h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Peanuts

Further to that- if you can stand it.. I finally decided to write something for the sake of my lost Labour roots in 2010

Here it is http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/brunel/A70729293

I entitled it "Can Labour Go Back to a Future?"

Cass

Cass, I will get back to this and I will read you link

I am going to say stuff about journals now. While everyone can read everyone elses journal and can post to them there is an ettiquette to doing so.

This is because that researchers feel that while their personal space is not private it is personal, while there is open door, it is like visiting someones front room.

If someone asks you to post in a certain way, no swearsy, or lengths of posts, stay on topic, or not post at all, whatever it is, it is expected that those requests are heeded, just as if you would take off you shoes before going into someone's house if they asked you too

You don't seem to me to be a disrespectful person, or one that sets out to put peoples back up, or to upset them for the fun of it, so I don't know what the reasons are why you can't pick up on the upset and discontent that you are causing by ignoring the requests that have made of you

I am asking this gentle like, because I am interested in understanding, is it that you don't understand, or feel compelled to post as you do or just don't care?

Peanut

Peanut

Thanks for your comments about Journals.. Really that is what I was trying to communicate with my St. George comment.. And actually this connects with what I wanted to say to you re our respective childhoods.

I have realised a long time ago that it was both a Blessing and a Curse to be born and brought up in Oxford. At the age of ten I could see around me the venerable walls of a city that had been a living part of Medieval European Christendom and had gone on to evolve into a City whose university had helped the educate the world particularly in its Humanist tradition. The world of Hiroshima etc was an abomination seen through the lense of a city that had grown up to serve humanity.

But getting from the depths of my personal life to where I thought I could "be of use" in that tradition involved something like the upward thrust needed to launch rockets up out of the Earth's atmosphere.

And once I had "made it" out and away from my childhood and adolescence, that I discarded just as a rocket discards its first stages, I was very much aware that really what I had to offer- in the world as I found it- was my experience of being able to escape from a pretty terrible world into one that was full of opportunities.

Which is why I went to the Inner City in London where I suspected that I would find people in similar need- since the prevalent Western Culture was based upon individualism, everyone for himself,"It could be you": and people needed power over their lives before they could really begin to change things.

But I am fully aware that having had such a fight and struggle, and not having given up my hopes for the world, I do tend to try to spread the idea that we should be fighting the good fight, and not wasting precious time.. It was quite troubling for a period when I thought that my book should be called "My Struggle".. It often felt like it.. But fortunately not too often while I was teaching for most pupils realised that I was fighting on their side.

I seem to recall that you have mentioned Manchester or that part of the world as being your own background, and I am very conscious of the fact that the people of this region, like much of the Glasgow region, have been the victims of a "Grand Experiment".. I rate Mary Shelley's "Dr. Frankenstein" as a brilliant premonition of what the consequences were going to be as the book-educated people took over and tried to remodel the world on the basis of their theories.

The whole realm of King Cotton grew out of the application of the ideas of Adam Smith in the most simple, radical and harsh way. Somewhere in the loft I still have the two volumes of schoolboy world Geography that I bought at the age of 15-16. And I can still see the Fifties map of Lancashire with the Division of Labour between Liverpool, Manchester and the Ribble Valley- all based upon what I have called "Potato-Patch Economics", that is more or less total dependency upon one core industry that exploited a purely temporary "windfall opportunity" that was not going to last any more than the gold and silver rush towns of the Wild West were going to endure.

Thus huge cities were called into being that have no "core activity" like Oxford, where the University will probably still be going in a thousand years, if Humankind survives that long.

But I am arguing in the study that I am just writing that the problems have been compounded by the fact that, until very recently, government policy has involved deliberately or unintentionally killing off the cities, instead of embracing their potential.

Thus my Inner City comprehensive schools in Lambeth suffered from: (a) a local Council that was very happy to focus on making the borough a kind of Ellis Island with subsised housing and lifestyles for people who came from all parts of Britain and the world, much as the Irish and dispossessed Scots flooded into the realm of King Cotton, content to at least survive for the moment.
(b) Re-housing policies that moved where possible council tenants out of the Inner City and into new suburban (or further out) estates.. As with the BUPPIES migration as the position of African-Americns improved this just left an even more deprived 'ghetto' population.
(c) High taxation and rates that moved all of the crucial small businesses and most of the skilled craftsmen with them out of the city into lower cost regions. It was the chidren of these families that stood to gain most from State education, and to show and share with their disadvantaged classmates just how to succeed.

