Kingston and lime trees

Now I'm alerted to lime trees (thanks to Oliver Rackham [see Rackham ‘label’ down the side] and my trip to Berlin) I'm seeing them everywhere, and as often as not they’re big. There’s a nice bunch at the back of the Institute of Education in Bloomsbury.

And then guess what. I'm walking down a few steps this morning to get to the riverside walk on my way to Kingston, where I was (though I didn’t then know it) to have a nice German bratwurst in the market square, and noticed the stainless steel information display erected like an odd-shaped sloping table at the water’s edge and for the first time ever went over to read it. A main item on it is lime trees, evidently a local feature worthy of remark. So are the great crested grebes on the river that I've mentioned before.

There was some good history, too, that I hadn’t been aware of. I knew Kingston had at one time been the seat of Saxon kings, probably because it had the first bridge as you went up the Thames (I presume the Roman London Bridge had fallen down). But it also had royal connections into the middle ages, with the Treaty of Kingston, 1217, about which I read ‘The Treaty of Kingston, describes peace negotiations commenced between John and Louis, dauphin of France immediately after the defeat of the latter's supporters at Lincoln in May 1217. Talks broke down before a further naval defeat at Sandwich persuaded Louis to agree terms at Lambeth’ (Wikipedia).

Also, Raven’s Ait, an island (old English eyot = ‘island’) in the river up by Surbiton, was the source of osiers for the basket makers. The baskets, I guess, would be for the salmon that were the main product of Kingston.

And finally Sopwith! Tommy Sopwith had a works in Kingston -- 6 fitters and carpenters and a boy -- designing flying boats for the First World War. The prototypes were tested on the Thames until the Thames Conservancy objected, so Sopwith moved down to Richmond where the Port of London Authority, who control the river up as far as it’s tidal, were more hospitable. Sopwith’s colleague in the venture was none other than Hawker, Harry Hawker, later of Hawker Siddeley.

So fancy living in a place like that. The sausage was nice, too.

Comic artists and English

Foyles had an event with two of the biggest US comics / cartoon / graphic novel artists, Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware. The theatre it was held in (Cochrane Theatre by Central St Martins School of Art) was full so they clearly have a huge clientele over here -- including son Jim who took me along with his animator mate, Alex Potts.

Chris Ware in particular had things to say about drawing comics that struck me as consistent with my understanding of writing as they it be occurring in school English.

Kids want to draw/write fiction with exotic characters but can’t because they haven’t enough experience. Turn them therefore to their own real lives, and even away from fiction. An account of a gym lesson, according to Ware, could be far more exciting than anything from what we usually think of as imagination (and, I would add, would involve as much real imagination). This is what Harold Rosen and those who thought like him at Walworth School and elsewhere were onto in the mid-fifties, and it’s consistent with the advice and practice of, say, Ted Hughes.

As for process, if I got it right, neither is in favour of sketchbooks and rough versions (for writers that would be notebooks and drafts). For Clowes going out every day to sketch when he was learning to draw was a drag and brought no pleasure; similarly doing his strips in rough to work out the ideas. Both felt the final version lacked energy and drawing it was a chore, so they now go straight to the final paper (they specified the brand, size and gauge!). The experience is 100 per cent pleasure when you don’t know what’s going to happen two pages ahead. In English at certain times the orthodoxy drafts and revision and may still be. James Britton expressed the same objection to it as Clowes and Ware, and emphasised the value of what he called ‘shaping at the point of utterance’ (‘utterance’, obviously, being used to include written ‘speech’.)

Drawing/composition should above all be a process of discovery.

Ignore thoughts of your audience. You know in general the sort of people you’d like to read your stuff; beyond that just make sure it’s intelligible. The transaction is between you, your stuff and your medium, so concentrate on that.

Ignore form, don’t try to develop a distinctive style. Focus on the content and draw/write it whatever way you do.

When I have my own school I'll have these guys in to teach drawing comics (as Jim in fact does now), and I’d get the kids to speculate about the implications for writing.

