Homecoming

Here's something that struck me as an interesting take on being part of your community. My friend Jeanne is doing a PhD at the moment, and has been spending months away in Kyrgysztan. She recently came back, and described coming back as a kind of culture shock. The big thing, she said, seemed to be not having an opinion on things. Things like Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister happened in her absence. It's not something that's difficult to get your head round as such - indeed, when she went away it would have certainly been in the pipeline.

So it's not a question of knowledge, or even understanding. The thing that seemed to act as a measure of engagement with community for her was how able you feel to take a view on what's happening.

Thinking about that leads a few interesting places.

Graduation

I recall the first time I went through the process of applying for university. I was mildly shocked to discover they wanted me to say what degree I wanted to apply for. "Can't I just choose where I want to go, and decide what to do when I get there?" No, it seemed, I couldn't. I followed the advice of the careers teacher (and the instructions of my Grandpa) and chose electronic engineering. At which I turned out to be a spectacular failure, averaging something like 28% in my 1st year exams. There, er, wasn't a second year...

One thing I seem to have kept hearing in recent months is that a great many kids these days have only one ambition - to be famous. Not famous for being a popstar, or an inventor, or a writer, or a footballer - just "famous". It's easy to slip into decrying the inexorable slide into the lowest-common-denominational mire and rampant social disconnection. However, it occurs to me that there's something else to be noticed here, and it's this: even planting a kid in front of the TV for hour after hour doesn't defeat their spirit. They still have that urge to progress - to graduate into something beyond their childhood experience.

They might not be reaching much further than the end of their nose. That's what my teachers and my Grandpa did - I was good at maths and sciences, so engineering of some sort was the obvious choice. That didn't work out, just as not everyone's shot at fame will work out. But even if things do happen which restrict, misdirect or even stall it, forward movement is our natural state.

That's really cool, because it means the battle isn't really about finding the wherewithal to make progress, it's about finding where you want to aim at. It might involve looking beyond where you're used to looking - or even within where you're used to looking - and that could be the hard part. But the point is that when you find it, you can ride your natural forward impulse.

(I eventually did find the degree for me - history. A subject I gave up at school when I was 13. It fitted me like a glove, and I had a fabulous time doing it.)

Explanation, explanation, explanation

Relaxing in a cafe in Edinburgh today, I noticed the Times "Body and Soul" section and decided to take a look. I was a bit disappointed, I have to say. There seemed to be a big preponderance of seeking explanations. The thing is, explanations are all very interesting, but in terms of personal growth, they're not much help.

Take the whole women-like-pink-and-men-like-blue thing. I gathered from an article in the aforementioned supplement that there's just been a study published that puts forward a theory, based on evolutionary psychology, which explains this. Prehistoric women, it seems, evolved to be drawn towards the pinkish tones of things they foraged for, while men were drawn towards stuff like blue skies.

Leaving aside any discussion of how abjectly absurd and contrived this might sound in itself, let's suppose it's true. So bloody what? How in the name of anything does this knowledge help anything?

Showing off!

A marvellously Scottish fauxtation, I think, for us today. It comes from my friend Lesley McDonald:

"You can get away with murder, but you can't get away with showing off."

Lovely. For me that's an excellent reminder that it's not so much the big, dramatic, yet less frequent things that impact our daily lives. The smaller, everyday things do too. The ways we behave towards others, for example. They can be insidious since their familiarity makes them easy to overlook. But they always come back to bite you in the bum.

Being fastidious and thorough is a very Scottish trait. The devil's in the detail, and Scots do detail very well. That's probably had something to do with the great engineers, economists, imperial administrators and so on that came out of Scotland in the past.

Such a culture is not as ready as certain others to accept boundaries being constantly expanded for the sake of nothing but boundary expansion. Purpose is required. Scotland's certainly got its problems - we consume too much in the way of drink and sweeties. But fundamentally it's a very principled country. It was the Moderator of the Church of Scotland who responded to Margaret Thatcher's remark that "There's no such thing as society," by saying "You see, Prime Minister, for us there's nothing BUT society."

The little things matter. They're here with us every day. So you need to keep an eye on them if you want to keep a handle on your principles.

Apologi-comics

It's the Edinburgh Festival, and a couple of days ago we went to see some free comedy. It was mainly a couple of American comedians, each with his own act but joining forces to put on this mini-show. So we had a taster of each of their acts. While they were both very different, and from different backgrounds and places, they had something in common - they were very apologetic about their President.

It seemed to me that there was something familiar about this. Then I got it. It's like when we had Margaret Thatcher at the helm. Suddenly comedy wasn't all about clumsy racism/sexism/genderism and smutty double entendres any more. Comedians sought to give voice to frustrations that weren't about discrimination against some generic group of people, but about the specific acts and decisions of specific individuals.

