Snapping the ‘hood ~ day 2

Now I think this short series should perhaps have been titled ‘Snappin Da Hood’, but never mind.

This is about 50 yards from my house, on the door of a boarded up pub. The pub has been bought and the purchaser has applied for planning to develop flats. This seems to be the way of the world now. It’s a lovely Arts & Crafts building; I’d like to get in there and take some black and white photographs some time.

Why I believe in Frankel, but not Chelsea

Frankel pulled me back a little from the brink yesterday. I don’t mind saying I shed a tear or two, not when the race was won, but a little way into that wide verdant straight; at the point when Frankel indicated he was ready to go on from his pacemaker, Bullet Train. It seemed to me as if the horse was saying, with a slight nod of the head, to the man on board, Tom Queally, ‘Come on mate, let’s go.’ And they did. And I thought to myself, ‘Fuck me, it’s Pegasus’ and he doesn’t even know it, he just is.

That’s why I believe in Frankel, because he will do his best, regardless. He won’t fall out with the owner, the trainer, the lad, or even the jockey – he’ll just put his head down and get on with it, in his own remarkable, mythical style. One day, perhaps, Frankel won’t win. I don’t want to ever see it, but if I do, I’ll still believe because I’ve seen the essence of the horse.

That’s where I have a problem with Chelsea. I can’t ever get to the spirit of the side. They remind me alternately of a bunch of mercenaries with no loyalty, except to the self, or a cadre of the worst kind of public service union members who work to rule, to the detriment of their service. There is one exception to this: Didier Drogba, whose gradual transformation from habitual box dropper and tantrum thrower to staunch goal-scoring servant, shines brightly enough to cast many of his team mates demeanours into sharp relief. Drogba, of course, looks like he may have played his last game, and Di Matteo, whose main attribute seems to have been that he is not Andre Villas Boas, is uncertain of his future.

And that sums up why I can’t believe in Chelsea, a club that is run at the top by a plutocrat, and on the pitch by the whims and moods of the dressing room. Di Matteo has done well they say, and why should they not, given the 2012 silverware, but haven’t the recalcitrant squad of AVB’s reign merely consented to play since the caretaker manager came in? On their finest night, instead of being able to fully enjoy the scenes of celebration, a neutral looks at the assemblage and sees a lot of luck, not much soul, and not nearly enough of whatever it is that Frankel and Drogba have got.

Winners with heart & soul

This post was partly inspired by a conversation with a Chelsea fan not long after AVB had departed. A lifelong fan, his disappointed and pained recognition of the pumped-up egos in the Stamford Bridge dressing room was palpable. This morning I imagine he has a well-deserved headache and a hoarse throat and natually all the previous suffering is instantly forgiven. Football fans have strong stomachs, suffering goes with the territory, no joy without pain. That’s all fine and understood, but I can’t quite forget the head-shaking of earlier this year and the expression of the fact that his team wilfully and frequently just chose not to turn up at the game.

Digital switchover turns me right off

For reasons beyond my control, this week I spent 4 and a half hours of my life with some people charged with making sure that televisual viewers living in the latest television area to be switched entirely to digital (London area, including Essex, Crystal Palace transmitter in April in case you care) are aware of what they need to do to get digital into their lives. This is because, I discovered, the very worst thing that could befall us in the 21st century is that we could wake up to a Blank Screen. The ‘catastrophe’ of the Blank Screen was emotively told through individual examples of society’s disconnect from other people, family, and community. What was terrifying was that the television was being sold as an answer to this symptom of a dysfunctional society, a panacea for the masses, and not acknowledged as a potential contributory factor in social exclusion.

Turns out that the other key message is that ‘no-one should be left behind’ in the digital switchover and suffer the armageddon of a blank screen in their lives. To this end, money, and I dread to think how much given that no less than four people were employed to deliver the workshop (although they were pretty tight with the post-it notes), is being spent on a three-pronged outreach strategy so that no-one is ‘left behind’ come the day, come the hour.

All this was delivered with unfaltering confidence and belief in the healing power of telly. No-one seemed to get that those who might be left behind with a blank screen, their target audience, have perhaps already been left behind in today’s strange society. For example we were given an example of some poor guy who lay dead in his flat in Brent, undiscovered for three years. I was left to wonder what it was they were trying to illustrate to us: it would have been less likely to happen if his tv was digital, or at least he had a wider choice of free channels to entertain him before he sadly died and laid undiscovered?

