Ten years on

The events of 9/11 are hard to get your head around, even ten years on. At the time, the pictures were too shocking, the numbers just too much to comprehend. It seemed like everything was just about to change.

Did it? Did it change? Well, we went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but everything I read says that – in all probability – would have happened in any event, sooner or later. The Hawks would have got their way in the end.

Big events loom large for a while, but over the last ten years, how much have these events impacted on most of us, as individuals? Wars, terrorism, assassinations: however politically engaged we are, these things don’t seriously impact on the lucky majority. We’re too busy with the detail of our own immediate lives. In the last ten years, I had two babies. I gave up one career. Moved house. Got another career. Then got another one. Talked about Shakespeare a lot. Made ham sandwiches. Went swimming. Even the events of 7/7 made little lasting impact on me, not really.

But I try not to forget, and I try to remember. At my school, the Year 8s study poetry inspired and drawn from the events of 9/11 in their English lessons; last year’s group were too young to remember the events. For them, for all of us, 9/11 is already becoming history.

And like all good history, human beings like to turn it into a story. We understand stories. They make sense to us. I tell the year 8s my story of 9/11 – where I was, how it felt, what it was like to observe in real time. This week I am willing to bet you have told your 9/11 story too, and you’ve heard lots of others. This is how we remember, how we make sense and make history – by turning appalling and almost unimaginable events into narratives about individuals. We can understand it better that way. Or, perhaps, this is the only way we can understand it at all.

And when faced with what seems like evil, what feels like unspeakable horror, it’s our instinct to find a hero. To look for courage and hope. The story of the Holocaust has become, for many people, the stories of Anne Frank and Oscar Schindler.

The two faces of courage and hope from 9/11 I show to the year 8s carry with them stories of courage and heroism, simultaneously both ordinary and extraordinary. The first one appears above: the face of firefighter Mike Kehoe walking up into great danger. We like to think we can see emotion from looking into someone’s face. Can we? It’s a nice thought. This man, this firefighter – we don’t really know what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling at this moment when the photo was taken. But he looks at us, and we look back, and we are both human. We know we would be afraid. And so he must be. And yet he walks up, he keeps walking up, towards the heat and the fire and – maybe – towards his own death. So he looks, to us, like a hero.

The second face of 9/11, Todd Beamer, tells a similar story. Todd was a passenger on the hijacked Flight 93, who made a call from the plane and told the operator of the plan of a small group of passengers to challenge the hijackers and fly the plane into the ground. His last audible words were, famously,”Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.” If you think you could repeat those words to a group of silent year 8s without crying, well, best of luck with that because I’ve never managed it.

You might think my choices for the faces of 9/11 are obvious, even schmaltzy. You might think that there are many other stories to be told. You’re probably right. I don’t claim to understand fully the wider geopolitical implications of that day, although I try, I really do. I definitely don’t claim to understand the motivations of the hijackers; that’s even harder to get my head around.

I only know that, the more I see of the world, the less sense it seems to make to me. The more unpredictable it seems. But I do believe this: that each of us as individuals is capable of acting well, even acting heroically, under pressure. Tales of courage and of heroism run through human history like golden threads. I don’t know whether I could hope to act with the kind of courage shown by Todd Beamer or Mike Kehoe given similar circumstances. But we can remember them. Show their pictures, tell their stories to the children who are too young to remember that sunny September day ten years ago for themselves.

So that’s what I am going to do tomorrow.

And don’t worry, I’ll take lots of tissues.

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The geeks will inherit the earth

Do you prefer the book or the film?

Well, der. The book, of course. Clichéd but true: the pictures are better in the book. With a book-adaptation, there is always an element of compromise. Some subtleties have to be smoothed out. The plot has to be simplified. Complexities and ambiguities swept away by a jaunty 80s soundtrack.

