Layer 256 . . . More Woody, Joan Bakewell, Contentment, Confucius, Virtue, the Treasury and Toyota

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Decided to re-listen to Sir Clive Woodward on yesterday's repeat of Desert Island Discs.

To give him his due, he did actually admit that he'd been fortunate to be associated with some superb players during his time as England rugby manager.

"I was very lucky. I had wonderful players."

He also admitted that in life generally he's been very lucky.

Hearing it the second time around I felt pretty sorry for him for having had such a crap childhood. Running away from his Welsh boarding school not once but twice, and managing a home run both times, shows a lot of unhappiness and desperation, and also a lot of determination. Finally though, it seems his spirit was broken, since he remained at the school in Anglesey between the ages of 13 and 18, and was never allowed by the Welsh to play his beloved football. It must have felt like being incarcerated in a kind of rainy and damp British gulag.

He finished up with a bit of a Zen-like  philosophy - "Don't get bogged down in the past, and don't look too far into the future. It's all about today."

But mentioning Bob Dylan and Ronan Keating in the same breath was still . . .  breathtaking. And very amusing.
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Kirsty Young is brilliant in her DID role. She has such a quick mind, and great empathy with the people she interviews. It must take incredible concentration, preparation and skill, as well as personality, to do what she does with such apparent unobtrusive ease.

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Joan Bakewell, age 76,  had a very thought-provoking column in the Guardian this week. This is the kind of thing that can change someone's entire outlook.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/feb/23/joan-bakewell-happy-at-74

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Bakewell

Happiness is being 74

The young have stress, ambition, unfulfilled dreams. The elderly have contentment

Happiness, it seems, peaks at the age of 74 – or so scientists have concluded after asking 21,000 people how happy they were on a scale of 1 to 7. Teenagers racked with angst registered around 5.5; in their 40s people reckoned they had less happiness in their lives. Those who were 74 rated themselves 5.9, the highest of the lot. At 74 I was single, living alone and all life's choices were mine: I was writing my first novel, making new friends and visiting new places. What's not to like?

We define happiness in our own terms and for our own particular life moment. There is probably nothing as ecstatic and overwhelming as falling in love; pledging your love together before family and friends carries its own euphoria; holding your new baby is your arms is another of life's highs . . . all family moments. Then there's the job, the promotion, the first home . . . all rungs on today's ladder for measuring how well you're doing in life and thus how happy you might expect to be.

Happiness is about something else entirely: it's not about future expectations but a deep satisfaction with the here and now, with yourself and your place in the world. It involves a degree of healthy self-esteem and a worldview that sets petty preoccupations against a wider canvas. It probably has little to do with money, though dire poverty will be its enemy. It depends on the falling away of all the things that blight our happiness when we're younger: ambition, competitiveness, stress, unfulfilled dreams and hopes.

In terms that will appal younger spirits, it calls for a certain resignation – an awareness that life is finite, that you finally know who you are and accept your limitations and disappointments. Disappointments, when they come, are less sharp than they once were. They are simply part of the pattern.

There's plenty to make old age unhappy, too. The deep wounds sustained by the death of those we love are the greatest. There's infirmity and illness, the closing down of life's options. But there's a relief too, in knowing you won't be climbing the Eiger or pioneering a new vaccine. The blessings of family and friendship count for more, and they grow as the years go by.

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A History Of The World

In 100 Objects

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/explorerflash/#/object_Fh59-tI4TViuv1RSsx0qhQ


A Chinese Bronze Bell from the time of Confucius - 2,500 years old - Radio 4

Music produces the kind of pleasure that human nature can't do without. Confucius believed that music plays a central part in the shaping of the individual, as well as the state. Individual people, individual sounds, blending together in a pleasant and pleasing way. Society needs harmony, and peace.

The individual and society also need virtue, benevolence and righteousness.

[See also Oxzen Layer 148]

Leaders should embody virtue, and demonstrate their right to rule.

[More for Brown and Cameron to think about.]

In a good society there should be no need for punishment. If leaders and rulers set a good example, then virtuous individuals will live and work together harmoniously.

[NB Gordo]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/Fh59-tI4TViuv1RSsx0qhQ

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/asia/c/chinese_bronze_bell.aspx

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The Great Offices of State - 3. The Secret Treasury - BBC4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00r0sf5/The_Great_Offices_of_State_The_Secret_Treasury/

Everything about the Treasury and the people who run it is repulsive. A nasty, gloomy building, full of nasty gloomy people. Full of people puffed up with ego and pride. And a fat lot of good it did them whilst they allowed the State and its finances to hit the buffers. Voodoo economics. Crashing and burning in the most spectacular fashion. No proper oversight or stewardship of the financial system. Many of us said this at the time the bubble was growing - but did they listen?

