The Riverboat trip
St Paul's from the river
On Monday I went on one of the many school based jollies we get round this time of year. It was a trip up the Thames with the year elevens, including the form I have had for three years and whom I like a lot. They all get dressed up in DJs and nice dresses (for boys and girls respectively - to expect them to wear both would be a bit much) and often come to it in stretch limos. I felt a bit of a pang this year as I saw my form for the last time, more or less, and let them know that I am leaving. Some were surprised, some weren't.
They weren't allowed to drink alcohol and a good half the time was spent resisting requests for us to sneak them some. The kids didn't seem to be half as well-oiled as they have been in previous years, which was good because it was rather more civilised and easy to organise than before. There was a buffet and a DJ, one of the year 12s who I know, and a really rather rotund couple who were in charge of taking pictures for them to buy. I am a big man but these two would have needed a bed made of girders to support them.
The boat went down to the Dome and then back up to Battersea Power Station and round to Greenwich again. We got back to the Cutty Sark at 1130 and that was that. I didn't have anything like this for my end of year 11. I wish I had!
The Jersey Cricket tour
Every year for these last four years I have been on the staff cricket tour to Jersey. This was probably the last time as I am leaving. So what happened? After three weeks, in which I have marked 230 exams and written 230 reports as well as teaching two weeks’ lessons, I went with some staff members, ex- staff members and a few partners to Jersey. It is a nice way to relax after exams and start the wind down to the end of term. We flew out on Friday night and had a Chinese.
On Saturday we did some tax free shopping before the game against a school there. We played really poorly and made 66 after they made 200. Nobody batted well for us and my 4 not out was surprisingly high up the scoresheet. I wished I had not been sent in at number 9. The schoolboys behaved a little arrogantly in the short time I was at the crease, whinging that our number 10 was slow to the wicket and wondering aloud whether he had had to get off his oxygen machine. They also did not provide tea, which was the real disappointment, as we all know the only reason for the Jersey trip is to eat well. This was especially disappointing as that is a speciality of the place where we normally play. We all went out to a very nice restaurant, LaRoque afterwards and did indeed eat well.
On Sunday we had a shorter game between the youngs and the olds. I played for the youngs, getting a duck and bowling five overs of relatively inexpensive donkey drops. I did wonder what contribution I had made to the tour just after my stumps had been messed up. Never mind, we won and it looks like I will have a higher average than my mate R, who is a far more illustrious cricketer than I. Then we headed off to a nice lunch and the traditional Sunday of putting and crazy golf. I didn’t putt but won both rounds of the youngs’ crazy golf, so that made me feel a bit better. Then we flew home, tired and, as I discovered later , sunburnt but generally pleased with ourselves. How was your weekend?
A weekend away from the depression
After yesterday it is a good thing that I will be on Jersey playing cricket for the weekend, so I don't have to remember. I am trying to avoid the rant that wants to issue from my lips. All I will say is this - did anyone else suspect something was wrong when we got a referee with a peroxide blond beard? What sort of a referee does that? Need I say more?
This will mean no blogging, but of course you expect that from me by now anyway. Can you wait any longer for me to tidy up the chainblog thing? Well, probably yes, which is convenient because you're going to have to.
Schools (a chainblog)
I have taught or been taught at seven schools, three in Manchester, one in Bedford, one in Bratislava, one in Birkenhead and one in South East London. Each of them has been very different.
I don’t remember too much about my infants’ or primary schools, except that I was easily obsessed with things, such as nature and trains, especially steam trains. Some would say that little has changed. I remember going for a visit to what would be my secondary school and being fascinated by the metal working rooms and the generally huge nature of the school compared to the little primary I had been at, where everyone knew each other.
I was very lucky – when I was picked by the primary school to sit the entrance exam and I knew I wanted to go there, my Dad said that I would have to get a scholarship to get in because we were poor, and under the now sadly departed assisted places scheme I managed to do that. How much of my present rests solely on that piece of fortune? What would I be doing now if I had not got that scholarship? Fortunately I don’t need to know.
