STUFF

Overheard a small boy in a shop (he'd have been about six), using emotional blackmail on his mother: "Mum! Mum! (very excited) I've wanted this all my life. I've wanted one of these since I was born!" (She didn't buy it.)

Old lady in a shop said irritably to her friend, for effect and to show off: "Oh! I wish I could remember what I've read!".

Saw a wonderful film, Le Gout des Autres. Tremendous. Nicely understated - didn't hammer the point home like the usual American rubbish. A middle aged businessman (he had an awful wife) without too much in the way of accomplishments / awareness of liberal intelligentsia, falls for a language teacher and actress. We spend parts of the film feeling a bit sad for the way her circle think he's a buffoon. With thirty minutes to go, something had to happen. Kept waiting for her to thaw out and stop being a snotty Parisian ice queen. She did eventually. Usual French features of snobbery, existential crises, interpersonal dynamics. Several spoilers here but what the hey, a great film.

Embarrassment in the classroom:

Boy (to me): Can I take my blazer off, miss?
Me: Yes, it's a hot day and this room is stuffy.
Boy 2: I thought he said "Can I have a blow job, miss?"
Much mirth, a couple of people quite embarrassed.
Me: (several minutes later), "Okay, it was funny five minutes ago but I don't expect you all to be still laughing about it now".
Class immediately stop chuckling and get on, obviously relieved that they don't need to continue finding it funny.

Just watched the European championship semi-final. Interesting thought: where a penalty is awarded unfairly, the penalty is saved in 70% of cases.

NOT MAKING SENSE

There are a few things about the job market and economy in this country that I just don't understand. Take, for example, the recent closure of the Peugot plant in Coventry. There is now, surely, very little manufacturing left - first shipyards/shipbuilding collapsed in the north-west, followed by coal, steel, now car maunfacturing. Yet there is such talk of economic growth and a buoyant economy, which I don't see any evidence of at all. Unless you include Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, etc, working in Costa Coffee and other shops. Can the UK manage its collective £trillion debt on the back of the retail sector alone? Not everyone works in a call centre or Tescos, and many who do are from Eastern Europe. Can consumer spending really sustain the economy for much longer, or will it collapse in about 18 months time? Most probably, house prices will save the day (again).

LINDA SMITH (RIP):

"If God wanted us to believe in him, he'd exist."

SCHOOLS AND TEACHING

I'm sick of this course and haven't enjoyed it since before Christmas. Constantly encountering the following spin and dross makes me feel miserable.

All pupils have special needs!
They are all different
They each have their own strengths and weaknesses
They all possess, in varying needs, a number of intelligences which need to be engaged in order to learn
One of these intelligences is emotional intelligence - maybe most apparent in the pastoral system of the school

yeah, yeah, yeah.
a. These platitudes are obvious
b. They quickly go out of the window when you are trying to control 30 teenagers, mark coursework, complete an abundance of paperwork and chase up late homework, students who don't attend detentions and 1,001 other small matters.

At first, this gumpf amused me but now it is depressing. Amazingly, there are those who seem to take it seriously. Of course, when you're doing the job, it seems to be more a matter of making it through each day. On the training, we are constantly confronted with exactly this kind of psychobabble which is at once hopelessly vague and also obvious (so much so that it is, in the end, meaningless).

SO OBVIOUS, and yet...

It seems to me that moods are like seasons. Maybe seasons are moods, in some sense. September would be nostalgia; April trepidation; December a relaxed kind of apathy. If you are in a state of happy, uplifted optimism, it’s very difficult to recall precisely what it means to be depressed. If you are in April, it’s a challenge to enter into the particular atmosphere of October. All you can do is recall the time(s) when you were last there. The bolder impressions may be close to the surface but the fleeting nuances and hazy ambience are ephemeral and therefore harder to recapture. It all fades to memory. Although recollections may feel vivid, they are not the same as being in it.