I know someone who used to have on their child's primary school's governing body a young man who worked in the Treasury. An arrogant little twat in the mould of Ed Balls and the other Young Pioneers of New Labour. He overreached himself in his plotting against the school's leaders and the staff reps on the governing body. He thought he was doing his stuff (secret meetings with local authority officers and so on) ever so cleverly behind their backs, but he was too clever by half, and tripped over his own ego. Thankfully the very people he tried to patronise - parent governors and staff governors - exposed him in a meeting and gave him such a fucking good kicking he promptly resigned. A story with a happy ending.

It seems the look on his face at the time of his public humiliation was a sight to behold. He hadn't realised that regular working people could use words so effectively, and with such deadly intent, and outcome.

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Talking of huge crashes -

Toyota: A giant crashes
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/25/toyota-giant-crashes-editorial

The Economist has written off the entire affair as exemplifying the problems with Japanese corporate governance. Oh, if only those salarymen in Tokyo had learned from their counterparts in New York and London how capitalism should be done!

Mr Toyoda himself yesterday reiterated that his company had been too focused on growth and had "confused" its priorities. One could put it more plainly still, as former Toyota executive Jim Press has, describing his old employer as being "hijacked" by "anti-family, financially oriented pirates". In so doing, a widely admired company has wrecked its reputation . . .

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Layer 236 . . . Goodbyes

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If we're fortunate to have parents who live to an old age then we probably start saying our goodbyes to them over a long period of time. We say good bye to the people we used to know each time they pass from one stage of life to another.

Late Old Age is when someone can no longer take care of themselves properly, and they need help with a growing number of mundane and everyday chores and responsibilities. This final stage of life is when people can no longer deal with responsibility, either for themselves or for anyone else. I remember my mother entering late old age around the age of 78, when she suddenly realised she'd become one of the “old people” she always felt so sorry for.

She couldn't accept becoming one of those frail figures who shuffle around with the aid of a stick, sit in the same chair for hours on end, for day after day, have little to say to anyone, have no-one or virtually no-one who cares to listen to them, and often can't remember what they wanted to say anyway. How she loved it when grandchildren and great grandchildren would pop in and chat and play. She also smiled at the eager friendliness and playfulness of their dogs, and willingly gave them the pats and strokes they demanded.

Old Age, or the penultimate stage of life, is what precedes Late Old Age. Old age, as far as mum was concerned, lasted from about 72 to 78. During that time she would still go out, still catch buses, still do her own shopping, still pay her own bills, still do her own cooking, still take a bath without help, still catch trains to distant places, still remember to transfer money between her pension account, her savings account and her current account.

The mum that I said goodbye to at the end of that stage was still in control of her life and still able to enjoy life. She still had much of her old confidence and determination, her self-reliance and her physical strength. It was a sad thing to say goodbye to that person.

Late Middle Age probably ran from around 60 to roughly 72. This was the first phase of retirement and of  living on a pension, when every day held promise and opportunity, and was for enjoyment and fulfillment. The grandchildren were still quite young and could be taken out and indulged. It was an age of still feeling needed, an age of still being of some use and some importance to other people. An age before weight loss and serious wrinkles and loss of vitality set in. It was a good age, and one that was hard to say goodbye to.

It was hard to say goodbye at the very end, as well. She was still my lovely old mum, a very dear and very lovable old woman. With a little help from others she still lived in her own home, still made herself (and me) cups of tea and slices of cake, still smoked her cigarettes and still watched her favourite TV programmes. She still came to the door to wave goodbye as I backed the car out of the drive when it was time for me to travel home, and still stood there waving when I drove off, thinking to myself that this could be the very last time I see her alive.
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Layer 155 Sweet F.A. and Bitter Desolation.

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Deep in greenest, most verdant Devon, in a marquee in the grounds of a well-known boutique hotel, for one night only, Fascinating Aida!

Or Sweet FA, as they sometimes used to call themselves. One of the funniest, wittiest and most original musical entertainments you could ever see. The local jungle telegraph has been busy and there's a complete sell-out of the show, despite there having been no advertising for it, and despite it taking place on a cold, rainy night in a location that's practically impossible to find if you're not familiar with the terrain. You reach it via several lanes that are basically just wide enough for a handcart.

They're billing this as their Silver Anniversary tour, and it's a real gem. They've performed at this particular venue on a number of occasions, to a venerable audience of the South Hams' upper-crust of wealthy, mainly retired, folk. Average age about 70. The perky old boy sitting next to me was 80.

God knows what he made of the song about dogging. Or the one about Tesco. Or the series of so-called Bulgarian folk-style ditties. They were wonderful and hilarious from start to finish. A magical evening that’s witty and satirical and which totally raises the spirits. What fantastic original talents. New CD on sale now. The Silver Anniversary.

