Trips Travel and All That Jazz

No, Boka your Kotorska!

2009-08-27T04:24:00.000-07:00

The bay surrounding Kotor in Montenegro is the stuff of glamourous films. As the teeny Fokker plane took us from Gatwick airport to the roasting tarmac of Tivat, James Bond could easily drop out of a plane in a parachute to land on a yaught moored on the bay, and sip some of the local wine. Postcard-style pictures are only too easy to take.

We picked up the colossal suitcase belonging to our friends, Chris and Vanja, which we had checked in as our own to save them a nasty baggage surcharge (a comical phrase, since they were getting married), and went through customs. The heat wafted off the parking lot, cooking tyres and the unprotected heads of relatives waiting, and the landlord of the self-catering flat we booked welcomed us in with a sign with my name on it.

"Hi, I'm David. We're just waiting for our friends", I bumbled.

"???", he replied

"Dobar dan" was my feeble attempt at greeting the man in his language as he started to gesture us towards his car.

"Ah, dobar dan!" he beamed awkwardly. And thus began our series of mimes and broken Serbian from a phrasebook which saw us through ten days of mistranslated fun.

Not so bad a start. Our apartment terrace looked over the bay, perched on a hill above the many seaside flats and tropical trees of Tivat harbour. The town itself had the tacky attractiveness of any seaside conurbation with its stalls of ice cream and odd flashy toys, minus the overweight families of Western Europe. Most couples looked like they were straight out of a swimwear fold-out of a fashion magazine; tanned and tight-buttocked with designer sunglasses to boot. Naturally we were completely inconspicuous.

Tivat has a harbour and lots of swimming and water-polo areas, but is otherwise fairly low-key compared to its neighbouring beach towns. We spent the next few days hopping on and off buses which careered down the coastal roads, brushing aside pesky pedestrians in their way, to laze about the little jetties and stony beaches of Stoliv, Prcanj (get your English-speaking tongues around that one!) and Kotor itself. The bay has endless coves, each of which seem to open up as you pass the previous one, all framed with white rocky hills and mountains, and is basked in sunlight from morning till evening. There are no tides. People leave fishing rods out when the day gets hot, and come and get their dinner on the end of the line when things cool down. God made lots of time when he made Montenegro.

We forgot our London rhythms and slowed down. Our flat had a massive terrace we could eat breakfast on every morning. Turkish coffee, fluffy white bread from the local bakery, cheap, local fruit and vegetables from the amusingly-named Panto supermarket. We took turns figuring out how to make a meal of the ingredients we got out of the teeny shops, not yet aware of how to get to the market. Meat and fish were readily available, but somehow we weren't hungry for that sort of thing until lunch in one of the local restaurants. Ten euros would see you through several courses of freshly-cooked meat or fish and a glass of the locally-grown "Plantaze" wine. The reds were better than the whites, and beer, of course cost less than fruit juice.

Of the ten days we were there, we spent three visiting historical sites and going on walks, the most memorable of which - for me - was the walk around the old city walls of Kotor, up to the fortress which overlooks the city. Deceptively close to the town centre, access to the fortress is by a set of stairs reminiscent of Citizen Kane's Xanadu. We went through two bottles of water just getting to the top, and had to stop to drink every few minutes. The view was definitely worth it, even though the fortress itself is a bit overgrown and graffitied, with confusing signs telling you not to enter it after you've been charged two euros to go there. But yes, memorable for the eyes and the legs alike.

Budva is another popular town in the bay. Its old town juts into the sea and is full of orthodox sites to visit, with the manageable feel of those stoney Roman villages with their cobblestones and piazzas. It's definitely the most touristy of the towns in the bay; the beaches are covered with signs in English and animations for party-hungry beachgoers, but restauranteurs and those pesky people who rent parasols on beaches were less than pleasant. We had a fantastic meal in an Italian restaurant, where 8 euros saw me through two courses of fish. Ruth enjoyed the food too, as well as the better quality of restaurant decor in Budva, and had plenty of time to poke about Budva's many jewelry shops while I enquired about trips to the local monasteries. The town is definitely worth visiting, but we were both left wanting to go back to Kotor or Tivat which are touristy but somehow more friendly and manageable.

Our trip finished with a flourish with Chris and Vanja's wedding. They had been busy sorting out last-minute details (like the location of the civil ceremony!) while we were swanning about beaches and wondering what to cook that evening, so we hadn't seen that much of them and didn't really know what to expect. We arrived at Tivat harbour suited and booted for the event to find a massive boat on two levels, all decked out for meals, dancing, a band and the table for the marriage registry to take place. The guests piled onto the boat only to be fed lunch on the way to Kotor for the church ceremony in St Nikolas, and were led in a procession into the church. The ceremony itself was sung by the two priests and was a moving set of rituals (incense, tying the couple's hands with a cloth, kissing and wearing each others' crowns of flowers...), all of which Chris followed in Serbian and performed flawlessly. Vanja's elegant train was trailed down the church steps and the guests proceeded to assail them with good wishes and take photographs with them. And despite the coordinated American-football style throw, Vanja's sister Sanja lost the bouquet flying past her outside the church to another maid.

We got back on the boat for an evening of festivities like something out of a Greek epic. Several courses of lamb, pork, potatoes, salads and vegetables were served, and drinks of every description were served for the rest of the afternoon and evening, complimentary to all guests. When I shyly mentioned I couldn't eat meat, the waiters went off and came back with a massive plate of fried squid and potatoes which I gladly murdered before the bemused eyes of the rest of the guests. The band played, the speeches were given, the guests danced, and we occasionally looked up from what we were doing to remind ourselves of the gobsmacking surroundings it was all happening in. Turquoise water with fish literally leaping out to see our boat, mountains and trees reaching over the bay... We were even greeted by a nun on an island in the middle of the water, who waved her approval of the wedding proceedings as we sailed past. The hills were, indeed, alive with the sound of music (i.e. the band on our boat).

The evening culminated with the civil ceremony, translated into English by an interpreter, with the wishes and blessings of Tivat's officials. The best man's speech was tame by British reckoning (but surprisingly unflattering to the groom by Montenegrin standards), and both fathers gave their wishes and thanks to each other's families. Chris stunned the guests by delivering his speech in Montenegrin, and translating it for the Anglophones, reading some parts off the page, but speaking others unfalteringly. He then proceeded to lose all kudos gained from his speech with Vanja's family by dancing alongside his beautiful bride.

The sky lit up with stars over the coast and fireworks over Kotor's festival, also going on that night, and we indulged in the power ballads of the band by dancing, drinking, eating and squawking our little hearts out (yes, Ruth I was actually dancing, it wasn't a seizure). By the time the boat docked and everyone was off, we were all worn out from an experiential overload, and had to head home to pack for our 8.30am flight home (sorry Vanja! I know you wanted me to embarrass myself further by dancing in a club).

After a speedy packing process and long showers we got home for a few hours sleep before hopping back on our little Fokker of an airplane (sorry, I can't resist!) with our tans, our bottle of local red wine, and minus about 4 years of worries and stress which Tivat's coastal breeze blew away for us.

What more could you ask for of a summer holiday?

Back by popular demand

2009-03-29T23:06:00.000-07:00

'Tis hard to say if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill;
But, of the two; less dang'rous th'Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mislead our Sense

Edmund Spenser, from An Essay on Criticism

Unsure as to whether to continue torturing this carcass of a weblog, I write on.

Recent months have been eventful. Moving to a new flat in Ealing, combining the pressures of a Masters and a full-time teaching job in a super-academic French school, and trying to squeeze in time for my partner in between short spates of sleep... It's been hectic, horrifically hectic, but oh so fun.

Twenty-eight is an odd year to celebrate, if that's what it is that I've been doing. Spending the evening at home enjoying time with people I really want to be with seems to be a whole lot more fun than going out and painting the town red. Then again, I've always been a bit party-shy. I guess I feel old and young all at the same time.

London life suits me right down to the ground at this stage of my existence. Down to the underground, to be more precise, which is where I seem to spend most of my day, bussing between lessons I teach and lessons I am taught both in and out of academic contexts. I love the hectic, unforgiving, bustle of London now, and no longer see it as a drag, despite the days when it literally drags me downwards by the shoulders (a leftover symptom of September's glandular fever perhaps, or perhaps just a psychosomatic emblem of London's energy drain...). I arrived in the Lycee this morning to see the sun reflecting off the rooftop of the V&A museum thinking yet again that my morning trip to work is a lifetime pilgrimage for so many visitors to the UK. I'm darn lucky to have landed here.

Cédric Clapish made a film a few years ago, the title of which summarizes my feelings about London right now: L'Auberge Espagnole. Like the fabled Spanish taverns, this city brings back to you whatever you bring to it. Be careful what you wish for if you decide to live here.

Musings

2008-10-12T04:44:00.000-07:00

Long time no write. I guess it must have been the move, the new job, the new partner, the whole new life, and the new annoying glandular fever virus that have kept me from this blog for so long. Oh, and the new pain in my rear lack of internet access from home too. I hate BT. With a passion.

Now that I've got something worth describing, I thought I'd summarise the last few months' experience of London, for all my huge audience around the world. Firstly, there's been the new job. A myriad of oddness, working for the French government, teaching English - sometimes the British curriculum - as an Irishman, thought to be English, among French colleagues... The school is something of a conundrum. I won't go into the politics here, but suffice it to say that the little channel of water which separates Britain from France is no barrier compared to the cultural chasm which separates how they think of education.

The move; I now live in Acton. It's an odd place, full of internet cafes and dodgy grocery stores where people look at you funny if you come in and ask for things they'd normally have in a grocery shop. It's an odd mixture of Arab-muslims, antipodeans and Poles, and shops which seem to cater for one of those three groups. It's got a great Portugese restaurant, though, where I just had a fresh coffee and apple pie for £2. In these times when the pound is worth less than the rouble, it's worth saving where you can...

My new lady. What can I say. It makes all the difference to have someone in one's life who can both boost and kick your self-satisfied male ego. That's Ruth. The most colourful, musical person I've ever met.

Onto a less pleasant subject, glandular fever. It's the strangest illness, because it's viral and can't be medicated, and doesn't express itself till I make some kind of physical effort. So no running, and therefore a feeling of constant tiredness. It basically doesn't go away, but dies down within 6 months, if you're lucky. Until it does, you feel like you've been hit over the head with a shovel half the time, and feel absolutely normal the rest of it. People get tired of you feeling tired. Are you ill or are you well? You were fine yesterday, make up your mind... It's all the more frustrating for someone like me who wants to either be healthy or die trying. Grr.

Finally, my MA course. It's in Critical and Cultural Theory, and we started last Monday with Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I wasn't too impressed with this essay, but have taken to reading Benjamin, and think I might be a convert after all. Meanwhile, it's got me back into reading all sorts of pretentious European philosophy. That's the idea.

This exhibition is what I got up to yesterday before burning out and going home to sleep. This guy makes waxworks of various bodies, and they are frighteningly real. You arrive in the exhibition hall and it looks like somebody has just fainted or fallen down.

As you can see in the second picture, the body is just a reproduction of himself. It doesn't look like much here, but it's really convincing when you're actually there. He captures a lot of what Foucault had to say about the body and how we have a pornographic way of looking at bodies nowadays. Our aesthetics in the media seems to be obsessed with turning the body into something to be admired or loathed, but in any case changed and improved. Xin shows us the body the way it is, and we wish it wasn't.

Too loose

2008-08-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

It's been a while. I've been so caught up with visiting apartments around London I've hardly squeezed in enough time to write a short entry.

I was watching Les Poupées Russes by Cédric Clapisch today, which had to be one of the best films I've seen in recent years. It's the sequel to L'Auberge Espagnole, a rambunctious tale of a Parisian exchange student's life-changing year in Barcelona, and the odd cultural mixity he finds there. This sequel skips about ten years into his life, where he becomes a script writer for French daytime television, and narrates his experience of trying to make it as an author, punctuated with his complicated love life.

The film contrasts Xavier's expectations as a single Parisian male in his thirties with those of his British and Spanish friends and girlfriends. He seems uneasy around butch, testosterone-driven men and prissy, girly women, being much more comfortable around his lesbian best friend. A sentiment I can definitely empathise with. Too much of one hormone seems to really mess people up.

Being back in Toulouse, I've had the joy of being around my niece a lot, go running when I want to, cook meals with my sister and play badminton with my brother-in-law. It's my idea of the best sort of holiday. It contrasts nicely with the frenzied, money-fuelled, angst-driven existence of London life. I just can't imagine going on one of those package holidays full of drunks like my housemates seem to do.

While I was running along the canals in Toulouse yesterday, one of the barges was named "Too loose", which seems to summarise a foreigner's impressions of the city in a clever pun the locals probably don't get. The Toulousains are chilled out, not too bothered about things. Great for a holiday, but probably too loose for my liking, as a place to live.

Off to Avignon and the Dentelles de Montmirail in the morning. Let's see what that brings...

Blues Festival

2008-07-20T03:37:00.000-07:00

Another weekend going down like a fine wine into Gorbachev's gizzard. Boy am I loving this city.

I was flathunting in Acton, looking for the perfect house, which I might well have found, to share with a new cohort of potential housemates. While I was left waiting in the estate agent's office, I picked up a paper which had an ad for the Ealing Blues festival. It was going on all day, but I would have enough time to attend when the flat visits were over, since one of my friends bailed on me for dinner that evening (not mentioning any names, Kades).

So here was some of the result. The sound is pretty awful on this because it was so loud in the tent, but I've rarely come across a band as good as this one. Funkydory, they're called. They rocked the funk out of the whole funking audience. I like saying 'funk' as a euphemism, you'll observe.

This festival is the closest the English get to the big Mediterranean musical gatherings like those you get in Andalucia or Marocco. Babies potter about your legs, and drunken granddads dance unabashedly as you order your beer and your burger just outside the tent. It feels like a giant family holiday with really good food and music.

I'm hoping the afterlife is something like this. There's an episode of Six Feet Under where Claire visits her dead father in a dream and they end up in a sort of festival like this one, to represent life after death. If only...

