England – Page 6 – For the fainthearted . . .

Nostalgia is disappearing

If anything positive has come out of Covid, it is appreciation for the ordinary lives we led until last year. Nostalgia extends no further back than 2019, there is no longing for an imagined golden age of decades past

In the 1960s and 1970s, nostalgia was big. People would talk about how little they had when they were young and how well they had coped and how happy they all were in the 1930s and the 1940s. To have suggested that the times seemed anything other than miserable would have …

King John’s day

“Arrogant, greedy, ruthless and cowardly,” the depiction of Prince John in the Walt Disney cartoon version of Robin Hood expresses a sense of the person we met in the stories we read at primary school. Television dramas depicted John as a grasping self-centred man. His brother Richard was off fighting for the faith while John was at home being a villain.

King Richard was away at the Third Crusade. Richard, in the story we were told in our books, was a good and just man Richard was the Lionheart who …

Debarquement

A Langport man, born on 10th January 1925, he would be ninety-six years old if he were still alive.

On this day in 1944 he was nineteen years old. A member of the Fourth Battalion of the Royal Dragoon Guards, the tank in which he was a member of the crew was bound for Gold Beach on the Normandy coast as part of the Allied landings on D-Day.

Tank landing craft were precarious vessels, seaworthy for only the briefest of voyages. As the landing craft in which he was travelling …

Natural violence

Springwatch seems unhappy this year. The late spring inhibited the growth of oak trees, meaning the caterpillars that feed on the leaves did not appear, and there was a lack of food for the newly hatch blue tits. The attrition rate among the young has been 37%, although there was a confident assertion that the species had the capacity to recover.

The harsh reality of the natural world recalled a morning when I arrived back at the house to discover a young crow hopping along on the tarmac, seeking refuge. …

PowerPoint education

Sending a PowerPoint to a colleague who is covering a lesson, I wondered if I was contributing to a continuing decline in a capacity for learning.

What did we do in the past? What happened in medieval times? Particularly in universities, what happened in medieval times? In times when writing materials were expensive, (and students were presumably as penurious as they have been throughout history), people came to listen to lectures and to remember. Lecturer and student alike might be able to recall lengthy passages from the writings of the …

Trying to teach Shakespeare

A Year 10 English cover.

“Sir, you can’t teach us English. We’re doing Macbeth.”

“You’re right. I can’t teach you English. We’re going to look at the history of the Globe Theatre and of Shakespeare’s times instead.”

They enjoyed discussing the earthy realities of theatre life at the Globe, and were interested in the ideas that the Sixteenth Century journeys of discovery changed the way that people saw the world. They looked perplexed when I talked about the power of the church in Tudor times. They could not understand …