A touching tribute paid to me by Younger Son over Jubilee burgers last night.
“I remember when we used to have a thermostat when we were kids. Dad would come home from work and I’d say, “Hi Dad, have you had a good day…?
“He’d march straight past me, glare at the thermostat, turn it down two notches, then turn back to me and say, “Yes, fine thanks, sweetheart. How was your day?”
Priorities. A life-lesson that has clearly stuck.
He’s about six years old and as long as the hotel DJ is belting out the music, this kid is going to dance to it.
Sometimes he’s sharing the floor with several of his peers, whose idea of ‘dancing’ is running round in circles; other times, the floor is his alone. But he presses on regardless.
He jerks his arms; he gyrates like a malfunctioning robot; he drops to the floor and revolves on his back and bottom like he invented such moves. He pursues the music’s tempo with the resolve of a stampeding horse without ever getting within a mile of it.
He is me in 1968 but with one key difference. While neither of us could dance to save ourselves, he is at least prepared to die trying.
“They’ll all dance, except him.” Sharon Spence, my school friend David’s sister, didn’t know I was just outside the door when she grumbled to her mother about me: the eight-year-old mood-hoover at her impromptu garden party. It would be 20 years before I could see a disco as anything other than humiliation’s vestibule.
So I make no apologies for being in awe of this six-year-old, his final flourish as his mum says it’s time to go a flamboyant snapping gesture with his hands reminiscent of a rapper. He has all the moves; just no idea of the order in which they belong.
He’s destined to be either brilliant at something or else one of life’s hapless punchbags but at least there will have always been a time when he could dance like no-one was watching. I pray that abandon doesn’t die with puberty.
Sharon Spence would have loved him.
“It’d be nice to come here in term-time, when there are no kids…”
The words are my wife’s, as we start putting our holiday’s ‘all-inclusive’ status to work at the poolside bar. Yet I inwardly tense up, just as I do when I hear similar sentiments from strangers.
It always takes me back to my own childhood and the numerous adults who cut me slack in response to my countless excesses. Were I reunited with all of them, I’d squirm with embarrassment, even now. And I doubt my nostalgic guilt would be unique.
Yet when the decades pass and it’s our turn to be the ones with the forbearing smile and bottomless patience, as another infantile scream goes through us like a buzzsaw, some find the quid pro quo objectionable. They were humoured, yet they refuse to humour; to the point of spending an extra five hundred on a no-kids hotel.
I used to find something arrogant about that. Watching some of the nippers and their notional custodians at our hotel these last 24 hours, though, a thought has occurred to me.
However much of a pain my peer group might have been, fifty years ago, there was always an adult on hand, ready to step in quickly, apologise on our behalf and leave us in no doubt that we had crossed a line that must never be crossed again.
Maybe that is the crux of it, when some of today’s adults — their own children grown up — make it their life’s mission to swerve everyone else’s.
Their stance is not so much against boys being boys, as against men and women who refuse to be proper parents.
Photo by freestocks.org on Pexels.com
The Good
A lunchtime walk through quiet dormitory suburbs. A young boy and his grandmother walk towards me. He can’t be more than two or three and she is doing what grandparents do, describing in excited tones what their afternoon together holds as long as he promises to be very good.
I might have spotted them in a crowd, without seeing them, but vividly alone against a background of hedges and brickwork, they drag me back almost 60 years, to when I too felt like the centre of everyone’s world; protected and nurtured, my potential a source of endless joy to those around me.
This sudden recall is so powerful that I look over my shoulder after we’ve passed, not once but twice.
The Bad
Home on the bus for the weekend. Two twentysomething glorified alley cats park themselves in front of me, denizens of the call centres that seem to abound around my own workplace.
It transpires one of them has been taking team-building exercises much further than his HR department might wish, with a female colleague who’s not his full-time partner. They had apparently wasted little time on formal introductions.
This strikes a chord with his smirking friend, who’s happy to divulge his own track record in this area – the deceit, the discovery, the eventual reconciliation with his aggrieved girlfriend and how they “both laugh about it now”.