An Odd Weekend

2008-07-10T06:57:00.000-07:00

Rufus Wainwright's voice is haunting. I found that out after receiving a text message on Thursday saying:

"We've got an Xtra ticket for Rufus Wainwright on Saturday. Want 2 come?"

to which I willfully replied

"F*** yes!"

and off to the gig I went. The venue was Kenwood House, up the back end of Hampstead Heath off towards Highgate. You either take a bus all the way round the park (if you're clever), or you walk all the way through the Heath and get hopelessly lost about forty times, along with countless other wayfarers with their picnic hampers.

Yes, how Hampstead. It was an outdoor 'picnic' concert in a heritage site, and the Pimms flowed aplenty. The sun, however, didn't. A layer of threatening dark cloud sat over the whole of London as Rufus mocked himself between songs, and prayed that his audience didn't vanish off home with the first signs of downpour (I don't know that many fans who are that fanatic as to sit in a muddy park for the evening when they could be at home. It's not Woodstock after all!). But the rain held off long enough for me to be blown away.

He was interesting, funny and poignant at intervals. He stopped songs halfway through if he didn't like them, and had the confidence to deliver the standards with real gusto rather than warmed-up hackery. I was left in that reverent that the really good concerts give.

So Saturday night edged to a close as we all left the park and tried to cram onto buses to get home. Sparing you the account of the journey, I was back in Twickenham by about midnight, preparing for the race I was meant to run the next day.

I had signed up for a 15 mile race out in Kent, in a really pretty area called Bewl. The idea was to break myself into longer distance running by trying out a half marathon, and I had to get out there on a train. Now luckily on Saturday night, despite getting home a lot later than planned, I checked the trains only to find there was no way from my place into London to get the train I wanted. So I set the alarm for 6.00am to be ready to get the Tube into London.

Everyone in this city is completely used to the idea that transport just doesn't work. It's the norm. Nobody complains that the bus is 20 minutes late; they just look at you blankly when you comment on it, as if to say "Well yes. What else did you expect?" So by 7.45 I was still sitting on my rear, under the rain, with all my running gear on, cursing my stars that the transport was bust.

I decided to go into town anyway to see if I could at least get the next train in, and run the distance even though the race was over. But then as I approached Picadilly Circus, the Tube packed up completely with runners. It turned out the London 10km run was on that very same morning, and was about to start at 9.30. I took my chances and went to see if I could enter. And I did.

It was a gruelling race, trying to keep up with the front row of runners I ended up with. These are people who don't go to bed at night without running at least 10km or the equivalent on a rowing machine. They look like they're made of sheer sinew. Hardly any bone, not even to mention fat. Just bark-like sinew.

I completed the run in 41 minutes, which is a competitive enough time for a beginner, and to my glee, gave chase to a Ugandan who looked like he was born running. It rained, the sun shone, the cloud came, and it rained again, and still the crowd of charity runners cheered us on. It was a real privilege.

Where else but London could you wake up after a Rufus Wainwright concert in a park, only to stumble into a 25,000 person race the next morning...?

Badgers

2008-07-02T12:30:00.000-07:00

"The world of badgers is in some ways analogous with the human world. Like us, their behaviour is greatly influenced by their need for homes and living space, and being social like we are, they too have their problems of learning how to live together ..... and with us"

Ernest Neal

Ah, the badger. A completely irrelevant and unimportant issue in today's Britain with its teen knifings and its completely volatile political landscape, and its overpaid bottom-teeth-grinning Keira Knightleys. But think again...

In the words of the great www.badgerland.co.uk...

The Badger (Latin name Meles meles) is one of the most popular animals in the UK. Widespread across England and Wales (with a few in Scotland), the badger is loved by most but seen by few. All too often the Badger and its environment are harmed by man (by accident or deliberately).

There's food for thought to fill your lost internet hours.

"Um why the bejesus are you filling up this godforsaken weblog with this drivel?" I hear you ask. Well for two reasons:

Firstly, there's a badger in my garden, right now. It's there, burying itself under a bush, which is right under my clothes line, and I actually shied away from the little fuzzball. How wimpy am I? Then on reflection, I had a good look, and the little critter was curled up in a ball with its head underneath it, pretending I wasn't there.

See now in that sense, I'm surrounded by badgers. People who turn away from reality, bury their heads, and hope nobody notices them, whenever things go wrong. I mean, there's a bit of badger in everyone, and I'm no exception. Right now, for instance, I'm badgering my way out of marking the piles of Year 10 coursework that's stacked on my desk. Why else would I be blogging about badgers.

My colleagues like to avoid any conversation which doesn't relate to work, ever since I called them on singling out people they don't like from their little "friendship" groups. They asked to make sure that nobody invited the Drama teacher for drinks with us even though she was right there in the same pub, so - being who I am - I went right over and invited her to join us. From that moment, it was decided I was to be avoided at all costs. I'm no longer part of that badger set. I cry a river every night in my cosy little bed, as you can imagine.

And if you're wondering, yes, teachers are always that immature. It's uncanny. They spend their time around petty, surly groups of teenagers, telling them to grow up, and this is what they do.

So I've been badgered out of the group. But still, there are times when curling up in your own ball and keeping the outside world out can actually be a creative way of dealing with a problem. Recently I've taken to wearing an AIDS badge on my lapel, in support of a Stuttgart-based initiative I was involved in, and a good few kids started asking what it was and why I was wearing it, which encouraged me to keep wearing it. Silly me for thinking that kids should be asking questions nowadays when it comes to AIDS. But in the den of brilliance of my staffroom, this was read as code for being gay. Of course, who else would wear an AIDS badge but a gay man? And this wasn't just the gaggle of gossiping English teachers, but an outwardly gay teacher who was alerted for exactly the same reasons. He thought: "single, vegetarian, interested in theatre and musicals, wearing an AIDS badge... there's no way a straight man would live like that" So when I was asked as to my sexual preferences by one of the more dim-witted teachers, the conversation went something like this:

(Let me just set the scene here)

Dramatis personae:

Me: me
C: Dimwit blonde middle-management English teacher
D: Outwardly gay Canadian drama teacher

D: (Opening his mail, without looking up) So what's with the AIDS button?
Me: I wear it all the time. I was involved in an organisation which brings AIDS patients into schools and has them dispel fears from the kids
D: Really? I see. I just started wondering about you. You know... you eat fish, you like theatre, now the AIDS badge...
C: See I knew there was something there
Me: Right...
C: See D. likes young men so you'd better watch out. Much younger men.
(D shuffles awkwardly, reading his mail intently)

C: (Trying to break the silence after the awkward 'joke') So are you...?
Me: Am I what?
C: Well... No, I was just joking.
Me: Well, you just never know, do you?

(C looks at me askew)

Me: Like Woody Allen says, it increases your chances for a date on Friday nights by 50%
C: So you're not letting on then.
Me: I just did.

(The conversation moves on to something even more inane and pointless, probably to do with the colour of somebody's skirt on the weekend, while C flicks her tall heels at somebody an twiddles her hair. I'm not even sure, I probably was mentally dead by then)

So that was my badger moment this week. It keeps them guessing, that lovely coven of well-intentioned teachers and the concerns which keep them from realising how boring their lives are and throwing themselves under the first Picadilly line train.

Then again, it's good for the psyche having people around who keep you on your toes. No wonder I'm in such badger-mode around my staffroom.

So let's finish with a literary moment, just in case this post hasn't been insane enough. John Clare who went totally loop-the-loop and ended up in an asylum, wrote this poem with a predictable title based on this post. I bid you goodnight and good burrowing.

Badger

When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den,
And put a sack within the hole, and lie
Till the old grunting badger passes by.
He comes an hears - they let the strongest loose.
The old fox gears the noise and drops the goose.
The poacher shoots and hurries from the cry,
And the old hare half wounded buzzes by.
They get a forked stick to bear him down
And clap the dogs and take him to the town,
And bait him all the day with many dogs,
And laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs.
He runs along and bites at all he meets:
They shout and hollo down the noisy streets.

He turns about to face the loud uproar
And drives the rebels to their very door.
The frequent stone is hurled where'er they go;
When badgers fight, then everyone's a foe.
The dogs are clapped and urged to join the fray'
The badger turns and drives them all away.
Though scarcely half as big, demure and small,
He fights with dogs for hours and beats them all.
The heavy mastiff, savage in the fray,
Lies down and licks his feet and turns away.
The bulldog knows his match and waxes cold,
The badger grins and never leaves his hold.
He drives the crowd and follows at their heels
And bites them through - the drunkard swears and reels

The frighted women take the boys away,
The blackguard laughs and hurries on the fray.
He tries to reach the woods, and awkward race,
But sticks and cudgels quickly stop the chase.
He turns again and drives the noisy crowd
And beats the many dogs in noises loud.
He drives away and beats them every one,
And then they loose them all and set them on.
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men,
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again;
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and crackles, groans, and dies.

John Clare

Exhausted but happy

2008-06-22T14:32:00.000-07:00

It's been a while. I'm really not doing very well at this blog, am I.

So much goes on in the round of a week, in a school, I think those who aren't in it anymore forget what a crushing death-march it is. Like Godzilla, school life just drives ahead regardless of everyone and everything crushing anything that gets in its path. You join it, or you are splattered to smithereens.

I attended an interview for a MA course on Monday, visited my new school (the one I'll be teaching in from September) on Tuesday, went on a theatre trip on Wednesday, and had a parents' evening on Thursday. A pretty insane week by any standards, but productive.

The most worthy of blogging about was the visit to the theatre. It's a shame I can't get hold of the pictures here. Our kids were a bottom set year 8 group, so we're talking 12 year olds with very short attention spans, and little or no experience of ever being in the theatre before. They were taken to the Old Vic by myself and two other teachers they knew fairly well. After an initial spree of surreptitiously filching their sugar-enriched supersweet caramel snacks on the train (they were asked to save them for lunchtime), and about ten arguments between the girls about who got to sit next to who, we finally made it to Waterloo station.

They left the train in a huddle and quietened down a bit while waiting for instructions. It's a big train station, and they don't usually get to go to London. To give you an idea, most of them stare out of the window with a provincial "Woaaah!" when they see the London eye. Hounslow has no such architectural delights. The sheer size and ostentatiousness of the architecture of Waterloo shut them up. They were waiting for us to buy the group ticket at the ticket booth (yes we got it after travelling, don't ask), and of course saw all the crowds on their way to the Ascot races.

Now at the best of times, Ascot hats look a bit surreal to those of us who know what it's about, but to our kids, it was about as foreign as I would feel at a tribal wedding in the Congo. They watched these pasty-faced, bare-legged 'ladies' sporting feathers, mounted animals, you name it, getting onto the train in the other direction, probably wondering why on earth those poor deluded people were going out towards Hounslow, and how likely they were to survive their trip.

We were then ushered through the suicidal traffic around the station to the Old Vic theatre, and greeted there by a sprightly young man who was by all accounts a graduate of a drama school turned professional guide. He seemed to love his job, and really engaged the kids in a discussion of how the theatre was built, and for whom, selling it to them very well, I have to say. They entered in quiet admiration for being allowed into an empty theatre, and got to go about asking questions about the place, and see the set of the play we were going to see. I was very impressed the theatre trusted a bunch of 12 year olds to not mess up their set before a major performance. But there you go. Just goes to show what Kevin Spacey has done with the place.

So after our tour, we were ushered to our seats, after a few drama warmup exercises and some questions to answer after the play was over. The show was Pygmalion, and was quite certainly the best Shaw production I've ever seen. Even our kids were kept on the edge of their seats till the end. Literally; we had limited visibility seats and had to lean forward the whole time to see anything. Kids that age rarely stay engaged more than 10 minutes with those sorts of seats, and ours stayed riveted for well over an hour.

The idea of Eliza Doolittle being transformed from a "gutter-snipe", as the Professor subtly puts it, to a lady is one which still hugely amuses kids from outer London. The teens I teach here are so class-conscious, fascinated by the wealth which surrounds their little pocket of depravity in Hounslow; their haven of British Asian family-centred life with its obsessions and dramas so removed from the busy city life in central London. They instinctively know they belong to an underclass, and can completely empathise with Eliza's hilariously goofy faux-pas as she tries to pass herself off for somebody she will never be, losing her working class identity in the process. I was just astounded at how engaged they were. Even their replies of "Yeah. Kay." when asked how they liked the show didn't mask their evident delight in seeing Eliza shift social boundaries and succeed and fail all at once.

All in all, the trip was a huge hit with them, and they even got their ice creams during intermission. Even though parents didn't show up till 45 minutes after we got back to pick up some kids, I was left with a real feeling we'd done something worthwhile. If those kids had that experience of the theatre at that age, perhaps they won't be completely condemned to a life of eating fried chicken in front of some crappy team sport every weekend. Sounds a bit classist, but it's true; we might just have opened up the question for later in their lives: why don't we go out to the theatre for once?

You can only hope!

Loving the chalk

2008-05-17T04:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the last day of our Year 11 students' obligatory secondary education. They were absolutely ballistic. It was a great reminder of what people like myself are there for.

Thursday was our last lesson together, and they were almost beyond control. We had a few last things to cover on the syllabus and amazingly we got through most of them, which was a lot more than I thought we'd get done. Then they chose a spokesperson to tell me what they make of me as a teacher, and then asked me to sign yearbooks, have pictures taken with me... This is the class I've been battling with for the last 6 months, having to raise hell for the first 15 to 20 minutes, and threatening detentions etc. to get them to do anything. It always comes as something of a surprise to find that students who are the toughest to teach are often the most attached.

The strange thing is, all the conflict going on is what seems to make all this work. The kids in most of my classes don't really have people around who have insisted they calm down and concentrate on anything. Their lives are fraught with conflicts, urgent orders to help out around the house, around the shop, pick up their little brothers, or fight with the rest of their siblings to earn some attention or any other sort of reward. So anyone who can get them to sit down, shut the hell up, and concentrate on a piece of writing is actually doing a hell of a lot for them. Doesn't feel like it when you're the idiot at the front of the room dealing with 30 kids trying to pull every trick in the book to wind you up, but it has its value somewhere.

My last few posts have sounded a bit disillusioned with teaching, as a couple of my friends remarked. Of course I love this job; I got out of it for a time and realised nothing else was quite so satisfying. So it's worth remembering why I'm in this.

