Of Diesel, Drudgery and Death.

                Been a while since my last confession/blog/whatever.  Been busy with work and play and things that don’t qualify as either, the last few days I’ve been helping my in-laws chase down their sheep.  Yes, I’m welsh.  Yes, they know that.  Yes, they find it hilarious.  Know it is not the wall to wall chuckle fest it may sound like. 

                For a start, sheep are not naturally inclined to get caught, even though half of these were bottle fed and are therefore far more tame than the average farm animal.  They are also commoned or “free roaming” sheep which means we couldn’t just drive them into a corner of a field or a little paddock, they must be pounced on – more racially stereotyped jokes ensue.  Once three or four have been grabbed, wrestled into submission (and a full grown Ryland Ram is built more like a Bull than a sheep) they must then have a symbol spray painted on and have both their ears pierced, cruel but legally required if we don’t want them rounded up and impounded. 

                Anyway, a couple of days of this and no one is in quite the jocular mood which kicked off the enterprise.  It’s bloody hard work and my legs and back are killing me so I schedule something a bit more fun and a lot more creative, myself and a good friend are working on some material for an online radio station and intend to embark upon a sit-com.  I arrange for my Mutsk-in-law to give me a lift down to the village in which he is staying and I know there will be a price exacted as there are some more of her menagerie in parcels of land along the route.  I’m expecting to have to carry large water containers over uneven ground, to have to lead bored donkeys from one place to another, I am not expecting to have to tend to maggot-ridden infection but I was clever enough not to change into something presentable before leaving.

                We deal with the nastiness in a swift and effective manner, the animal in question is now healing nicely but one little lamb appears to be missing.  Fearing the worst I am sent out on recon, I begin circumnavigating the two acres of 1:1 slope and I find the recently deceased lamb in the bottom corner of the field.  This is always a sad discovery but you just have to get past these things if you’re going to be around livestock and so I began to drag the surprisingly heavy corpse up the suddenly much longer and steeper than I remember slope so that it can be taken away and disposed of.

                I arrive at my destination but I’m asked; “could you just check on the donkeys while you’re down here, I didn’t see them on the way past.”, I understand, animals have been known to get out of their fields, to be stolen and sold on, all sorts of things can happen.  I am not in the mood however to go traipsing round the village on my own so I invite my cohort for a light spot of strolling.  First field- two donks, ah, there’s lovely.  Second field, steepest slope possible without being a cliff.  Only possibly to climb because of zig-zagging clefts cut into the ground.  No bloody donkey.  Lots of places to hide though so we split up, he goes left to check a wooded area, I go right to search the top of the slop and some undulations which may be concealing the naughty creature.  No joy.  We do another round, no joy.  We check the fences and hedges for notes or receipts *  but we find nothing.  We check with people in the adjacent pub, no we don’t even stop for a drink, they saw a donkey wandering up the village the previous weekend-Oh BOLLOX!!  But one of them definitely saw it in the field the day before- phew, some other donkey wandering around then, not our problem. 

                We go for one more jaunt up the hill and round the nooks, crannies and pathways along the hill above the field and back down through the field and I was soaked from the long wet grass and in agony from the exertion – I’m not in fabulous shape.  Then I spot a tiny gap in the middle of a large and otherwise impenetrable bramble bush, “impossible” thinks I, but worth a shot before we conclude the bloody animal has disappeared.  I make my way through the cruel and pointy thicket and discover a cavernous Narnia-like wonderland of clear and dry space up against the sturdy remains of a mostly demolished viaduct that used to take coal trains over the village in the glory days.  There, looking slightly bored but very guilty, is Wagtail the Donkey.  I make my way back to the real world cursing and swearing great and terrible oaths of vengeance against Donkey kind and after nearly two hours of literally ceaseless searching, we make our way back to the warm, dry, Georgian manor house in which my friend resides for that week.  He lends me a change of clothes, for which I am most grateful and not merely because I am frozen and saturated but also because I reek of diesel.  Why?  Because my mother-in-law is not only deeply foolish but as obstinate as a Donkey hiding between a bramble-bush and an abandoned viaduct.

                On the way to deal with the death and the drudgery we first had to stop to take on diesel.  One of the notable features of my methyr-in-lah’s, for want of a better term, personality is that if there is someone else in the vehicle she will not get out, not for shops, not to pump fuel, not for anything until she reaches her destination.  It’s in-bloody-furiating but that’s life.  So, I get out to pump the diesel.  We’re at the wrong pump, it’s the one intended for articulated lorries and the like, I inform her and attempt to hand her the keys but she refuses, she won’t even open the window so I can’t even shove the bloody keys down her ignorant throat.  This is probably because she knows full well it’s what I would try to do.  So I have little choice but to use the truck pump, it is the same fuel after all.  The nozzle is a little snug in the hole and I am aware the fuel will probably come out extremely quickly so I squeeze very gently and dole out ten pounds worth of finest diesel.  Unbeknownst to me the nozzle in fact fits so snugly in the hole that it allows no air to pass out around the edges, the pressure inside the tank has simply built and built as I pumped and when I remove the pipe from the aperture I am treated to a spurting, spraying gout of lovely lorry liquid right in the fizog and all down my front, it’s only lucky I managed to close my eyes in time or it could’ve been a whole lot worse.

