Basket cases?

I've got a headache after a long day. It meant bunking off the meetings/courses at the end of ordinary school today. I must make up some message or something if any boss should call me in. "Bunking off" reminds me of my own school times and all this ties in to the links I have added to this blog. I was at St. Marylebone Grammar School for about seven years. It was a good school in many ways, opening up perspectives and providing a certain amount of knowledge, but was also a miserable place to be at times. All the growing pains of being a teenager were not made any easier while I was there and I still think back with shock at some of the tricks some teachers pulled. Things like that would never be countenanced today, of course, because times change. But even then, I remember feeling hurt by Colin Bosely hanging Nigel Hart up on the wall bars by his feet and castigating him for having a yellow stripe down his back because he was afraid of doing a handstand in the gym. Horwood's French teaching, continued by McNeal, convinced me at the time that I was not made out to speak a foreign language. I have laid that one to rest anyway, and the way Dr. Rose forced Bob Donald to strip when he couldn't answer questions in history was a classic case of a teacher breaking a boy's spirit by using the ridicule of the rest of the class as a weapon. A cowardly way to behave. On the other hand, George Hartshorne's geography lessons were inspiring to me, even though he wouldn't admit it himself. He is the teacher who gave me my first interest in the sea after taking me down to the Millwall Docks for an onboard visit aboard Clan Matheson. Aggie Greenwood frightened me in the first year, but I grew to like and respect him. Going down to his home in Kent with Nigel Lyons and Rick Bull to do up his garden and and enjoy dinner with his wife and daughter (I wish I could remember her name) were really fun times. Such a pity he died so early.
The pictures here bring back fond and not so fond memories. They remind me of what life might be like for the kids I happen to be responsible for today, and how much our behaviour, in the detail things, can mean so much to them later on. It is a little bit awe-inspiring to wield such a constructive or destructive weapon and I can only hope that being conscious of it makes me a teacher most children will look back on with kind memories when my time is done. The ultimate accolade I suppose, a cliche, but worth more than the money or the supposed status.

Enough maudlin' talk! The current poor weather with winds from the south west seems to have brought the first migratory birds back this part of Southern Norway. The lone blackbird singing in the dark of pre-dawn has been joined by more. I have also heard yellowhammers, song thrushes and other singers I can't place. No robins yet though. They are my favourite, a minor key, often at night, and alone. A very special sound in the Scandinavian woods. And this all presages spring which we are looking forward to keenly round here!

I have been following the vote counting in the current Zimbabwe elections with interest. It looks as though Robert Mugabe is finally going to get the push but I will be surprised if he goes without a struggle. He has managed to bankrupt his country, a country known for its natural resources and productive agriculture for so many years, but turned into a famine and poverty stricken place by a man with an -ism mentality. The usual thing again, a megalomaniac basing his ideas on political theory and not on human beings. We've seen it so many times before. It need not be repeated here. But one thing I fail to register in the news today is the way in which he gained power back in the early eighties, I think it must have been. After Smithy was forced to go, there were four names who were candidates to run the country. Does anyone remember Joshua Nkomo, Ndabaningi Sithole (this is spelt right), or the Rev, Abel Muzorewa? And Moscow University, East Germany inspired Mugabe of course. The other three are all dead. Let us hope the future will be peaceful for the people of this African bread-basket. It all looks very doubtful at present. More like a basket case, as the opposition rather aptly put it.