Beyond the Hegelian struggle that was year 11, finally behind me now, the real solace of my week's work is creative writing lessons with the younger kids, particularly year 7s. One of my classes is a lower set with mostly non-native speakers, who are amazed by the fact that I can type really fast and spell correctly each time. They do exercises in their workbooks, and correct them using mini-whiteboards on which they hold up their answers. When I use the interactive whiteboard (a big screen where I can project documents) to type up our corrections, they look around in amazement that all my fingers are moving at once, and I can put all the commas in the right places without looking at the screen.

My year 8 class - a top set - a bit sneakier than year 7s, after a year of having streams of English teachers going past, so they're not so easily impressed. They clearly read a lot, though, and two of them are always keen to perform their writing in front of the class. Last week was an extract from Touching the Void which is a biographical account of two mountaineers who survive an incredible mountain accident over three days. They had to write a chair-gripping interview with one of the survivors, and our lesson ended with the performance of one of their scripts, which was like a cross between a circus clown act and a Brazilian soap opera.

When things get tough at school, the moment you think it's the most frustrating, pointless system of government hackery, and you'd prefer a 9 to 5 in KFC than sticking around the stinking staffroom for another second, a partially-sighted 11 year old with a backpack bigger than he is stares up at you from the front of a classroom and tells you it was the best poetry lesson he's ever had, and can he take it home to show his Mum. Now who could turn away from that?

Teaching

2008-05-11T14:52:00.000-07:00

I've started to wonder what teaching was like before there was any such thing as school. Is it possible that we've somehow killed teaching with school, just like hospitals generate illness or a Ministry of Defense can generate war?

I'm reading through some openings to Gothic novels which I set as a creative writing task for my year ten students, and most of them have gone to town on it. Tried to incorporate the Gothic setting and characters into an original script, making use of twists or red herrings to lead the reader on... Basically they've ticked all the boxes, and in some cases, tried to do something new or interesting. But Claire, one of my brightest students, wrote a tale called: "Bruce the Emo Shark Who Cuts Himself" in which she derides this shark for being 'emo', or as the kids understand it, a depressed, self-indulgent Goth who takes himself too seriously.

I'm sure this is a crucial part of her path to fulfilment; rebelling against her English teacher by deriding the writing task and seeing if he'll pick up on it. In the Freudian sense, it's all very healthy, normal and adolescent. But a part of me muses as to what Claire is doing taking up a seat in a classroom. Wouldn't she be better suited to doing something else? She's coasting her way to a mediocre GCSE, for whom exactly? Certainly not for her own benefit.

Before there were huge buildings called schools which housed dozens of classrooms, interactive whiteboards, book cupboards, libraries, canteens, and absolutely mind-numbing amounts of paper (where does it all go???), people still got an education. They paid for it, or offered their labour in exchange for training. They picked stuff up, trained at things to be considered worthy of a trade, or made damn sure they were found in the right place at the right time by people who needed them.

I'm sure it was all quite undemocratic and class-biased. Just like school still is today, mind you; nobody is fooled by the comprehensive school's used of streaming by 'ability'; it's basically a social segregation. But ok, it could be a little more meritocratic than depending on the size of your father's address book for your career prospects. But nonetheless, I wonder if education systems kill education.

At the moment my Year 11 class is one week from their study leave. Only for them, that means a week from holidays. They basically refuse to work now, and I have to kick out 4 or 5 per lesson to have any peace and quiet from them. They've given up, imagining that somebody will rescue them out of this. And they're probably right.

The paradigm in the UK is that education is the problem of the educators. Teachers are responsible and accountable for how much students achieve and learn, and parents are only consulted for a 5 minute interview once a year, where in fact they are told what they should or shouldn't be doing to support the school. So it's not their problem.

Plus, when a kid does mess around and give the finger to the whole system, they're basically taken off to a room, a programme or a college which will give them another option for 'success', which basically amounts to somebody else telling them something less difficult they're being offered in exchange for cooperation. At no point does anybody really say: "Either you perk up or you're out", and actually mean it.

I certainly don't think education should be a privilege of the well-behaved and the most able. But I do think somebody should call Claire on her talent at scraping through year after year of school without learning anything, by telling her to perk up or face the consequences. It means treating kids like adults. Do we have the guts?

Really?

2008-05-05T04:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a day of celebration in the tiny town of Whitton which I currently inhabit. The neighbourhood is sandwiched between Twickenham - a well-to-do riverside haven for Land-Rover driving, middle-class bankers - and Hounslow - a pocket of working-class Asian, Polish and Ethiopean families, bunched under the Heathrow airport flight path to keep their house prices nice and cheap. So Whitton is a bit of both. It has the white suburban feel to it, but it's also pretty rough round the edges. Mullets and football scarves in just about every pub, a big St. George's day parade etc... you get the picture.

So Cancer Research was holding a three-legged-race, presumably in honour of May Day in some vague form, but it was bascially an excuse for people to get dressed in ridiculous costumes and get shamelessly drunk in the daytime, during a long weekend. I was dragged out by my Irish housemate, who rightly told me I wasn't getting involved in any of the local colours and I needed to experience this thing. So down the pub I went, and chewed the fat with Tim, while watching the residents spilling themselves out of their hula-dancer skirts and tight-fitting leather outfits, ironically quoting Little Britain or Shameless, or other similar TV shows.

By the time we got home to eat dinner, my housemate was completely worse for wear, and ended up eating my starter as well as his, spilling his plate on the grass (I served the food in the garden out of well-timed precaution) and pouring wine all over the kitchen floor. He went to bed punchdrunk, and there was no way I was either waking him out of it, or going back to the alien world of the local pub without him. It would literally have been like an episode of Star Trek, with Captain Spock lost among a tribe of Clingon-hostile locals, but without the option of being beamed up by a Scotsman. So I kicked around at home reading, watching TV and realising I'm as much of a foreigner here than I ever was in Stuttgart, if not more.

I enjoy going out for a pint, don't get me wrong. I like standing around a pub talking rubbish as much as the next guy. But it genuinely disturbs people that I don't have an identifiable accent or a single place that I come from. It makes them feel awkward, uncomfortable, and even somehow judged. They keep asking "But no, really, are you Irish or what?", and when they don't get a straight answer (because there isn't one), they sort of peter out the conversation or change the subject and wander off. They're either afraid I'll say or do something they won't understand and will therefore look ignorant or stupid, or else they think they'll say something which is offensive or racist, but won't know till it's too late. After all, the French love their food and the Swedish make Ikea furniture, but what do you talk about (or not talk about) around a French-Irishman with an accent from god-knows-where?

Ah, the thrills and spills of being the product of an 'international' background. You are successfully trained to never quite fit in anywhere except other people who've had a mixed background, however freethinking and culturally aware you think you are. You think you've got the freedom to adapt to living anywhere, without suspecting how people will (or won't) adapt to you...

Meanwhile, as I went out for my evening walk yesterday, I noticed some kids hanging around a chip shop, at about 10.15 at night. I realised one of them was from my year 7 English class, and he was holding hands with a bleached-haired blonde in a miniskirt which left precious little to the imagination. He's twelve! I know this is a sign of aging, when you start railing against young girls' clothing, but I just couldn't get over that this twelve year old was already so streetwise. It just begs the question as to what he's going to do when his real teenage rebellion sets in, if that's his normal Sunday evening at twelve years old.

I'm decidedly not a Whittonite, if that's what they're called. But it's an eye opener, at least.

Book Review: Why I'm Not a Christian

2008-05-01T08:11:00.000-07:00

Over the last Easter break, I got tired of reading fiction, and decided to dabble in some philosophy. Anything that was well written and accessible, and funnily enough, there's more than you'd think. One of the books recommended on the shelves in the shop I was in was a collection of articles and speeches by Bertrand Russell, entitled Why I'm Not a Christian.

It probably sounds like a Richard Dawkins-esque attack on the lack of evidence for religious belief, which bluntly discards religion as a sort of senseless craze, and discredits the history of theology which supports it. Far from it. Russell was writing and talking from about 1895 to 1960 on this topic, and never really made it his academic specialism. He was a logician and mathematician who simply had a few things to say about religion. It just so happens that he puts arguments I have always believed myself far better than I can.

Firstly, that the arguments in support of Christianity are almost identical to those supporting other dogmas which we now discredit as being either dangerous or irrational. For instance, the idea that the beliefs are worth supporting because they're good for society or it helps to uphold moral values - regardless of whether or not they are actually true - is a slippery slope. It's like telling children that the bogeyman is out to get them to keep them in bed, or lying to your wife about cheating on her. It assumes people are willing to settle for untruths, and sets up a very bad social precedent.

Regardless of whether the moral principles of Christianity are 'good', its history is pretty dismal. From crusades to inquisitions, to attacks on its strongest ideologues, like Thomas Paine or Martin Luther, Christian institutions have done at least as much harm as they have good. Russell argues that any ideology which claims to have an unquestionable access to truth, coupled with a sense of owning moral values, will inevitably result in haughy, judgemental and eventually punitive behaviour. He draws analogies with Russian communism, indicating that the various strands of Christianity have followed an almost identical path. The purges, genocides, pogroms all stem from that same dangerous cocktail of dogma and moral superiority.

Russell puts it far better than I do, of course, and one chapter even transcribes a debate between Russell and a leading contemporary theologian, arguing about the requirement of a God to talk of a meaningful universe; a debate which has largely been railroaded by the Dawkinses of this sensationalist world.

More's the Pity.

London city centre

2008-04-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

Spent yesterday meandering my way about the sights and sounds of the capital. London is absolutely huge. An unplanned sprawl of neighbourhoods, which are almost independent cities of their own, each with very peculiar identities.

On Saturday, after cancelling an impromptu visit to Paris, I ended up walking all the way down Regent's canal, from King's Cross to the Camden lock, and on till Little Venice, which is out by Maida Vale. You wouldn't believe how pastoral it feels. The sun was out, as well as the bellies and skinny white legs of a lot of tourists and passters-by, and it was like being in a small Italian town, or in Cambridge, even though trains were screaming in and out of King's Cross right next door.

London is full of gorgeous walks that nobody seems to tell you about. The city is so hectic and busy that people tend to get out of it to enjoy calmer countryside, when they want peace and quiet. Only it's right there at their doorstep; they just don't have the time to see it.

This part of the canal borders Little Venice, which is almost like a port for barges. It's a nook of tranquility in this mad, buzzing city. People seem to live much more peacefully than in the rest of London. And when you walk down here and see rusty old barges with 'for sale' notices, it can only make you fantasize about a different life right downtown.

I'm quite sure they're hellish to maintain, and I can hardly imagine how many insects you get in the summer. But still. There must be people who are nuts enough to live this way. Anyway.

This part of the canal is right next to the London Zoo. I can't imagine what the zoo itself is like, but from the canal it looks stunning. Especially since it's near the part of Camden where loads of people come walking from Camden, so you get every possible freak of nature around there. People hanging out consuming all sorts of entertaining items, with more piercings on their bodies than skin that isn't pierced.

See London is a bit like a giant anthill. Very impressive architecturally, makes you want to admire it, and observe it aesthetically, but before you know it your shoes are covered in odd things you didn't even know existed. And you love it, even though it itches and you'll need a shower when you get home. But boy will you have enjoyed the ride.

The graffiti down brick lane isn't that far off from Picadilly, where the canal ends. It's a pretty-boy pretentious part of town with lots of fashionable designer shops which find 'retro' clothes and sunglasses which they sell for an outrageous fortune. Sort of like something out of a Jennifer Saunders sketch, but taking itself far more seriously. There are DJ stores all around, which sell overpriced second hand records.

But it's fantastic.

When you're not stuck in the tube, that is...

Teachers' strike

2008-04-24T08:15:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in the almost empty staffroom of my West London school, finishing off some marking, as most of my colleagues are out on the streets protesting. Strange that. I never thought of myself as a strike breaker.

I simply didn't get my act together to join the teacher's union after moving back here a few months ago, and now they're swamped with requests for people to renew memberships, with the strike action starting. Seems like teachers are keen to be in a union when it gets them out of school.

Funnily enough, this is still a view held across the UK. Last night when we went for dinner to celebrate a colleague's birthday, someone started railing against strike action, and complaining that she had a 10 hour workday while others were out parading on a street for more pay. She wanted them to deduct their day's pay and remunerate her for her extra work, or so she quipped, at the top of her bellowing voice, across the restaurant. Playing right into the hands of Labour government's rhetoric, she saw striking as just another way to skive off a day of school. No political significance, nobody taking risks in order to improve conditions for everyone else, just plain laziness.

The fact of the matter is that this strike is not about getting more money. Essentially, the government is proposing a pay increase which is below the current inflation rate, and has done so for two years running already. So this effectively amounts to a fairly hefty pay cut, since prices rise, and our salaries don't match that rise. To quote Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers:

“The Retail Price Index, which features on Government websites as the figure used for pay bargaining, is currently running at a yearly average of 4.1%. The current pay offer of 2.45% is well below that and can be seen in no other way than as a pay cut.

“Year on year pay that fails to keep pace with inflation has real consequences for the profession and our schools. It saps morale and causes problems of recruitment, retention and teacher shortages, not to mention real financial difficulty for our members. It is time to call a halt.

“Real term pay cuts hit youngest teachers the hardest. Not only do they have to contend with high housing costs, fuel bills and escalating food prices, they also have to pay back student loans at a rate of 4.8%.

(www.teachers.org.uk)

So this is about a profession which is a benchmark for a lot of others, which is slowly having its salaries eroded. The knock-on effect of allowing this to happen is that doctors, academics, civil servants, and pretty much anybody whose job is related to the government is going to have a harder time keeping up a decent standard of living, if Labour gets away with cutting teachers' salaries. I don't argue that I should be earning the same as somebody working a tough, dog-eat-dog business job, who can be 'let go' because of a downturn in the market, nor even that my job has the same social significance as a General Practitioner. But when you know that a starting lawyer earns well over twice what I earn after 5 years on the job, or that a starting GP earns well over three times my salary, then something is out of joint.

A whole load of other unions are following the NUT's lead and announcing strike action over pay issues, which is a first in recent years in this country. I can only breathe a sigh of relief that people are mustering up the courage. It's harder than it seems to face a group of kids and tell them you're choosing not to teach them...

The attitudes towards striking are very rife in my current school. Arguments break out between teachers who see striking as troublemaking, and those who are so involved in this that they won't accept they are also being manipulated by a union.