Chatting to Dilly Keane, the leader of the trio, their piano player, during the interval, I heard they're not doing any London gigs because it's impossible to make any money there after the cost of a venue has been paid. So much for our capital of culture.

Here's an excellent and very comprehensive review of the current show:

http://alexhopkins.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/harmonised-anarchy-a-review-of-fasinating-aidas-25th-anniversary-tour/

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At the other end of the spectrum my spirits were cast into the deepest, darkest pit by the lead article in this week's Guardian Education. Christ knows why but they decided to feature Chris Woodhead and his new book. "Know your enemy", I suppose.

Ghastly, horrible, appalling man, with his vacant gimlet eyes staring out from the photo on the front of the supplement. Nasty, reactionary, ignorant fascist. He even rants on about the gene pool of the lower orders being responsible for their supposed lack of interest in education and lack of achievement. Whoops! What a give away.

I think I need to quote directly from the article to give a proper flavour of this ludicrous bozo, who taught for about two years and considers that qualifies him for the status of pontificator-in-chief on schools and the state of education. He's even got the fucking gall to be disrespectful to Jim Rose and Robin Alexander, his two colleagues on the Primary 'methods' review back in the mid 90's.

The fact that those two eminent gentlemen and scholars take a diametrically opposite view to his on teaching and learning doesn't phase him one bit. Of course, he's right and they're wrong. He has no actual evidence or experience to back up any of his Neanderthal views, but no matter. He's still right.

He never lets doubt enter his mind for one moment. How could he? He's built his whole life and his career on being the scourge of progressive educational thinking. It's what he does. It's what he is. The right-wing media and the private educational sector adore him and pay him handsomely for it, now that he's no longer taking money from the public purse. I suspect his pension and his investments have crashed, thanks to the exploits of his right-wing chums, and he's back in circulation, as it were, trying the generate income from a shitty and very unwelcome new publication.

Take this little gem, this perfect pearl of wisdom: "There is a huge propaganda machine that's lobotomising the teaching profession." And you're not part of the machine, Mr W? So that's you and me folks, should you happen to be a member or an ex-member of the teaching profession - lobotomised. What a patronising, ludicrous tosspot. He just can't see that the instrument of terror and torture, Ofsted, which he helped to create in his role as HMCI and as a collaborator with two utterly reactionary governments, is what's responsible for so many members of the teaching profession acting as though they have no brains.

I hesitate to mention, for fear of promoting it, that his book's called The Desolation of Learning. The sheer nerve of the man to talk about learning when he knows zilch about it. According to the interview he did with Polly Curtis he tries to be the 'antidote' to the 'educational research establishment', the majority of which, he says, reject his passion for grammar schools and "traditional" fact-based learning. Well too fucking right we do, you ignoramus.

He goes on to say that he's 'sickened' by efforts to make education more "accessible" and "personalised", rather than "rigorous". Well, woe betide us if education becomes more available to those who want it, or if it's at all designed to meet the actual learning needs of pupils and students. He wants to have a system of education that divides kids into grammar schools and into other ‘non-academic’ schools for those who just need to learn such things as manual trades. "Practical education", he calls it.

According to Woody, "It would be unlikely that large numbers of grammar school kids would come from disadvantaged areas". And why is that, O wise one? "The genes are likely to be better if your parents are teachers, academics, lawyers, whatever." Maybe add to that bankers, stockbrokers, politicians, estate agents, etc. So it's all down to genes, you see. Presumably the genes are even better if you happen to be white, since that's the dominant group within those professions.

"And the nurture is likely to be better," he adds. So that's the reason I'm such a fucking underachiever. Crap gene pool and lousy upbringing by idiot, unloving parents. If only I'd been blessed with the advantages of Woody, and his ilk. If only I could have grown up to be such a balanced, thoughtful, wise and open-minded individual, and if only I had such a thorough understanding of genetics, eugenics and child psychology. Better still, if only I could have gone to boarding school and grown up away from my parents, like Tony Blair and the Bullingdon Club bozos.

So, finally, here's what the Wooden One has to say about education.

"There are two fundamentally different views of education. On the one hand, there is the emphasis on the child. The insistence that everything must be relevant to the child's experience and to the perceived needs of society. The argument that the teacher should be a mentor or a coach who facilitates the growth of the child's understanding. The current obsession with personalisation. On the other there is the belief that the school is an institution in which children are initiated by teachers, who are authorities in their subjects, into a body of knowledge which has no immediate connection to their lives or necessary relevance to the problems of society. I believe in the latter."

Big C believes in initiation. He believes in teachers who possess subject knowledge and who know fuck all about pedagogy, or how to "facilitate the growth of the child's understanding". He sees no place for mentoring or coaching. He cares not a jot that the "perceived needs of society" include the need for individuals who possess large measures of emotional, social and spiritual intelligence, and also creativity and imagination. He just wants to stuff "a body of knowledge" into kids' heads. Obviously a body of knowledge that he personally approves of.

