SOHRAB AND RUSTUM - (M ARNOLD)

"...But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved
Rejoicing, through the hus'd Chorasmian waste,
Under the solitary moon - he flow'd
Right for the Polar Star, past Orgunje
Brimming and bright, and large; then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles -
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,
A foil'd circuitous wanderer - til at last
The long'd for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea"

"The poet or his reader, dreaming of the river that breaks at last into the free ocean, sees in this image his own life and death... in accordance with a deep organic need for release from conflict."

'Archetypal patterns in poetry'. M Bodkin

Naturally, literature is best when you can psychoanalyse it to some extent.

SPRING

... feels like it already sprung. Winter came and went last week. As I recollect, it lasted for one day. Last night I walked along the canal/river (it's actually both, they run parallel) in the dark (it was about 6.30) and put my hand up in the air to try to figure out how cold or how warm it was. There was a breeze - there usually is next to water - but it was a mild breeze. It felt mild to my ungloved hand because the air wasn't cold relative to my body temperature. And yet - it's fricking January!!!! When I was kid (there's a phrase if ever there was to give away one's age and latent conservative tendencies) every January involved prolonged snow, wellies, gloves, hats, bundling into the house and parking oneself inches away from the fire, etc etc.

This morning, as I arrived at school, the kids were in the playground at 8.20 and some of them had abandoned their blazers and were wearing just a shirt!!!! As it dawned on me that kids were playing out at 8.20 on a January morning in just their shirts, I realised once again that we are in very big trouble indeed regarding the climate.

PICNIC / AWFUL / PURPLE

Occasionally, with the lower-ability lower-school kids, I think of random words and get them to write sentences containing those words. They seem to enjoy doing it and there's no forward planning required. A dreamy, terminally disorganised boy who always swings on his chair so much that he falls over backwards (he also has an exasperated father - at parents' evening "I don't know what to do with this boy!") spontaneously composed the following, for picnic/awful/purple:

On a beautiful day watching the purpley orange sunset at an awful picnic, a man said "as long as we're family all we need is each other".

I think there must be an element of repeating things they hear at home.

OWL JOHNSON

This WarnerBros cartoon about a straight-laced Germanic family of owls and its jazz-loving offspring is very charming indeed.

MISUNDERSTANDING STUFF

Until about six months ago, I would blithely refer to a lacklustre person/event as "a damp squid". Someone pointed out my error, but 'squid' seemed more logical. I had thought the idiom meant a squid that had been out of water and which was no longer tough/muscular/supple, but which was beginning to dehydrate, wither and wilt - like a neglected houseplant. It seemed particularly reasonable given that a squib is a chink of light, and light is 'dry'.

Just marking a paper and a student had written of a character "[he's] like a gardening angel". Now, I can only begin to guess at the logic behind this. I'll have to ask him. Presumably he envisages a host of angels tending a heavenly garden.

44%

This is the national average proportion of 16 year olds who pass 5 GCSEs at grade c or above, including English and Maths. So the inevitable headlines in August, screaming about the 'dumbing down' of exams and record pass rates, are misleading. Still, 44% is pretty staggering. Are we a nation of idiots? How difficult is it really? (not very, surely). What is wrong with people, with parents, with schoolchildren, with teachers, with schools? It's such a low pass rate. Are people really as dumb as the statistic suggests? So it would seem, but you have to wonder......

COUNTERINTUITIVE

"contrary to what intuition or common sense would indicate..."

Mute speechmaker
Backwards-looking mystic
Dying healer.

A shepherd
Who follows his sheep.

A watching, painted clown
Holds his sides laughing
At what he sees.

Siren, siren, siren,
Dashing only herself
On such impassive rocks.

R D LAING - KNOTS

Only two days back at work and already there are several urgent deadlines. Hence, I'm spending a lot of time looking out of the window at the birdfeeder and generally pissing around. But R D Laing is rewarding my efforts at displacement activities. 'Knots' is about behaviour, which I'm incurably curious about. Here are two knots. They are convoluted and dense; the paperback is about 100 pages. I'll have to get round to buying it sometime.

There is something I don't know
that I am supposed to know.
I don't know what it is I don't know
and yet am supposed to know,
and I feel I look stupid
if I seem both not to know it
and not know what it is I don't know.
Therefore I pretend I know it.
This is nerve-racking
since I don't know what I must pretend to know.
Therefore I pretend to know everything.

I feel you know what I am supposed to know
but you can't tell me what it is
because you don't know that I don't know what it is.

You may know what I don't know, but not
that I don't know it,
and I can't tell you. So you will have to tell me everything.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I know you believe you understand what you think I said,
but I'm not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.

and so on.

SEPTUAGENARIAN

Check out Septuagenarian's blog over on the 'links' column, even if it is a bit gloomy this week with the death of one of his mates. He's taken a fantastic digial photo of a Christmas decoration. Septuagenarian is something like cult reading. He's a parody even of himself, with his incessant grumbling about 'lax Brittanicans', 'terminal economic and social decline', etc. etc. He's a man who takes earplugs to his social club on New Year's Eve. He has such a problem with women he can't even bring himself to spell the word correctly (unless, which seems unlikely, he's a right-on PC exponent attempting to rid the word of its androcentric component by masking the word 'men'). He's so full of contradictions - not least, continually berating all and sundry for their lazy work ethic while himself taking early retirement back in his 50s and steadfastly resisting any work since - not even voluntary work which he thinks is for 'do gooders' and hypocrite busybodies. It amazes me that he will criticise everyone, indiscriminately, for laziness in spite of avoiding work for, what, a good twenty years? At least he's honest, I suppose.

SCHOOL

NEW YEAR

And while it's still new, and happy, before anything goes wrong or we have to go back to work, here's a beautiful Bright Eyes song to try to start the year on a positive note. Bright Eyes = Conor Oberst. This YouTube video is of people listening to the song. It's undeniably lovely.