This compromise is particularly hard to take when it’s a book we cherish or a character we identify strongly with. A bit of clunky miscasting can ruin our enjoyment of not only the film but the book too. My own particular Room 101 has a video loop of David bleeding Jason smothering the perfect memory of Pop Larkin in cloying ITV Sunday-night candyfloss. For ever.

Sometimes, very occasionally, it works. For a whole generation of women, Colin Firth IS Mr Darcy, more or less. And thank God the BBC managed to rectify Austen’s appalling omission from the original novel of a description of Mr Darcy in a wet shirt. That page is probably still stuck down the side of the sofa in the Austen Hampshire vicarage.

So when I heard that ‘One Day’ by David Nicholls was being transferred to film, well, I squirmed a little in anticipation. I’d read it, of course. I’d have to check but I *think* it might be illegal *not* to have read it by now. And for someone of my age, it was all so familiar that it was difficult to say whether I liked it or not. It was like trying to decide if I liked being 23. Christ, hard to say but I wouldn’t say no to giving it another shot, at least for about 300 or so pages.

Nostalgia can be a powerful thing and this book had nostalgia doing a little Bez-dance on every page. It brought back a lot of memories, mostly happy ones, if sometimes a little sweet and fuzzy, like a tumbler of Archers and orange juice. It felt real, especially the two main characters. By the end, they even felt almost like friends.

Especially Emma Morley. Especially her.

In case you haven’t read the book or seen the film, Em is a slightly chippy, slightly awkward, rather geeky, very lefty working-class Northern girl with a penchant for heavy poetry and heavier sarcasm; she works as an English teacher for a good proportion of the book and later becomes a writer. Yes, it’s possible we have more than a little in common, Emma Morley and I.

But if there was to be a film made of my life, I am pretty damn certain that the first name to spring to mind wouldn’t be Anne pogging Hathaway.

Anne Hathaway! Seriously. Leaving aside for the moment the laughable quality of her accent… Actually no, let’s give that a little consideration after all, because God knows it deserves it. I know she’s not exactly Meryl Streep but really, that accent was distressingly bad. Come on Anne! Gwyneth managed it. Renee was note perfect. And if someone’s paid somewhere close to the Greek National Debt to pretend to be English she could at least have made a bit of an effort. As far as I could tell, Ms Hathaway’s homework for producing the voice of Our Em was a couple of episodes of Acorn Antiques and a little Groundsman Willie thrown into the mix.

But that’s not the real gripe. Em and Dexter spend twenty years *not* getting together because, well, Em isn’t exactly Anne bloody Hathaway. She isn’t hot and sexy and glam with eyes like Bambi. She’s normal and a bit shy and geeky and awkward. That’s why Dexter isn’t all that interested in her. Because he’s so shallow and she’s not fit enough. But eventually he grows up and sees her real qualities and then he falls in love with her. Aah.

Now this is a pretty powerful bit of wish fulfilment, particularly for the kind of women who like to read novels. Hang on in there, geeky clever girls! It doesn’t matter that you aren’t beautiful, or blonde, or skinny. It doesn’t matter that your legs don’t go up to THERE. No, not there. Higher! Because one day, one fine day, a REAL man will understand your true qualities. Your ho-hum looks, your chunky thighs, your entirely forgettable face won’t matter because he will be more interested in your intelligence and your conversation. One day, or even One Day, a handsome brooding attractive man, one who is a great deal more physically attractive than you (and probably a great deal richer) will be dazzled by your wits and not by your… well you get the picture.

This is the plot of some pretty key texts for the studious female – Pride and Prejudice for start, and Jane Eyre of course. And it’s the plot of One Day. Em is a bit dorky, a bit shy and a bit awkward. But in the end she bats way, way, WAY out of her league and bags the alpha male, the utterly luscious Dexter.

The trouble is, those who market films aren’t really getting this whole geeky girl thing. They are, ironically enough, a bit like Dexter. They like hotties. They like sexy chicks. They like the Bambi eyes. They like it when legs go up to THERE. And they think the viewing public thinks the same. That audiences wouldn’t go for a female lead unless she was, well, like Anne Hathaway. Geeks don’t sell. At least geeky girls don’t.

