In Memoriam.

So there I was, in our small flat, having breakfast and trying to tune into the BBC world service. Eventually, between sips of tea, I was successful. Instead of the usual news programme, however, there was solemn music.
'Hello!' I thought, 'The Queen Mum's copped it!'
A couple of minutes later, the announcer came on air.
'Our normal schedule is suspended today,' he intoned, 'following the news of the tragic death of Her Highness, Princess Diana'.
My first reaction was one of complete surprise, accompanied by a couple of swear words, partly because I burnt my mouth while my jaw swung open. I turned on the TV and put on the godawful Euronews channel, which was showing continuing coverage of the events: The tunnel, the crashed car, Prince Charles arriving at a hospital, papparazzi.
I went into work, sorted out some papers in my office, then when the break bell rang I went to the canteen and mentioned that Diana was dead to some of the teachers.
'But she can't be!' said one.
'I saw it on the news, I'm afraid,' I said.
'No, but she can't. I'm using her for Practising the Present Perfect.'
In her hand there was a worksheet with a gapfill exercise, with sentences such as 'Diana has been a princess since 1981. She has been divorced for five years.'
'I think you'd better change that to practising the Past Simple.'
That's what I remember most of that day, anyway.
About a fortnight later, my wife and I went to the UK for a short holiday, and we went up to London and saw the vast stretch of (by now rotting) floral bouquets outside Buckingham Palace.

computers.

dancing dogs' arseholes. I've been trying to put the Ubuntu Operating System on my ageing laptop (a Dell inspiron 3500 with 256k and an external 40gb hard drive, since you ask) all evening, to no bloody avail. Sodding bollocks. I'll just have to clone a decent hard drive loaded with Windows XP off someone.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho...

...it's back to work we go. And so far, so discouraging. Paperwork. Updating forms, letters, handbooks, texts. Checking classrooms. Testing and enrolment. Inadequate pay. Corridors whose smell is transformed from industrial cleaning product to sweat, crisps, old biscuits and old footwear as putative students arrive to enrol.
And yet there are bright spots. In particular for me, My proposal for a paper to deliver at the English UK conference in November has been accepted, something I am both very glad about and rather nervous of doing. The topic is 'English Tenses and the Notion of Distance', and I'm afraid that I'm going to bollox it up big time. Then again, a little fear is always a useful thing. That's what I tell my students anyway, as they nervously anticipate what I'm about to do next...

Nuts!

The first batch of hazelnuts from the trees around our place.

A step, nothing but a step:
Yet all these footfalls
Help me climb the tallest peak.

Reading Festival, bottling and...

...the six hundredth posting!
It's the time of year when I wish a) I had the money and b) I was a bit younger - not much, just a bit - and I could go along to enjoy The Reading Festival. Well, I can get it on BBC3 and recreate the experience by pissing in my garden until it turns into a quagmire, pitching a tent in the middle, have bouncers posted at the gate to prevent me bringing any food in from outside, and have someone in the garden shed sel me overpriced and undercooked burgers and expensive piss-weak beer in a plastic glass, which I then drink until I keel over next to the bonfire I've made out of extremely toxic bits of plastic, and do that for three days, but, I dunno, it wouldn't be authentic enough.
One thing that would be missing is the opportunity to bottle a bad band. I read an amusing piece in the Guradian guide this weekend, and it brought to mind my first experience of it, appropriately at my very first Reading festival back in 1986. It was still very mind a metal festival then, and that year it was the first time it had been held after the Tory council had barred it for the previous couple of years. However, they only gave their permission for the thing to be held six weeks prior to the August bank holiday, and perforce the line up was not overly amazing. The sunday night headline were, for example, Hawkwind.
The weather was pretty crap, but it didn't matter; I had a wonderful three days, wandering round in a drunken daze, taking photos and pretending to get high. Inside the main arena, the Melody Maker tent was handing out free seven inch vinyls. This were instrumental in what was to come. Around about three in the afternoon, some really crap set came out. They weren't metal, or even rock n roll - perhaps more like twitch from side to side, making 'doo-wop' noises. Anyway, that's when I saw it: A glistening missile, very clearly full of piss, rise into the air, make a graceful arc, and splatter the lead singer. He stopped, horrified at what had besmeared him, but thengamely continued. And that's when the bottle barrage began. Bottle flew, mainly at the stage, some full, some empty, some gaining their target, others falling short. The ones that fell before their intended target were the problem, as those who were unwittingly splattered with the foul contents decided to lob other stuff back. Eventually, the audience were having a bottlefight with each other, when some clever soul decided that the seven inch vinyls were the perfect frisbee, which they were. First one, then another, then hundreds of the things were zooming round, and causing nasty cuts wherever they landed.
However, there are times I wish I could have seen some of the legendary bottlings: Meatloaf having his nose broken by a cider bottle full of piss: Bonnie Tyler screaming obscenities at the crowd after being poo-bombed; Courtney Love ripping out her tampon and flinging it enraged at the crowd.
You see, sitting in the garden just doesn't come near to being visceral enough.

God I'm tired. I've had an absolutely horrid night's sleep. I spent yesterday feeling knackered, and unfortunately for me (and anyone else trying to sleep in the vicinity) whenever I go to bed really worn out, I start snoring loudly, waking myself up. And so I spend another tired day, go to bed, start snoring, wake myself up, et cetera. And, of course, I'm in a terribly crabby mood, which helps no one. And, because I'm tired and crabby, I can't concentrate, meaning that I end up writing inconsequential entries such as these. Anyway, here's a couple of pics.

