It’s nearly 30 years since I taught in a school but it’s amazing what a big role teaching evidently still plays in my psyche. Being in a secondary school classroom in one situation or another, nice and not nice, is perhaps the most persistent component in my dreams. Sometimes I'm brilliant, sometimes none of the levers work and things decline unstoppably into chaos. In reality being out of control was a small part of my experience -- nearly all the time I was ok -- but those occasions must have burnt themselves into the soul.
No other job that I've done gets so deep into one’s sense of self.
Saturday, 20 November 2010
Wednesday, 17 November 2010
Waterloo train of thought: recognising a good poem
Walking through the pedestrian underpass by Waterloo Station I was thinking of the crap poem I hated and despised that used to be on the wall but is now largely painted out, thank God -- some sad, happy-hippy effort.
I was thinking that most of my English colleagues would agree it was crap. Equally we’d mostly agree on which poems were any good.
Which doesn’t mean there is such a thing as a good or bad poem poem, and that it’s a matter of recognition. The fact that we share some sense of what a good poem is doesn’t mean goodness is a feature of it per se. This sense is something we’ve got from a particular training or socialisation and is, in that trite phrase, ‘socially constructed’.
That doesn’t, however -- this was the following thought -- make our judgement purely subjective. What we share is a really shared thing, a real thing, a thing per se; it exists all right, between us, and enables certain performances. Of course it’s a mental, virtual and cognitive reality, but it’s real in its effect. It’s real specifically in enabling skilled performances.
It enables any one of us, independently of anyone else, to make a valuation, to evaluate a poem as good or not when we encounter it for the first time. But not only that: it’s also a resource of perception, having which means that we notice certain features and find things presenting themselves in particular ways, with certain features perhaps ‘salientised’, others appearing in finer detail than they would to a reader who lacked this shared resource, and so on. With it we observe distinctions and samenesses, and also recognise a certain field of external allusion, to other works and to the world. It makes what we read more significant, more interesting, more subtle or bold and more artful.
I suppose this is what Eliot’s longed-for ‘tradition’ was supposed to supply, or a shared literary culture. No doubt, it’s a real resource, a powerful cognitive amplifier, and much of what it enables us to see is real. So, it’s good to have this sort of ‘cultural capital’ in our kitbag.
The thing, though -- and this where the Eliots, the Leavises and most English teachers of the 1950s and earlier were at fault -- is to be humble with it. The thing is to recognise that other groups too can have their equivalent shared resource, and that what those resources make appear in works is as real as what ours do. The two ‘socially constructed’ ways of seeing are simply incommensurable -- it doesn’t normally seem possible (perhaps I'm wrong here?) to slide from one way of seeing to the other.
Thus: the said English teachers despised pop culture and TV as ‘meretricious’ (a word they loved but never defined and which appears simply to mean they didn’t like it). Along comes another generation, brought up with soaps, kids cartoons and comics but equally well educated and they love this despised stuff stuff and make endless discriminations (that favourite Leavisite word) between the different examples. Their resource (what shall we call it? template? model? standard? none of those seems right) makes things which we find poor, thin and trivial rich, complex and interesting to them.
I was thinking that most of my English colleagues would agree it was crap. Equally we’d mostly agree on which poems were any good.
Which doesn’t mean there is such a thing as a good or bad poem poem, and that it’s a matter of recognition. The fact that we share some sense of what a good poem is doesn’t mean goodness is a feature of it per se. This sense is something we’ve got from a particular training or socialisation and is, in that trite phrase, ‘socially constructed’.
That doesn’t, however -- this was the following thought -- make our judgement purely subjective. What we share is a really shared thing, a real thing, a thing per se; it exists all right, between us, and enables certain performances. Of course it’s a mental, virtual and cognitive reality, but it’s real in its effect. It’s real specifically in enabling skilled performances.
It enables any one of us, independently of anyone else, to make a valuation, to evaluate a poem as good or not when we encounter it for the first time. But not only that: it’s also a resource of perception, having which means that we notice certain features and find things presenting themselves in particular ways, with certain features perhaps ‘salientised’, others appearing in finer detail than they would to a reader who lacked this shared resource, and so on. With it we observe distinctions and samenesses, and also recognise a certain field of external allusion, to other works and to the world. It makes what we read more significant, more interesting, more subtle or bold and more artful.