In a post-shame world, all of this gets aired at normal conversational volume, regardless of the fellow passengers who surround them, as if they were discussing going off-road in a hire car, in breach of the rental agreement.
“Feel any remorse?” one of them asks, and the ensuing chucklefest confirms my suspicion that the question was rhetorical.
When this really gets interesting, is when we disembark in town, and go our respective ways. For convention says this is the point at which a lament for lost youth should kick in, and I should glumly reflect on how tame my weekend will be compared to theirs.
Instead, and to my surprise, I feel a certain elation. I am at least going somewhere where the air may well be fresher and cleaner than wherever it is they’re off to.
In many ways, I’m delighted he’s taken after his mother.
No dorky wardrobe like I had at that age. No functional bachelor pad décor, reminiscent of 1956.
No in one ear and out the other when the conversation turns to soft furnishings and interior design.
He knows exactly what he wants in matters domestic; right down to a duvet cover in something blue and white, to go with the “coastal theme” he’s working on for his bedroom.
His birthday gifts, spread on the floor of his flat in front of us all, revolve around cookery utensils and kitchenware. In his position, I’d have been looking to kill someone with that Japanese-style carving knife. He’s in seventh heaven.
In what seems less like thoughtfulness and more like a reaguard action, I bought him this. He loved his holiday in Spain last winter; really bought into the Spanish lifestyle and he still likes his football.
But I still feel like the man who brought burger and chips to a gourmet supper party.
A middle-aged diabetic with excitable blood pressure, experts would probably say I did the right thing, but it doesn’t feel like it.
“Hey, can I have your baseball cap?”
“Yeah, and that bag with your laptop in it….”
They were rhetorical questions, although more mischievous than purposeful.
On my way home from work, walking through the park in broad daylight, I’m conscious of three teenagers to my left; two average height; one a pint-size redhead. I should have been more than just conscious, but I’ve gone into default mode for the law-abiding.
Ignore them. No eye contact. Keep walking.
And I don’t care what the experts might say. I hate myself for it. Not because I’m ruing all the juicy, valid threats that I could have made in response, because there aren’t any. My last fight was in 1975. I lost.
No, I rue the fact that I have just fed the popular belief among today’s goons that they can shout and no-one will shout back. I have aligned myself with another man in glasses.
One thing feeding thuggishness among young people, someone recently suggested, is precisely the fact that no-one older and wiser bothers engaging with them, and while I’m not so soft as to regard this as excusing them, it does offer food for thought.
Even if the trio had been for real, and a brief, one-sided struggle had seen me wave goodbye to my hat and my bag (my laptop, thankfully, was 20 miles away) I could have landed a few blows of my own. Asked between shoves where their self-respect was. If this was how they proposed to pee their lives up against a wall. If this was their idea of being men.
Yes, that’s right. Just words. In one ear and out the other, probably. Or maybe not. Maybe one verbal blow might have landed, triggering just enough self-loathing in its target to set him on the long road to sorting himself out.
The fact is, words were all I had, yet even in a situation more code orange than red, I chose to not to use them, and so fed the pervading belief among Society’s wrong ‘uns that they rule in a vacuum, in which they shout the odds and no-one shouts back.
Two weeks ago, it was a brick through their front window.
Tonight, it’s someone smashing the side-windows of their car.
There are several candidates as to the source of the grievance, but it’s not the time for us to press the point.
While he’s gone off in a futile bid to catch the culprit and introduce him to rough justice, I’m struck by her resigned calm as she shivers on the doorstep. This grievance has rumbled for a while; their shouts, audible through the wall, suggesting a family under pressure, and its ability to frighten her seems to have diminished through repetition.
More angry now, she detachedly takes us through the drill, as if discussing the cost of food at Tesco.
“He’ll have got someone to do it for him,” she explains, staring at the car. “It’s twenty quid to get someone to smash a window for you. Fifty if you want a kid beaten up…”
This shopping list dismays me almost as much as the sound of breaking glass. I don’t live in Sicily, or New York. I live in an English country town, yet even there the value of life is now apparently so cheap, all it takes to have a price on your head, is to be a child who’s narked someone.