Not surprisingly we ended up with the Brixton Riots- and others around the country (as again last year) because what young people came to share in the Inner City was a feeling of despair, desperation and rage. At least perhaps it helped some people to see that these problems transcended race and religion.

Cass

Morning Cass

Have I got this right, your motivation is to spread the word then and to educate rather than share and discuss ideas? Because if it is then we have a mis-match right there and I see why that could cause friction and frustration.

I have been wondering also if there is a difficulty here with this form of communication, online communication skills being different from RL ones. So I have being trying to imagine having a rl discussion with you and if that would make understanding your gist easier and I think undoubtably it would.

So, I'm wondering, do you write here like you are talking?

It is just that in a conversation I think I could pull off a discussion that goes from Medevel European Christendom, Hiroshima,the Humanist tradition, through your personal experiences of childhood and adulthood, your personal motivations,to Adam Smith, Mary Shelly and regional economics- just, there would be a lot of interestion facial expressions and the like

Here online,discussing in writing,it has a totally different flow and it is impossible

This is because I can't possibly keep up with amount of ground your are covering, the links you are making,or understand how you move form one point to the next and then formulate a responce to what I think you are saying.

So one tactic has been to pluck a point or section out of the post and try to discuss that with you but then the reply cover again a lot of ground and I can't follow, trying too gets me hopelessly jumbled so I give up

So bluntly, what will happen if you post in forums, given that this is time limited and social activity for people then people will skip your posts and in journals are going to get tetchy.

I also think that there is onus on the person who is trying to communicate, ideas or opinions, whatever, to make it understandable to the person or people they are communicating with, so that has to come back to you. Which is why I written all that

The other important reason is that, while I think we would probably disagree about a fair few things, our 'takes' I think are quite different, I don't consider that a bad thing. I would like to get to know you and am interested hearing what you have to say and being able to have a discussion in which I think we both get what each other are trying to say

Peanut

Peanut

One of the things that pleased me most was when my PGCE supervisor , in writing my first ever reference back in 1967 picked on the fact that:

(a)I really like to raise controversial issues -like the presentation that I made in our student group that he tutored (which I found again recently in old papers)when I raised the question of encouraging collaborative working amongst the pupils, rather than the obsession with individualism which was then so standard.. In my school we had class positions almost every month: and I was usually more or less at the bottom, until the school suggested that perhaps I was in the wrong kind of school. So I came first the next month. (Rocket-thrust!)

and (b) that in teaching practice my pupils quite quickly learned to respond to my encouragement in trying to get them to think for themselves. That remained my object throughout my teaching career, and the things that I write. But it does make me often quite critical of people who take rather a Cash and Carry attitude to ideas and knowledge, and are quite complacent and prepared to settle for ideas that they have found 'ready-mixed'.

I also write and perform songs- which I hope eventually to get back to more of what I was also doing in the Sixties and Seventies.

One of the songs from my Brixton days has a chorus:

Don't call me to yesterday's battles
Stop living with yesyerday's blues
For you know that yesterday's battles
Were formed by yesterday's views.

And the last verse:

So call me when you see that everyone
Has a partial view of the truth
And that ideas you depend on
Are getting too long in the tooth
And the tooth and the claw of the jungle law
Is making the innocent bleed.

And to come back to your initial point, I totally agree that inter-personal, face to face inter-action is far, far preferable- as my pupils always knew- I hope. Lessons were usually very much based upon what one very learned colleague, who I enjoyed chatting to, Socratic Dialogue. For the task of a teacher is to "educo"= I lead, and in order to lead pupils you have to go to where they are and encourage them to take their own steps, an important part of the art being to understand what each and every individual pupil has got to contribute. For I often found more conventional colleagues unable to understand "the truth" as understood and known by some pupils.