I suppose this is what Eliot’s longed-for ‘tradition’ was supposed to supply, or a shared literary culture. No doubt, it’s a real resource, a powerful cognitive amplifier, and much of what it enables us to see is real. So, it’s good to have this sort of ‘cultural capital’ in our kitbag.
The thing, though -- and this where the Eliots, the Leavises and most English teachers of the 1950s and earlier were at fault -- is to be humble with it. The thing is to recognise that other groups too can have their equivalent shared resource, and that what those resources make appear in works is as real as what ours do. The two ‘socially constructed’ ways of seeing are simply incommensurable -- it doesn’t normally seem possible (perhaps I'm wrong here?) to slide from one way of seeing to the other.
Thus: the said English teachers despised pop culture and TV as ‘meretricious’ (a word they loved but never defined and which appears simply to mean they didn’t like it). Along comes another generation, brought up with soaps, kids cartoons and comics but equally well educated and they love this despised stuff stuff and make endless discriminations (that favourite Leavisite word) between the different examples. Their resource (what shall we call it? template? model? standard? none of those seems right) makes things which we find poor, thin and trivial rich, complex and interesting to them.
Thursday, 11 November 2010
On Certain Survivors
On our research project we’re planning a book of our findings and have been trying to think of a title that reflected the notion that developments in English teaching in London after 1945 should be seen within the more general process of post-war reconstruction. I’d come up from somewhere in the back of my mind with Out of the Ruins: [plus the usual more explanatory subtitle].
It occurred to me a couple of days ago that where the phrase came from was an East German Poem by Gunther Kunert that I used to use in school a lot and that came from an anthology by Michael Hamburger. (I see I've mentioned this before -- see this this.
Now I’ve found the poem, as typed out by me long ago, and ‘out of the ruins’ doesn’t come from there at all, so the mystery remains (maybe it’s from David Lodge’s Out of the Shelter, a quite early novel that I’d read only recently about coming out of the war) but it’s such a great poem that I'm moved to share it here.
On Certain Survivors
(Uber einige Davongekommene)
When the man
Was dragged out from under
The debris
Of his shelled house,
He shook himself
and said:
Never again.
At least, not right away.
Gunther Kunert, trans. Michael Hamburger (I think)
From East German Poetry, An Anthology. Carcanet, 1972
I've found the book second-hand on Amazon (of course) - practically free as so often these days -- public libraries and university libraries discarding stock like crazy -- so it’s on its way and I'll be able to check I typed the poem correctly.
PS How many of the many brilliant poems from communist East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia get used in English lessons these days as they were by me and lots of others in the 1970s?
It occurred to me a couple of days ago that where the phrase came from was an East German Poem by Gunther Kunert that I used to use in school a lot and that came from an anthology by Michael Hamburger. (I see I've mentioned this before -- see this this.
Now I’ve found the poem, as typed out by me long ago, and ‘out of the ruins’ doesn’t come from there at all, so the mystery remains (maybe it’s from David Lodge’s Out of the Shelter, a quite early novel that I’d read only recently about coming out of the war) but it’s such a great poem that I'm moved to share it here.
On Certain Survivors
(Uber einige Davongekommene)
When the man
Was dragged out from under
The debris
Of his shelled house,
He shook himself
and said:
Never again.
At least, not right away.
Gunther Kunert, trans. Michael Hamburger (I think)
From East German Poetry, An Anthology. Carcanet, 1972
I've found the book second-hand on Amazon (of course) - practically free as so often these days -- public libraries and university libraries discarding stock like crazy -- so it’s on its way and I'll be able to check I typed the poem correctly.
PS How many of the many brilliant poems from communist East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia get used in English lessons these days as they were by me and lots of others in the 1970s?
Saturday, 6 November 2010
Who should determine the curriculum?
I mentioned that I was enjoying De Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime -- so elegantly scientific in the manner of Marx and Weber, and so freshly written and modern-seeming. Lately (last few years) I'm reading more history, which I’d always told myself I was interested in but had rarely chosen to read. I like the argument in it, like De Tocqueville asking why, toward the end of the Middle Ages, was the native Germanic law of the northern peoples decisively if gradually supplanted by Roman law. He argues that since the states were very different and yet all changed in this way, there must have been a common cause, and he identifies it.