Dear ……….,
I was delighted to learn of your successful GCSE results and I wanted to congratulate you and wish you all the best as you enter Sixth Form and the next phase of your education.
At the same time, though, I wanted to offer you some advice, because some of the things your mother told me about the way schools work these days and the pressure they place on young people, concerned me greatly.
Some pressure is always good, of course. It drives us on to succeed and so brings out the best in us. Too much pressure, however, is no good at all, and I found it very depressing to hear that no sooner have schools stopped pressuring their students over GCSEs than they start pressuring you over A-levels and university places.
It is important that we take time to stop briefly and savour our achievements in life, and the school summer holiday used to be the perfect opportunity for that. You would, hopefully, do well at your end-of-year exams and then have a clear six-week break in which to enjoy that achievement and rest, ahead of the next year’s challenges.
I understand from [my son] that things are different now. He tells me that in every summer holiday during his time at secondary school, he had homework to do in readiness for the following year. You will have heard of the expression ‘the rat race’ – it used to be something only adults had to worry about, but it seems that children are now expected to join in as well.
I sincerely hope it doesn’t come to this for you these next two years, but if it does, I want to offer a little advice to help keep your head above water.
Schools lie to us, I’m afraid. They mean well, but they do lie.
They will try and tell you that the next two years will shape your entire life, for example. This is not true – they may be influential but in the end, your destiny lies in your own hands. Read biographies of successful men and women and you may be amazed at how many of them left school with nothing, yet went on to do great things. You are already ahead of them.
Schools talk about guiding you into ‘good jobs’, but beware. Those ‘good jobs’ might come with fancy cars and big houses but they also often come with stress, 16-hour days and misery. Don’t drift into one of those ‘good jobs’ like I did; make it your mission these next two years to identify what you’re good at and what you’re interested in and see if you can spot a career where those two things meet. Like me, you may be in your thirties before you get there but the sooner you start figuring out where ‘there’ is, the better. And whatever your careers teacher might tell you, there are only two definitions of a good job – it pays your bills and you look forward to going to work in the morning. You find a job like that and it doesn’t matter what car you drive; you’re still one-up on 95 per cent of the British workforce.
Oh, and the idea that you must go to university to amount to anything – this may be their biggest lie yet. It’s an option, not a ‘must’.
Schools also act like the pressure they put you under is all for your benefit. This is only partly true. The better you do, the better they look and the safer their jobs are. That’s not to say you shouldn’t respect them but don’t buy into all their hype. Remember, you will shape your destiny; they will play only a small part in that.
None of this means you should just amble through the next two years, of course. Education remains a wonderful opportunity and it is one you should take with both hands. It isn’t failure that makes old people bitter; it’s the chances that they never took; opportunities that are gone forever. You don’t want to be that person when you’re old and grey, so work hard now. But work reasonably hard: preserve your leisure time and your health, for both are equally valid elements of a good life.
For all the talk of projected grades these next two years, I believe you have just one objective between now and the summer of 2019 – that you walk out of your final A-level examination knowing that you have given it and those before it your very best shot. If you can honestly say that, then you will cope with whatever the results may be.
In some respects, a good school does its job long before its students sit GCSEs or A-levels. It fires their imaginations, gets them engaged with the world around them and makes them unafraid of hard work. If you take those qualities into the outside world and keep hammering at Life’s door then it won’t really matter how many certificates you have in your pocket. Somewhere, that door will open.
With my love and very best wishes,
Nice piece by Toby Young in CapX – Free schools are working – just look at their GCSE results – but I was irked by the un-challenged assertion that channelling every pupil into university should be a de rigeur objective of schools everywhere.
No. Their objective should be switched-on youngsters, engaged with the world, its problems and opportunities alike, and fully accepting that nothing it offers will come to them by right, but must be worked for. Making them excited about the next phase of their lives once the blazer’s retired, that should be a teacher’s primary goal, for life’s doors rarely remain closed to someone who’s committed to hammering at them until they open.