One way or another, it's great to see these debates coming out in a country where, as I mentioned in my previous post, people are willing to put up with the most ludicrous inequalities or dysfunctions in government, and see protest as being childish or confrontational (as though these struggles can be resolved without confrontation...). Teachers have had pretty much any authority over their curriculum taken away in the past decade, and have had little or no say in the way that schools have been run over the past 20 years. I can't think of any other profession which has seen so much change with so little consultation as British teachers have, and for once that they stand up and are counted in this struggle to stop their basic salaries from being chewed away inconspicuously, they are railed against and branded...

It's about time I put my money where my mouth is, and sorted out that NUT membership so I can proudly get the hell out of this staff room if another strike day is set...!

St George? Who's that?

2008-04-20T12:07:00.000-07:00

Just spent my last weekend in freedom before going back to the grind at school tomorrow. It was a phenomenal week of doing as little as possible, travelling to Toulouse to spend time with my niece, getting back here and eating and sleeping a lot. And last but not least, renewing some really valuable friendships.

Meanwhile, this weekend, London hosted the St George's day celebrations, which were quite something. As I was waiting for the train to get downtown yesterday, I realised that the tiny little town I'm living in - a suburb of Twickenham - had its own St Geroge's Day parade. Far from the gaggle of bewildered kids I was expecting, it was quite a spectacle. Everybody, from the local drug volunteers in a double decker bus, to the line dancing group hot on the heels of the enormous military orchestra, was out under the dark, soupy April sky, braving the likelihood of rain.

I'm pretty flabbergasted to see how much is going on in this suburban sprawl of a place which I thought completely barren of everything except 99p shops and Tesco's. I suppose people don't advertise what they do here in the same way they do in downtown London, because they tend to stick around here for Longer, and don't need as much attention for what they do. I really should get involved in something, and find out for myself what Whitton is actually like.

Something I really enjoy about living in the UK is how small, grassroots-type stuff works. People have this unending ability to create small groups to address a local problem, or keep a social group going. As compared to France where people complain about the government not doing enough to improve their lives, but hardly ever actually set up any viable alternatives of their own, the British are far more proactive and resilient. Then again, they let their government get away with gross incompetence or negligence a lot of the time. The transport, the health system, overcharging everyone for everything and doing little to pay it back... When stuck in the Tube for the millionth time, with a 45 minute delay, and everybody patiently sighing and saying "Mustn't grumble!" the Frenchman in me often thinks "Yes you should grumble! Why are you so damn resilient??!"

Anyway, I got into town and moseyed about the city centre, looking for something interesting to do. As I got to the British Museum, I heard Indian music playing. I went into the main hall - which is a spectacle of gigantism in itself - and witnessed this unbelievable music and dance show. This snippet doesn't really capture how colourful and graceful the six dancers were. It culminated in a Tarantella-like frenzy of drumming as the dancers spun wildly out of control. The audience - mostly composed of tourists visiting the museum - were completely wowed, as I was myself. That was probably the first time in history that the British Museum was anticlimactic. What an unbelievable place.

It just strikes me each time how absolutely enormous the British Empire project was. My friend Chris has helped bring this to the forefront of my thoughts by bringing me all sorts of documents on Sudanese politics in the 19th century to translate. But while moseying around the Islamic and South Asian sections of the British Museum, I couldn't but think what a massively organised enterprise of pillage the Empire was. They actually organised raids, or 'razzia' as they called them, to break down local resistance to their government, where they would steal the odd woman here, shoot the odd herd of cattle there... And of course, get hold of any interesting-looking booty on the way. So the grandeur of this museum is always mitigated by the knowledge of how it was acquired, in my case.

I can't help but enjoy the simplicity of British attitudes. The way they can be uncomplicated about organising themselves to get things done and address problems. Of course, that simplicity can sometimes translate into oversimplifications when it comes to understanding foreigners, as many of the idiotic TV programmes on immigration display. But then there's also a sort of instinctive acceptance that outsiders like myself can disagree with the non-essentials. That I can look at the St. George's Day parade with amused detachment, without being anti-British. And of course, the most interesting Britons, those who like Chris display the mixture of humility, self-mockery and genuine cultural interest, are the most critical of their own Empirical history. And long may it continue, despite the rants of Boris Johnson, or Tony Blair's Americanism.

The China Saga

2008-04-11T04:06:00.000-07:00

After seeing all the protests in London the other day, and everyone sporting Tibet flags, it was tempting to be involved in some way. It's hard to stay out of this one.

I can't help sympathising with the Tibetan cause, even though I think the Chinese are right to say that Westerners butt in without really understanding the situation too well. I mean, we take no real interest in Chinese politics except to show pictures of their military propaganda and then to criticise their foreign policy without having much knowledge of how it works or why. Admittedly it's a bit hard to understand it when they don't allow foreign journalists. But it's important to acknowledge, most of us criticise the policies without any clear idea of what's going on.

Two things are clear to me. Firstly, that you can't dissociate sport and politics in this whole Olympic affair, the way people like Steve Redgrave call for. The Olympic Games are political one way or another, however much sportspeople would like to live in a fancy schmancy world where they're furthering the cause of sport without playing to anybody's agenda. The protests are countering another political agenda which is China promoting itself through the Games, they're not "politicising" it, as many would have it. Let's lose the rosy glasses if we're going to be realistic athletes.

The second thing is that whatever way you look at it, the Tibetans are drawing attention to the sores in Chinese government policy, which somebody needs to do. Whether this is territorial in-fighting or - what seems blindingly obvious - a superpower determined to crush a legitimate people's right to self-determination, the Chinese have no right to keep everybody out of their "internal politics" if they want media attention for how wonderfully developed their society is. You can't have your media cake and eat your Tibetans.

Not that I'm an expert on any of this, but it certainly brings it home when you've got friends on either board, or when somebody comes up to you in the street asking how much the Dalai Lama is paying you to take his side. Literally, a host of Chinese students were convinced down to the hilt that the only reason these protests were taking place - and that idiot Westerners were getting involved - was financial gain. They simply couldn't accept it was on moral grounds.

I for one will make a point of boycotting as many Chinese products as I can at this time, if for nothing else to make the separation between the government and its people, which is all to easy to conflate in this situation. After all, I wouldn't like to be amalgamated with Gordon Brown's appearance on American Idol just because I happen to live in the UK...

Back In

2008-04-10T15:48:00.000-07:00

This morning I woke up to the clattering of the roadwork going on outside my sister Michelle's house. The sun was blazing, but because the shutters were all fastened, I had slept in till 11:30. A disturbing notion for one who is usually sweating down the road to the melody of Jimi Hendrix music on a morning run, at 5:00am on school mornings. So I got up and went for a run to purge my laziness.

Since I came to visit Michelle here in Toulouse, I've been able to stand back a little from the madness of the last few months. Landing back in London, getting back in touch with friends and family I've missed, and fighting my way to some sort of normality in a tough work environment. Being in the airport and reading Bertrand Russell's lectures on why he's not a Christian gave me solace in my pagan condition. And spending time around my neice Zoe is just great. She keeps patting me on the chest and reminding me that I'm her Tonton (uncle), and that she's Zoe. Obviously she's picked up on the clueless, confused look on my face and wants to set things straight for me.

I've littered the place with books I've brought on my own initiative, and one series requested by Zoe herself. It's called In the Night Garden. A rather disturbing airheaded bimbo called Upsy-Daisy prances about a hill littered with multicoloured balls of something or other, and is invariably joined by an alien creature with a head in the shape of a monkey-nut, known to his viewers as Iggle-Piggle. There is no discenable plot to any of this. They give each other kisses and eventually engage in some form of dance resembling a bunch of drunken babies trying to perform Cats, the Musical but forgetting the steps.

I feel so old reading this stuff and lamenting some sort of narrative. The poststructuralist senselessness of it disturbs me. Maybe it's a good thing that kids are brought up on this stuff now. It might do a better job of preparing them for the insanity of education and the world of facebook and myspace which awaits them, than Enid Blighton's pathetic trash.

Bertrand Russell is helping me remember why I reject Christianity now. A brilliant article in this collection, called Nice People, is a hilariously scathing reminder of the vagaries of Christian thinking, and how its rampant righteousness pervades Western thinking. He is clearly biased against the faith, but seems to know enough about it to be genuine and lucid. I definitely reccommend it to anybody in need of a good, clear analysis of religion, without delving into overcomplicated theological rants.

Meanwhile, the prospect of moving further into the centre of London looms now. Got to get a flat somewhere downtown so I can be nearer to my new school, and generally within reach of the rest of the human race rather than at the total mercy of London's fashionable Hounslow.

I am more and more comfortable in the knowledge that my senseless chaos of a life, hanging by a thread of momentary reflection between episodes of Scrubs on Sky television, is actually good fun. Accepting like Russell does that we don't need to live in fear by clinging onto religious belief, is actually quite comforting. And if all else fails, there's the knowledge that...

Sheep go to hell

News

2008-04-01T23:11:00.000-07:00

Just a quick news flash to say that I took a job in a French school right downtown. Yes, a French Lycee in London's glamourous South Kensington (quite a contrast from London's glamourous Hounslow).

Better rush off and do the marking I didn't do yesterday as I was so wired about taking the new job. Who knows what it'll actually be like, but it helps the old ego to be offered a job like that while working for such a mental school where people won't even give you the time of day!

More to come soon...

How long now?

2008-03-24T07:47:00.000-07:00

Boy it's been terrifyingly long since I've been able to post on this thing. My new job, being stuck in Twickenham without internet, and general disillusionment with blogging have conspired to my silence. So if anybody still checks this thing after over 3 months of silence, thank you for taking an interest.

I'm actually writing from Coffee Republic in Twickenham (how middle class of me) over my honey-flavoured cappucino, as I'm supposed to be searching for a new job for September. The school had apparently hired somebody already, so I'm on my proverbial rear for the new term. Luckily there's a horrific shortage of teachers still, so it shouldn't be that hard to find work.

I can't imagine why people don't want to be teachers here. I mean, you get to wake up at 5.00am to get to school in the transport system (a short commute is about 1 hour), get to school where you don't have any workspace of your own to prepare for a full day of teaching, with 11 different classes. You get a laptop which doesn't work, you get to see about 8 different classrooms in the space of just one day (they move you around to keep you on your toes), and all this for about half the average salary of anybody else with the same qualifications in London. You are told exactly what you should be doing at any moment of your teaching just in case you don't trust the four years of university and teacher training you've put yourself through, and you get to attend a parents' evening, a department meeting or any of 5 other types of meetings in the space of an ordinary week. Meetings!!! Yay!

Report writing, documenting absences, filling in forms for the Head of Year, filing resources and not being allowed to contact parents are only some of the perks of the job which aren't even mentioned in the job description (they must run out of space on the website), and if you are afraid you might get bored or lonely on a lunchbreak, you can be sure someone will get you to supervise a lunch club, a detention or any of the other activities which replace the ennui of actually eating.

When you are removed forcibly from the building by 6pm, you'll have an evening of marking to keep you from any dangerous personal activities (sports, culture, reading - God forbid) which will be due the next day. Two pieces of homework per week, set by somebody else, for each student of your 11 classes, plus marking the enormous copybooks they carry will guarantee that they don't go into any real depth in the topics they study, by keeping all tasks short and snappy. Happy clappy. Year ten and eleven exam coursework will be controlled, moderated, set and moderated again - and then, just in case, moderated - by other teachers in the department (i.e. you, when it comes to everyone else's coursework) to ensure complete exhaustion of the marking process. Complete and utter exhaustion to the very last toe-curling drip of coursework juiciness.

Sharing classes with other teachers means that you can avoid those pesky relationships with students, or getting attached to them and building an intellectual response beyond what happens in that one lesson. And lessons are divided into 30 to 35 minute periods, guaranteeing that nothing too substantial happens in the classroom (because if it did, then the marking would be ridiculous!).

So by and large, the system here works well for everyone concerned. Throw interactive whiteboards (giant computer screens) into each classroom and a training session for each teacher, and you've got the real deal, the interactive entertainment, Warner-Brothers-eat-your-heart-out, surround-sound experience of your local Imax cinema in your local classroom. You can shower with video clips and powerpoint the bejesus out of every kid in that room to stave off the boredom of listening to the teacher.

What more could an educator possibly ask for?

Off I go to apply for another job, in anticipation of tomorrow morning's fun-loving schooltastic experience.

By the way, for those of you who are wondering, the picture is of the famous London guitarist Will Rutter standing in front of a car-pooping chicken, sported by a trendy modern art exhibition in central London. Don't ask.

London Tahn

2007-12-04T02:35:00.000-08:00

Back in good old blighty where the weather is damp and the moss grows thick over the bobbies' helmets. Yes indeed, this place is the vibrant cacophony I left behind those years ago, with the primary school yelping in one swell voice behind my window, and large trucks thundering by on tiny streets, barely missing the Ford Kas which dart about the streets.

I hardly landed here that I was whisked into an interview and landed with a 6 month appointment in the Heathland school in Hounslow, where I will start on December 10th. Boy am I looking forward to being back in school again, after these odd months of patching together sundry teaching jobs on top of odd jobs of all descriptions. I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss it.

Montreal is currently under 30cm of snow, and although everyone there is surely bummed about it, I am horribly jealous. I love the snow, even when it's all slushy and horrible (although having cold, wet shoes all day long is not nice), and I really wish I could hop up the Mount Royal path to beaver lake for a morning of ice skating under the snow. But then again, people who live and work dayjobs don't get to do that stuff there either, as I found out the hard way.

I guess you have to make the most of the place you're in, and be there for people who are important; close friends and family who need you around. And being in London will hopefully allow me to do those things as well as take short (and long!) breaks to places like Montreal when I can afford them. After all, schoolteachers have holidays to travel, and given a little thrift, I should really be able to afford flights here and there.

Everybody around me has been so patient with my vagaries around the globe, especially the friends I've been staying with here in London tahn. What better way to confirm my decision to come back here than to know I can count on you lot to put up with my hectic ways.

Better go open a bank account so I can get paid soon. I'm off!

Montreal departure

2007-11-27T04:21:00.001-08:00

The bus station in the centre of Montreal has the most terrifying diner I've ever seen. Luckily it wasn't the only place I'd eaten in town, although their poutine wasn't at all terrible. For those of you who aren't familiar with poutine, it's a large bucket of chips/fries covered in gravy and really fatty cheese. It's sloppy and extremely fattening, which is why it's a favourite dish in a city as cold as Montreal.