It's almost midnight: Sean has not long woken up, yet again, and is being suckled back to sleep by Nur, while Angus is hunkered beneath his duvet in a room that smells of fresh blue paint. I am sitting at the cheap old bureau that used to belong to mum and dad, wondering what to write, knowing that I have to write, impelled to drive my fingers thither and yon across the keyboard, all the while reflecting on the fractured four weeks I have had at home.
My holidays are almost invariably crap. I will except last year, which I spent reading books on the top floor balcony of a villa overlooking the Marmara, getting pissed on raki. It's generally just a bad combination of circumstances. This year, there has been the worrying lack of money to, er, worry about, as well as having little Sean to look after. I don't quite resent it, yet I feel as if I have done absolutely nothing for one twelfth of the year. I can't help but feel sorry for Angus - we have no cash to go anywhere and do anything - but also for Nur too, for the same reasons. We end up staying at home, bickering over that most stupid of things, cash.
I would love to do some studying, but when? When I try to, it seems that there is always some other demand on my attention.

The Joy of Working from home

..or not, as the case may be. I should be getting on with doing a) my diploma studies, b) the paper I may (or may not) be presenting at the English UK conference in November, c) writng up my CV and scouting out other job opportunities (of which more later), and d) painting the bedrooms. However, it is easier said than done, especially when it comes to studying in a house containing a bored nine-year-old and an increasingly curious ten-month old. It means hiding in the bedroom and trying to study there in order to get a bit of peace, the planned shed-cum-study idea having been knocked on the head. God, what wouldn't I give for a proper desk and work space! However, there is always the domestic stuff to do, the cleaning and taking an interest in the children and so forth and so on, that obtrude into the space of time I need to do the other things. Or at least, that's how it seems.
One thing that has become very obvious over the summer, and that has also been gnawing at my mind to the extent that I think about little else, is the fact that I am not earning enough to support us. Even when Nur returns to work, virtually all her wages will be swallowed up in nursery fees, meaning that my salary has to cover almost everything, and that there will be a significant shortfall. This leaves me in a quandary: do I find a new job, in which case, why do the Dip? Or do I stay at TVU, do my dip, and find other part time work, in which case, will I ever be able to find time to complete my studies, and have a life? The paltriness of what I'm earning, which is in real terms roughly what I was getting as DOS at Dilko back in 1999, was cast into a stark highlight when I was chatting with a couple of relatives over a barbecue the other day. I discovered that their son, my 37-year-old cousin, had been earning over £50K for managing a shop and had been offered £8K more a year by a rival company. I literally felt gutted. It's not through jealousy of my cousin, far from it: I know how hard he works. Rather, it was the fact that I had sweated my life out in teaching, I had done my studying and working, and here I am doing a demanding and highly complex job, and I earn less than half this. There's something truly and terribly wrong with the world.

mnuuh. Still a bit knackered from travelling to Brighton and back to suprise my old flatmate Graham's wife, Deniz, on her birthday. The car bumped and buckled and vibrated all the way there and back - I suspect I might need to change the tyres and get the bloody thing rebalanced.

Here's Grimbo with his eight-month-old son, Ediz.

smalltown boy

As if by magic, the lyrics appeared in my head:
pushed around and kicked around,
always the lonely boy.
You were the one they talked about round town
as they put you down.
But as hard as they might try to make you cry
you'd never cry to them
just to your soul.
Accompanied by Jimmy Sumerville's falsetto and his slightly unnerving resemblance to a singing potato.
And I remembered a time when those lyrics, ostensibly about growing up gay in a small town, had a tremendous resonance with me for different reasons.
It is natural for a teenager to feel apart, alone, different from the herd - it's part of the process of growing up, when we detach ourselves from the family in order to find out who we are. For me though, my sense of alienation, detachment and solitude began early and finished late, and certainly I felt that others pushed and kicked me around, that they talked about me behind my back, that I was being criticised just for being me. For many years, I felt that I was deliberately ignored and belittled, and this affected the way I viewed life, understandably. Indeed, it still colours it somewhere deep inside - when I feel down, for example, I cannot help a certain feeling of put-upon insecurity creeping over me, and I find certain people who give the impression that their lives are fine, perfect and dandy, who look like they fart flowers, insincere and false. As such, as I have grown older, I have given the impression of, first, shyness, then diffidence, and worst arrogance. I also have great difficulty in accepting my own abilities for what they are and being positive about myself in front of others.
Nowadays, though, I cannot help feeling that I am somewhat at fault. Was I ever really pushed round, as I saw it then? Sometimes, yes, and definitely when at primary school. Were people putting me down behind my back? Possibly, but to nowhere near the extent that I thought. The fact is, I think, that I was extremely poor in interacting with others (in fact, I still tend to keep my distance from people until I know them better), and so I blamed this on others - that it was their fault they didn't want to know me, that I wasn't worth knowing, and so forth and so on. Now, many of those I know and love may not recognise this portrait of me, yet I feel it to be honest.
And while I listened in my head to the potato singing his falsetto of loneliness back in the eighties, I recalled myself sat in the corner of the sixth form common room with considerably more hair than I have now, looking over the room to a group of fellow sixth formers laughing and smiling with each other over petty nothings, yearning to join in and yet unable to.

Not the best way to start your new job.

You've got to feel sorry for Gordon Brown: Since he became PM, he's had to deal with the wettest summer recorded and devastating floods, crap terrorists, a postal strike and now trhe return of Foot and Mouth. Not the most auspicious of beginnings. I blame Tony Blair. There was always something of the malevolent pixie about him, and now I envisage him darting hither and yon, sowing discord and misery around him and doing his evil pixie dance of joy at his latest piece of malice.

Menus and Pirates

While out and about recently, I saw two things I felt I had to share:
Now the menu is from the estimable Griffin pub, but I couldn't help noticing that it describes its cream as being, er, creamy. I bloody well hope it would be.














meanwhile, is it me being weird, or is this picture of a pirate tucking into a pasty a bit obscene?