Reading De T gave me to the following line of thought. He enumerates the functions of the state: administrative, financial, judicial, military etc. Nothing here that isn’t fairly obvious but I would have had to think for a while to come up with them. I.e. I’d never been taught them, though probably most American kids would be as the Americans are hot on their constitution. I think I should have been, perhaps in my school history course. De T’s understanding of the functions is essential to his explanation of the significance of the Revolution (namely, quite different from what was usually supposed), and the UK equivalent would seem equally important to British citizens today.
I'm regularly aware, though, that my history course has nevertheless paid off for me in all sorts of ways that wouldn’t have been specifiable in advance, except in very general terms. I often find myself understanding or being interested in things and realising that it’s because of my school history, of which only the last two years (10 and 11) were well taught, that they have meaning for me. My bit of history is a widow’s cruse, continually delivering significance to my experience. (The pay-offs from my endless and all-consuming classical education, in contrast, were thin indeed.)
It’s a problem, no doubt of it, deciding what should be in a curriculum. Someone has to decide what it is a person needs in order to understand the world and find it meaningful. Who’s in the best position to know that? I would say, those people -- experts, let’s call them -- who are both knowledgeable about the world and culture and reflective about the nature of that knowledge. That sounds like people who combine philosophy and some broad area of knowledge, students both of knowledge itself and of some discipline; there aren’t many such around and we need more. It doesn’t sound like teachers -- with some exceptions -- but when it comes to pedagogy (how can the curriculum actually be taught, if it can -- Michael Gove and Dryden [Gove: UK Sec of State for Education]-- they have to be the deciders. The last person it should be is a politician.
Also, it goes without saying: education isn’t just a curriculum of knowledge as organised in the disciplines. It’s also experience and activity and has an important moral aspect. A crucial contribution of good comprehensive schools, for instance, has been to take diverse groups of children and young people and teach them to sit and talk to each other in a purposeful and respectful way.
Reading De T gave me to the following line of thought. He enumerates the functions of the state: administrative, financial, judicial, military etc. Nothing here that isn’t fairly obvious but I would have had to think for a while to come up with them. I.e. I’d never been taught them, though probably most American kids would be as the Americans are hot on their constitution. I think I should have been, perhaps in my school history course. De T’s understanding of the functions is essential to his explanation of the significance of the Revolution (namely, quite different from what was usually supposed), and the UK equivalent would seem equally important to British citizens today.
I'm regularly aware, though, that my history course has nevertheless paid off for me in all sorts of ways that wouldn’t have been specifiable in advance, except in very general terms. I often find myself understanding or being interested in things and realising that it’s because of my school history, of which only the last two years (10 and 11) were well taught, that they have meaning for me. My bit of history is a widow’s cruse, continually delivering significance to my experience. (The pay-offs from my endless and all-consuming classical education, in contrast, were thin indeed.)
It’s a problem, no doubt of it, deciding what should be in a curriculum. Someone has to decide what it is a person needs in order to understand the world and find it meaningful. Who’s in the best position to know that? I would say, those people -- experts, let’s call them -- who are both knowledgeable about the world and culture and reflective about the nature of that knowledge. That sounds like people who combine philosophy and some broad area of knowledge, students both of knowledge itself and of some discipline; there aren’t many such around and we need more. It doesn’t sound like teachers -- with some exceptions -- but when it comes to pedagogy (how can the curriculum actually be taught, if it can -- Michael Gove and Dryden [Gove: UK Sec of State for Education]-- they have to be the deciders. The last person it should be is a politician.
Also, it goes without saying: education isn’t just a curriculum of knowledge as organised in the disciplines. It’s also experience and activity and has an important moral aspect. A crucial contribution of good comprehensive schools, for instance, has been to take diverse groups of children and young people and teach them to sit and talk to each other in a purposeful and respectful way.
The Thames yesterday morning
A resolution I formed not long ago and am keeping to pretty well is that, despite always having loads of work to do (despite in turn being 70% retired), if it was a nice day and I felt like I’d go out and enjoy it, whether for a walk from home or to drift in London. It’s not as if we’re so over-supplied with good weather that want to willingly squander it by staying in.
It helps now that I'm taking walking a bit seriously, after taking a course (six Wednesday mornings in lovely Battersea Park) with Joanna Hall who runs Walkfit and shows you how to walk, for aerobic exercise, not hiking, wearing exercise kit and trainers, unencumbered by shopping, so as to get most benefit from it. (Thoroughly recommended -- it works and she’s good-- see her website.)