Cass

Peanut

One of the things that pleased me most was when my PGCE supervisor , in writing my first ever reference back in 1967 picked on the fact that:

(a)I really like to raise controversial issues -like the presentation that I made in our student group that he tutored (which I found again recently in old papers)when I raised the question of encouraging collaborative working amongst the pupils, rather than the obsession with individualism which was then so standard.. In my school we had class positions almost every month: and I was usually more or less at the bottom, until the school suggested that perhaps I was in the wrong kind of school. So I came first the next month. (Rocket-thrust!)

and (b) that in teaching practice my pupils quite quickly learned to respond to my encouragement in trying to get them to think for themselves. That remained my object throughout my teaching career, and the things that I write. But it does make me often quite critical of people who take rather a Cash and Carry attitude to ideas and knowledge, and are quite complacent and prepared to settle for ideas that they have found 'ready-mixed'.

I also write and perform songs- which I hope eventually to get back to more of what I was also doing in the Sixties and Seventies.

One of the songs from my Brixton days has a chorus:

Don't call me to yesterday's battles
Stop living with yesyerday's blues
For you know that yesterday's battles
Were formed by yesterday's views.

And the last verse:

So call me when you see that everyone
Has a partial view of the truth
And that ideas you depend on
Are getting too long in the tooth
And the tooth and the claw of the jungle law
Is making the innocent bleed.

And to come back to your initial point, I totally agree that inter-personal, face to face inter-action is far, far preferable- as my pupils always knew- I hope. Lessons were usually very much based upon what one very learned colleague, who I enjoyed chatting to, Socratic Dialogue. For the task of a teacher is to "educo"= I lead, and in order to lead pupils you have to go to where they are and encourage them to take their own steps, an important part of the art being to understand what each and every individual pupil has got to contribute. For I often found more conventional colleagues unable to understand "the truth" as understood and known by some pupils.

Cass

Peanut

Sorry about the double-take.. But going back to the top.. this thread started with me saying that the h2g2 site is not an appropriate place for me.. And I am only here because I decided to leave the BBC History Message Board groupwho I had exasperated over the last few years.

Cass

Peanut

Some of our exchanges make me think of exchanges with an ex-pupil a few months ago.. Always an interesting and somewhat troubled girl who-as she said in this note was fed up with teachers telling her that she was not fulfilling her potential. By this time I was teaching in an academic school up to Oxbridge- and perhaps neither of us totally "fitted-in" as far as the Establishment were concerned.. But I found lots of pupils who really enjoyed my approach to various subjects.. But in the light of comment about getting them to make and take small steps of their own- and avoid pontification- I rather welcomed her writing this:

"As for you>>>my goodness; you made me want to scream.you always seemed to have a knowledge that you kept. I wish I had been able to have you as my politics/ economics teacher.
I studied politics at uni, I was shit hot.my teacher loved me, I didnt make the grades tho.I hated it. it was part of my sociology.x"

In fact she was one of those unfortunate pupils who were already being required to be "grown up" about her parents splitting up: and was generally thrown too early into adulthood. She left us at 16 and did her A Levels etc once her first child could spend most of the day in a playgroup.

Cass

Cass

well, that made me chuckle the reason why you are here on the other hand it doesn't leave me with very many innys does it? Really do you want to follow the same patterns to the same end result.

I ask why, again interested, but it says to me that you are not that invested in this engagement, with me, with other individual researchers and have no real interest in participating in anything collaborative here and this isn't going to go anywhere fruitful

We have a transactional difficulty here, I (we) are not your pupils and you are not our teacher, we are equals for the want of a better word (because I don't think students are unequal). We don't need you to lead, or facilitate.

Can you relate to me or others in that way, and do you want too, or not really fussed?



Peanut

Peanut

You write:

"We don't need you to lead, or facilitate.

Can you relate to me or others in that way, and do you want too, or not really fussed?"


As you have already said - and as is commonly understood as a danger of the internet- I believe that pretty well all electronic forms of communication do not actually help people to relate to each other as human beings.. Hence I suppose the way that people n h2g2 like to meet up from time to time..Then exchanges can become real.