Lopped planes and the trees of Berlin

Pity I didn’t have my camera when out today. The planes that I presume were lopped first are sprouting. The one at the back of my flats, though, still has no life and has been colonised today by a bunch of rooks and some magpies. There goes the neighbourhood. Their noise suggests a dispute but I can’t see what about.

I've been in Berlin since my last post and there I saw more lime trees than ever before. The ones you see here are usually small and ornamental, and are found in towns on roadsides and in parks, like the ones along the Severn in Shrewsbury. According to Oliver Rackham, however, it was once one of the dominant trees of Britain, and the tallest.

I didn’t warm to the trees in Berlin. Here we’re good at trees in parks and parkland but in Germany you have the feeling that the forest is only provisionally and partially cleared and would be back if they all went on holiday for a couple of months at the same time. It’s as if they fell enough trees to stick a building up and never get round to removing the rest, so you see a toddlers’ playground in front of an apartment block overhung by giant trees that cause a permanent gloom for the kids to play in. And whereas English oaks tend to be light and luminous -- sometimes almost backlit -- the trees amongst the Berlin blocks are of some dark and dull species, somewhere between sycamore and the maples I knew in Ottawa, maybe a European maple. It’s the Wald, that’s what it is, the Teutonic forest that swallowed up Varo’s legions so they could be massacred by Arminius (Hermann the German); and it’s overlaid only superficially by Berlin.

Limes are lighter but even they don’t relieve the gloom. And in the parks the grass is uncut and scrappy, as in Mexican parks. Berlin strikes me like a colonists’ city: they’ve moved in recently and imposed their massive buildings and infrastructure on a landscape they’ve never paused to domesticate and convert from nature to culture.

Which I suppose is why Berlin is exciting in a way no English city could ever be. I loved it. But that’s another story, or posting.

Children of other lands

Hmm, I seem to be blogging again. I think I can keep it up provided it doesn’t become too much of a commitment -- like shaping my periods into elegant prosodies, checking my (deteriorating) spelling (I’m constantly, almost predictably, writing the homophone instead of the word I mean -- what’s that a sign on?) -- in short, if it doesn’t take too long. More of a jotter.

Anyway, no more next week. Off to investigate Berlin.

Deep Sussex yesterday, for an outdoor party. Old house from which the land (the Weald) falls away on two sides, down, eventually, in the far distance, to dense oak woodland and then, at the horizon, rises into the lovely outline of the South Downs. Oak country, hazel hedges, but terrific horse chestnuts -- great-rooted blossomers, tha’ knows -- and also the odd ash, and I can confirm that the oak is out well before the ash, though oaks of one species are out before the other (I don’t know which is which: I understand Britain has two native species).

I knew some but not all of the people. One young man who I had known for a few years from earlier visits and who had been an IT person doing one-off contract jobs was now writing prestigious reviews of children’s books -- of which he had piles of review copies, some of which he read to an eager audience of children there, age 6 and under. Brilliant with kids, lovely to watch.

One person was married to a Catalan man; they’ve had two children in Barcelona. She and the children were at the party and were delightful. She told us they can go to school at three, free, and that it’s quite formal -- they sit at desks -- but that the teachers, like Spanish people generally with children, are kind.

Which makes me ask, what makes the Spanish (and Italians, I've noticed) particularly kind to and delighted with children? Is it Catholicism? Is that they’ve industrialised less completely and more recently than the British? And have they always been that way because the story I keep reading is that until, say, Rousseau Europeans were pretty indifferent and callous when it came to children, regarding them rather as chattels and investments. I imagine that story’s simply wrong, or true only in certain parts of certain societies. Enlightenment welcome on this.

Also present were a lady who’d come to London from Russia 20-plus years ago and her son, now taking A levels in a London comprehensive. His take on school was interesting. He’d started out at at private school and had moved to the comp in year 9, where he’d found the standard much higher. His teachers on the whole have been brilliant -- dedicated, expert, enthusiastic. (For the record it’s Queen’s Park Community School.) But he was glad he’d escaped SMILE -- a popular junior maths programme -- by attending a traditional private school; he reckons if he’d done SMILE he’d now be having great difficulty with his A level maths.