                So I had to trudge round a soaking wet field no less than three times, dig maggots out of living flesh and drag a corpse up a 1:1 (maybe steeper) slope over wet grass in disintegrating trainers, all the while with the sickly-sweet, gag-inducing honk of long-distance-Clara’s motion-lotion burrowing directly into my face without even needing to pass through my nose.

                This was not a fabulous day for the Reezer.

*(it may sound odd and it’s a story for another time but the RSPCA are frequently known to steal animals and leave receipts as though what they’ve done is perfectly legal- IT IS NOT.  I will enlighten you further in future posts but for now have a look at http://the-shg.org/Many%20people%20have%20thought.htm)

Teachers are under enormous pressure to get better test scores so they teach kids what they "need to know" in order to pass. I can't help thinking that if children were taught at an early age some of the many ways in which the floppy, wobbly thing between your ears can be brought to bare on any problem or obstacle that knowledge would be seen as a good thing and not something which is forced upon one by the state. Just because you're not planning to be a chemist doesn't mean chemistry isn't interesting etc.   Subjects which are seen as difficult are seen as boring rather than as a good way of exercising the grey cells so you'll be better at what you do want to do.  This is pretty natural if you’re not inspired by a particular topic but what if kids were introduced to philosophy in school?  There’s a group on Facebook (oh no, he mentioned the enemy) which calls for making philosophy compulsory in schools and I absolutely agree.  Reading/Writing, Arithmetic and THINKING!!  Not what to think but just some of the many ways how one can think. 

We each and every one of us are born with this incredible tool which even the most amazingly powerful supercomputers are only just beginning to be able to match in a few very specific and specialized ways and even they take up a massive amount of space and power.  Ours fit into our tiny little skulls and can run for a day on like, a bean.  Have you ever thought about what it is you are actually doing when something is throw to/at you and you catch it?  Even just preventing it from smashing into your face requires an extremely complex piece of differential calculus which a tiny proportion of us actually know how to perform.  This proportion does not include me by the way, my attention was drawn to this concept by a Chipmunks cartoon but I was reminded about it by an article Douglas Adams wrote and which his family and friends very thoughtfully put in a collection of works and unfinished writings called “The Salmon of Doubt” (which I heartily recommend to everyone alive, if they can’t raed English, there’s an audio version and I daresay a fair few translations out there).  I cannot consciously do these sorts of mathematical problem but the fact that I can (fairly often) catch a ball tells me that my brain is capable of performing the task so if I wanted to I could learn how to do it.

It’s strange to think that Sports people are actually far better at performing complex calculations that the academics that sometimes look down on them, they just don’t know they’re doing it.

Having said all this, the pointless pressure on teachers could be easily relieved if someone in government read a little Confucious - He Say: "One cannot make a pig any fatter by repeatedly weighing it."

Logic and common sense are not often the same thing in a society that believes things for no better reason than because it always has believed them but in this case I have not met anyone (pupils, parent or teachers) who actually thinks that the constant testing OR the way in which children are drilled for it are good things.  In fact a scheme/research project was recently run in several areas including my own that gave year sevens (second years in old money) the chance to help design their own learning experience, this was only possible with one age group because literally every other class is expected to attain this target and tick that box and will be tested at the end of the year.  Guess what happened!

Well for a start, behavioral problems were almost entirely eliminated, class discipline wasn’t even a consideration anymore because kids rarely reject a task or activity if they’ve taken a real part in the process of selecting it. 

Secondly, the children became emotionally invested in their own education, it began to matter to them for their own satisfaction’s sake that they did well in the few low key tests that they were presented with (weighing pigs doesn’t make them fat but it does tell you if you need to switch to a different kind of feed or if they need worming etc.). 

And thirdly, they learned more quickly and more thoroughly than the previous year’s class or the year that followed them.  Something you learn very quickly when teaching over sixteens (which is something I do as a freelancer) is that there is a stark difference in the ability to retain what’s been learned between the average “adult” learner who has chosen  to sign up for the course and the few individuals who feel that although it was their decision, it wasn’t really much of a choice, they “had to”.  It’s the same oppressive feeling of being controlled and ruled which the vast majority of pupils in the vast majority of schools in the “compulsory” education sector experience.  (Incidentally, the reason I put “compulsory” in quotes is because there is no such thing as compulsory education, every parent/guardian except for foster parent and others monitored directly by their local authorities are free to educate their own children- although the government is trying to make this harder and harder despite the statistics saying home educated kids do far better in life and in employment.)