The whole thing was madly topsy-turvy. They are switching analogue off ostensibly because we can get more free channels and better quality picture. But scratch the surface and you will see that they can pack the digital signals more tightly which means they (the government) can sell more broadcast licenses and then the switched off analogue will be re-allocated and those licenses sold on again… These guys are selling fresh air folks, what a wheeze.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t like to think of my grandmother, in her late eighties, without access to tv, but neither would I like to think of her (one of the scenarios we were run through more than once) timing her whole life through the programming schedule of digital tv: breakfast tv – eat, take pills, Loose Women – repeat, and so on. This was taken as far as the following statements: tv is part of a care package, tv has been ‘proven’ to speed the recovery of people in hospital – ‘fact’.

I have tried, but I can’t find this scientific fact about the healing powers of tv and even if I did I would ask what the healing powers of tv were compared to, lying in your own faeces and staring at a wall when you can’t afford the fiver a day it costs to watch Andrew Landsley’s political party broadcast?

I need to stop now because I can feel a rant coming on…

If I didn’t suspect it before, I now know: television is the new state religion.

P.S. If you don’t know what I am talking about please leave a comment and I can deluge you with a tsunami (what I hitherto thought of as an actual catastrophe before I was told it was a blank screen) of beer mats, book marks, leaflets, posters, pens, pharmacy bags, stickers and a story book of information overload. Then if you are over 75, blind, or in receipt of certain benefits (that class you as an economic benefit unit – nice) I can point you in the direction of the service where for anywhere between £40 – £233 you can get all set. If you are not eligible – tough – sort it out yourself and make sure you open the letter they are sending us all.

A 'catastrophe'

Forgetting about the OFF switch

It’s a black squat beast, hunkered on its haunches in the corner of the room, spewing out its feed. No-one seems to know how to get it to stop.

Where is the remote? I ask when the on-screen primpy woman warns that dog-fighting footage is immiment. No-one knows, no-one is looking at the screen, but no-one knows how to turn it off.

I sprint across the room, hurdling the coffee table (an awful but functional concept that rarely entertains coffee) to Hit the Switch. I’ll have no dog-fighting in the front room of an early evening.

Earlier the sound of a war game rattled its fire round my head. The shouts of the pretend men tie my stomach in a knot.

At bedtime, the news wants to show us the last faces of Muammar Gadaffi. Here he is bloodied, staggering, here he is on the ground. Here he is now: dead? They have stopped short of footage where they might poke him with a rifle to prove the point in its entirety. A rebel waves a gold pistol. A rebel without a cause, now.

And I wonder what it is with the news these days and their thirst for these graphic pictures, taken from mobile phone footage. And I wonder if we would broadcast these dying, dead faces if they belonged to people in this country. And I wonder if being cast as an evil, oppressive Middle East, no let’s say it: an Arab dictator, somehow allows us to broadcast these hideous images of a far-removed pantomime death. Only, it is real. It really is a death. And we consume the terror of it through our eyes.

The beast in the corner is off, and it will stay that way, for today.

Some things are best left to the radio.

Right & Wrong? Missing in Action

‘Educating Essex’

I am slightly allergic to institutions, especially these factory farms for teenagers called secondary schools; so it’s been a bit of a trauma over the last few weeks visiting some of the secondary schools round here for their open evenings. We still have the 11+ in Essex, but it’s not compulsory. Sounds ok, but actually it means that in the year your child turns 10 you have to start thinking about whether they want to take it, or not. And that’s a pressure in itself, especially when (regrettably) the word from the playground hasn’t changed in the 30 years since I did the 11+

Grammar school = good
Comprehensive = bad

Rubbish of course. Try telling that to a 9 year old… That’s why we’ve been visiting the schools, so the 9 year old can make her own judgements with her parents, rather than listen to other 9 year olds.

We visited a High School this week; it gave me the heeby-jeebies. Built in the 1930s it was like a carbon copy of my own school. The Head Teacher’s speech was a thinly-veiled message I can summarise as:

If your kid isn’t a super-geek from a wealthy family, don’t bloody bother.