The snow was covering the ground, and I had to drag suitcases through slush and ice to get to the station. Somehow my mobile phone had vanished the night before, while I was out having a celebratory drink in a blues bar the previous night. I went back to the bar and luckily they still had the telephone, and hadn't called any antipodean countries on it. So I was all set to go.

So much has happened during this time in Montreal. I haven't even started to blog about the trip to Quebec city with Jo, Niels and Julien, and our fantastic experience of photographing dilapidated buildings and ice skating in the old centre of the city. I didn't even get round to posting pictures of the Montmorency waterfalls we visited on the way, or the surreal Ethiopean restaurant we dined in when we got back.

Nor did I even get to describe my most unusual professional experience to date; working morning shifts in a factory and teaching evenings and afternoons in high schools and universities. Try preparing a lesson on 20th century short stories while sitting on a bag of rice in a warehouse, between two rushed bouts of loading a truck with pallets. Without even starting on the political discussions these guys get into on their way to delivering in Chinatown.

But I suppose that's what happens when you are living life rather than writing about it. Unlike Sartre's protagonist from "La Nausee", I don't really get to sit about contemplating all this very much. All I can do is stick up a few pictures in retrospective (when I get my camera in order), and tell you that Montreal is unforgettable. The graffiti around the city (take a look at the facebook albums), the snow-capped trees, the unmistakable cafes and the bums in the metro are completely unique. Nowhere else does the teenager bagging groceries in the supermarket say 'papier-plastic-paper-plastic?' when you get to the checkout and are trying to remember which language to speak in. No other city has a Chinatown with shop signs which are bad translations of English badly translated into French, and then back again.

Goodbye to all the wacky people I've met in Montreal, and thank you for the music. Now I get down to supply teaching in London. Won't that be an eyebrow-raiser...? Stay tuned for the next chapter, where guitarist and composer extraordinaire Will Rutter plays Irish melodies while scoring Mariah Carey songs for high school Christmas parties, and takes me running round sphinxes in London's strangest park. The Ghost of Crystal Palace...

Elizabeth: the sellout age

2007-11-06T19:17:00.000-08:00

This huge film, destined to demonstrate the hugeness of the humongous history of Queen Elizabeth, sequel to another film entitled Elizabeth a few years ago, achieved the quasi-impossible. It proved that it is actually possible to depict the history of this period with even less intrigue, interest and wit than the first one did. An achievement of cinematographic mediocrity like no other. Just how did they do it?

The thing that fuels my ire the most about this film is that you don't even need to have an original writer to create an interesting plot around this queen's life. The history itself is full of intrigue, suspense, sex, murder, plots, wars, exploration, literary and philosophical originality and the thrill of the British renaissance. You don't even need to fictionalise it; it's all outstanding film material. How they even managed to make this reality boring is quite beyond me.

Elizabeth is portrayed as this snivelling, cold-hearted Queen whose humanity and womanhood nonetheless pours through the cracks to reveal her weaknesses, or what Hollywood would disgustingly caricature as her 'femininity'. During an era of unprecedented literary growth, of science developing beyond belief, and of religious strife tearing families and communities to shreds, the Elizabeth of this movie spends her time moping over Sir Walter Raleigh, in a J-lo meets Britney rich bitch scenario barely worthy of Desperate Housewives. The males in the film - who are incidentally unanimously appalling actors - are tapping her on her regal shoulder, reminding her that the Spaniards are, sort of, coming for war with thousands of well-armed ships, and maybe she should be doing something other than teaching Sir Walter Raleigh how to two-step with her lady-in-waiting. But this isn't even intended as humour. This is supposed to be either good fiction or historically accurate? And Walter Raleigh, who was the most fraudulent explorer ever, is depicted as some sort of war hero, who single-handedly sets fire to the Armada ships, jumps overboard and swims to safety as his horse dives headlong at him. What this was meant to mean I really don't know.

Aside from being historically inaccurate, this film is a two hour emotional porn flick, with even less effort given to plot than a Hugh Heffner would bother with. Scenes of decapitated limbs are cut to larger-than-life philharmonic string sections, between even more gratuitous scenes of Elizabeth wringing her hands over her sex life and the decisions she had to make. No effort is made to display the woman's unparalleled wit, her paranoid delusions, her machiavellian war genius, her obsession with virginity coupled with unbridled sexual desire... Even the sex is shoddy. How did they get that wrong?

It is worth seeing Elizabeth: The Golden Age, just to see how creative Hollywood filmmakers can be at ruining a good story. But if this doesn't interest you, stay home and watch the Simpsons, and avoid the flooded bathrooms of cinema multiplexes where staff dismiss you nonchalantly when you mention that Niagara Falls has taken over the gents' loo. Perhaps they had a hand in making this film

Another week past

2007-11-04T08:21:00.001-08:00

I spent yesterday walking around the city again, which is my favourite way of getting things moving upstairs, when I need to think. Keeping the old engine oiled, so to speak.

We headed out after a brunch into the freezing cold air of Montreal, to climb Mont Royal and take some great pictures (I'm hoping Jo will contribute a few to this blog), but also to do some English conversation. Jo is an interior designer who's created a life for himself here for over a year, and has just started in a new job as a technician for a fairly prominent design office. His English is far better than most French people who learned through school, but a healthy dose of conversation will be a bit help for his job.

We ended up walking to the Oratoire St Joseph, which recently hit the Montreal headlines, when a guy entered with a gun and threatened to kill himself, in the middle of a mass (this place is a church). The enormous, cathedral-like building looks like a postmodern blend of a Soviet gulag and a giant temple for a religious sect. The organ is straight out of a Star Trek episode, and the 20 foot high wooden statues of the apostles who glare down at unsuspecting churchgoers, were the object of our fascination and mirth (sorry God, but what with being the creator, we thought you'd empathise with our need to laugh at this morose sight). Still, from the outside, this massive place of worship is an impressive promontory over the city, and certainly makes an interesting walk.

The walk across the cemetary, up to this church, and back round the glitzy Outremont neighbourhood with the floor heating under its driveways (I sh+t you not), led to the inevitable conversation about parallel universes, time travel, and how human decisions influence endless splits in the course of the universe, creating the past as well as the future (retroactive causality...). Then we walked home down the Lachine canal, tried some guitars in a guitar shop, and had a slap-up meal while watching a few episodes of Lost.

The episode happened to be about a character who has flash visions of the future and tries to influence the course of the planet through his actions. The acting is about as believable as a South American jungle island having polar bears, and the plot seems about as likely as Hollywood funding a decent director through a well-written movie this century. But of course, it echoed our conversation pretty nicely.

Any of your feedback on these questions would be useful to me.

- If physical energy is never lost but transformed, what happens to mental energy when we die? (for instance, the fact that we dream, and our dreams influence our mythology and narratives... surely that doesn't just disappear when after death)

- If particles from parallel universes manifest themselves in our universe (and I think this is the dominant school of thought in astrophysics at the moment), then is it possible for us to inhabit several universes at once, provided we can invent a tool which allows us to observe these shadow particles?

and most importantly:

- When I flew to Canada, I travelled a few microseconds in time, since I was further away from the earth while on the plane, and therefore time passed differently for me than it did for most of you. Does that mean I'm in a different dimension to you?

Just a few thoughts for Sunday morning, to get your brains going, or to get your blood boiling, if you have any real scientific understanding of these issues and can correct my misapprehensions. Please write comments, however abusive, to help me out!

Pea soup

2007-11-01T11:10:00.000-07:00

Now why is it that pea soup tastes so funny? And the smell... All I want is to fill my newly-proclaimed vegetarian belly with something warm, healthy and enjoyable. Why do the makers of pea soup have to do this to me?

The fridge and the flat stink of whatever horrific products they put in pea soup. OK, so at 1 dollar per can, you can't complain much. But I'm complaining anyway. For the love of God/Allah/Jehovah/Mcdonald's/Buddha please add something artificial and unhealthy which gives the illusion of eating an actual organic substance. As the song says

"Fool me, fool me, go on and fool me"

Give me artificial colouring, artificial taste, artificial anything over the pungent odour of pea soup which currently infests the flat from curtain rod to bed leg.

Teacher's Sunday

2007-10-28T20:19:00.000-07:00

Today was beautiful. Cold, but beautiful.

I woke up at 7.45, after a late evening of preparing pumpkin-based food for a bunch of French people. A 'Cremaillere' (potlach) which went till late last night, in which I was the 'head cook', so to speak, expected to feed the masses equipped only with an internet connection (for recipes) and a pumpkin.

So waking up to face a 17km run with the Running Room - the group which trains for marathons, here in Westmount, west Montreal - was a tall order. But seeing the beautiful sunlight outside, I mustered up the courage.

The group had dressed up for hallowe'en, and people were running in costume, and had brought their own food for a bake sale, raising funds for people to go to marathons later this year. Their unabashed north American costume-wearing bore its fruits; making an idiot of yourself for a good cause is a well-accepted activity here. And so it damn well should be. Of course, the hardcore runners (who ran 25km around a lake) were equipped as per usual, and didn't slow down a whit for all the Hallowe'en shinanigans. Luckily for my left knee (currently taking its revenge on me for my vagaries this morning), I didn't follow them all the way.

Otherwise, I've spent my Sunday preparing for a job interview in a hotel (yes, I'm looking for anything at the moment, and hotel reception is as good as anything), and getting some food ready for the week. A few meals to grab on the way out the door, so I don't starve during the day or blow a fortune on overpriced crappy sandwiches.

The job interview in a glitzy downtown hotel didn't happen after all, and while I was standing outside the door, after the would-be interview, it started to snow. Only very lightly, and barely a couple of minutes, but it's the first snowfall of the year. I couldn't help but laugh out loud. I love snow!

This evening was spent preparing more applications for schools. I'm hoping to start a position in January, and am going all out, applying for 4 to 5 jobs every 2 or 3 days (which gives me time to redraft, contact people, get extra information they need, etc...), on top of preparing the lessons for this week. Three different sessions, preparing adults for the TOEFL examinations, in two different schools. One is a very well recognised university, and the other is a dodgy little language school in town, whose arm I had to twist to get anything like a decent hourly rate from. But better than a kick in the teeth.

I'm balancing a crazy timetable, and have already mixed up a couple of appointments, which is partly behind today's interview mixup. Yes, my talents with timetabling, so well known amongst my friends and family, are being put to the test, to say the least. It's a learning curve; I hope to come out of this a bit more savvy about how to plan my week around train times, maps to find unknown places, making job interviews and appointments on time, preparing my materials without the help of a photocopier in a school copy room...

But I'll be back to schoolteaching soon, people. Armed and ready, you'll see...

Work

2007-10-22T20:50:00.000-07:00

It was 25 degrees celcius today in Montreal, and people were sunbathing on their lunchbreaks in the park. I didn't have a lunchbreak; I'm jobhunting. "Pounding the Pavement", as one of the business English texts says is a common idiom to describe my situation. Pounding indeed. One of the reasons I originally decided to come to Montreal was that I had a fairly comfortable life and job in Stuttgart, and I needed to step back from that, to know what my next step would be. I've sure as hell done that all right.

Being jobless or in a precarious situation at work is one of the rare problems that a well-established, qualified teacher doesn't have to face often. Teachers qualify, get a job, and then move to the next job without having to face the concerns of being fired from one day to the next because of downsizing, because a powerful client doesn't like your face, or because your boss had a bad morning. Although some teachers struggle to find a position, we mostly take our position for granted. Unless you do something horribly wrong, you're probably safe, you just might have to deal with a bolshy parent or a stroppy teenager, but you're not likely to end up jobless.

Unless of course you decide to pick up your stuff and leave for another continent on a whim, without securing a contract on the other end, that is. But only idiots do that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, there are some things you learn about yourself when spending your time interviewing, running around trying to convince people that their company is the best thing since sliced bread, and the only thing you ever asked Santa Claus for since you were three was to have a job in their scrumptrilescent company. I, for one, am learning to make everything count more. Friends, family, possessions, the knowledge that I've got fresh vegetables at home waiting for me for dinner, and that the sun shone really nicely this morning through the trees when I was out running. The insecurity and fear of looking for work makes you focus on the essentials. What's really important, and how can I be grateful for it.

Sounds cheesy, I know, but it's true. I hope anybody who reads this realises that right now more than ever, I value them for who they are. I have a couple of students who read this, Julia and Pragathi, and I have never been so grateful for having been their teacher. My parents might read this, and I know they don't believe it but I love them and appreciate what they've done for me over the years. My sister is endlessly patient with my vagaries, my endless rants over the phone, and my crazy ideas for how I'm going to change the world. My friends in Stuttgart think I'm raving mad, and my friends in London are just checking in to see if I'm going to be in another country by the time their TV series is over.

But having a permanent job isn't the only form of important work. Friendships are work, and so is study and leisure. It's hard work to practice the guitar for hours to be good enough for a gig, or to keep at a friend till they tell you what's really the matter. And some forms of work are really fascinating.

Last week I went to a reading by Colum MacKann, an Irish author whom my mother is officially in love with. His all-too-obvious Dublin accent punctuated a series of readings from his short stories, from Dancer, the biography of Rudolph Nureyev, and his most recent, Zoli, an unusual tale of a roma gypsy girl. His writing sounds like some of the most gruelling work I could imagine. He has travelled and spent time in the most unlikely places, doing 'reasearch' for his novels. He's worked all sorts of mad jobs and sacrificed years of his life for one piece of writing. His friendliness and genuine interest in each reader who came up to get a book signed, testified that this is work to him. Art is work; simple as that.

I just came back this evening from a public lecture on Seamus Heaney in Concordia University, given by Kevin Whelan, an Irish UCD scholar. It was a beautifully conducted lecture, which dealt with some of Heaney's biography without reducing his language to the mundane events of his life. Dr. Whelan obviously has a love for Heaney's work which goes so deep he barely needs to be prompted to deliver a fantastic lecture. As a teacher, it was so satisfying to finally grasp some of what the song-and-dance over Heaney actually is.

I could have sat in front of the TV and watched a series with my flatmate. I could have quietly finished my chapter of 'Les Miserables' (yes Julia, I'm keeping up with the reading, although I don't read as fast as you!), but I have decided to make the most of the academia in this city and go out to an academic lecture after a rough day's jobhunting to attend this lecture.