Which is a shame really. Yeah I know it’s only entertainment and all that but it would have been nice, just for once, for the geeky girls to see one of their own (one of OUR own, let’s be clear) up on the screen. Especially getting the boy. Geeky boy characters in films can be played by geeky and awkward looking actors and still get the hot girls; see Jesse Eisenberg in the atrocious Social Network and Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim and er, absolutely everything he’s ever been in. Nerdy boy characters are played by nerdy looking actors. Geeky girl characters are played by ravishingly beautiful actresses wearing spectacles, at least for the first half an hour.

And girls have to behave themselves too, up on the screen. The film allowed Dexter to keep his coke addiction and his sleazy sexual tastes, but we didn’t get to see Film-Em’s little stash under the bed and her extramarital dalliance with her head-teacher boss got airbrushed too.

Well it could have been worse I guess. Em could have been played by Megan Fox, although even she couldn’t possibly have make a worse job of the accent.

So geeky girls, it’s back to the books.

I’ll bring the popcorn.

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Baggy trousers, dirty shirt

Life is short, and childhood passes fleetingly in the twinkling of an eye. We all know this, don’t we? Then tell me this. Why have I spent more time than I can count teaching my tiny daughters to tie a Windsor knot?

I have just about managed to get the GothicDaughter to master this fiddly process at the age of eight. And now I am back on the merry-go-round again with the 5 year old. I actually had to Google it the first time I had to tie my daughter’s tie because – and brace yourself for the shock of this – I had got to 40 years old without having to wear a tie. You know, what with me being a woman and never having been quite gamine enough to pull off the Annie Hall look. And I was very bad at it, although not quite as bad at it as a clumsy and easily distracted five year old.

What has happened some time in the last 30 years to persuade us (or at least a lot of school governors) that a five year old girl can only look ‘smart’ in what is effectively a drag outfit? Like a very dull fancy dress party where the invite reads: come as your favourite junior bank clerk. Or for the more relaxed ones with a polo shirt policy, come as a Kwik-fit fitter. It’s bizarre if you think about it.

When I was a kid, we didn’t have to wear uniform in primary school at all and the secondary uniform was extremely loose too. As long as we were dressed, more or less, and our make up didn’t make us look like a startled budgie, then no one really commented on what we were wearing. Ah, how little we knew back then. We just weren’t aware that we were teetering on the brink of anarchy without a set of complicated rules about the length of skirts and the width of our lapels to keep us from total chaos.

In sixth form, the only rule was no denim – a rule we expended a great deal of time and energy howling in protest about. It was a breach of our human rights not to dress like Shaking Stevens. It was, basically, like Stalinist Russia, you know?

During the course of the average school day, I keep having to break off from banging on about Topic Sentences every ten minutes or so to bark ‘tuck your shirt in!’ and ‘five stripes on the tie please young man!’ Now on the upside this does make me feel like a genuine bona fide teacher. But on the downside… well sometimes all this emphasis on the length of skirts and the colours of belts and the maximum number of bracelets and which bits of cartilage is it OK to pierce and which not – well it does all seem a tiny bit trivial.

I do understand, though, that it’s all a bit of a ritual. An age-old formation dance where the authority figures set the boundaries and the students give them a bit of a tentative push, to see what gives. I find it quite comforting to imagine that this is a clever piece of misdirection. Persuade the kids that they need to direct their attention towards the crucial issue of whether they can wear stripey socks, to distract them from the fact that they are forced to stand on a hockey field for two hours a week in the freezing cold, or even the fact that they have to come to school at all. If all the teenagers in the country suddenly decided to ACTUALLY rebel rather than fretting about nose-piercings, we would all be in a great deal of trouble.