So this morning being nice despite the forecast I headed for Hampton Court (two stops on the train) for the walk along the river to Kingston (then home on the bus). Classic autumn morning, tints and that., but the walk was more interesting than usual in that there was regatta on, I think the Teddington Sculls or similar. As I left Hampton Court bridge along the path downstream, boats were assembling for the start. I counted 13 fours. Also hanging around were a couple of pairs and the odd single. I kept walking and passed quite a few more boats moving up to the start. Soon they were coming down and overtaking me from a staggered start with gaps of perhaps 50 or 70 metres. I reckon there were more than 20 fours, then the pairs, then masses of singles and as I walked on there was more and overtaking. Coaches were shouting heartily from bikes on the bank: ‘Let’s go, guys!’ The participants were schoolboys (Kingston Grammar School, I believe - they have a boathouse opposite Hampton Court and probably have rowing on the curriculum between Greek Verse Composition and Calculus -- I hope it wasn’t one of their masters shouting so vulgarly), women, though far fewer, of various ages; and older man, some grunting vociferously to indicate they weren’t effete.
When I got onto Kingston Bridge after 40 or 45 minutes, the fours and pairs had all passed and the last were disappearing downstream, but the singles (are they sculls?) were still coming and indeed were littering the river upstream as far as I could see.
That’s it. Nothing to say about it -- no significance except I'm keeping to my intention to post updates even when I've nothing to say.
But, I was at a school like Kingston Grammar and in the sixth form you could do rowing. The school had a boathouse on the Aire at Saltaire, though the stretch you could row on wasn’t all that long and ended downstream at a scary weir. Anyway, being averse to all proper sports, I did it. Not sure if I enjoyed it but I think I felt the exercise was good, and the river was nice despite smelling a bit effluvious on account of the woollen mills that were still working in those days. I realised this morning, though, that I've no recollection of rowing against other schools though I can’t believe the school would have tolerate a sport without fixtures. (Did the school have a trailer and vehicle to transport the boats?) The teacher (‘master’) in charge was Mr H. Macdonald -- don’t know what he taught and he seemed boring -- as opposed to Mr J. Macdonald who taught French, was also boring (perhaps most grammar school teachers were) and was notorious for taking a party to France and, on the ticket inspector entering the compartment on the train, indicating that they should move outside to confer in the corridor -- such, it was believed, was his incompetence in French.
This (the rowing, not Mr J.) does have significance: we must have had rowing fixtures but I can’t remember them, though they should have been out-of-the-ordinary-run-of-life enough to have been memorable. This was 51 to 52 years ago. Yet our research depends on collecting school memories from 45-65 years ago and it’s clear why so often we hit a brick wall.
It helps now that I'm taking walking a bit seriously, after taking a course (six Wednesday mornings in lovely Battersea Park) with Joanna Hall who runs Walkfit and shows you how to walk, for aerobic exercise, not hiking, wearing exercise kit and trainers, unencumbered by shopping, so as to get most benefit from it. (Thoroughly recommended -- it works and she’s good-- see her website.)
So this morning being nice despite the forecast I headed for Hampton Court (two stops on the train) for the walk along the river to Kingston (then home on the bus). Classic autumn morning, tints and that., but the walk was more interesting than usual in that there was regatta on, I think the Teddington Sculls or similar. As I left Hampton Court bridge along the path downstream, boats were assembling for the start. I counted 13 fours. Also hanging around were a couple of pairs and the odd single. I kept walking and passed quite a few more boats moving up to the start. Soon they were coming down and overtaking me from a staggered start with gaps of perhaps 50 or 70 metres. I reckon there were more than 20 fours, then the pairs, then masses of singles and as I walked on there was more and overtaking. Coaches were shouting heartily from bikes on the bank: ‘Let’s go, guys!’ The participants were schoolboys (Kingston Grammar School, I believe - they have a boathouse opposite Hampton Court and probably have rowing on the curriculum between Greek Verse Composition and Calculus -- I hope it wasn’t one of their masters shouting so vulgarly), women, though far fewer, of various ages; and older man, some grunting vociferously to indicate they weren’t effete.
When I got onto Kingston Bridge after 40 or 45 minutes, the fours and pairs had all passed and the last were disappearing downstream, but the singles (are they sculls?) were still coming and indeed were littering the river upstream as far as I could see.