It might be said that Ben Elton, wearing his trademark sparkly suit and in mid "Little bit of politics, little bit of politics" rant, was hardly apologetic. There was perhaps something a little desperate in these two American comics. But then, I can remember how it felt in Scotland in the Thatcher years - totally disenfranchised. As a country we felt completely politically irrelevant to those who governed us.

So, in the wake of George Bush's speech in which he cites America's Vietnam War experience as an argument in FAVOUR of keeping US forces in Iraq, I can sympathise with these two comedians from across the water.

Lice and selfishness

On the way to school today, Fred said to me "You know Dad, there's advantages of being bald." (So delightfully straightforward).
"Yes, I suppose you're right," says I. "What ones can you think of?"
"Well, you don't get head lice." So we talked about head lice for a bit. The subject of how they lay eggs in your hair came up.
"That's very selfish of them," says Fred.
"Well, they're just doing what comes naturally," I replied

Selfishness is something I think about quite a bit. It's something that often has a lot of guilt attached to it, but is it actually a constructive way of looking at things? I always come back to the example of aeroplane safety drills, where they tell you to put on your own oxygen mask before trying to help others. If you don't, you're just another body thrashing around for breath. You're part of the problem until you've looked after yourself.

So what head lice reminded me of this morning is that we need to care for ourselves - and it's 100% natural. You could even see them as nature's reminder to wash your hair on a regular basis. (Had to get that in for Fred's benefit, just in case he looks in. Plainly not for mine.)

Choc-opoeia

I've just noticed that chocolate is an onomatopoeia.

Imagine. You're standing next to a vat, on a level with its top. It's maybe ten feet by ten feet, and nine or ten feet deep. It's full of warm, molten chocolate. This is all very Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I know, but try to take out all the Roald Dahl-ian junior gothic horror elements and under-currents. It's lovely and quiet and peaceful next to the vat. Then, oh-so-calmly, you slowly dive gently into the vat. What sound do you make as you break the surface and glide in until you're fully immersed? "Choc-o-late." Then, after a moment, you surface, and everything's quiet and all's right with the world. Mmmmmmmm.

Now, go forth and have a lovely day.

Getting down about the kids

Bonnie Greer on Any Questions on Radio 4 today moved me very much when she spoke about youth crime. She spoke of schemes in her native Chicago, which focus on the fact that the great majority of gang members aren't what we might call villains. They harness the skills and energy those young people have, redirecting them into positive outlets. I was wondering why we don't do this already, when almost psychically she hit the nail on the head: "We hate our young people," she said. We - that's to say adults - fear them, mistrust them, and expect the worst from them. Berating young people is a national pastime. And we wonder that they feel excluded and misunderstood?

But hang on. Obviously not all kids are gang members or hoodies, so perhaps we might say it's hoodies specifically that we hate. They're the ones that cause the trouble after all. As a society, surely we're much nicer to better behaved kids? The higher achievers? The ones that don't bunk off school to go shoplifting from the age of 11?

Well, I'm not so sure. I noticed too that on the same program, there was the A-level results issue. Every year results get better; every year the cry goes up that A-levels are too easy, standards are slipping etc etc. That's not exactly expecting the best from those kids either, is it?

Getting down with the kids

I watched a reality TV program last night which made me sit up and say "Why haven't I been watching this whole series?" Its catchy title is Sex With Mum And Dad, and in it, adolescents and their families meet with a sexologist. The object is to try to open up channels of communication, not necessarily just about sex. It was fascinating stuff, I needn't tell you. One of the two girls who featured in last night's program wasn't allowed a bedroom door.

Through most of the program I got the feeling that neither of the families featured were making any progress at all. They did a couple of the tasks they were set as homework, for example putting condoms on bananas en famille. But when it got to things like asking questions like "Are orgasms important?" in a multi-generational situation, nobody was up for it.

Imagine my surprise when, in their final meetings with the sexologist, the members of each family all agreed they felt much more open and relaxed with each other. Better yet, the dad of the girl with no door installed one at the end of the show as an unexpectedly heart-warming surprise. This, after she had finally admitted she wasn't a virgin. She'd been petrified her dad would really hit the roof about that one, and frankly so had I, from what I'd seen of him and their relationship.

So it's amazing what a bit of sharing and engaging can do. The parents didn't suddenly start positively encouraging their kids to attend orgies, or buying them sex toys for Christmas. But they did get a lot closer in more general ways, which is possibly more useful on a day-to-day basis.

The thing perhaps was that the agenda was set by the kids; and both they and their parents discovered that despite what they'd believed, they had concerns in common. Some, at least; and where they didn't wholly agree, they found they could talk and the sky would stay up.

All in all, rather like when I got off my high horse about video games and played a few rounds of Wii baseball. Well, a bit.

On trying. Or perhaps, On doing.

Here's a great fauxtation from Sheila Stewart:

"Do what you can, and then stop."