I met most of my best mates of the present just over twenty years ago in my first year form at that school. We had lots of happy times there, even including Latin. I never really felt like I achieved any more or less than I knew I would, not spectacular by the school’s standards, but good enough for someone with a bit of an inferiority complex.
It was only when I went to University that I began to realise that I was actually quite good at this subject, however I had got to this point. Let’s just say that the University I went to was untainted by any of the modern teaching methods to be discovered at school level. I suppose it’s something to do with the nature of Classics that anything to do with it is a bit backward and that really was a prime example. I had a lecturer whose jacket had built up a calcified stratum of chalk dust by years of neglect on his part. Don’t get me wrong, he knew his stuff, he just didn’t present it in a very accessible way. Perhaps he has been a bigger influence on my teaching than I first recognised….
It took me a while to work out what to do with myself after Uni. It was such an anticlimax getting to the end of the yellowbrick road and discovering that I had to find my own way from there. Why teaching? Well, to be honest, I drifted into it. I was anything but proactive, yet still found something I wanted to do.
I went to a University I had always wanted to go to for my PGCE and was rather disappointed that it was very different from my old schoolmates’ undergraduate courses. How stupid was I to expect that? So I did my main teaching practice in Bedford and I wasn’t very good. All of my significantly more illustrious colleagues seemed to be sure of their future in teaching, yet their certainty made me unsure of myself. I didn’t get a job. I was worried. What if I never got back into Classics? That would have sucked, especially seeing as I had finally realised that it was what I wanted to do. Typical!
More to follow.....
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Exams therefore no blogging
Sorry, I have loads of work to do with the marking of many exams, so I won't be putting much here for a bit. You'd given up checking anyway, hadn't you?. Maybe it would have sounded cooler to say I was having a blog-holiday, but that would be ridiculous for someone with my very short record of posts. I was half way through a chainblog thing and I
will finish it, but it might take a while. I've got reports to do straight after exams. Don't get me wrong, I know what I'd prefer to be doing....
Download at Donington
What, two posts in two days? Shurely shome mishtake! Nay, nay and thrice nay. Well, actually it’s exam week at school and all the exams I have to mark don’t start till tomorrow, so I will be a bit quiet when the madness starts.
On Sunday I went to the second day of the Download heavy metal festival. I have been going to such gigs since I was sixteen and still enjoy them. The only problem with this one is that I made the almost fatal mistake of being disorganised. I had been thinking about going for a bit but had done nothing as it was being held on the last day of the summer half term holiday, so I knew I would have to get back from Leicestershire to South East London overnight somehow to be back for 8am the next morning. Then my mate K emailed me, getting really excited about the lineup – Metallica, Slayer, Slipknot, Korn, Machine Head, all bands I knew would deliver on the day or hoped would – and saying that we HAD to go. So I got the tickets and forgot about it. Pants! What an idiot!
Then last week, after the previously advised stag weekend I suddenly realised that I would have to get there and back. I also thought I would give M a call as I had not seen him for a bit and thought he might fancy it. Annoyingly, M dithered and that slowed down my attempts to sort out any transport until the very last minute, causing any number of panic attacks at the end when I thought I would be stranded in the middle of nowhere over night.
In the end M didn’t come and I got the train up there. Simple enough apart from a few missed trains slowing me down and meaning that K had to pick me up from Nottingham, as I had the tickets and it would have been a needle in the haystack job to meet him at the venue.
The only problem was that I still had no transport organised for the journey back as the public transport back was absolutely laughably pathetic. When I went for the first time in 1988 I got the train to and from Manchester, no trouble at all. This time I couldn’t arrange a train, bus or lift back and knew that I would have to try to blag a lift from a complete stranger at the festival. Still I thought it would be okay and I would be able to do that and not take up all of Witho’s suicidally kind offer to pick me up from Derby, a six hour round trip. What an angel!
So we got there and I had a good go at the lift blag but every single person I met was either not going back on the Sunday or going a different direction. So Wonder Witho came to the rescue. Phew!
