Write of reply

Here I am, chugging away at the blog, and all of a sudden, there’s two comments in a couple of days.  Someone, nay, two somebodies, are reading what I’ve written!

Now I know this is part of the point of a blog.  You can have lovely conversations about the same things – or violently disagree – or deploy increasing amounts of punctuation to form faces, smiles, beards, polar ice caps, that kind of thing.

Probably there’s a sneaking concern about people reading what I write.  Yes, this blog is probably meant to read a bit like a newspaper columnist, but really it’s a bit of a diary too.  And who wants to have someone reading their diary?

I still have my teenage diaries, and I have to work out whether to keep them for historical purposes (what were people watching on TV 20 years ago?), counselling ones (can this help us work out how our kids might be feeling in the future?), or burn them before those same teenagers find out how much time I spent worrying about boys.

In the case of these two comments, the trick seems to be to write about someone important to the commenter.  The only difficulty is, this could get complicated.

My reasons for writing about the people in question were personal, spur of the moment celebration of them.  To go round the houses, writing about people you know – yes you, person reading this! – is unlikely to keep working.

I may get completely the wrong take on your auntie you’ve mentioned, your brother I met once, and so on.  And having just captured you as a reader, I’m hardly going to want to let you go, let along have you run headlong from these pages.

But write a reply…go on.  Even to the naff puns about Wispas.  It allows me to keep my little dream that maybe, somehow, one day, someone might even pay to read what I write.  And the longer you indulge me in that dream, the cheaper it remains for you, eh?

Alternatively, post your latest photos on Facebook, and I’ll be over there like a shot.

You’ve got a Friend

Time for some mention of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” – a TV show surely dedicated to people who love alliteration.

I’m probably one of the few people in the Western world who didn’t watch “Friends”, the long-running US comedy.  I therefore never saw Matthew Perry in the show, and so when he turned up on Studio 60 as one of the main characters, I was seeing his work for the first time.

And he is really good.  Funny, ironic, annoying, but his best turns are the serious, even anguished ones, which perhaps gives him a whole different area to play from that of “Friends”.  Having been away on holiday, “Studio 60” was probably the main thing we wanted to catch up on, given his character’s pretty serious relationship break-up just before we went away.  That’s a lot more anguish waiting to spill out.

It’s not really about the anguish.  Perhaps even more so than on the writer Aaron Sorkin’s previous show, “The West Wing“, the characters seem to have permission to be human – real characters, with good points, flaws, working in an industry that shows up both aspects in equally extreme ways.

Both shows have characters working in highly pressured environments.  Yet in “Studio 60”, Sorkin seems to be taking even more opportunity to make different sections of American society meet head on.

The characters of Matt (Perry’s part) and Harriet are perhaps overly unlikely to be together, so different are their values, their mindsets.  With Harriet as the Bible believing Christian, Matt plays devil’s advocate with fair venom at times.

But still, the scenarios they face as characters, together, and apart, do help to question what makes a ‘good’ person.  For all of Matt’s ability to mouth off about various sections of society, there are other areas in which he is determined to do the right thing.

As a Christian myself, it makes for interesting viewing.  There are plenty of times where I’m in situations – at work, with friends, in a social setting – where it’s not always clear what is the ‘right’ thing to do.

The show reminds me how everyone is facing the same complications, whether they have a faith to guide their values or not.  And perhaps some of the environments which are less likely to be seen as moral – such as the entertainment industry which is the feature of “Studio 60” – have in fact some of the most compelling dilemmas to face.

It’s perhaps even more frustrating, then, to know that “Studio 60” was only given one season to run.  So even if this is a short-term Friend, I’ll be continuing to tune in, while these debates, and story lines, continue to twist and turn.

 

 

Has anyone seen my topic?

Most nights, no problem selecting what to write about.  Tonight, I’m feeling weary, and suspecting a cold coming on.

Still, not to worry, as I’ve read enough of these journalist “oh dear, I don’t have anything to write about but I’ll spin some words” pieces.

Actually, if I’d called it “Has anyone seen my Topic?”, as I considered while typing it, that suggests whole new vistas of chocolate snack bar to explore.  Not an inconsiderable subject, given that there’s been enough public interest in the UK to bring back Wispa bars.

How do people make the decision that they want to bring back a chocolate bar?  I suppose you build a petition online these days, though the option of marching on the Bourneville factory dressed in large crinkly wrappers is another way to make your point.

Perhaps the other question to ask is, at what point does a company decide it’s a good PR point for them to bring something back?  I’m aware of other companies which have strong customer loyalty – thinking of Lush, and Lakeland – which also herald when they are reintroducing items at readers’ demand.  But to go back into production for a chocolate bar, with all the economies of scale and so on – you must need to be sure that people will buy it.