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Chris Woodhead has motor neurone disease, which he says is unfair. Given his belief in God and the all-determining nature of genetics, it's surprising he doesn't consider God's will, and genetic pre-disposition. Is God unfair? And genes that predispose you to having a loud self-opinionated mouth, a narrow mind and a huge ego aren’t necessarily intelligent genes when it comes to physical intelligence and longevity. Or is MND simply a disease that can affect anyone, no matter how ‘good’ their genes?

No matter. I'm with Chrissy on this one. It's unfair. As someone once said, life's a bitch and then you die. Desolation Row, indeed.

Returning to my conversation with the nun earlier this week, however, I still can’t find it in me to actually wish him happiness - not after all he’s done to ruin the possibility of children actually enjoying school and being happy to go to school every day. Woody would be the last person to care about whether or not children actually discover happiness and enjoyment at school. And forget about the joys of self-discovery. Initiation into subject knowledge, and desolation, is all.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/may/12/chris-woodhead-teaching

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Brother B, who did so much to sort out mum’s place when it got flooded by a leak from her loft whilst I was away in Japan, showed me a recent article in the Sunday Times magazine by AA Gill, on the desolation of old age.

Its strap line reads, “Most people in this country die weepingly lonely, left in no doubt that they have overstayed their welcome. This is the greatest shame and horror of our age.”

“Old is not a number, it’s not a date. It’s simply the absence of youth, the absence of attraction, interest, new friends, society. The absence of conviviality, warmth, choice, or surprise, or life.”

“The old aren’t the problem. It’s the rest of us. It’s you and I that have the problem. It’s our collective refusal to look at the old, to be in a room with them, to ask them into our lives. The great terror of our age is age. We would rather consign the old to a netherworld, a waiting room where they are out of mind and out of sight. The old are the zombies at the end of our own home horror movies.

“[The old] live on every street, in every block of flats, above every parade of shops, in every dripping-laurel cul-de-sac, up communal stairs and down muddy lanes. The old sit in mushroom chairs, never further than two feet from a radiator, a phone and the TV. They don’t go out much because out is frightening, panicky, hostile for the old. Outside is a country they don’t belong to any more. Where they’re no longer included.

“You will see none after dark. The old live like Transylvanians, terrified of the young, the swift and supple, loud and late, irritable young. Even when they do venture out among us we don’t look at them, we don’t see them; they cling to the wall, curl up like dead leaves in bus shelters, press themselves into corners.

“The old are slow and cold, brittle and cancerous, breathless, toothless, sexless, forgetful. They’re victims of bugs, of councillors and chancellors, or welfare and weather. They’re also the victims of grief and pity and comedians. To be old is to be stalked by taxes and frost, flights of stairs, and finally God. To be old is to vanish behind the sum of incurable, piteous conditions.

"For many, the final furlong of life is spent immobile in a chair, in a bright room that’s euphemistically called a “home”.

"All life ends in failure. However much you’ve laid aside for the package tour of an afterlife, it ends in failure: heart failure, failing eyes and limbs, the failure of bladders and balance, the failure of memory and hope.

"But it should also be a long moment of success - the pleasure of a race well run, the pride in a family born, nurtured and fledged, a valedictory break on the bench to remember times transcended and misfortunes overcome or stoically subdued.

"We are one of the very few cultures in all the world, down all the ages, that don’t treat age as an achievement in and of itself.

"Ageing is so frightening in part because we treat the old so badly, and we treat them badly because we’re frightened of them. We ignore them and consign them to horrible solitude because we can’t face the truth that someday someone will banish us. Most people in this country die weepingly lonely . . . ”

“We never listen to them; we’re deaf to the old. We assume they have nothing to tell us, nothing but loopy non-sequiturs and circular complaints. Even when the news is about them, nobody asks an old person what they think.

“You know, you really should spend an hour listening to someone who’s lived twice as long as you, not as social philanthropy or goodness, but for your own sake, for the sake of your self-worth, to calm your speechless fears about ageing, and because you’ll hear something funny and clever, touching and probably astonishing.

“Most old people are more interesting than most young people, simply because they’re older. Experience may not bring wisdom, but it does make for some cracking stories. Every old person you ignore has lived through times and done things, seen stuff that you never will, and its worth hearing about.

“We should, at the very least, ensure that nobody, none of our kin, compatriots, kith or countrymen, ever sits alone wishing for their own death because they know of nobody who wishes them to live. We will abate our own fears of ageing by ensuring that someone else isn’t fearful and lonely. You get back what you give.”

Tell that to Chris Woodhead, who I truly hope isn’t a sad and lonely old bastard, even if he can’t go mountain climbing any more.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article5980973.ece
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