But there is something further perhaps which makes h2g2 unsuitable for me.. It does seem to be predicated on this idea of a "Guide to the Universe.. And one of the great (and malicious) dynamics of the last 250 years of world history is that about 250 years ago Diderot and his gang thought that they were qualified to write an Encyclopedia of all useful knowledge-- which has led to a culture of opinionated and pontificating people who pride themselves on their ownership of "Intellectual Capital"..

People are welcome to write Guide Entries as if we actually do have a "state of knowledge", and if a state of knowledge is of any use. Merely "knowing about" lots of things is a like being an obsessive collector

State =static, and Life =movement.


The bi-polarism of Stephen Fry at least means that, though he can take some pride in being a "Know it All" who took his Cambridge College to a University Challenge final, in the final analysis it does not qualify him to tell even a sparrow how it should live. The sparrow almost certainly "knows best" sparrow fashion. Quiz knowledge has no attraction for me.

But since the collapse of the Humanist Emlightenment of Diderot and his lot, we have lost confidence in Human Beings- and people so often retreat behind their entrenched positions as people because they are now surrounded by things like Chaos Theory, which takes no account of us and our humanity.

Our current communal life seems to be largely shaped by people like our daughter who is a Master of Physics from Oxford, who then took the 14-15 professional examinations that qualified her an an Actuary so that she can model the probable future for each one of us and each group and category, and it is such complex matematical modelling that shapes and informs all the important decisions not what human beings hope and dream about- though she insists that she is not "foretelling the future"- in effect such people are writing the scenario that we all have to fit into.

I do not.

Cass

Cass

I think we can relate to each as human beings and have meaningful relationships and interactions online and that the response to the move from the bbc demostrated that a community can exist that is as real as the ones we belong to in real life

This does not compensate for anything that is lacking in my life in that I have a community and friends etc but it adds to my life in that I get to meet and interact people from all walks of life, different countries, with all sorts of interests, the mix is something that I would not get down the local pub for instance

I value the friendships that I have formed here, I don't distinquish between them and others just because we may never meet.

I not overly sure what you are saying about the Guide, or the people who are writing it. It doesn't sound complementary

The guide is meant to be informative, diverse and a little quirky, not a encylopedia, a constantly growing and updated guide. People contribute freely and it is free to access.

Journal are places where people write about their daily lives, their thoughts and feelings,like mass observation, if offers an insight into the ordinary except with the massive bonus of being able to talk to each other.

I don't know what the future holds for h2g2, but if it is around many years from now and this was all stored, wouldn't you find it interesting to read your Granny's journal?

Peanut

Peanut

I think that relating to people as "human beings" is part of the wishy-washy world that has crippled us as human beings.. It is the kind of thing that science and technology likes us to think because it does not want to treat us as real human beings with all our individuality.

Lovers of all humanity like Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin lived unconsumated married lives it seems just because the actual sexual reality of their wives was just "too much". Victorian women were supposed to be on a pedestal.

As a schoolteacher I tried very hard to relate to each one of my pupils as someone unique and to get them to feel that I cared for them -not because I care for the whole world- but because I could appreciate what was special about them: then people have a very real relationship that connects us and makes us stronger.

The strength of Humanity is very much associated with the fact that we are social animals: and- having raised the question of Manchester and such huge cities that were just thrown together almost like Labour concentration camps- I was thinking just how the depth of the hunger for group identity became focussed on the new religion of football.

In Japan in the Fifties I recall that under the influence of the US occupation football stadia were built, and a strange cult grew up to replace Emperor worship. It was called something like "Soccer Kakao" and it consisted entirely of various scrupulously choreographed maneouvres by the huge crowds in the stand- with no game being played at all on the pitch.

The close correlation within the British Isles between those "guinnea pig" cities and the great centres of football passion, with the most passionate and intense local derbies, is so significant.

Was it Bill Shankley of Liverpool who said "Football is not a matter of life and death. It is more important than that."