They don't read the papers

It’s said ‘this generation’, ‘young people’ etc don’t read the papers but get all their information from the internet. Don’t we agree that if that’s true, it’s a pity?

I don’t think kids/young adults, many of them (let alone older adults), know what papers are, what they do, how they’re used.

So in my school every day will start in the tutor group/home room/whatever with reading and discussing the papers. They’ll all be available in each room in sufficient copies. (The publishers will supply them free in hope of future custom.) The teachers will get in an hour early to review them. (If necessary the kids will come in an hour later. Or be in some sort of study room when they arrive.)

The proceedings around the day’s papers will be a mixture of browsing and directed inquiry. The students will get to know what to expect from each paper. They’ll do a lot of comparison of treatments of the same story, but will also come to appreciate the best writers, best cartoonists, best sports pages, best tv coverage. And they’ll learn what goes on on the financial pages.

Seems rather obvious, doesn’t it. Why isn’t it done? probably because it isn’t a ‘subject’.

Education and forming the brain?

A chap on the Today programme just now was claiming that no one becomes a top sportsman/woman without at least ten years of practice, which doesn’t just develop the body but changes the brain. Pretty well anyone’s brain and body, moreover, can get there with enough practice.

We know about the brain changing with learning from London taxi-drivers and the archaeologist I heard who’d taken singing lessons for a month (or perhaps it was a year) and had his brain scanned before and after -- sure enough one part had grown, and I imagine the change was in the structure too, what was connected to what, how many connections each bit had. Sorry to be so technical.

Dr Johnson said that education in childhood should be determined and relentless because that is when the brain is particularly retentive so that knowledge gained then lasts for life.

So I wonder: is there enough emphasis in contemporary ideas of education on the sheer volume of repetition and application needed? is education arduous enough? is there enough practice to decisively reconfigure the brain?

Ian Pringle and Aviva Freedman in the 1980s did a study of students' writing at different ages in a Canadian school board and concluded that by the age of ten children should be writing many pages of continuous text every week. It seems to me that most children are well capable of that if properly taught from the start, and that it should be happening.

Similarly, it’s necessary to read a certain quantity of poems in a school year. No one has attempted, as far as I know, to say how many but I'm sure it’s far more that most kids do have the chance of reading. Books likewise.

Classrooms cursed by too much variety of activity, not enough sheer application and persistence? too low a tolerance of the possibility of boredom?

Or am I just getting reactionary in my old age?

Alice Oswald

Someone, might have been Carol Ann Duffy, wrote the other day that the best poets writing in Britain are Don Patterson and Alice Oswald. There are lots of poets I don’t know but of those I do I agree those two are the best, though I’ve only just got to Oswald.

I’d knew of her Dart, about the River Dart in Devon, and had read bits in reviews and bookshops, but I’ve been reading A Sleepwalk on the Severn, about the moon and the Severn Estuary -- tidal of course, the mud uncovered half the time and under twenty foot of water for the rest. Bits are spoken by a chorus, the moon, the wind and the sleepwalking poet who takes notes.

Though it’s not always easy to see what is being literally ‘meant’, reading the Sleepwalk is intensely pleasurable. There’s a high density of phrases that pull me up sharply with their freshness: e.g. from the second and third stanzas of the whole thing:

Swans pitching your wings
In the reedy layby of a vacancy
Where the house of the sea
Can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour

All you flooded and stranded weeds whose workplace
Is both a barren mudsite and a speeded up garden....

And later, the moon rising above the mud:

She begins to climb
In her slimy death sheath
Very strong-willed and tugging
Tied to the earth

And I like the frequent use of colloquial language and contemporary ‘unpoetic’ references:

But it’s like searchlights out here
I keep being followed by a strip of light
I keep seeing the moon
Mother of all grasses

Will re-read. Looking forward to Dart.