That’s it. Nothing to say about it -- no significance except I'm keeping to my intention to post updates even when I've nothing to say.
But, I was at a school like Kingston Grammar and in the sixth form you could do rowing. The school had a boathouse on the Aire at Saltaire, though the stretch you could row on wasn’t all that long and ended downstream at a scary weir. Anyway, being averse to all proper sports, I did it. Not sure if I enjoyed it but I think I felt the exercise was good, and the river was nice despite smelling a bit effluvious on account of the woollen mills that were still working in those days. I realised this morning, though, that I've no recollection of rowing against other schools though I can’t believe the school would have tolerate a sport without fixtures. (Did the school have a trailer and vehicle to transport the boats?) The teacher (‘master’) in charge was Mr H. Macdonald -- don’t know what he taught and he seemed boring -- as opposed to Mr J. Macdonald who taught French, was also boring (perhaps most grammar school teachers were) and was notorious for taking a party to France and, on the ticket inspector entering the compartment on the train, indicating that they should move outside to confer in the corridor -- such, it was believed, was his incompetence in French.
This (the rowing, not Mr J.) does have significance: we must have had rowing fixtures but I can’t remember them, though they should have been out-of-the-ordinary-run-of-life enough to have been memorable. This was 51 to 52 years ago. Yet our research depends on collecting school memories from 45-65 years ago and it’s clear why so often we hit a brick wall.
Another Brussels encounter
I’ve held off telling you about my second encounter in Brussels while waiting for the person concerned’s ok.
I’d arranged to meet Martin King, who I taught for a year or two in a secondary modern in Wakefield till he left at 16 with one CSE in 1976, after doing a project for me to interview three old men on the village bench about their memories of the First World War (Passchendaele, in fact).
No contact since then until recently I noticed something on Friends Reunited, and as a result we’ve met. Martin drove in from Antwerp one morning to show me Brussels -- expertly (see below) -- and induct me in some unusual beers. (Unfortunately our meeting had to be curtailed so he could get out again: the EU summit was about to open so a ring of steel would come down on the city at 3.)
After leaving school, which he didn’t get on with (for good reasons), Martin went to tech for a couple of years to get more qualifications, joined a band and took off with them to tour Europe. The tour lasted some years, they made records and he was a star in Belgium where he met a Flemish nurse and married. Got into university, ended up lecturing in history and then left when they wouldn’t pass his PhD thesis -- too sensitive, it seems (quite a story there). Off to Hollywood to make a documentary, then Discovery Channel in Canada for another, drawing largely on his specialism: military history -- and especially the First World War. I'm eagerly awaiting his films that are to be on tv, though maybe not here. And he’ll have two books.
In schools nowadays you’re required to write lessons plans that include a statement of ‘learning outcomes’. How about, ‘In 35 years time will pick up this topic again and be inspired to make two documentary series’?'
Here are two clips to give an idea of the them:
<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F3DtITOOoM” target=“_blank”>Greatest Tank Battles</a>
<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL5_RZffQ9g” target=“_blank”>Voices of the Bulge</a>
and a notice for the book:
<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Voices-Bulge-Untold-Stories-Veterans/dp/0760340331/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1289310014&sr=1-1” target=“_blank”>Voice of the Bulge</a>.
The trailer from ‘Greatest Tank Battles’ is currently on the ‘Discovery Channel’ in Europe and from January can be seen in the US.
I’d arranged to meet Martin King, who I taught for a year or two in a secondary modern in Wakefield till he left at 16 with one CSE in 1976, after doing a project for me to interview three old men on the village bench about their memories of the First World War (Passchendaele, in fact).
No contact since then until recently I noticed something on Friends Reunited, and as a result we’ve met. Martin drove in from Antwerp one morning to show me Brussels -- expertly (see below) -- and induct me in some unusual beers. (Unfortunately our meeting had to be curtailed so he could get out again: the EU summit was about to open so a ring of steel would come down on the city at 3.)
After leaving school, which he didn’t get on with (for good reasons), Martin went to tech for a couple of years to get more qualifications, joined a band and took off with them to tour Europe. The tour lasted some years, they made records and he was a star in Belgium where he met a Flemish nurse and married. Got into university, ended up lecturing in history and then left when they wouldn’t pass his PhD thesis -- too sensitive, it seems (quite a story there). Off to Hollywood to make a documentary, then Discovery Channel in Canada for another, drawing largely on his specialism: military history -- and especially the First World War. I'm eagerly awaiting his films that are to be on tv, though maybe not here. And he’ll have two books.
