been surprised at my suggestion that their morning run might have been anything other than a happy time, they might reasonably have pointed to the scientific evidence that connected physical exercise with happiness.

Since the schools returned last September, the constant refrain in Personal, Social and Health Education lessons has been that exercise is important to good mental health. Children have been repeatedly urged to set aside their smart phones, to put down the consoles of their X-boxes and their Play Stations, to switch off the television box sets, and to go outside. Of course, most of those in most need of exercise still spend most of their spare time attached to electronic devices. One student insists that he cannot sleep without his smartphone.

To talk of endorphins and dopamine seems pointless, to talk of generating happiness seems to fall on deaf ears. There seems a process of natural selection taking place, those who take care of their physical health are those who enjoy good mental health and are those who are making most progress in their much disrupted education.

If students fail to achieve, there will be blame placed on the schools, but there need to be questions about attitudes to learning and attitudes to lifestyles. The jolly jogger points towards those who will succeed.

 

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