One of my many special pupils who really was a lover of all human beings and so thoughtful- she won a young citizens award from the Local Council, and wrote me such a lovely leaving card, when I had not taught her at all in the Sixth Form, was cold-shouldered by her classmates, and seemed to have no friends.. For in a girls only school friends are formed by common hates and dislikes as much as by the reverse.. There is something so liberating about finding that there are people who will not be appalled-quite the reverse- when they see your 'bad' side.

I usually liked pupils with a "bad" side. They were the ones most likely to 'make a difference'.

Good night

Cass

Morning Cass

You speak a lot of the thank yous you have got, they are wonderful aren't they. As are the times when you know you have connected with someone, or shared an experience with them that you know is something more than everyday, or when the difference you have made is not just a short term thing it has somehow influenced longer term outcomes for the individual

I think for me while I recognise there is a certain ethos that underpins my actions, I do what I do because I enjoy it, I get back in spades more than I have to offer and it just seems the normal,natural thing to do.

I've just sat here now for about 20 minutes, thinking of those times, when you know they were special, I have a goofy grin on my face at the memories

It is hard to choose one to share but I go with school trip when I was a parent volunteer. I looked at my list of the children that were going to be my group that day and grinned. Two were what I call exuberant boys, one boy was way more challanging than that and 'a runner' ( and actually a good climber, used to scale the walls and sit on the roof as he couldn't make it over the fence to escape school).
One of the girls lacked confidence and was shy, one was very withdrawn
because of the violence and abuse she had experienced and t'other was my own.

Miss pulled me over and said, you ok with your list you have a handful there and a range of needs. Course I said you know I love them. Her rationale was good and displayed a lot of confidence in me. She thought that I could handle it and so could they. My relationship was more informal as I was parent, not a teacher and I had connections to them one way or another in the community or personally, 3 of them being visitors to my home because they played out with Hiccup. We discussed risk assessment and she wished me luck

We went to a huge adventure park, when we got off the bus, we got a map, sat down and I gave them the spiel. Right today is going to be a great day, we have all these exciting things to do and we going to pack in as much possible. Now I don't want to be arseing around dealing with poor behaviour,lost children and the like it a waste of time and spoils it for everyone, I need you listen me if I am giving an instruction but other than that I would really like for us to have a good day together. So today, we are more than a team, we are a herd like on Ice Age, now lets plan our day, who wants to do what.

Did we pack it in that day but it was just such a happy day. We were a herd, like ice age, an unlikely group put together but bonded, and looking after them was no harder than any other day out at an adventure park.

Stand out moments, seeing the not confident one who at the beginning of the day did not think they would ever go on the water ride, go on the water ride.

The withdrawn one relaxed chatting and laughing with her peers, when I felt an hand take mine and I thought it was Hiccup and it wasn't, she just held my hand as we watched others on a ride and said 'this has been a good day just like you said I think it has been my best day' looking into her eyes and knowing those curtains of defence she could pull back for me.

My runner doing the same and just dumping the baggage for a day, tenderly handling the animals at cuddle club, and a cracking sense of humour. The biggest act of faith at the end of the day we had time for one more thing, 4 opted for waterslide, two including runner wanted to go another ride, which was in sort of in eyeball range but not running range. At the end of the day there is less to lose and if they went awol, we wouldn't be back on the bus on time but the other 4 needed me too.
I trusted them, to go on the ride and WAIT FOR ME THERE, do not think you have time for one more thing and don't try to get back to me because we can miss each other, I'm trusting you. They were a good as their word.
We got ice cream (my treat don't tell Miss ) we are huddled behind a bush, keeping a look out, made it taste all the more delicious and the children decided that this was definately the best group, no-one else would have had as good day as we had
Last thing, walking home, shattered but happy and Hiccup saying, people say I am lucky to have you as a Mum and really I am.

Now, that day wasn't life changing for those children, I don't think I made a difference that day what I do know is a day is remembered as a good day, a happy day. It is a memory of childhood that is recounted, recalled and remembered as special.

If it made a difference well that was for the longer haul, I had earned trust, respect, kudos, good basis for healthy relationship and I can demonstrate more tangibles that came from that but even if I couldn't on it's own it was good enough.

Peanut

oops and one more thing I keep forgetting to say, I am from Somerset,a Wurzel

Peanut

What a lovely reminiscence.. Your mention of a little hand takin yours reminds me of so many: But one perhaps was life-changing.