Once you’ve got them pumped up for life’s journey, however, you do them a grave disservice if you imbue them with the notion that it follows only one road. Some people just don’t want more academia by the time they are 16 or 18: they want to be out in the world getting their hands dirty, not mulling over abstract concepts in a seminar room.
By all means, let them know that university can be theirs if they want it (money permitting, but that’s a whole new debate) and show them what it could mean for them, but don’t fall into the polarised mindset that university is the summit, with every other route into the workforce falling short of it. I have a son who sensed a certain detachment from his teachers once it became apparent that he wasn’t Oxbridge material. It could have been someone else’s son, though, and I doubt this deplorable attitude would have dismayed me any the less.
Letters after your name are just one strain of success, to be celebrated no more loudly than the kid who walked away at 16 and is now driving his/her own Merc at 22, while employing 30 people, or who makes furniture or works of art for whom customers routinely pay four figures.
If this distorted university-for-all mindset really has taken root in our schools, I would suggest that educators who are paid to broaden minds might like to take a look at their own.
[Pic courtesy of School of Media and Public Affairs at GWU]
Pic courtesy of Harlow Heslop
Countless women descended upon Washington DC last weekend, determined to prove that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned by the electoral college system. They’re not backwards in coming forward, women nowadays, be it the marchers, the breast-barers, or the actors with a cause.
I just wish they’d mobilise with equal fervour when it really matters. When a 14-year-old Canadian schoolgirl is sexually assaulted, for example, only to have it put to her afterwards that she needs to cut her assailant some slack.
This latest tale of bleeding-heart madness is said to have begun at what should have been a happy occasion: a high school dance at Fredericton High School, New Brunswick.
“Speaking on condition of anonymity, the girl’s mother said two Syrian students attempted to grind with her daughter at the dance, before one of them began groping her breasts and forced his hand inside her underwear, touching her vagina.” – from The Daily Caller
If the poor girl thought the worst of her ordeal was behind her once her attacker backed off, she could have been forgiven for wondering who was the villain here, once the school’s victim support kicked in.
“…vice-principal, Elaine Kilfillen, worried that the alleged attacker “will become a target in our student population once the rumor mill gets going.” The girl’s mother claimed that school officials encouraged her daughter to understand the alleged attacker’s perspective and consider the effect her clothing may have had.” – ibid. [point of order here – if she’s allowed to remain on school premises in unsuitable clothing, Fredericton High; that one’s on you]
The culprit, who denied the accusation, was suspended for one week. His victim, whose own ‘sentence’ will probably last rather longer, should the allegation be true, is in therapy.
This account comes from just one or two secondary news sources (disturbingly, a possible reason for this is suggested at the foot of this post) so a cautionary note must be sounded. Should the story be solid, however, then it would be the latest recurrence of a familiar pattern. The Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens speculated for some time over what would happen when political correctness towards women collided head-on with political correctness towards Islam. We may be starting to find out.
Oh-so-enlightened Western civilisation makes all the concessions, and what passes for civilisation in parts of the Middle East presses on gleefully through the doors we hold open.
The school’s reported attempt at compassion ensures only that there will be more emboldened young men, more attacks, and more traumatised young women. Former muslim Nabeel Qureshi sets out here (starting at the 3:55 mark) exactly where this misguided approach is destined to lead us.
“I think the term that’s being used for it…is ‘terminal niceness’. We’re being so nice and politically correct, to things that are willing to rip us apart, that it will be the end of us.”
As I write, meanwhile, Emma Watson’s Twitter feed makes no mention of Fredericton, and the town’s edition of the Washington march appears to have had eyes only for a caucasian male with bad hair.
And on the theme of ‘familiar patterns’ – if this tweet is true, then this is another one…
@DailyCaller this happened in June & all major media reports have been taken off-line to hide it from the public. https://t.co/ry33GXE47h
— miguel radimez (@miguelradimez) January 19, 2017
Notepad on Life 