Who knows what I'll think of this time, when I look back on it years from now. One thing that's for sure; this will be one of the times in my life I most appreciated the value of an honest day's work.

Storytelling and street smelling

2007-10-06T10:01:00.000-07:00

This past week has been just as hectic and fantastic as the others. This city seems to be crammed with surprises, and I'm loving every minute of it so far.

So last weekend, I'm on my way home through Parc La Fontaine, and I stumble on a group of storytellers, sitting in a circle around a chair. It's a fairy story about a baker woman who tricks fairies into letting her back into her life, after being kidnapped as a slave, explaining the history of the 'Baker's dozen'. Little kids and big kids are sitting in a circle around this fifty-something year old woman, with a dark shawl and a little squeaky voice, sharing a tale she'd probably heard as a child herself. The sun occasionally lights her face from between the branches of the overhead trees as she tells her familiar story, and she makes the most of it to show the children where fairies live... in trees.

I stayed for three hours, listening to the rambling tales of Quebequois mountains, clever Arab merchants earning donkeys through language trickery, and even attempted a story myself. I've told the tale of how Finn was saved from his fellow giant Cuchulainn by his clever wife, Una, several times to my grade six and seven classes. Storytelling is easy when it's your mother tongue, you've got the attention of a class, and a book to support you if you get lost. But telling Irish folktales in French, in a park, with no book to support me, was another matter.

A matter which allowed me to admire the talents of the Breton storytellers, who are unparalleled in the art, next to the Irish, that is. In this Francophone group, the Breton guy (I've got his name on a card somewhere, I'll dig it up) completely stole the show, turning folk tales and Bible stories into modern commentaries about news stories. He used tales by Marcel Ayme, and tweaked them to suit his own lively style. Outstanding.

And this was a complete fluke, a chance event, like so many in this city brimming with music, art, theatre... That's precisely what I missed in Stuttgart; being able to scour the city as a 'flaneur', soaking up whatever is going on. Like I did as a kid in Paris.

My friend Lisa sees the 'flaneur' as a privilege of a wealthy society, and which is largely reserved for males (women are often pestered if they meander about a city alone), and I'm sure this is absolutely right. Nobody with six children and a mortgage to pay can really hope to be much of a flaneur. But it's something so engrained in me that I can hardly help it.

I grew up in Paris, in a very privileged, wealthy neighbourhood, which was largely geared towards the retired Christians and dinosaurs of Parisian aristocracy. Neuilly-sur-Seine had large boulevards with leafy trees and ecologically friendly solar-powered parking metres, each worth about the price of a new Mercedes. The entire community flocked to the church every Sunday in knickerbockers and prim red reading glasses, squawking out hymns as they left the feelgood ceremony. The priest sang along with the guitar-playing adolescents, who had rehearsed the hymn during their scout weekend in the hills of Dordogne the previous weekend. The birds sang, and Sarkozy - yes, THE Sarkozy of current fame and infamous dizzy presidential heights - was mayor, and had the excruciating dilemma of choosing the colour of the new set of children's slides and swing sets to adorn the local park behind the church. And the slides were changed every six weeks, if my memory serves me right. The unnamed north African teens were safely kept away through Sarkozy's subtle tactics of having military police at every other street corner. A peaceful, Christian, whiter-than-white safe haven, barely a stone's throw from Paris. But no one threw stones. Of course.

I hung out with the 'foreigners', who were scarce in the local public school, populated almost excusively with the offspring of respectable, God-fearing French families, who owned apartments in Paris and the Alps (for skiing in winter), Corsica (for swimming in summer) and a country house not too far from Paris (for fine weekends). So my friendship circle consisted of a Croatian hippy with body odour issues, a Serbian singer whose father had earned a fortune in professional basketball, and a French hanger-on who had lived in Egypt and had gotten into our school through some shady deal with the headmistress, because of his father's connections. We didn't have the money or the privilege of going to the trendy overpriced cafes, bars and nightclubs sported by the glitzy teens who populated our school, and were strangely unimpressed by the priest's efforts to recruit us for the scouts and the upcoming church fair. We smoked, were sarcastic, and played guitar on benches in the cold. We wrote songs and poetry, and admired the indie music scene for its 'alternative' nature. Radiohead CDs littered our bedrooms, and we read Henri Bergson and Nietszche, and knew how fake it all was.

The dichotomy of horrifyingly wealthy christian hypocricy versus teenage pseudo-marxist spleen left little room for anything else at that time, and after many evenings of sitting on the same bench listening to Predrag (the Serbian kid) groan about how, like, unreal it all was, I would decide to get lost. Literally.

I'd go to the Metro station, Les Sablons, and after a 10 minute ride, hop off at Chatelet-les-Halles or Odeon, to meander around the streets of the latin quarter. Sure, it was full of tourists and students, but at least it wasn't packed with money-and-religion-soaked teenage girls with pretty haircuts and expensive scooter bikes, or depressive wannabe artists. I'd browse books in the second hand bookstores, and walk around the labyrinth of streets near the Sorbonne, till the cobbles all looked alike and I wasn't sure which way was north. I'd listen to blues CDs in the stores, and on a good day, spend my Mum's treat of a restaurant ticket (a 30 Franc voucher redeemable only against food in restaurants or takeaways) on a slap-up crepe with cheese and a dessert. There were hairy weirdo travellers and students with dreadlocks selling posters in the metro, and that saxophonist at Concorde metro station, who summed up Paris in a solo.

So being a 'flaneur' means more to me than meandering about aimlessly or window shopping (which, again, it surely is in some places). In Paris (as now in Montreal) it was a way to anonymously soak in the city. It's a sort of altered mind state in which you absorb whatever's going on - and so much of it is - without having to dwell on specialising or knowing everything about a subject to be a part of it. I'd stop to listen to Bulgarian orchestra musicians playing the Four Seasons on accordeons (they couldn't bring the church organ with them into the street), as well as teenagers breakdancing in the underground corridors of Les Halles. I'd talk to bums about where they came from, and chat with American tourists, explaining the conversion rate between Dollars and Francs. I learnt what I later understood from reading and speaking to artists, actors and musicians; that there is no high or low culture except the canon fabricated by political elites. There's culture in the museums, planned by a government-appointed and state funded organisation, but there's the culture growing organically, in all its uncontrolled weirdness. The Bulgarian organists in the Paris metro, sprouting out between the cracks of the French music scene, just like the storytellers of Bretagne appearing in the park in Montreal.

My French literature teacher used to sardonically quip that 'Shakespeare is worth a pair of boots' to ridicule the notion that the literary canon is political. Well, by revisiting the flaneur in me, while meandering about this city, I'm finding out that Shakespeare is certainly in a pair of boots, when you can afford to wear them down that far...

Contes

2007-09-30T05:04:00.000-07:00

Je suis tombe hier sur un cercle de conteurs, qui pratiquaient leur art dans un parc près de la ou je travaille. Le parc La Fontaine (quelle belle coïncidence) donne lieu à toutes sortes d'évènements culturels ce week-end, à l'occasion des Journées de la Culture.

L'expérience était d'autant plus fascinante pour moi, que je m'étais promis de me mettre à l'art du conteur, ou du moins, de voir si j'ai le moindre talent. Je suis fasciné par l'expérience d'un groupe d'adultes et d'enfants qui écoutent avidement raconter des fables, des mythes ou même des histoires surréalistes, qui reflètent si intimement l'expérience de chacun.

Le conteur cherche souvent à établir un lien direct entre l'audience et l'histoire qu'il raconte. On se sert du nuage qui passe au moment du récit pour amorcer l'incertitude du personnage, ou alors les arbres du parc pour faire visualiser la taille d'un géant. On reflète les sourires, les soupirs, les ennuis ou les déceptions de l'audience pour piquer la narration.

Autant de gens talentueux qui m'ont fascine pendant plus de trois heures hier, et que je vais retrouver aujourd'hui. Un breton a lunettes qui parle de la religion des autos à Detroit dans les années '80. Un irlandais francophone (oui, il y en a d'autres!) qui parle des trous dans les routes irlandaises qui se vendaient a travers la campagne, par les escrocs des campagnes.

Au plaisir du conte, je vous retrouve ce soir pour finir l'histoire!

Risible discombobulation

2007-09-27T18:35:00.000-07:00

Since I have arrived, the media is absolutely choc-a-block full of the vagaries of the Bouchard-Taylor commission; a political fanfare which is touring Quebec discussing the problems of integrating immigrants' culture in Quebec. The idea is for the commission to sound out what Quebequois residents can consider as reasonable accommodations for immigrants, particularly religious groups, to provide exceptions for laws or customs which might conflict with immigrants' customs.

The media is, predictably, having an absolute field day over these hearings. A Jewish community somewhere frosts its windows to allow prayer in the dark, while a baseball game is going on next door, and there is "mayhem", "clash of religions", you name it... Someone says it's an unreasonable accommodation, and boom, there's your news story. Interview Michel Leblanc who is sick of everything changing in his town, and berates the foreigners, and then interview the Chinese corner shop owners, who barely speak French, and their statement translates (badly) to being sick of Christmas trees littering pavements in January. As Eric Cartman from South Park says: Race war!

The commission is spearheaded by the guru of cultural relativism himself, Charles Taylor, whose openmindedness shines forth through the murky darkness of our ignorance and modernistic, backwater mentalities. His razor sharp mind cuts through the provincial idiocy to remind us that

Other societies present us with different and often disconcerting ways of being human. Our task is to acknowledge the humanity of these "other" ways while still living our own. That this may be difficult to achieve, that it will demand a change in our self-understanding and hence in our way of life, is the challenge our societies must reckon with in the years ahead.

The Other and Ourselves: Is Multi-culturalism Inherently Relativist?
by Charles Taylor, July 2002

"Tut tut", he says, wagging his creamy white messianic finger "you've been skipping your multicultural pills again, haven't you?". The commission pushes onwards, at warp speed, boldly going where no culturally relativistic commission, destined to spin policies government has already predetermined, has gone before.

These public hearings have become a freak show, allowing the loudest vessels to voice whatever opinions they choose to on immigration issues. This obviously gives rise to the most hilarious and depressing interventions, and I never know whether to laugh or cry when reading them.

The world's most popular sport is a way to bring people together even if they have different religious beliefs, said Joseph Morelli, a physical education teacher in Joliette, Quebec.

"We all have the same objective — just to put the ball in the net, and everybody who participates in the sport can go get something out of it. There's no colour or language barrier through all of that," Morelli said at public hearings Wednesday."

Soccer can sow sectarian serenity, commission hearsWednesday, September 26, 2007
CBC News

Hooray. Let's all play soccer, eat oranges at half-time, and sing 'Heal the World' by Michael Jackson while holding hands, around a giant footbll painted with the 5 continents. Then we can watch reruns of the World Cup last year and watch the final, when Zidane headbutted Materazzi for insulting his sister... no, wait.

I can hardly believe the sort of media reports which are darkening between 5 and 10 pages of every newspaper, not to mention 5 minutes of each radio report on CBC. The amount of attention given to this is unbelievable. And Quebequois residents have no problems with immigrants! Compared to being in Europe this place is multi-culti heaven. And I'm not just talking about Montreal, where half the residents are so happy from passive pot smoking they wouldn't flinch seeing a naked, four-headed, turban-wearing sikh with black bangles, singing 'Kum-ba-ya' to Hare Krishna music. The rest of Quebec is unbelievably accommodating to foreigners.

Is it a coincidence that yesterday in one of my classes, I find out that Michel, a 50 something-year-old postal worker with the best pension imaginable, who rides his bicycle for 70km per weekend just for kicks, has a 2 month wait before he can see his family doctor? The words 'red' and 'herring' seem to scream their way out of the paper with each new charade of this commission. And still blogs like this one find space to discuss it. What suckers we are.

Concert

2007-09-23T19:24:00.000-07:00

Wow.

I've wanted to blog about the Bjork concert at Jacques Cartier pier since it finished on Friday, and have only just made time for it. Being caught up in a random bicycle demonstration, meeting my former students from Italy who are now in university, and meeting my 3rd cousin David and playing with his baby girl, are only three of the wacky things which happened this weekend, and which I'm trying to process. What a weekend!

So the concert. It was the best gig I've ever seen, and I've been to a few. In a nutshell, it was a masterpiece of amplified live music, orchestrated by a team of musicians who use the combination of live harmony and prerecorded electronica better than any others I know of.

The stage was decorated using the theme of flags, which depicted creatures from Nordic mythology (as far as I can tell) which became part of the music only in the final encore piece. It was a colourful, lively set, without being too pretentious, like the visuals in big concerts often are. For instance, I was in the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert (not that they're at all the same register), and the set was so visually interesting that it distracted from the concert. It was an LED display of a dragon which twisted and turned in synch with the music. So mesmerizing that the musicians could have been playing 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' backwards with yukeleles, as the solo for "Under the Bridge" and I wouldn't have known.

But I noticed Bjork's music; the visuals didn't distract at all, except for an oddly-timed, Spidermanesque moment where she cast a web of threads out of each hand, which hung in mid-air for a few seconds. Oh yeah, and the obligatory towers of flame which flared 15 metres high on either side of the stage for the opening tune: "Earth Intruders". But anyway, I was talking about the focus of this concert, the music.

Step one. A choir of Icelandic girls who doubled as a brass band, to drive the harmonies previously played by the philharmonic orchestras Bjork toured with on her second album. They echoed her whispering in 'Pagan Poetry', and built up the harmonic swell on 'Joga'; another ballad a la Bjork which culminates in a sort of childish passionate scream.

Step two, Bjork's voice. Although it's something of a trademark, and her lyrics can be irritating efforts at poetry, on the odd occasions when they fall short of being actually poetic (but hey, who's perfect), nobody does it like her. She builds up a fragile hum only to culminate in an out-of-control scream, declaring love, frustration or humour, or questioning why a partner is cowardly and "can't handle love"... Again, the lyrics can be juvenile at times, but a phrase or a sentence in which she mocks herself for being too scandinavian, too naive or a recluse ("I sit here with a beard and a pipe...") bring home that these lyrics are the immature feelings of a mature woman and artist.