More worryingly, everyone was sooo serious, no-one smiled – least of all the teachers. It’s no good telling me you are welcoming on the one hand, when there’s none of it in evidence on the other. Additionally, the head mentioned that all girls did PE ‘hockey, netball’ before drifting off into an non-commital ‘etc…’ and all girls we expected to ‘enjoy it!’. I did exceptionally well not to flee the hall screaming.

This school boasted 100% success in 5 GCSEs A-C grades including English and Maths, but they start them a year early, on their accelerated curriculum. In one classroom I heard a teacher referring to ‘accelerating the learners’ *shudders*. This is a top 100 school and it boldly claims to send your children out into the world at 18 ‘set for life’, but I can’t help but wonder what kind of life. A fairly serious one I would think…

I can’t decide if this is worse than the comprehensive that has the highest exclusion rate locally, a ‘behaviour modification programme’ and the best exam results in the borough, outside the grammar schools. I can’t help but think that comes at the cost of the excluded learners the behaviour modification didn’t work for.

It was, therefore, a rebalancing experience to watch the actual C4 #EducatingEssex programme from Passmores Academy in Harlow. I especially enjoyed the senior management team meetings where they had been edited to look as if they were permanently in hysterics. You can sometimes measure the gravity of your occupation by the regular need to laugh so hard you fall off your bar stool. It’s an exercise in grounding.

The show also neatly summed up my main objection to how we organise secondary education in this country. This was done through following the Deputy Head, Mr Drew. Mr Drew is a history teacher and spends just one hour a day teaching his subject. Mr Drew was forthright, outspoken some might say, but his views, at least, seemed to come from the heart as well as the mind. He seemed to respect the kids in school as individuals and have enthusiasm for his subject. He believed that permanent exclusion of children from school is morally wrong, he promoted the idea that bad behaviour is just a manifestation of some deeper confusion or pain. But it seems that despite having all that sound ideology, Mr Drew spent much of his working life being a faux-policeman: enforcing uniform and behaviour policies and apparently (from their perspective) making a nuisance of himself to the kids he was purporting to educate.

But what else can Mr Drew do? If you have a school of around a thousand kids there have to be rules, and when they get broken someone has to ensure there are consequences. It’s just a damn shame that it’s the teachers who actually like kids and are effective in the classroom that have to spend so much of their time doing it.

I had the opportunity to teach (cover for one session) a class of teenagers last week. It was a small class, one where ennui seemed de rigueur. What do you do with that boulder of disaffection and negativity when it’s landed on your foot? Well like Sisyphus of Greek myth you can push it up the hill yourself, watch it roll back to the bottom, and begin the task again, or you can get creative.

You can look at the boulder, you can talk about it, you can give it a name and make it your friend. You can ask the disengaged to give you a hand with the interminable rolling thereof. What I wouldn’t do is ask it to do is straighten its *tie.

My old school's logo 'Not for ourselves alone' I don't remember the logo or the mermaids. I would've remembered mermaids, surely?

And finally, because writing this didn’t quite annoy me enough, I took this gem from my old school’s current website

THE FOLLOWING SYMPTOMS MIGHT BE SHOWN IN SOMEBODY SUFFERING FROM WHICH MENTAL ILLNESS?

Hallucinations
Poverty of speech
Delusions of grandeur

So wrong on so many levels, grammatically for a start. Plus it’s from the ‘psychology quiz’ and it’s a psychiatric question. Oh, and we don’t tend to term people as mental illness sufferers either these days. Perhaps the super-geek school where they accelerate the girls and they all love PE because the male head said so is not so bad…

*If you are of the strict uniform persuasion I recommend you consider the selective High school I visited this week. £26 for a name-embroidered ON THE BREAST POCKET science lab, £50+ for a blazer.

Red Rum on BBC Sports Personality 1977

Red Rum and Ginger McCain interviewed here by a slightly nervous Frank Bough.

A classic moment when Red Rum hears his jockey Tommy Stack via black and white video link…

St Leger: the oldest classic

For various reasons my heart’s not been in the flat season this year. The truth is that I have barely watched a race since Derby Day. I’ve turned the racing on just now and absence has made the grass seem greener than ever before and the jockeys’ silks buzz out of the tv screen.

Re: bets, I’ve had a few… Then again, (this season) too few to mention.

