The Examined Life (1)

Me: “OK, so you’ve learnt a lot of things about Indian geography today and over the past few lessons, and you’ve all done really well. Now I’d like you to show me what you know. I want you to imagine that you’re at the end of a long holiday in India. Draw a giant postcard in your exercise books and write on it what you know about the country. So, for example, where you’ve been, what sights you’ve seen, the wildlife, the weather, the people and how they live, what they eat, what they wear, how they get around and so on. Write as much as you can and if you need help just put your hand up. Any questions?”

Pupil 1: “Who do we address it to, Sir?”

“Anyone you like: your family, your friends, even yourself if you want.”

Pupil 2: “Why would I address it to myself?”

“Fair point! Someone else, then.”

Pupil 1: “So my parents?”

“Yes, why not.”

Pupil 3: “Can I address it to my Granny?”

“Yes. Anyone you like!”

Pupil 3: “I don’t know her address.”
“Your parents, then. Right, everyone, let's get going!”

Pupil 1: “Does it have to be our parents?”

“NO. Now please get on with it.”

Pupil 4: “Do we have to put a stamp on it?”

“You can DRAW a stamp if you want, but can I just emphasise to everyone that the point of this task is to show what you’ve learnt about India: the postcard is just an idea to make it more interesting.”

Pupil 5: “So can we just write it without drawing the postcard, Sir?”

“Yes.”

Pupil 4: “Do we draw an English stamp or an Indian stamp?”

“Well, since you are supposed to be in India, an Indian one, I should imagine.”

Pupil: 4: “But I don’t know what an Indian stamp looks like.”

“Then just draw a little square with a ... with an elephant on it or something. RIGHT, CAN I HAVE THE WHOLE CLASS’S ATTENTION FOR JUST A MOMENT? DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE DESIGN OF THE POSTCARD OR THE STAMP OR THE ADDRESS YOU ARE GOING TO BE SENDING IT TO. THE REASON WE ARE DRAWING A POSTCARD IS SO THAT YOU CAN SHOW WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT INDIA FROM THE LESSONS YOU HAVE HAD. IT IS NOT, REPEAT NOT, TO WORRY ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE. IS THAT CLEAR?”

The Class: “Yes Sir.”

Pupil 6: “Like this, Sir?”

“Yes, that’s a beautiful postcard, really nice, but you don’t need to colour it in. YOU JUST NEED TO WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT INDIA. NO, THAT’S THE ADDRESS SIDE: WRITE ON THE LEFT!”

Pupil 7: “Who do I send it to?”

“Old Mother Hubbard who lives in the Cupboard.”

Pupil 2: “I thought you said it was supposed to be addressed to our parents.”

“I DON’T CARE WHO IT’S ADDRESSED TO! OLD MOTHER HUBBARD, THE LITTLE OLD LADY WHO LIVES IN A SHOE, HENRY KISSINGER OR VINEGAR JOE STASSINOPOULOS: I JUST DON’T CARE. WHAT I DO CARE ABOUT IS THAT YOU GIVE SOME INDICATION THAT YOU HAVE A BASIC GRASP OF THE PHYSICAL AND HUMAN GEOGRAPHY OF THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT AND I WILL KEEP THE WHOLE CLASS BEHIND UNTIL KINGDOM COME IF YOU ALL DO NOT DO SO. IS THAT CLEAR?"

Pupil 8: “Sir, he took my ruler.”

Life is Elsewhere (2)

Further to my post of 3rd April, what joke is this?

It's another "UK General Election party leaders' debate", in which, this time, 

• the two governing parties don't take part;
• those who do have only 268 (41%) of the 649 contestable Westminster seats;
• thanks to the British electoral system, only one can form a government;
• only two are UK-wide parties (one of which has only one MP and will be lucky to get even one more);
• four of the five participants have a combined total of 12 MPs (one of them thanks to defections from other parties);
• the nationalist parties of Scotland (the SNP), Wales (Plaid Cymru) and England (the absurd, absurdly-named UK Independence Party) take part while the Northern Irish parties don't although one of them has more MPs than four of the five parties who are present.