There are, I know, a number of positive arguments wheeled out in favour of a uniform but I am pretty unconvinced by them. The uniform is a great leveller, and makes everyone look the same? Anyone who has ever been in a classroom knows this is a big fat lie. Walk into any classroom and within 15 seconds you can tell the kids from comfortable homes, and those from lower income families, just like you can tell the cool kids from the normal ones. In fact the idea that a strict uniform policy helps reduce bullying and improves things for poorer children is quite a nasty little lie.

If you enforce a strict policy, then this makes it harder for poorer children to look smart, particularly if you restrict supply to specialist shops. In extreme circumstances, it might stop a family from accessing a particular school. This isn’t just anecdotal. A report by the charity Family Action this week laid out the problems faced by many families trying to equip their child for school, especially now clothing grants have been abolished. The more restrictive the policy, the more likely it is the poorer child will stand out: in clothes too big or too small, a bit grubby or torn because they only have one skirt. Or the sixth form girl with only one suit. All in all a pretty miserable way to spend your adolescence. Make the policy less restrictive and the cost, and therefore the problem, reduces.

And the one about dressing ‘professionally’ making you work hard, concentrate more. Really? So in all of continental Europe, all of North America, the lack of a polyester blazer is what’s really holding all those children back from achieving academic success. And as for looking ‘professional’ – which professions really wear uniforms these days? Most workplaces don’t have a strict dress code any more. If you make the sixth formers wear cheap dark suits, then they don’t look like smart professionals; they look like they are on their way to a very low key funeral.

And anyway, why should schools be about institutionalising children for corporate life? I know I am going to sound like the pinko Guardianista I am, but surely they should be about learning. A few pairs of ripped jeans don’t seem to hold back the undergraduates.

And, you know, it’s kind of nice to look a little different, a little individual. A pupil of mine once saw me on my way to an interview dressed in a trouser suit and she didn’t hold back: ‘Hi Miss oh my GOD WHAT ARE YOU WEARING?!?!?!’ It was a fair point. I didn’t look like myself. I looked, and felt, uncomfortable.

So roll on non-uniform day, when the children get to look like themselves. Till then, tuck your shirt in. Yes, you. All the way round!

Ah, that’s better.

school uniform costs ‘break the bank’ for poorer families

 

can a school improve exam results with a uniform policy?

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Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think

Well, as the summer holiday draws to a close, it’s time for a recap I think. A wee state of the nation moment. So here is my summer, in numbers:

Countries visited: 4 (not including the People’s Republic of Dorset)

Beaches visited: 7

kgs of sand hoovered out of my car today: 238 ish

Picnics: numerous

Remnants of picnics removed from back of car: 5 loaves, 2 fishes

Seemingly endless coach journeys: 4

Days spent at home: negligible

Hours spent working: not statistically significant

Police escorts: 1

Episodes of goosing by French customs sniffer dogs: 1

Glasses of Leffe or equivalent Belgian beer in the sunshine: just about enough

Novels read: 12 (yeeeeeeessssssss! VICTORY! This has involved quite a bit of child-ignoring, aka ‘encouraging independent play’.)

Blog posts: 48

Hours of fretting about blog posts, musing about blog posts, asking other people anxiously about blog posts: 217 (approx)

Moments of boredom: 0

Hours left till Real Life kicks in: 12

So, with 12 hours left, I should probably be packing my school bag, shining my shoes, sharpening my pencils, right? Well it turns out I am going to watch a very loud Scottish Celtic fusion band The Peatbog Faeries. Not sensible I know. But just before the holidays started, TicTacGirl gave me a compilation CD. The first track is by the Specials. It goes like this: ‘Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think’. And that has been my motto for the summer.

For the autumn, I am going with ‘It’s not wise to be a footstool.’ At least I think that’s what he’s singing.

Wish me luck, and enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink.
The Peatbog Faeries

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Wake me up when September ends

Happy New Year!