I might have one later on Blue Bunting, or I might not. Either way I will be with her in the
St Leger. Fillies don’t win the race much, but of them all I think the drying ground won’t inconvenience her and I like her robust profile. I’ve got to finish the post now because I want to watch Born to Sea, Sea the Stars half-brother, make his debut in ten minutes at the Curragh (2.40).

Blue Bunting: unusual tail

Blue & Green: not what they seem?

There is so much that we take for granted on a daily basis; perhaps assuming that one person’s experience is going to be another’s for example. It was fascinating then, to watch the BBC’s Horizon: Do You See What I See?

It turns out that how we see colour is not the same: illusion, mood, culture and language all directly affect our colour vision. Show this aspirational summer sky to the Himba tribe in Namibia and they will describe the blue and some of the greens with the same word. In fact, they will take considerably longer than readers of this blog to even see there is any difference in the colours of the leaves and the sky.

Five words cover the colour of their world.

Contrast this with the Desana language in the Amazon, a tribe who, with their words for such colours as yellow-bright like the sun’s rays, and yellowy-green, and greenish-blue like moonlight, can experience and describe their rainforest hues in all their spectral glory; leaving our *language, and perhaps our colour experience, wanting.

And best of all, consider this: blue and yellow are the first colours we evolved to see and as such are hardwired into our emotional lives.

Escape into blue and our perception of time quickens.

No wonder we miss those summer skies…

*A useful list of words for colours

Hoof It

The blog has not had much time or inclination to entertain, or be entertained, lately but I did manage to watch the Nassau Stakes and the Stewards Cup from Goodwood last Saturday. Aftertiming is a disgusting habit as all punters will know, nonetheless, after not having had a bet for ages I was very much taken with Hoof It’s appearance and was therefore prepared to overlook both his joint favouritism and top-weight of ten stone.

Looking at the horse, with his deep chest and powerful engine, I concluded he would be well able to carry the weight. And he was, and more impressively than I could have hoped. He was a joy to watch, and you should take those when you can in my experience, as they can come few and far between in a gambler’s life.

The horse’s owners are supplementing him for the Nunthorpe @ the Ebor Festival I think. Good.

Hoof It and Kieren Fallon coming home well - ears pricked

Derby Day: Part II

The Queen *curtsies* not Carlton House *admires nostrils*

Well, well, well. Kieren Fallon comes a cropper in the law courts.

Native Khan’s owner, Ibrahim Araci, has been successful in his appeal to prevent Fallon from riding Recital this afternoon and the sensational story has usurped the favourite in the market, the Queen’s horse, in the racing headlines.

Going into the race it has all been about Her Maj’s Carlton House and his twanged leg tendon. Now we will be hanging off our seats going round Tattenham Corner to see if Fallon’s intended mount, Recital, is running like a Derby winner and Native Khan’s Araci will be wanting right to be on his side for the second time in a day in the UK.

Imagine the equivalent in another sport? Injunction prevents footballer playing in a Cup Final. Legal ramifications may abound. But that’s for another day.

Today we have the Queen, the Aga Khan, the Turk and the Irish, plus a billion punters. What story are they going to back this afternoon with so many to choose from.

Now, with a little help from the judge, one of the most intriguing narratives of the day belongs to Recital.
Pat Smullen is forgoing a date in Tramore, Ireland this afternoon and hot-footing over to the Epsom Downs to partner Recital. I don’t really rate the form of that horse myself – Fallon may know better than me of course, but I would like to see Native Khan come home in front of that one, for both the craic and on pedigree.

Then there is Carlton House, belonging to the Queen. She has never had the Derby winner, so a first winner for her and a sixth winner for her trainer, Sir Michael Stoute, would be a nice headline for the Sunday papers. Better yet that she saves her first winner of the Derby for her Diamond Jubilee year (that’s 2012)?

Best story: Native Khan wins, making Fallon a liar and a fool
Second best: The Queen wins and a nation rejoices
Third best: Recital wins and the British justice system prevails

Ok, not buying that analysis? Try this instead.

Ballydoyle run 4 – yawn, yawn, yawn, yawn. Of the four, I would take Seville.

I can’t have anything by Montjeu today so that narrows things down nicely. And I find I am bored of typing now so I will leave it as a combination forecast involving Native Khan, Seville and Vadamar. Oh I am nothing if not rigorous in my analysis…

Native Khan's sire: Azamour - an exceptional looking horse