It's a folly, a pretence. But like many great pretences it is honoured by precedent, saturated with time, money and expertise, engraved in minds through its promotion and packaging, and ringed-fenced by individual and corporate reputations.

Yet, far from being a conspiracy, none of those involved, from the parties themselves right down to the BBC audience, seems to possess the mental vocabulary let alone the means to step outside and see it for what it is.

Will voters?

No Representation without Taxation!

Two things strike me about the Conservatives' (unfunded) pledge to "take those on the minimum wage out of tax altogether", a phrase parroted without evidence of scrutiny by the BBC and its appalling Economics Editor Robert Peston, a man who just doesn't seem to understand that there only ever was and only ever will be one Peter Snow. I fear that the realisation - and it will come one day - may kill him.

1. It's a deceit and a sham. These people are not being taken out of tax: they're being taken out of Income Tax, which, however inadequately levied and wastefully spent, is redistributive in that you pay more if you have a higher income and less if you don't. They'll continue to pay National Insurance as well as taxes like VAT which are less fair because everyone pays at the same rate regardless of income or wealth.

2. It makes tax sound inherently undesirable when it isn't. American revolutionaries rightly demanded that there should be "no taxation without representation" (a formula I hope survives although many modern Americans seem only to know the first two words of it). Tax - fairly levied, wisely spent - is actually a fine thing. It makes possible many other fine things that, were they lost, even the British might take to the streets to restore. Tax is a symbol, but far more than a symbol, of inclusion and social mutuality; it's a contribution to the well from which any community draws.

In fact, the Conservatives' professed desire to "take people out of tax" encourages the something-for-nothing mentality that they tell us they abhor. Lying to us about it is even worse. 

Here's an idea: don't vote for them!

Richie Benaud: G'night.

Farewell Richie Benaud, the greatest voice of the greatest game: Test Cricket.

Throughout my childhood, whether playing with mates against the garages with the TV booming inside or deep in the living room with curtains drawn all summer's day long, Richie Benaud was alpha and omega, umpire and arbiter, philosopher, preacher, policeman and, for all we knew, web-footed cocklewoman too.

From May to September each year we paid tribute by adopting Benaud's accent and nightly willed that tomorrow it would fall to him to announce when one team or the other - we didn't care which - would reach the magical, the, the ... Benaudian scoreline of 22 for 2: a phrase once heard - and I only did so once - never to be forgotten.

Nor, I hope and am sure, will he ever be.

Most memorable for me was Benaud's verdict on one of the most disgraceful moments in sport when, with New Zealand needing a 6 to tie, the Australian Trevor Chappell was instructed - within the rules but with utter disregard for the dignity of cricket - to bowl the last delivery of the match underarm and along the floor.

Here's the clip. In true Benaud style - politely authoritative but with forthright finality - it's even more withering than the accompanying subtitles for his Australian viewers.

And that "G'night" - what a sign-off!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvGHC7REkdM

Driven Mad

While Jeremy Clarkson's recent ill health means he continues to recuperate at his luxury Black Sea dacha in the Crimea, where the Central Committee of the BBC has kindly provided him with qualified use of a top-of-the-range Moskvich 1500SL plus chauffeuse (see photo), Derek Seeds​ has started a valuable debate - well actually a series of foul-mouthed rants - on Facebook about the state of modern driving in Britain to which I have felt both compelled, and indeed privileged, to contribute.

Subjects have already included lane discipline on motorways, drivers who don't put their lights on in dense fog and my own tentative contribution about the many mentally asymmetric drivers who indicate wrongly, when at all, on roundabouts. Readers able to override parental controls will already be familiar with both my and Derek's less than poetic paeans to tailgaters. Please, please do also send in more examples of bad driving that you have witnessed or experienced, whether or not you survived them.

However, as a number of Canadians also report similar deviations over there, and they are a very long way away (a simple fact wherever on Earth you live, so this clearly involves us all), it's clearly time to widen the debate; that is, to discover whether this is an Anglo-Saxon problem or just, as usual, Europe's fault. So I'm also calling all foreigners - by which I mean those few who UKIP concede don't already live in Britain - to contribute your thoughts about the state of driving where you are. Do you too have problems? If so, are they like ours or different? Can you also blame them, without censure, on eastern European benefits cheats and health tourists? 

