‘You don’t look sixty-two, sir,’ said a sixth year student.
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘you are very kind to say so.’
There was a temptation to ask what he thought a sixty-two year old might look like.
Being older than the parents of most of the staff and being the age of the grandparents of many of the students, I am aware that I am in a land unimaginable to the teenagers I try to teach.
Last year was much easier. Last year, I could walk to school, and if …
Charles Dickens has become a daily companion. There are free unabridged readings of his works on YouTube. A voluntary group called Librivox have uploaded a selection of work which now fills my many hours of journeying. The voice of reader Mil Nicholson endows with life the characters drawn by Dickens. The forty mile journey from Athboy back to Dublin at the end of each school day has become a time passed in a profitable way.
There is not a single Dickens character whose vocabulary I do not envy, even the …
It is forty-one years today since he died – a Sunday in December 1981.
The telephone rang in Somerset. ‘Ian, my Dad died last night’.
‘Would you like me to come over?’
It was too late in the day to begin to travel to Scotland for a ferry to Larne. The alternative was an overnight journey, via Dublin.
The man in the ticket office looked at me with suspicion. A ticket to Ireland from Taunton had to be hand written. He took out the fares book to find the fare …
The history textbook is called Artefact, it is an attractive and imaginative presentation of history.
I once once called an ‘artefact.’ It was the humanities teachers’ Christmas dinner and the conversation had turned to television. ‘I remember Channel 5 starting,’ said one of the younger members of the department.
‘I remember Channel 4 starting,’ commented a teacher who was a smidgen older than the first.
I lent back in my chair and admitted that I remembered BBC 2 going on air.
‘You are an historical artefact, sir,’ said one of …
Until I saw today’s Google Doodle, marking the 82nd anniversary of Jerry Lawson, the electronic games pioneer, I had always been convinced that I had been born far too early to ever be adept at electronic games. Now, I realize that it is not a question of age but ineptness.
My first encounter with such games was the game where you played table tennis with two controllers connected to your television, which you could obtain cheap with vouchers from Corn Flakes boxes it came out when I was at school. …
In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila, the Reverend John Ames comes into the kitchen in the early morning and talks with Lila, his young wife who is expecting their child.
…“And how are you two this morning?”
She said, “I guess this child of yours don’t want me to sleep. Maybe he don’t like my dreams or something.”
He helped her with her chair. “You’re having bad dreams? Here, I’ll get the coffee.” He poured her a cup. “Do you want to tell me about them?”
“They’re just dreams. You must
