International – Page 5 – For the fainthearted . . .

The six degrees stuff

Sitting on the top deck of the No 40 bus from Ballyfermot to the city centre, there was time to conemplate the diversity of people and languages among the fellow travellers. It is very different from the times when all the travellers on a particular route would probably have been known to each other.

It is said there are only six degrees of separation between any two people in the world. It sounds a dubious claim, to imagine any connection with those on the bus was difficult enough, without imagining …

He fell out the window

‘Russian oil chief Maganov dies in ‘fall from hospital window” says the BBC headline. If one was writing a political thriller, the critics would dismiss the line as silly, as absurd, as carrying the plot into the realms of implausibility.

Russia has become a place where satire is no longer funny because it has become reality. The satirical television programmes of the 1980s would have best been able to capture the mood of the current kleptocracy. Perhaps a Spitting Image dummy could be revived, one that contrives mysterious ends for …

Talking badly and speaking well

On reflection, it was not the best of interviews. I fear I over-egged the cake. Talking about my experience teaching students with additional educational needs, I talked about oracy, oral literacy. I even got in a point about there being no written examinations before 1792.

The interview panel looked bemused.

‘Oracy’ was a word new to me during teacher training, the verbal equivalent of literacy, oracy is defined as ‘the ability to express oneself fluently and grammatically in speech’.”

Early in my teaching career I realised that oracy and literacy …

Hippy towns

Visiting Glastonbury, there was a memory of visiting the Canadian town that was its counterpart, Nelson, British Columbia. It was in 2008 that I was there.

“Where are you from?” I had asked the man in the record shop.

“New York”, he said.

“You don’t sound it.”

“I came here when I was eighteen. I’ve been here forty years.”

“You came here in 1968”.

“Yeah”, he said, “to avoid the draft”.

“Nelson or Vietnam? I think you made the right choice. But why did you come to Nelson?”

“Because pacifists …

Going shopping?

Passing through Long Sutton, I noticed that the shop that was once the Co-op had gone. Perhaps the surprise is that it endured for so long.

It was the shop at which my grandmother did her weekly shopping from the farm telephone. Making a list through the week, she would phone the Co-op with her list of requirements and the Co-op van would deliver her groceries to her door (online shopping would have been no novelty to her).

For us, trips to towns with high streets and department stores were …

F. Ledwidge remembered

31st July 1917, the horrific and futile slaughter of the Great War claimed the lives of two poets.

The graves of poet soldiers Francis Ledwidge and Hedd Wynn lie close to each other in Artillery Wood Cemetery outside of Ypres. It is a strangely attractive place to visit, an opportunity to read poetry rather than accounts of battle. There is a sharp contrast between the gentleness of their craft and the brutality of their adopted trade – and neither need have been in the trenches, Ledwidge coming from a country …