Readers are of course advised to brief themselves on the burning issues already raised by referring to Derek's and my Facebook pages. But here, to give you a flavour of the quality of the debate so far, is another habit that's become very popular within the dickhead community and is - quite literally - driving me mad. Mad, I say.

It's the one where there's a part-filter lane at traffic lights. On green you can go straight ahead, turn right if traffic allows, or wait for the filter arrow light if it doesn't. There's a junction near me where I need to go straight ahead to get home, the left lane is always chokker and there's always heavy oncoming traffic. Good sense says that if the car ahead in the filter lane doesn't signal right I should follow it, but if it signals then I should keep left to avoid possible delay.

Now I've been counting, and nine out of ten cars these days go into the right lane, stop at the lights without signalling, wait for the forward green light and ONLY THEN signal, meaning that the poor deluded fools who trusted that their fellow motorists know what they are doing either have to wait or incur the road rage of drivers in the left lane who think they're just trying to push in.

DEATH - however lingering, however many innocent family members and relatives are herded into the net of retribution, tied to a post against a wall and shot: first the knees, then, after a couple of days to think about it, the rest of them - IS TOO GOOD FOR THESE PEOPLE.

You know, that kind of thing.

Life is Elsewhere (1)

Last night's 7-way party leaders' election debate was dispiriting. Little was said beyond the predictable gobbets. Now it's the task of those involved - namely the political parties, pollsters, pundits and the media - to fabricate a significance and momentum it didn't deserve.

Firstly, it was inevitably superficial and personality-focused. These are the last things we need. The number of participants meant that only four subjects were discussed; and anyway ours is not a presidential system. The election should be about policies, not what one man or woman will do for us. If we understood this better we'd be less cynical and leaders would make fewer bullshit promises.

Secondly it was bogus, not least the ruse of getting members of the public to ask the questions and the fake, mawkish presumption of the leaders in addressing questioners by their first names.

Thirdly it was fudged. In order not to offend anyone there was a false appearance of equality between the parties. This was clear from the fact that Leanne Wood's plug was solely towards the Welsh electorate. And so it should have been, because Plaid Cymru have no candidates let alone influence elsewhere, but it made what was supposed to be a debate about a UK election look daft. And why, assuming the stage was big enough for four more, weren't the Ulster parties there? Or for that matter the BNP, which polled twice as many votes as the Greens and more than half the votes of UKIP in 2010?

Perhaps worst of all, it was illusory. Thanks to our first-past-the-post voting system, only the Conservatives or Labour can return enough MPs to provide a UK prime minister. So the logic of having this kind of beauty contest is that only Cameron and Miliband should debate. Of the UK-wide parties, the Liberals or even, God forbid, UKIP, might well win 20+ per cent of the vote, but they will get disproportionately few seats. The best they can do is to hold the balance of power, but that's not what the debate was about. For the Greens it will be even worse.

So while there's a case based on popular support for getting everyone on stage, it's irrelevant and even deceitful if the system can't translate that support into seats and power. People say that the old two (or three) party system is dead. No it isn't: and it won't be so long as huge numbers of us continue to waste our votes on no-hopers in seats they can never win.

The trouble is, in the 2011 referendum 68% of us voted against even a mild reform of the system. The subject is therefore ruled out of public discussion. Yet the debate was structured not only as if it hasn't been, but as if a system like the one we rejected were in place. A very British fudge!

And now spittle-flecked pollsters and sleep-deprived pundits are crawling over the debate with their little league tables showing who was the 'victor', which will, in consequence, be required to mean something - whether it does or not. (Apparently it was Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP; which indicates what, exactly?) Yet from pretence will grow the reality of significance. Already, between the breathless contributions of party motormouths, the BBC is trying to have it both ways, hurling barrages of high-tech statistics at us while reassuring us that they don't tell us very much. Well exactly.

Until then, I do suspect that life is elsewhere.