I am aware that other people celebrate the New Year at a slightly different time, but I don’t hold with that kind of nonsense. The start of September, when the summer holidays start to give off a little rotten stink: this is the beginning of the new year for me and always has been. It comes from having spent most of my life in education, one way or another, I guess. I just keep enrolling at different universities, year after year; it’s for the free wall planners, mainly.

This new year, my new year, is better than that other one in lots of ways. Firstly, there isn’t the need to attend parties where everyone has drunk far too much and is pretending to be jolly in order to stave off the horror of the passing of time and the drawing nearer to the grave. In early September, there is no obligation to kiss anyone at midnight, thank God. Because the New Year Countdown is just an excuse for drunken, slightly sweaty men (or women, possibly, although I have no experience of this) to cop a quick feel.

But it’s worse, of course if no one even bothers to try to molest you. Being on the receiving end of drunken fumbling is bad enough, but the realisation that you aren’t even attractive enough to merit a whisky-fuelled grope – well, that’s enough to sober you up, just in time to mumble your way through Auld Lang Syne. At September New Year, no one kisses anyone at midnight or forces them to sing songs they don’t really know, because everyone is in bed at midnight with a nice cup of herbal tea and an improving book. It’s a school night after all.

The other good thing about September New Year is that the weather is better. Tons better in fact. Traditionally, the journey home from a New Year party involves stumbling across frozen pavements, feet aching and ill-advised lovebites throbbing. In early September, you can tell it’s time to go back to school because suddenly the leaden skies clear, the howling winds drop and the sunshine blazes down. Ah, it must be the start of the school term.

Some things are similar about the September and January New Years. I don’t know about you, but I start September with a sense of optimism about abandoning my old habits and adopting a set of new ones. My house is a list-strewn shrine to our new resolutions right now. We will be organised! We will remember which days are swimming days! We will not build up the kind of library fines that necessitate leaving the county at midnight! Fruit will be eaten and not left to rot and form a slightly malevolent still-life installation in the fruit bowl! These are much better than those joyless January ones, which normally involve stopping all those things that make midwinter bearable – drinking wine, eating Galaxy, flirting with the bus driver, or at least not all three simultaneously. In January, resolutions also often involved pretending you are going to start visiting the gym regularly, which is bad enough at any time of year but is particularly humiliating in January when you have to flash your milk-white mince-pie flab in front of the buff gym bunnies.

The other cheering thing about September New Year is the nice pile of sparkly new things. Shiny new shoes. A lovely new winter coat. And best of all – new stationery! A lovely fresh new notebook to write down all the things you are going to do and, a few pages later, a book of the current odds on how long before you break all your new resolutions and slip back into your sloppy old ways.

The September New Year is also a good time for learning new things. This even infects school children – well some of them – and as a teacher this can make the first few weeks of term quite cheering, or alarming, depending on your point of view. This morning, I found myself flicking idly through the magazine from the local college that popped through the door, yearning for the opportunity to learn something NEW! – Pottery Throwing? Conversational Ancient Greek? Art with Toenail Clippings? – before receiving a slightly stern look from the LongSufferingHusband. Yeah, maybe another night class isn’t so sensible, what with the full time job, the two children, the several time consuming hobbies and the small matter of the Masters Dissertation this year? Well, maybe next year.

And then there’s that whiff of autumn in the air. Ah, autumn. No more daily stubble removal, and the welcome return of the leggings and boots. No sitting in pub gardens shivering, pretending it’s warm because it’s SUMMER; back to the roaring fires and chunky jumpers. Note to the British catering industry – the café culture doesn’t work this close to the Arctic Circle.

And the new TV season! And those big tubs of Quality Street on offer for £5 in Sainsburys to ‘save for Christmas’… hahahaha.

In fact there’s no need to go outside till spring.

Except for the Christmas shopping.

OH GOD. Let’s make a pact to NOT talk about Christmas yet, just for a bit longer? Cheers. And Happy New Year to you all.

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