Oh yeah, what about the gig? Well, it was great. Machine Head were on first of the bands I really wanted to see. They were so energetic and I loved Davidian live, easily one of their best songs from a crushing first CD. I wasn’t a vast fan of their second, but the third and fourth seem to have been a steady return to top form. I liked Robb Flynn and Phil Demmel in Vio-lence, one of my little eighties Bay Area Thrash bands, so I knew they’d be great here. Excellent start!
Then we got the news that Slayer had been delayed and would not be playing on the main stage, causing a bit of a dilemma. Live, they were one of the most brutal bands I had ever seen, but they clashed with Korn who I had never seen live before. In the end we decided to stay for Korn so we would have a good spot for Metallica after them.
So then we saw Slipknot, who were absolutely mental, full of energy from the start, with nine lunatics running around like loonies. I wish I had known their material a bit better, because I think I wiould have appreciated their contribution more had I done so. Even so they were fantastic. What a show!
Korn were up next and I was impressed with what I saw. I do like a bit of variety and there are few bands who would attempt to get bagpipes into a song, never mind carry it off! Again I wished I had listened to their stuff a bit more, but they were very tight live and I would go to see them again. They also played the heavy section from Metallica’s One in a medley, which was cool as K and I had been moaning about Metallica not playing it at Leeds last August.
Finally, a long time after they were supposed to go on, Metallica turned up and played a very short set because Lars Ulrich had been taken ill and they had to use guest drummers. This meant that they mainly played their best, early material, mainly from Kill ‘em all through to Master of Puppets. I was really excited to see Dave Lombardo, best heavy metal drummer of my youth, playing with them, but the guy who stole the show was Joey Jordison from Slipknot. Wow! What a drummer that guy is! He was adding in insane double bass parts that weren’t on the original, which really added value to the show. It was only about ten or eleven songs long, but I will never forget that Metallica set!
So with the aid of Witho I did manage to get back for Monday’s school, even managing to sneak in three or four hours sleep. It was a crazy trip, but worth it!
Stag Weekend, day two, the revenge, son of stag weekend et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...
The second day began with me not feeling too great after the first, wondering what exactly I had got out of the day. We all met up after breakfast, some in better form than others and prepared to go off to paintballing. Large plates of fried foods were scoffed with malice aforethought, by me at least, though I gather that some could not face it after the previous night’s activities. That *never* happens to me….
It was at this point that the real disaster of the previous night was revealed. G had left his contacts in a glass in the en suite bathroom of their room and A had drunk them, leaving G, the myopic creature that he is, with no ability to see for the one activity he needed them for all weekend. Yes, driving me home! Never mind the paintballing! So G and A, who knows the area, stayed in Dottingham and the rest of us got into the minibus and headed off to the activity.
Paintballing was a real laugh, though possibly not quite as much as the previous stag based paintballing I had been on, largely because there wasn’t quite as much variety in the games. It was the main thing I had been looking forward to since the itinerary came out and I did enjoy it a lot. I generally stayed put in one place and didn’t run around too much, lumbering oaf that I am. We stayed all day. Highlights were J’s random betrayal of K even though they were on the same side in the last game (possibly because he was missing the traditional hunt the stag game, eschewed by this particular crew, Skirmish), J’s general weird Rambo-esque nutter type antics and K’s kamikaze run at a group of mates, which ended in perfect comic book fashion, with him getting a shot in the nads from close range for his trouble. He won’t do that again…
After we’d got back to Nottingham, we took a while to get cleaned up and then headed out for a few drinks before the meal we had lined up for the evening. We went to a weird but nice combo restaurant at which you could have foods from Italy, China, Thailand and Italy in the same meal. I did and it was very nice. The thing I liked best was the Italian, where you could ask the chef to make something for you there and then from the ingredients he had in front of him. I had two lots of it, it was so nice! Then as we were getting full, the others started playing drinking games. Initially irksome as they were, I found that they were a lot more fun when I became part of the judging of who had broken which rule when and what they had to do as a forfeit. I really enjoyed that as it meant that my stomach contents were largely untroubled in their proper location, which is how I like it.
After that I went back to the hotel. It was a much better day than the previous one. What do you think of that?
The Stag Weekend, day one.