Lastly, the three DJs who do the samples and electronic sounds for the non-acoustic songs. Basically, these three guys (whose names I couldn't find on the internet) are incredible. It's impossible to understand exactly what they do until you go to the concert and stand in an audience with thousands of other people, and amplifiers the size of a small apartment. Although that doesn't sound like much artistry - needing so much technology to perform music - it's actually extraordinarily creative. They create sounds which they adapt to the acoustics of the space they are playing in, as they play. During the concert, there were screens showing the programs they were using to create and control sounds. For instance, one of them had a disc-shaped table on which he put cup-like objects which he moved and twisted around the table. Depending on their relative position to each other, the frequency, balance or pitch of the bass could be altered. Doesn't sound like much until you combine this with a 15 piece brass band, a live drummer and Bjork's screaming vocals, and use it to really drive the spirit of the song.

Picture this music being performed live, literally shaking your organs through your rib cage (that's one of the frequencies they use; it shakes your entire nervous system), playing over the pink, darkening skies of Montreal's quays, with a ferry taking off in the background, and a light breeze which cools off as the music drops...

I guess this means I'm siding with the tattoo-sporting, dreadlock-wearing intelligentsia of Montreal's fashionably unfashionable art student population, croaking to one another about how Bjork is like, so Bach-meets-Kaftwerk, y'know? But through the haze of their pot smoke, emanates some decent taste in music. While other musicians (such as Montreal's philharmonic orchestra) still use amplification to imperfectly reproduce live sounds to a large audience, often losing in quality, directness or timbre, Bjork's band uses electronics to immediately convey exactly the sound they want the audience to experience, and can raise a frenzy of celebratory adrenaline or hush up to a soul-crushing tragic finish, silencing teeny-boppers and fogies alike in mid-stride...

The finale was 'Declare independence', a song from her new album, for which all the choir tore up flags from the stage and danced to Bjork's screams of 'Protect your language' and 'Don't let them do that to you'. Needless to add, the overwhelming majority of Quebequois separatists went wild. Her rare moments of speaking to the audience being in French, there was obviously a message geared towards this audience, about cultures having to fight against nations, which I for one recognize in Nietszche's 'Zarathustra'. But that's another discussion. The point is, the final message was unexpectedly political.

Given that this morning I spent about 20 minutes listening to a sextagenarian Anglophone Montrealer ranting about how Quebequois politics has actively discriminated against English speakers, and was a 'fascist measure', the concert resonates strangely for me. Does it make sense that a shape-shifting musician should be a spokesperson for Quebequois nationalism?

I get around

2007-09-16T16:01:00.001-07:00

(picture of the 'canal de Lachine'. Take a look at how much like a seafront this canal promenade is)

Comme promis, je continue mon effort de changer de langue une fois sur deux, pour bien intégrer la loi 101 dans mon blog. Apres tout, au Quebec, il faut bien manger de la poutine en criant devant le match de hockey sur glace pour faire l'expérience de la culture. Pourquoi pas bloguer en Français (ça se dit, 'bloguer' on dirait un Quebequois au café qui veut amuser le patron.)

J'ai fait environ 30 bornes a vélo aujourd'hui. Je voulais m'acheter un super vélo d'occasion, une Peugeot de course qui serait retapée dans un magazine, dont seulement le cadre serait vieux, et tout le reste mis a neuf, pour a peine 200 dollars. Ça valait le coup d'avoir un très bon vélo a ce prix, mais voila, je n'ai pas encore encaisse de salaire, et vu les mois d'hiver ici, je ne sais même pas combien de temps je vais encore pouvoir faire du vélo Je vais tenter jusqu'a fin Novembre, mais c'est ambitieux, aller au boulot sous la neige en velo.

Bonne nouvelle entre-temps, j'ai contacte un gars sur craigslist (un site de vente d'affaires usagées) qui m'a vendu sa Peugeot un peu vieillotte, mais encore bonne, pour mois de la moitie du prix de l'autre. Seuls 6 des 12 vitesses marchent, mais ce n’est pas si grave, je peux remplacer la pièce manquante si j'en ai besoin. Le siège est comme du bois, par contre. J'ai de ces bleus au fessart, au bout des 30 bornes que j'me suis tape en rentrant de Beaconsfield, ou j'ai du chercher le vélo Mais c'etait une superbe balade, le long de la riviere.

Sinon, j'ai découvert le quartier Mile End, que je trouve vraiment superbe. Un petit café a peine la taille d'un appartement 1 et demi (comme ils le disent ici), gère par un Chilien, sur la rue Bernard, plein de bilboquets, un vieux piano avec un 'Real Book' de jazz, et un chien résident; un échiquier en verre et des tables en bois. Janis Jopin en vinyle, dont le blues sarcastique accompagne les bruits des tasses et la machine a café Quelle perle, ce cafe que j'ai vu en rentrant d'un autre rendez-vous inutile pour voir un velo d'occasion.

Dans la même volée, en route vers chez moi depuis le met Beaubien, j'suis tombe sur un bar excellent dont je ne me souviens pas le nom, mais j'ai pris le flyer, et j'y retournerai de sitôt. Encore une trouvaille de la rue Bernard, ils font des concerts gratuits 3 soirs par semaine, dont une jam le Dimanche. J'pense que, vu les musiciens que j'ai rencontre ici, ça doit être un boeuf à voir.

En tout cas, j'guette le quartier de près. Les magasins sont 15 a 20% moins cher qu'au prestigieux Westmount, et l'ambiance y est distinctement moins distinguée (une bonne chose, a mes yeux d'irlandais de souche paysanne).

J'ai failli oublier de vous raconter la rencontre philosophique de Vendredi dernier. J'y retournerai en anglais dans mon prochain épisode.

Same bat-time, same bat-place. So there!

So there!

2007-09-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

I'm going to see Bjork on Friday! Found out she's playing in an obscure venue in Montreal next Friday evening. I'm teaching the next day, but what the hell.

I just thought I would post this to make you all very very jealous of what a great city this is. Where else could you see Bjork perform at a week's notice, for 55 dollars!?

The World's Language

2007-09-15T11:49:00.000-07:00

I've just finished my first week as a language teacher (as opposed to a schoolteacher) today, and I have to say it's a pretty good experience. At least, it's been refreshing and fun so far. I get the fun of teaching, presenting, guiding activities, meeting people who want to educate themselves and exchange ideas, without the pains of an institution. Bells ringing every hour, disillusioned inmates, desperately glaring at the clock in the hope of a time warp, angry parents with enormous, fluorescent pink-tinted glasses, and endless meetings about achievement, assessment, curriculum, bla bla bla.

So I'm teaching The World's Language, as the great Bill Bryson (yeah, great, sure) calls it. I'm a sellout, taking money from a private institution to correct the inadequacies of public systems. After 12 to 15 years of schooling in English, my students turn up without a word and need to study English pretty much from scratch. And actually, it's really satisfying. They want to do something with their lives, and need English to achieve it. The odd scrounger is just there because the company has forced him, but even he will pull his socks up when it's important. So for the time being - even though business environments are completely not me and I still struggle to remember to shave every day and wear an ironed shirt rather than a patched cardigan and corduroys - I've opted out of the institutional cynicism of schools. It's quite a refreshing change.

I know of a secondary school teacher who invented a game called 'Bulls**t Bingo'. Several teachers had cards with terms like 'assessment', 'child-centred learning', 'community', 'objectives' and 'moving forward' written in sequence on a battleship grid, grouped like submarines. When the headmaster/director gave a speech or held a meeting for teachers, you could tick off words, and if a 'submarine' of words was hit, you could cough out "Bulls**t!" discretely enough to not be noticed by the speaker, but loud enough to be heard by other players, in order to gain points. Of course in my school, we were educated, well-meaning professionals, fully involved in the director's agenda, so we never finished a game. (coughs uncomfortably)

This sort of game isn't really needed in a language school. In fact, if your boss is really breathing down your neck or the place is a god-awful mess, you can simply look for work elsewhere, or even set yourself up independently, given the contacts. For the most part, they're pretty small and well-run, although there is some unnecessary cafuffle, like in every school. I like the idea of getting to work, doing my job, and leaving it behind at the end of the day, though. A major perk, in comparison with being a schoolteacher, day and night, whether you like it or not. Whatever anyone says, schoolteachers are in it for good. It changes the way you pee and the taste of your child-centred, objectives-driven tofu meal; knowing that at any time, you can be called upon or recognized as The Teacher. The guide-by-the-side everyone loves to hate, mock and criticise, and noone wants to be.

But I want to go back to it, before long. The masochists among you, reading this blog, know what I'm talking about. I appreciate a change, I'm working in a language school and getting a lot out of it, but the teacher's itch is at me; a part of my educational mong wants to be standing in front of bored and disillusioned teenagers and moaning in the faculty lounge, waiting for the bell. I miss bad spelling, fart-smelling classes of edgy kids, eager for attention, irritable, and repeated questions about colours of pens.

To compensate, I'm thinking of doing some work in schools, but via outside organisations. I'm looking to work for a charity which raises money for leukemia patients, by sponsoring runs and the like. I might go into schools and pester parents, kids and teachers to raise money for this charity, asking them to sponsor me to train up for a marathon. I might do some storytelling in local libraries or primary schools, using hats to distinguish characters in French and English. Or I might just go back to a plain old classroom. Who knows.

Laundry, Radio and Teaching

2007-09-09T10:59:00.000-07:00

I've been staying in for most of the weekend, which is completely against my nature. I might reward myself later by going back to the tam-tams. Maybe.

Yesterday, after using up every stitch of clean clothing I had, I picked up my courage and did an evening's washing. Why am I telling you this? Because it illustrates the little differences in everyday tasks, between living in Europe and here. I had to call up the janitor of the building, who lives here, and buy tokens from him for 2 dollars a pop. He's Philippino (I think), and his friendly but frighteningly efficient wife provided me with the troublesome tokens I had been trying to get hold of all week. The previous weekend, I had been taken to a 'coop' which sells environmentally friendly products, to buy my detergent. Something I've wanted to do for a long time and never quite knew where to buy the stuff in Germany. So I did my laundry, and fought a losing battle with the clothes horse, the architecture of which reminded me of those boats people make out of thousands of matches. Or one of those mind puzzles, where an apparently simple pair of metal circles make a fool out of people like me, when asked to join them.

Freshly adorned with my favourite clothing (and no longer having to wear my undersized gear I avoid wearing unless nothing else is clean, during the hottest days of Montreal's summer), I've been preparing meals, sorting files, working out finances... all the boring, annoying stuff. I always put these things off when I was earning a steady income as an international school teacher, somehow able to put them off. I'd get a ready-made meal or eat out on weekends, leave a desk strewn with bills and letters, put bills into a bowl and hide from them till I'd get an angry reminder. I guess this change is forcing me to be a bit more conscientious about this stuff. Tant mieux.

I've had to be around the flat as I am now, listening to CBC's programmes, which range from the ultra-prententious interviews about plurals for double-barreled nouns, to a guy playing guitar as he presents blues tracks. I love the radio here; I find it investigative, interesting, varied, and somehow real. Something missing in a lot of countries, where the news is cursory and uninteresting, the talk is all about stars or pretentious political debates leading nowhere, and the music rarely goes beyond Bon Jovi.

How do I connect this to teaching. Well, it seems to me that these small shifts in habits are an important part of my reevaluation of what teaching is about, to me. I was talking with a former student yesterday, and was trying to explain why I chose to move from a comfortable job in Europe to an insecure, chaotic, badly paid job here in Montreal. And my explanation was that this is partly why I am doing it. I've been a part of an institution since I left university, in the UK school system and in both international schools I've worked for. A state school system encourages teachers to behave institutionally. To expect cares and comforts which aren't offered in other professions, in exchange for commitment to government policies and programmes. In a different vein, international schools institutionalise their teachers as well. They are closed communities, often independent from the country, language and even legal system which surrounds them. The community is encouraged to rely on the school for social events, for assistance with everyday life, from finding an apartment (as a teacher) to the bells which structure the day's timetable. Inevitably, everyone thinks hierarchically, dislikes but yet depends on the institution to support and punish them.

So my struggles with where to buy cheaper milk and how to get hold of the bloody coupons for the washing machine, are useful to me. I'm working outside an institution, for the first time in my life in fact. School, university and then schoolteaching have cocooned my life, so those who still wonder why I've put myself to all this trouble, the answer is, basically, because it puts me to all this trouble.

La Musique

2007-09-06T18:41:00.000-07:00

Je n’ai pas fait grand chose d'utile aujourd'hui. Pourtant ça a été une journée super utile, puisque j'ai pris contact avec beaucoup de gens sur Montréal. Ce qui me manque le plus ici, c'est de pouvoir jouer ma musique.

J'ai bien sur perdu mon lecteur MP3 avant de partir d'Allemagne, et actuellement mon ordinateur ne marche plus. Je suis donc en manque totale de ma musique, et je suis oblige de chercher ce qui me plait sur Youtube. Pas plus mal, vous me direz, puisque ça m'oblige a chercher un peu dans ce qui se fait sur le net.

John Butler est déjà dans mes favoris en haut de la page. Je pense qu'il est tout ce que Ben Harper est censé être, mais n'a jamais été. Il a un style vraiment unique à la guitare, et mélange les styles avec beaucoup de succès. Il est très fort.

C'est justement ça qui me fait kiffer en ce moment, dans la musique. Les artistes qui savent vraiment mélanger les styles sans que ça fasse salade de chocolat et de camembert. Les groupes et les zicos qui maîtrisent suffisamment plusieurs genres souvent différents et difficiles a mélanger, pour oublier les conventions stylistiques et créer une musique vraiment originale.

Hocus Pocus fait partie de cette catégorie de musiciens. C'est un groupe hip hop qui est maintenant très connu en France, et pour cause. Les samples sont originaux et recherches. Ils ne se contentent pas d'un rythme pompant sur un thème rébarbatif. Ils vont chercher dans le classique, le hip hop old school, la bossa nova... partout ou ils peuvent assembler des musiques qui portent leurs paroles. Celles-ci sont intéressantes et ne prennent pas l'audience pour des cons. Respect bien rare dans le hip hop, a mon avis.

Bjork est un autre exemple du musicien qui brasse les styles de manière intelligente. Bien sur, bon nombre de ses clips vidéo poussent un peu les limites du ridicule. Elle aime pousser son image de fillette dans un corps de femme, qui chiale comme une gamine ou gémit en orgasme en fonction de la chanson. Un peu lourd parfois, mais elle reste une génie musicale. On peut acheter un album sans même se poser la question si ça va être de la qualité.