After about the time that teachers of my generation were taking early retirement- burned out in tough inner city schools, as often happened to the Victorian missions, I just resigned from teaching.

I had been sacked as surplus to requirements by the school after 14-15 years; and had ended up re-deployed to a senior job up in the North of London. It was subsequently described as the worst school in the whole ILEA, and going back to all boys in a really 'alien' North London environment, very different to my South London, was quite a challenge. After about a year and a term of crossing London back and forth I decided that it was time for a change.

You may not be surprised to read that teaching was the one thing that I knew I did not want to do in my younger days. But I eventually decided that those feelings came from the way that I had been taught, rather than been helped to learn. As I said I could go from the bottom to the top of my class without any change in the teaching. For me the key always was and is the motivation and the application that comes from the individual, once given confidence and self-belief, though I am not sure that I had/have either still. Life merely backed me into a corner and left me with the rat's instinct.

My love therefore is not specifically for human beings but for all living things that I can commune with in real life.

Anyway I left teaching and spent the first Gulf War doing much needed decorating and DIY, with the occasional bit of supply teaching. One of our parent friends from our children's primary school was head of a special school for children who theoretically were medically unsuited for mainstream. And one morning I spent some time in one to one work with a little girl with cerebral palsy, and the cycling helmet to prove it.

It was lovely to work with someone who was so determined to succeed in quite minor tasks for most people. Then break-time arrived and I knew that she had to be escorted to the canteen. As we walked along the corridor I felt a little hand take mine. This little girl had learned that people mostly are to be trusted, when you have sized them up, and she had learned to trust me and to see that I would respond to that trust.

That experience persuaded me to go back into teaching, but to teach children who really wanted to learn. And, with the comprehensive schools having proved dismal failures in really achieving our goals of social mobility, so that a working class child like me was in many places (like the deprived Inner City) worse off than under the 11+ system and grammar schools, certainly in South London children of academic ability were better served by Mrs Thatcher's Government Assisted Places Scheme. I think that the school that I ended up teaching in was pretty special in terms of the large proportion of pupils that we had from disadvanataged backgrounds, and I was fortunate to teach various subjects up to Oxbridge entrance level nb. History and Economics.

It means, for example, that a current Government Housing Economist who sent a message of thanks to me when she got her First in Economics at Uni, was brought up in a dodgy high-rise Sixties council block near the South Circular.

Small victories at the human level are the way that Humanity makes progress. (have you ever studied the movement of sand dunes across the desert. Even the most massive ones move one grain at a time)

Regards

Cass

Peanut

PS

I have very fond memories of Somerset.. My mum's roots were Cotswolds which makes me at least a bit West Country + holiday visits First ever seaside experience I believe was by train to Watchet + I deliberately chose Bristol for uni and enjoyed the City and surroundings.

Cass

Good morning Cass

I know Watchet, Mum took us there once when we were kids, with a friend of hers and her kids. Although not by train by Mini. I think we got filthy muddy and getting clean was rather exfoliating and tinged with a bit of sunburn

What I do remember is our swimming costumes, they had little skirts to them, like ballerinas and sitting in the sand (silt?) and a few inches of water.

It was hot but breezy, Mum and her friend were wearing summer dresses that that they had to hold onto as they sat and chatted and watched us and they wore massive sunglasses

My mum and step dad go there sometimes now on their buses passes as a day out, they go for a stroll, and a look around the Harbour, have a lunch and a . Which is a good use of a bus pass I think.

I know Bristol reasonably well, I have relatives there and it is a city we visit.

Which part of the surroundings did you like?

Peanut

Morning Peanut

So did I spell Watchet correctly?

I recollect cliffs. As for your Mum's dress- sounds like those full-skirted "Rock and Roll" days often with petticoats to hold them out and bring out the 'hour glass' figure. Last week I noticed my wife's TV on the the corner showing some late Fifties musical with an actress called Cyd Sherysee or some such; I had forgotten just how explicitly sexy that age could be.. I recall when I was perhaps almost in my teens picking up my small Oxford School Dictionary to see what this word "sultry" meant, that made it possible to apply it to MM equally as to the weather.