Last weekend I went on a stag weekend and it made me realise a few things about myself. Here’s what happened. Eleven lads went to Nottingham for the weekend, for a bit of weaselling (climbing over and around boulders), abseiling, drinking, visiting of lap dancing clubs and paintballing to send off our mate K.
I have known K, H, G and C since school, J and M since University and didn’t really know S, C, J or A at all. I went up with G on Saturday and we arrived at the weaselling site. From the start I didn’t fancy it, I don’t know why. I had wanted to do the abseiling since I heard it was on the programme, but the weaselling just did not appeal. M also wasn’t keen, so we mostly sat about while the others did it. I took some photos and had a relaxing time, unlike the others. I really needed it after a hard half-term at school and was happy with it.
After that they went on to the abseiling and I chickened out of that too. Then we headed back to the hotel and checked in before heading out for drinks in town. I have not been drinking much recently because I have just not been enjoying it. I know I am not supposed to say that and that somehow I must live up to the stereotypical male image, but why? If I don’t fancy it, why should I do it just to please someone else? I know it was K’s stag do, but to whom am I really responsible? So I made it clear from the start that I would not be a victim of the drinking games’ rules, which H, as best man was enforcing rigorously.
Then we headed off to an American diner with girls with very skimpy clothes on and bronzed limbs. I began to enjoy myself as I relaxed a bit and the company was good, even if I did cringe a bit at the antics of some, such as J who won the bet for who could lick our waitress first. Don’t worry, she gave as good as she got and didn’t suffer the fool too gladly. Incidentally does it surprise you to discover that one thing on the menu was 20 chicken wings and a bottle of Dom Perignon? It certainly surprised me. Then there was the ritual humiliation of the stag, which involved him having to take his shirt off while standing on a chair in the middle of the restaurant, being dressed up in a top like the one the waitresses had on, being drawn on with magic marker, wearing a pair of boxers on his head and having to down a pint in one. I know I would hate this, but K seemed to enjoy it to a degree and was especially happy with the feeling of having toilet paper down his top, so that he had “boobs”. I get concerned about K sometimes.
Then we headed off to a club, which was not very enjoyable, so we headed off to a lap dancing club. Everybody had a good time of sorts there except me. Don’t get me wrong, I like to think I have a healthy appetite for naughty things, but I got a real dose of the heebie geebies. Every time one of the dancers came up to me and asked if I wanted a dance I just wanted to run away. Then every odd one would ask why not and that really made me feel bad. I was trapped, I hardly felt that I could leave and hated that I was being interrogated for not being into it. I was asked whether I was gay a couple of times. I really resented being asked and made to feel uncomfortable in a place I had paid to enter. Anyway, I left as early as possible with some of the others once they’d had their fill of it all. The next day G said he had spent more than £200 in there, all told, and he wasn’t the only one to spend so much.
That was the end of day one, which I really didn’t enjoy too much. I really felt like an old man.
Music
I am going to start with music today as I feel that it is important. I love music of all kinds but the type that I prize above all others is Evil, as Witho knows it, or Heavy Metal as the rest of you may know it. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of oddities in my taste which go completely against this simple statement. I started off with Duran Duran and as Dear Witho readers know, I still like them. I think I am part of a generation of metal listeners who are not afraid of having other inflences, as can be seen in the influence of 80s pop on nu-metal - Korn said Duran Duran were a prime influence on them and Limp Bizkit do a George Michael cover. However, all told, my favourite metal is mid 80s to early 90s power/speed/thrash metal. Favourite bands include Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Iron Maiden, Vicious Rumors and Savatage. I also like widdly guitar music, especially Joe Satriani. The reason for today's post is that an old friend of mine may be coming to Download with me at the weekend and I have just been reading some of the Evil music press. It doesn't matter what you think of metal, please just put say what your favourite music is, preferably a few different answers. The thing I like most about music, like books or films, is its ability to take me away from here and take me into someone else's world. I like atmosphere. Metal also allows me to exorcise the violence inside myself and get it out of my system in such a way that it is not part of my normal life. Anyway, that's my first real post, I hope you have a lot to say too!