In schools nowadays you’re required to write lessons plans that include a statement of ‘learning outcomes’. How about, ‘In 35 years time will pick up this topic again and be inspired to make two documentary series’?'
Here are two clips to give an idea of the them:
<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F3DtITOOoM” target=“_blank”>Greatest Tank Battles</a>
<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL5_RZffQ9g” target=“_blank”>Voices of the Bulge</a>
and a notice for the book:
<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Voices-Bulge-Untold-Stories-Veterans/dp/0760340331/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1289310014&sr=1-1” target=“_blank”>Voice of the Bulge</a>.
The trailer from ‘Greatest Tank Battles’ is currently on the ‘Discovery Channel’ in Europe and from January can be seen in the US.
Friday, 5 November 2010
Update
No ideas in this one but have decided that to keep my few followers I need to post regularly. Being too busy (which I have been) shouldn’t be an excuse; I could always post at least a one-liner once a week. Keep me to it.
I'm at the ‘writing up’ stage of my bit of the research (English in three London schools, 1945-65 -- Walworth School is my part, with Pat Kingwell). The task is somewhat tedious: you look at 30 bits of information and can write one sentence as a result. As a result it doesn’t flow, and the text is pedestrian -- I end up saying what happened but not what it means, why significant. That, I suppose, will be the next stage. And I imagine much of what I've written will be discarded as too trivial, too nitpicking or just too much. But I don’t think I can shortcut the process.
By Eurostar to Brussels last week - my first time except to change trains. (Return journey tedious -- 3 hours delay when train broke down, towed back to Brussels, check-in and security all over again, replacement train not ready. But the compensation made it all worth it: another return ticket to Brussels.)
I enjoyed Brussels of course, but one highlights was meeting two of my ex-PGCE students, John and Amy, now married and with a son and teaching at a British international school. On the train and in cafes etc read Camus L’Etranger in French - surprised how easy since I'm not very good. Fantastic novel -- hadn’t realised how good. (Read it English years ago -- can’t remember when). Inspired by that I found a great second-hand shop and bought some more Camus and also de Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la Revolution, which I also found I could manage. Great book, terrific writing. What made me get that was two things: (1) an interest in the French Revolution, arising from reading Burke and Carlyle (see label); (2) reading Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America, which is about de T and his earlier book, Democracy in America, which I’d also looked at. Ancien Régime is a terrific read: intellectual force and lively, spirited writing. It has an argument that holds it together beautifully, and some polemical points for contemporary France (1850s).
There’s more but that will do for now.
I'm at the ‘writing up’ stage of my bit of the research (English in three London schools, 1945-65 -- Walworth School is my part, with Pat Kingwell). The task is somewhat tedious: you look at 30 bits of information and can write one sentence as a result. As a result it doesn’t flow, and the text is pedestrian -- I end up saying what happened but not what it means, why significant. That, I suppose, will be the next stage. And I imagine much of what I've written will be discarded as too trivial, too nitpicking or just too much. But I don’t think I can shortcut the process.
By Eurostar to Brussels last week - my first time except to change trains. (Return journey tedious -- 3 hours delay when train broke down, towed back to Brussels, check-in and security all over again, replacement train not ready. But the compensation made it all worth it: another return ticket to Brussels.)
I enjoyed Brussels of course, but one highlights was meeting two of my ex-PGCE students, John and Amy, now married and with a son and teaching at a British international school. On the train and in cafes etc read Camus L’Etranger in French - surprised how easy since I'm not very good. Fantastic novel -- hadn’t realised how good. (Read it English years ago -- can’t remember when). Inspired by that I found a great second-hand shop and bought some more Camus and also de Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la Revolution, which I also found I could manage. Great book, terrific writing. What made me get that was two things: (1) an interest in the French Revolution, arising from reading Burke and Carlyle (see label); (2) reading Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America, which is about de T and his earlier book, Democracy in America, which I’d also looked at. Ancien Régime is a terrific read: intellectual force and lively, spirited writing. It has an argument that holds it together beautifully, and some polemical points for contemporary France (1850s).
There’s more but that will do for now.
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