Far better than all this pfaffing about would be to teach kids at the earliest reasonable point in the brain’s development (which medical science has charted very well over the years) how to perform a particular mental task. 

“These are some of the ways we might solve this problem…

This obstacle might be overcome thuswise…

This goal could be achieved by planning things like this…

And most importantly “we can work out what the “right” course of action might be in this situation by considering the facts rather than asking what Jesus or the Prime-minister would do.  Now I happen to think that if you ignore the church’s views and simply read the stories Jesus actually set a bloody good example in many things but if you start off using religion as an example in a secular society you are asking for trouble.  When the child grows and decides it isn’t a Christian after all there’s a danger that s/he will reject all of that faith’s teachings and become a ship with no moral rudder.  This isn’t the norm in such cases but why not cut out the risk entirely?  

Teach kids moral determination, it’s actually one of the few subjects that used to get the louts and jokers genuinely involved with a discussion in my school and the whys and the wherefores are simple:  The only reason most of them were the louts and the jokers in the first place was because they knew instinctively that being ruled and controlled was not a natural state for a human being, they wanted control over how their day was going to be and the more they tried to assert themselves the less control they were allowed.  Ipso-Facto-Ergo Elk in the words of John Cleese.  The moral maze (radio 4) may feature some absolute tossers sometimes but that’s part of the point, thinking about why you consider them tossers, what kind of tossing is it they’re engaging in.  It should be recommended listening for any and all people who are trying to change themselves for the better and personally, I don’t care how good you think you are, even how good you actually are, that should be each and every one of us and that is something we can instill in all our children by making philosophy part of the “compulsory” primary school curriculum.

So There!!

Two in one day?!  Well, I think this merits a second post!

   Last week I bit the bullet and stumped up £45 for a six month membership of a casting agency website.  Within three days I was being offered parts in two short films (unpaid), one is a vampire flick and one is a sci-fi, my two favourite genres.  Another two days and I’m filming a screen test for an advertising job and sending vocal samples to pitch for some voice-over work.

    Got home from the allotment (story for another time), fed the goats (for another time), tempted a rare breed chicken (another time), chased down two adolescent geese (time), then checked my emails.  The reply has come through for the advertising gig – I NAILED THE BITCH!!

     Not only do they want me to be in their adverts, they’re considering using me as a “poster boy”.  It’s not exactly the “Face of Revlon” but I’m not that fond of throwing up these days anyway and it’ll be my first paid acting job.  I could’ve been doing this for the last fifteen years if I’d been arsed to make the attempt.  I would just like to thank ex-band-mate Olly Alexander (The Tormented, Gulliver’s Travels) for making me kick myself for not having made the effort at his age.  Now I’ve got over myself I’m not going to waste anymore bloody time.

YEAH BABY YEAH!!

    It’s been a while since my last post and I’m sure it will become clear why if you care to read on.

    You may remember that I’ve been working on music for a games developer I was introduced to earlier this year, there was more to it than just music but that was the main thrust of it.  I’d been having some trouble contacting him for some time and I was beginning to wonder if there was something seriously wrong.  Was he dead?  Had he decided to throw in the towel and get a day job?  The truth was far more disturbing.

    Some time ago the man in question went mysteriously missing, his other half was frantic, posters went up everywhere, there were at least two Facebook groups appealing for sightings and eventually after nearly a month he was found in the woods near his house and after a discreet interval I emailed and was told he was in hospital but generally fine and we’d be getting on with things soon enough.  I continued in my work and made good progress, I enlisted collaborators, worked out how I was going to get cheap studio time, found top notch session musicians who didn’t want blood etc.

    I was having no luck contacting them as I say and I was beginning to worry that his brainstorm had been a full scale hurricane but nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.  One of my collaborators called me on another subject and said that he assumed I had seen page nine of the local paper, I had not and he recommended that I make haste to a newsagent’s and do so.  I checked on line instead but the story was still the same; the headline read “Paedophile Hid in Woods for Two Weeks!”.

    I was agog.  It seems he’d been under investigation for two years or more after an incident with a shared Limewire folder at his previous employer.  Over 1400 images and several dozen videos were discovered on his hard drive and he’s been sent down for fourteen months.  It’s bad enough that the guy turned out to be a e-nonce, worse that he hid from justice for two weeks but what really boggles my mind, what I cannot get my head round is this:  Even a normal everyday perv (I’m quite partial to a bit of ordinary porn myself) knows to cover his tracks.  If anyone else is going to use a particular computer you wipe any trace that there was “inappropriate” material on it especially from shared folders like Limewire folders. 

    The man was an IT consultant, a systems engineer, if he’d wanted to he probably could’ve stored his files on a total stranger’s computer on the other side of the globe without them even knowing, yet he got caught by leaving illegal images in a shared public folder on a communal company laptop.  On top of everything else, for not even being aware enough of the massive sicko factor of what he was doing to take steps not to get caught, for that most basic monumental dumbness, I judge him.