BLOG CARTOON

(Speech bubble) "I'm just updating my blog": (Computer screen) "Me Me Me Me Me Me Me"

So says the cartoon in Private Eye. In the pub last night, an anti-blog person suggested all blogs are examples of self-absorbed tedium. 'Solipsistic', I believe he said. Er, yes - of course that's true. How can you write about anything at all unless you've seen, heard, conversed, thought about it?

There is no more egocentric form of writing in my opinion than the majority of newspaper columnists. Bloggers don't even begin to compete with the likes of Euan Ferguson writing 1,000 words on the highs and lows of using cufflinks, and Barbara Ellen informing us of how she'll watch the Oscars at home in her living room wearing a dressing gown. Julie Burchill and Alexander Chanceller seem to be the only columnists who are consistently outward looking and intelligent (although Julie is occasionally ridiculous).

So, blogging is okay, just so long as noone pretends it's art. If everyone bears in mind that it's nothing more than a free outlet for people to write shite, what could be wrong with that? Having the ego to do it for a living and charge people for it is much, much worse.

RUSSIA

Saw a documentary a few nights ago about the inexorable decline of Russia. It was very well put-together and presented by Louis Theroux's more attractive, Russian-speaking brother, Marcel. Hard to believe that this huge, formerly great nation is now in such a terrible mess. The programme contained no great revelations: since the collapse of the soviet bloc, when everyone was poor but provided for (and knew their place and purpose in life), the new world order has benefited a tiny minority and left the majority bereft, poverty-stricken and directionless. Although communism was flawed, it gave meaning of a sort to the lives of its citizens. Freedom, choice and independence are only meaninful against the background of imminent, or at least some fledgling signs of prosperity. For the majority of the now-declining population, the concept of prosperity or material comfort does not even exist in the imagination. There have never been any realisable, attainable models in evidence to aspire to - either before or after communism (oligarchs don't count). Add a massive AIDS crisis and institutional corruption for a truly bleak picture.

The programme interviewed a businessman - one of those types who did well by sweeping up land and assets after the fall of communism. He looked exactly like Harry Enfield got up as a dodgy Russian businessman. He was in the process of securing himself a municipal appointment, wanted to clear away local housing to create a hotel and golf course, and had made allies of the local administration. When the residents tried to protest about the proposed demolition of their homes, they were chased by armed guards. Their behaviour was in the process of being criminalised. All par for the course, apparently. Of course, I may have re-told the events slightly more crudely than they were presented in the show, but the patterns of corruption are predictably along exactly these lines. (Fact: there is no Russian word for 'business'.)

Alcoholism is becoming all-pervasive and life expectancy across the country seems to have declined by eight years in the last 15 years. Life expectancy for men is now in the mid-50s. The birth rate is half what it needs to be just to sustain the current population which will soon, if trends are to be believed, become ravaged by AIDS.

Also, along the border of one of the former-USSR countries (Krygstan, Kazakstan?), there is a community of Meshket Turks systematically persecuted, harrassed and discriminated against by Russians. It turns out that 30,000 Meshket Turks are to be accepted into Buaffalo, New York... which suggests a decidedly dodgy and politicised US immigration policy.

It is hard to foresee how Russia will emerge from this period. Its problems don't seem to have a profile or receive any attention here, although policy-makers in back offices must surely be giving the situation some urgent attention - not least because the country is so rich in oil and gas. Also, I can't help thinking about the presentation of society in the great 19th century novels - in Tolstoy and Turgenev and Gogol, where of course things were less than ideal but compared to now, no less so than anywhere else.
All those great novelists, scientists and composers! And now look...

If I were a Dead Russian Composer, I would be Dmitri Shostakovich! I am a shy, nervous, unassuming, fidgety, and stuttery little person who began composing the same year I started music lessons of any sort. I wrote the first of my fifteen symphonies at age 18, and my second opera, "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District," when I was only 26. Unfortunately, Stalin hated the opera, and put me on the Enemy Of The People List for life. I nevertheless kept composing the works I wanted to write in private; some of my vocal cycles and 15 string quartets mock the Soviet System in notes. And I somehow was NOT killed in the process! And Harry Potter(c) stole my glasses and broke them! Who would you be? Dead Russian Composer Personality Test