"Hot and close".

Re surroundings of Bristol I really could not put names. I have not been back since I think 1968.. In my last year I had a motor scooter and,as by then I was in a bed-sit rather than Halls- I made a some sorties out and still have a few photos.

But Bristol for me- like most at uni- was mostly Clifton. I had deliberately chosen the smallest Hall of Residence. Burwalls- the family home of at least part of the Wills family, patrons of Bristl University (the Wills Building etc).. We were just the other side of the famous suspension bridge, and I recall crossing the bridge on foot sometimes several times a day as a kind of act of faith. In going to Bristol, I had quite consciously "set my counter back to zero". Life was all to do, and if it was going to be like life up to then the bridge offered me the intersting prospect of just slipping over the railing and reaching out to embrace life one last time.. As I say getting off and getting on with life was an act of faith.

In fact the best place for suicides was not the bridge. Someone in Halls with a car invited me to go and play tennis with him on some hard courts that were at the bottom of the cliffs below the 'Downs'. The courts were red- we were told because that made them easier to clean back to their normal state.

But I really liked Bristol people who told one to "shut your face"- an interesting summing up of comments here about my verbosity and the fact that real conversation involves face as much as voice and ears.

Cass

Hello Cass,

Yes you spelt Watchet correctly

Thinking about the dress I supose they were quite 50's in print, I think the petticoat that Mum wore was for modesty as it was quite see through in the sun.

There is a great photo of my Mum in a mini skirt, a tight top and what we call kinky boots. And later on when they were going out for the evening for pot lucks she wore long cocktail dresses, and smelled of Tweed perfume

It was good to see you on the reality thread last. I had a bit too much of a good time last night so slight this morning, fully deserved.

I can't access the thread this morning though maybe later.

Have you felt suicidal in your life (don't have to answer that one if you don't want to, you can tell me shut my face ) or where those more abstract thoughts on the bridge.

Peanut

Peanut

Mini-skirts.. I finally found myself teaching girls in my fourth year of teaching.. Our boys Sec Mod merged with the girls.. A very interesting story in itself, but I suppose it aggravated the situation as experiments do. I am talking 1970 here and in those days of leaving school at 15 girls' ambitions involved going out with 'boys' at least two or three years older, who assured them that they were so mature for their age (a classic chat up line especially when you want to persuade that having sex is being grown up).. There were many who quite obviously intended to be married at 19 and Mum's by 21.. A recent stay on FriendsReunited revealed that many are now great-grandmothers, and here I am not yet an grandad.

Anyway I recall an incident in summer term (no tights anymore) when a rather 'physical" 16 year old called me to come to help her with some work she was doing in History: and as I approached her school table (old desks were probably better) there was a great deal of tugging as she tried in vain to make her very inadequate micro-mini skirt actually cover her knickers.

The irony of British establishmentarianism however.. Once we had got accustomed to mini-skirts, one day I saw a girl in some distress in the corridor. She was being sent home. She had turned up at school in a lovely calf-length Midi skirt in regulation school grey; and had been told that it was "not school uniform".

As for suicide.. I did write something in response to a Radio 4 appeal for input about the spate of suicide + family exterminations that have been such a feature of recent times- I suppose including that crazy man in Norway.

It is, I believe, very important for every individual and group to believe that there is some point in being alive.. And as an individual and as part of larger groups- including Humankind and all living things- I have had to discover such a "point" for myself.

Back in those Clifton Suspension Bridge days I wrote a song; last verse:

"And in the end of a world without love
I may find peace in the flight of death's dove
Fluttering on gilded wings
To bring release from pain and all mortal things.

chorus
Black, black light locked within me
Black black light set me free".

It seems quite likely that my mother disconnected all of her life-support things in hospital just 8 years and about a week ago because the next day I was due to visit, though my initial conviction was that she did it because that was my older sister's birthday and she has been made to feel guilty most of her life at ever having been born.

For me "West Country" was always alloyed with a Hardyesque darkness.

Probably all this helps to explain why I came to London.

Cass