As she would say, I like that. It has that so-simple-it's-obvious quality, yet also has such serenity and peace. It somehow really grants you permission just to be who you are. To express your personal greatness, rather than struggle for perfection.

I think I'll stop now. Yes.

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

In response to a query from one of our regular viewers - yes, I've done it. I've joined in with Fred on the Wii. I'm working up to the wands and other Harry Potter stuff, so we stuck to your basic classic games - bowling and baseball. (Golf just wasn't going to happen, let's be clear about that. But that's nothing to do with the Wii.) How was it? Absolutely brilliant! Under instruction from Fred I learned that actually you go through motions which are remarkably similar to the real thing. No running, sure, but quite an upper-body workout, by my standards at least. I certainly worked up a sweat.

It's another sort of new swords, I guess.

New Swords!

It's fauxtation time again!

"Guitars are the new swords."

So speaks Jenni Brooks, writer, poet and chum. And I think she makes a lot of sense. You can do a lot of the things guys used to do with swords with a guitar instead. Swagger, impress women, attract attention, hide your inadequacies, make a reputation, ruin or make a party. You can make films and write books about the people who wield them and their exploits. And the hardware can be iconic objects of great beauty made with extreme love and expertise, symbols defining the time and culture in which they originate.

One might spend many a happy hour speculating which sword equates with what guitar. If the Fender Stratocaster is the guitar equivalent of the Samurai's sword, for example, does the Highland Claymore correspond to the Les Paul? Perhaps the ukelele could be said to parallel the skein dhu that every self-respecting Scot sticks into the socks he wears with his kilt.

Of course, she might have been talking about phallic symbols. I wouldn't know.

Kids/life balance

We've got a very schizophrenic attitude to parenthood and work. All parents are supposed to be at work, even if they're single parents. Work has many faces. It's the great emancipator, liberating the poor from poverty and women from male oppression. It's a status symbol (a friend of mine recently told me of how certain people faintly sneer when she tells them she's a housewife, and thus lacks this badge).

Work can also be a source of great satisfaction and an income, so let's not diss it completely. We do all have to eat, and our kids need to be kept in video games. But as a culture, we do have an attitude problem here. Work-life balance is a big issue these days, and the more I coach people around this area the more it seems to me that it's the parenting/work dilemma that's usually at the heart of it. There's a whole spectrum of ways in which that occurs - you don't even need to have kids for it to have an impact on you.

We've built a world that's constructed around work, and we've reached a point where we're not sure where kids and parenting fit into it. For some people it's a simple question of finding themselves in a straight choice between attending vital meeting and picking up a suddenly-vomiting child from school. For others it's despair at how to juggle conflicting expectations and pressures on themselves as a parent - these come from partners, TV, their kids, their family, other kids, horrible fast-food chains, wherever.

It's a mistake to moan about our world though - it's just there. Better to find productive ways of dealing with it. My suggestion is that a good start would be to get a clear idea of what work means to us, and what raising children means to us. All of us.

If Chandler was from Aberystwyth...

That's Raymond Chandler, creator of Marlowe the archetypal wise-cracking private detective, not Chandler the archetypal slightly gay flat-mate. Just to get that clear from the outset. If he was from the aforementioned Welsh seaside town he might have come up instead with Louie Knight, noir comic spy creation of Malcolm Pryce, author of the book I'm reading at the moment - Last Tango In Aberystwyth. (This is the second book in the series - Aberystwyth Mon Amour precedes it, and the third is The Unbearable Lightness Of Being In Aberystwyth. I've just discovered that there is now a fourth - Don't Cry For Me Aberystwyth. Had to happen). Here's a pretty decent official website where you can learn more, and there's an entry here in Wikipedia.

If you haven't yet, I urge you to make a bee-line for the nearest copy of one of these books. The idea of transposing Marlowe to a surreal version of Aberystwyth, a world of ice-cream cones, druids and "girls who come to make it big in the 'What The Butler Saw' industry" could so easily be a terrible failure. But this is a triumph. Louie Knight has Marlowe's deadpan-ness, but more. He clearly wants on some subliminal level to be detecting in the stomping ground of Marlowe himself, the world of the real gumshoe; yet equally plainly, he is fiercely rooted in Aberystwyth. The writing is immaculate - where else could you come across lines such as "This was also the time when the Chief of Police had to confiscate a lot of large-print pornography" and "When you work as a private eye in Aberystwyth you learn not to worry too much where your hunches come from"?

What are you waiting for? Go read!

Crime and individuality II: The Kids Aren't Alright

That Radio 4 program on crime was on again today, this time focussing on the 90s. It certainly has my attention, I think primarily as a parent. Michael Howard, interviewed on this program, related that when he became Home Secretary some civil servants came along and explained to him that crime had been going up at a steady rate of 5% per year for decades "and there's nothing you can do about it." The only question for politicians becomes how do you clear up the mess - punishment vs. rehabilitation. Either way, the figures keep soaring. We now apparently lock up about four times as many of our young people as the French do.