Le dernier dont je veux parler ici, c'est Thomas Fersen. C'est un génie du jeu de mot et de l'auto-derision, au point qu'il n'en est presque même plus français. Il sait se moquer de lui-même, de sa musique, avec une créativité digne des Monty Python, tout en créant des morceaux originaux, et en mélangeant les styles, encore une fois.

Il y a seulement deux semaines, j'étais encore en Irlande, comptant les jours et les heures avant de venir ici, a Montréal. J'ai travaille dans une école de langue, ne sachant pas combien de temps il allait me falloir là-bas. Sachant que j'ai passe sept années de mon enfance là-bas, que c'est mon pays d'origine et le pays de ma famille des deux cotes, c'est dommage que je m'y sente tellement étranger. Seulement lorsque j'ai vu ce groupe sur scène, j'ai eu le sentiment d'appartenir réellement a mon pays. C'est difficile à expliquer, mais il y a quelque chose dans le brassage musical qui me donne le sentiment d'avoir un chez moi, un foyer ou je peux me reconnaître, en dépit du fait que j'ai tellement bouge ces dernières années. C'est peut-être pour ça que les gitans sont tellement musicaux...

Getting a sense of the city

2007-09-05T19:02:00.000-07:00

Spent today doing jobhunting, like most days I've spent here so far. It looks like I've lucked out and will be starting work next week on Tuesday. There's quite a lot of jobs opening up with the students starting classes again.

I dropped into the main French university, UQAM, for a coffee. It seems like a pretty nice place, in that sort of hectic, underfunded public university sort of way. It's got the scattiness of the Sorbonne without being covered with graffiti and smelling of urine (sorry, but it's true!). I'd be interested to find out what the courses are like.

Meanwhile, I signed up to the main public library. Amazing. The place has five stories of books, CDs, DVDs... you name it. I was looking for some pretty specific writing on Oscar Wilde and found some pretty extraordinary tomes there. Given it's not a university library, the collection is outstanding. It's free, open till past 10pm on weeknights, and most of the weekend. The staff are pleasant, and actually know what they're talking about. This library is a good enough reason to want to move here in itself!

I sat outside to eat lunch, since the job searching office of my exchange programme was shut for a meeting, and read my books in the sunshine. It's not always warm here, but it's really bright. I'm constantly told the weather is terrible here, but I've yet to see it, despite being here in winter. Even then it was snowing in December, and I remember wanting to sit out in the sunshine.

I walked home from downtown, after the job interview. It took several hours, but it was worth it. Getting to know the city is a good enough reason in itself to walk it, even if the weather wasn't so good. But there's more to it than geography. Walking helps me think straighter, focus what I'm doing, question my own thinking, and really have time to mull things over. Right now, when I've got all the questions popping into mind which naturally ensue from such a huge move (What is the meaning of life? Where can a guy get some decent chips round here? How come Canadian squirrels are so gangster-like?), it's a huge help to have some thinking space. And by Jingo I'm getting good use of those shoes I bought before I left. If I wore off 1 euro per kilometer I've used those shoes, they'd be a shred by now.

Concert

2007-09-04T21:02:00.000-07:00

Ce soir je suis tombe sur un concert assez unique, en plein centre de Montréal. J'étais a UQAM (l'Université du Québec a Montréal) pour prendre un café, et en sortant, je vois des camions de 3 chaînes radio très connues ici, de l'autre cote de la rue. En traversant, je me rends compte qu'il y a une scène énorme, pour un orchestre. J'apprends que l'orchestre symphonique de Montréal va jouer ce soir, dirigée par John Nagano.

D'évidence, mon ignorance de l'identité de ce surhomme était irréparable. Je crois qu'il est américain, en tout cas il le parait, mais d'origine japonaise.

J'ai donc traîne un peu dans des magasins de musique à regarder les MP3, et les boutiques de souvenirs, à imaginer des cadeaux moches pour mes copains, en attendant le début, à 19h30. Je reviens, et ça en valait véritablement la peine.

C'était en fait une espèce de double jeu orchestral, ou Nagano dirigeait l'orchestre symphonique dans la salle même, et un autre orchestre, compose de deux universités Montréalaises, à l'extérieur. D'autant plus de bouchées doubles du fait que les immeubles autour de la Place des Arts faisaient office d'écrans géants pour projeter le concert même, dans la salle. On a donc eu droit a une pièce de Gershwin (je n'avais pas de programme, mais je crois avoir reconnu 'Porgy and Bess', pardonnez l'incertitude) en 'live' avec Nagano sur notre scène en plein air, suivi d'un Nagano de 30 mètres de haut, projeté sur une cheminée, dont la gestuelle évoquait un homme qui se noie en pleine crise d'épilepsie. C'était 'Ainsi parla Zarathustra' de Wagner. Comme l'avait dit Woody Allen, on a du mal à écouter ce morceau sans vouloir envahir la Pologne...

C'était bizarroïde et magique à la fois. Des mamans qui chuchotaient a leurs bambins, des étudiants grignotant leurs fast-food, et des professeurs sortis tout droit de l'université, qui comme moi, n'avaient pas du tout calcule le concert, et sont tombes dans la foule par hasard.

Bon nombre de villes ont ce genre d'événement maintenant en été. Des concerts gratuits, projetés dans des places publiques, des festivals a tout bout de champ. Mais à Montréal, il y a quelque chose de particulièrement rafraîchissant quand des milliers de personnes se tassent dans un square pour écouter de la musique. Peut-être un bon but pour ce blog serait de refaire la même chose dans un an, et voir si je peux l'expliquer. Entretemps, je me régale ici. Si seulement je pouvais vous montrer mes photos!

Values

2007-09-03T06:36:00.000-07:00

Here's something I read this morning while browsing the net (as you do, while you're meant to be job searching)

For why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals--because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these "values" really had.--We require, sometime, new values.

Friedrich Nietszche
The Will to Power

Something hits home to me here; the idea that an extreme idealist like Nietszche felt forced into nihilism in order to re-evaluate his own values.

Nihilism. To me, the idea evokes Jeff Bridges in the bath fighting a ferret, surrounded by German gangsters in tight black leather (The Big Lebowski) But somehow it also stands to reason that ideals are clearer when the background is cleared.

Nietszche seemed to be trying to rid himself of his European idealism in order to start an entirely new philosophy. Ironically, his anti-religious and anti-establishment thinking became the very thing it hated. He was an idealist whether he liked it or not, and invariably European in his views. Perhaps I won't ever shake my Europeanness either, nor the very European ideas of education I picked up during 5 years of working in schools in Europe. But I can try...

Promenades

2007-09-02T07:38:00.000-07:00

Back to English. I like the idea of switching languages for each post; I hope I can stick to it. As I mentioned before, it's a pretty good illustration of my chaotic mind...

Just came back from a 15km run with the yuppies from the local running store. Yes, there's a shop entirely dedicated to running, just around the corner. I wouldn't have guessed you could make a living out of products to do with running. I mean, how much can you actually need to buy to go for a run, however long? Shoes, shorts, and a t-shirt. Maybe a belt to carry a water bottle, if you're stuck... I suppose people will find all sorts of ways to spend their money when they have enough of it. Sweatbands worth 30 dollars. Come on.

It's always a great way to get to know a city, running, long walks, generally getting lost on the way home. I have the equivalent sense of direction of a mute bat with a hangover, stuck in a sonar lab experiment. But somehow by meandering my way around Mont-Royal over to Westmount yesterday, and then today's run, I'm getting a good sense of where I am. That's what it takes, in my case. 3 holes in my shoes and a half-dozen callouses later, I pretty much know where I am.

So Montreal is getting to know me, slowly. I'm having to curb my instincts of hanging around in cafes or going for cheap eats around the town, as I used to do on a full salary in Stuttgart. But it's all the more incentive to get outdoors and do sports.

I wish I could upload pictures (I will do this soon), to show you Mont-Royal on a Saturday afternoon. Kids playing frisbee, Colombians playing music, potheads playing god-knows-what... The giant hill, plonked just west of downtown Montreal, is a-buzz with every wacko and his ferret, enjoying the sun and getting up to something outdoorsy and usually fun to watch. And people keep fit here. Droves of joggers and bikers tearing their way all around the place, dodging toddlers, pets, barbeques...

I'm off to do some Sunday washing and cleaning, and then hopefully get to Mont-Royal for the Sunday hippy gathering, the famous 'Tam-tams du Dimanche'. Talk about a stereotype of left-wing tree-huggers in their drum circles. But what the hell. I've only just arrived, I can afford to be a stereotype for a while. A stereotype without a drum, though.

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Video of tam-tams

Montreal's wacky

2007-08-31T17:28:00.000-07:00

Pour que ce blog représente véritablement le chaos qui survient dans ma tête ces jours-ci, il faut que j'affiche des pages en français, de temps en temps. J'ai tellement a vous raconter, et je trouve que l'anglais ne me suffit pas.

Il fait beau et chaud ici, ce qui fait véritablement plaisir après les éternels vents et crachats pluvieux de Dublin. Je me suis balade hier soir dans le centre de Montréal, histoire d'habituer mon corps au temps local. Je m'étais permis trop de sommeil jusqu'ici.

Je me promène donc sur la rue Ste Catherine, et je tombe sur le festival du cinéma mondial; le film principal de chaque soirée est projeté sur un écran géant en plein centre ville.

Donc, d'apres le programme, le film etait:

LA NUIT AMÉRICAINE / DAY FOR
NIGHT
France 1973 / 116 min / Fr. STA
Réal.: François Truffaut. Int.: Jacqueline
Bisset, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Alexandra Stewart.
Splendeurs et misères d’une équipe de tournage aux studios
de la Victorine à Nice, le temps de la conception
d’un film.
Funny, touching tale of a motion picture director
(Truffaut) and his problems in trying to film a silly love
story. A loving look into the intricacies of filmmaking.

En plein essor du cinema dans les années '60, ce film satirise la vie du cinéma, les petits drames des acteurs, l'incontrôlable machine du film qui avance en dépit des vies de tous ceux qui y participent... On était des milliers de spectateurs assis sur la Place Desjardins, à regarder ce film, et seulement la moitie devait être francophone, à en juger par les réactions. Ça faisait vraiment bizarre de regarder autour de soi, et de voir les sourires confus des Indiens qui cherchaient à comprendre la blague, avec 6 secondes de retard sur le public francophone.

Donc le Québec se veut une société bilingue, mais je ne vois pas ça partout. Le 'Montréal Gazette' de Mardi affichait cet article:

http://>www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=492f2936-7eaf-45fa-8b35-776a1c92134d&p=2

qui déplore les discriminations qui ont découle de cette loi, interdisant presque l'anglais sur les affiches publiques, les pancartes, les enseignes... Plusieurs familles se pressentent actuellement en justice pour combattre l'interdiction de faire éduquer leurs enfants dans les écoles anglophones, après qu'ils sont passe par un établissement prive. On ne peut que se poser la question; a quel prix s'est fait, et se fait encore, le Québec francophone.

En tous cas, j'y suis heureux. Je peux commander un fish-and-chips dans un restaurant du Plateau Mont-Royal, et on m'amène un 'Feeshondechips' bien français. Pourquoi pas. Mon identité bordellique, mélangeant l'anglophone, le francophone et un voyageur incorrigible est complètement à l'aise dans cette ville bouillonnant de couleurs et d'accents. De langues entremêlées, presque créoles, qui amènent le sourire. Je ne peux pas m'empêcher d'adorer les jeux de mots des magasins, qui cherchent à intégrer des mots français dans un titre ou une phrase anglaise... Je ne vais pas me plaindre!

Vous voulez un breuvage avec ca?

2007-08-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

This is my second day in Montreal, and man the jet lag is making this seem even more surreal than it is. A couple of months ago, I'm Mr. Kelly in a well-to-do private international school in Germany, and now I find myself squinting at the price lists in takeaways, trying to figure out what a "Chien chaud" is (hence the blog address), and trying to sift my way through the rows of enormous cereal boxes to find some plain old muesli, goddamn it.

I flew into Montreal Trudeau airport at about 5pm local time on Tuesday, after more than 12 hours of flights. Air Canada obviously see time as being a luxury their privileged customers can afford, and didn't tell me that the initial 15 mintues delay on my flight meant a 2 hour delay in the connecting flight. But I got there in the end, starved out of my mind because I hadn't told my travel agent that I have a 'special' diet - meaning I don't eat dead rubber chicken - so I had had precious little food the whole day.

I arrived at the counter in the airport coffee shop, and the depressed students trying to work the tills call me over to place my order. I ask for the bagel-and-soup option, and the girl replies "Vous voulez un breuvage avec ca?" (which translates loosely as "would you like a medieval broth with that?"). I know I'm the foreigner here, and I really don't want to emulate the snobby Parisians who turn up here and mock the Quebequois for their 'weird' language. But with my head spinning from starvation and jet lag, and the excitement of FINALLY being in Montreal after all this time, it's hilarious beyond belief. I mask my splutter of laughter as a cough.

So I'm here. After six months of wrangling my work permit off the Irish and Canadian authorities, relying on the immense patience of my friends in Germany, my sister and my aunt who housed me, fed me, put up with my daily frenzy of forgetfulness and chaotic plans, and creased their brows in concentration while trying to understand what the hell I'm doing and why. I'm here. I got through customs scatheless.

Unlike the guy in the queue next to me, who was being interrogated via a Spanish translator, as to why he had a US felony registered on his passport, and informed that he would be held in jail till the report came from the FBI. The man looked bemused, and this all could have been a mix-up. Despite wanting to mind my own business and concentrate on the questions coming from my own immigrations officer, I couldn't help but think that my Spanish-speaking neighbour might suddenly flip and do something desperate to avoid being thrown into Guantanamo or shipped off to a non-existant Syrian prison.

Looks like the chaos in my life isn't so bad after all. I've got a flat, this computer to write on, a job interview lined up for this afternoon, and am meeting a friend for coffee in the evening, hoping yesterday's storm doesn't hit again. I went for a jog this morning, and had my first experience of being mesmerised by a supermarket here, leaving with twice the stuff I wanted, crammed into a paper bag, and no idea which way was home.

Sure beats the hell out of being stuck in a prison cell waiting for the FBI to determine whether I get let out of prison, for having the wrong name.