Fortunately, it’s not difficult to like a Wispa bar.  It really is just chocolate.  Easy.  Except a little bit softer in texture, I suppose we should say.  Not difficult to build up a new fan base when you have a product like that.

So, be careful of your water cooler discussions, my friends.  You never know what a careless wispa could spark next.

 

I gotta use words

A little light tidying at work to finish the day: English language teaching textbooks  And yes, I couldn’t resist keeping a few myself.

Some are collectors’ items in their own right, interesting now for what they reveal about life at the time they were created, as well as how people thought we should learn.

Picture dictionaries are particularly revealing: what are the food items available on the nice picture of the market stall (and what aren’t), what clothes are the people wearing, what social patterns are revealed by who’s doing the shopping, and so on.

Even a more recent book refers to ‘micro-computers’ and ‘diskettes’ – your average school child would certainly think the computers used even ten years ago were micro indeed.

Been reading one of them on the way home, on teaching vocabulary, and how much it relates to personal responses to words, exploiting different ways of learning etc.

One of the authors, Mario Rinvolucri, comes up with some great exercises, some borrowed from psychotherapy techniques, such as having conversations in numbers so that you can express e.g. anger (or in fact other emotions) in another language without coupling it to words, and having to deal with meaning too.  It’s the reverse of counting to 10 to calm yourself down, I guess.

It reminded me how closely linked are some of the things I love about language: teaching it, writing it, using it as a vehicle to explore who we are, our personal stories, and how we live and learn.

I’m hanging on to the vocabulary book as much as anything to give me writing ideas, pre-set exercises that I can just try out, as a way of getting into writing without having to derive everything myself from scratch.

Some of the sentences in the book – that a whole world is within a word, through the meanings it conjours up – could apply just as much to teaching, as to counselling, as to writing.

It’s that worlds within worlds that I love.  A Roald Dahl short story also had a brilliant notion of words as a series of cogs, interlinking.  The narrator of the story talks of the effect of putting a small word next to a really big one, and, in effect, setting it spinning.

At any rate, here’s some ways to get some words, and ideas, spinning, wherever they turn out to be useful.

You know me.  I gotta use words, whatever I’m up to.

(PS the title comes from a poem, which the editor cites, but doesn’t say who wrote it.  Anyone know?)

Haystack 101

Another title I planned a while ago, and on a much happier note.

I’m no expert, but I’m fond of the odd haystack. Bountiful nature and all that.  Going on holiday to the Isle of Jura most summers when I was growing up, a relative there still had a smallholding, and you could see him out in the fields, gathering and forming the stooks by hand.

Later, there were the ‘burnt cupcake’ haystacks of Monet, in shades of pink and blue, as well as more strawy colours.  One year I discovered the upstairs floor in the National Gallery in Edinburgh, which has quite a collection of these.

Monet got a bit obsessed by these – as he did by waterlilies and a few other things – but it’s amazing the number of different colour combinations he comes with.  Much of the time, though, the stacks remain the same shape.

I was going to say you can imagine my delight when… – and it wasn’t really as strong as that – we got to see loads more variants when on holiday in Poland this summer.

But really, when you’ve grown up with square bales, roly poly round bales, and perhaps the handgathered wigwam type, I was struck by how many other variants you could come up with, should you have the time, energy, and more importantly, enough straw needing drying.

What was more impressive was how many there were in a relatively small area.  We had been staying in Warsaw and came down on the train to Zakopane, the main mountain resort in the south.  After Krakow, the train meanders for a while, in and out of foothills, for a couple of hours.

In that time, we saw I think seven different variants, including ones with ‘ears’, ones that looked like double axles, etc.  A couple of years further back, we saw another variant in Slovenia, where there are covered drying racks in many fields, something that seems to be distinctive to that country.

My question is: who teaches them how to do that?  Is it set for the area, or is it up to the farmer’s own choice – and perhaps time?  It’s not that the hills are so high in that part of Poland that you are really cut off from other areas, as you could argue you might be elsewhere, as an explanation for why so many types remain.

Perhaps it’s also that in the UK, we’ve been told how mechanised farming has become, how industrialised, effectively.  Travelling up to Aberdeenshire in September to meet incoming students, where field after field was full of identifcal cotton reel bales, you had some sense of this.

Yes, it was quite pretty, but you also lost sense of how far you’d been travelling after a while. Which is why it was nice to see in contrast such variety, ingenuity – and personality.

Making hay while the sun shines eh?  It’s a lifestyle thing.