It's just this sort of thing, that feels at once so potentially damaging to your child and so completely out of your control, that strikes at the heart of parental paranoia. I get to thinking about the African proverb - it takes two people to have a child and a community to raise one. I fret about how we don't have community any more in this country. I worry about the full extent of most kids' ambition these days being to be famous - not even for something specific apparently, just being famous.

Such resignation! It's ridiculous, because I'm also one of those who believes that parents have a lot to do with raising kids. Specifically, I think we're a little too ready to offload responsibility for that onto schools. Interesting, isn't it? Schools get us used to the idea of leading an ordered life and being productive in a structured way. Then we end up relying on them to care for and raise our kids while we go to work. But we don't need to be swallowed up by that. Parenting is a constant, multi-dimensional balancing act. Balance needs control, and that requires taking responsibility.

It's tempting to pass the buck to the community in the shape of schools. However, the most important members of the community that raises a child are his or her parents.

Scottish? Moi?

My chum Charlie sent me this tool for discerning how Scottish your name is. Hmm. Despite it being a little gizmo on a marketing company's website, and despite that site being positively plastered with my least favourite word, "solutions", I gave it a go. 100 being average, I score 14, apparently. Given that I profess to being a proud ex-patriate son of the Godly Republic of Yorkshire, why do I feel just a teeny bit non-plussed by this? I thought mine was a nature completely unsoiled by competitiveness. I guess I was wrong.

Still, I can console myself with the fact that Fred only gets a 9, even though he was actually born here.

Beautiful...

According to the words of the Carole King song, "You're beautiful as you feel." Here's proof, as witnessed by the camera of Carol Faculjak (whose mostly non-gardening-related blog is Charming Gardener) when I was a little hungover on Kat's birthday. I do believe I look like Homer Simpson here.

Solitaire: The only game in town?

My mobile phone has a solitaire game on it. Fatal. Fatal for conversation, that is. It's bad enough having it on your computer - any moment you get stuck with something, there's a nice handy game right there for some instant distraction from your work. But having it on a phone, well, that's asking for total social breakdown. Phones are with you everywhere. Even where a laptop is unlikely to go.

I've recently become way over-keen on taking every opportunity to zoom in on the two-inch screen and flick virtual cards pointlessly about. I'm also starting to notice that it's one of the ways I avoid conversation, and that I'm constantly banging on at Fred not to get sucked into his exactly equivalent video games. It is, you might say, becoming rather an issue.

I don't think these things should be banned, or even avoided. What's going to be far more constructive is to take a look. What do I get out of it? What keeps me coming back to this alluring yet totally unsatisfying puzzle? One thing I do see is that it has the feel of the bus queue about it - it's something to do to fill in time while the bus is coming. What about when I'm not waiting for a bus though?

What, in other words, am I waiting for? And do I really want to wait in solitary mode?

Zeitgeist! That's a big word!

Well, it seems to be a word I'm hearing a lot these days anyway. In particular, in connection with media people. As a blogger, I have to wonder - does that include me? Media people that I've heard seem to like hosting a debate as to whether or not they themselves create and propagate the spirit of the age, some notional communal world view. So by doing this blog, am I bending - or perhaps simultaneously bending and reflecting - reality? That would be cool!

Out of the mouths of babes...

One of our local schools, Leith Academy, has a very good website, including this page of fabulous wisdom. It's a selection of tips from existing pupils to prospective ones. I particularly like:

"Be yourself, dont do what other people say just to fit in."

"Don't be scared, and if you are speak to somebody"

"Try as hard as you can toget on with teachers no matter how boring they may be!!!"

"Work hard and be yoursef, Never let other people get you down!! As you grow, people will care less about your clothes and the way you look and lots lots more about you."

Something there for all of us, I feel.

A jumped up country boy who never knew his place...

That's me - I grew up in the country, and have lived almost all my adult life in the city, feeling faintly lost. I never really spotted that until a few days ago. I've certainly been aware of my various complaints about people here: they don't have time for each other, they look alarmed when I say "Hello!" as I cycle cheerily past, you don't get everyone all congregating in the same pub. (Actually there was one time when I greeted someone as I was cycling along the canal and he was so startled he almost fell in.) But so far I've just seen that as everyone else's shortcomings.

What I've just realised is that I've actually resented all my fellow city dwellers for not being identical to the inhabitants of the village I grew up in. It seems very silly, but then that's how it is with those things that sit in the background of our lives. Of course, now that I'm plucking up the courage actually to speak to the people in my neighborhood, it turns out they're very willing to chat. Not so different after all then.

Another thing that on reflection seems pretty daft is that I'm surprised.