What Am I Doing?

Dreams and Kindness on a London Street

2012-02-03T22:39:00.000-08:00

It was the middle of the night and I was deep in sleep. Tucked up warm and secure, I was having a quite unusual dream in which I and two children from my class were trying to escape this fearful sound of shrieking and wailing by sliding up and down these gigantic ravines and slopes, which were all concrete and stone. The dream then shifted its location and I was in their house with their family and I, the two kids and their mum were standing on the landing in our pyjamas. The mum and I were moaning about the shouts and the wailing, and I recall her saying "It had to happen on a night when we can sleep in." The two kids were getting rowdy so I said I would go and have a look at the noise.
I stepped out of the house (now on my own actual street) and rounded the corner, where I found it to be the break of dawn and there was a large bumbling white guy in a thick coat staggering around the pavement, while a crowd of onlookers gazed at him, some of them filming on their phones. He was shouting, cussing and - to the 'dream me' - being frightening. I ran back into the house and locked the door, then ran upstairs and locked the kids into their rooms.

Then I woke from the dream.

The wailing and shrieking continued. I opened my eyes and it was dark outside but there were loud garbled shouts drifting up from the street outside. I laid in bed, ignoring it but listening nonetheless. Curious at how loud it was, I got up and looked out of the window.

Just outside of our house there was a man laid out in the gutter, his feet on the pavement but the rest of his body sprawled out on the road behind a parked car. It sounded like he was shouting angrily and weeping at the same time. "Fucking c**ts!!!" he bellowed. I was stood there, hovering in the darkness by the crack of the silently opened window, trying to ascertain whether he was ok. It was that very limp middle class style of caring which is equivalent only to 'keeping an eye on the situation' from afar. I went to get my glasses to work out whether it was blood swilling around beside his head on the roadside, or whether it was his shadow. Luckily, it was the latter.

I took a photo, just like the gawping unhelping bystanders in my dream; also like in the dream, I felt my heart racing, as though this was my special little voyeuristic treat.

As I was squinting out from the window, another man rounded the corner and shouted 'Oy! OY!'. The drunken passed out man groggily raised his head to look up - I thought he was looking to see whether he was in danger. This other man, quite a beefy young man, walked right up to the drunk man and squatted beside him. He asked how he was doing and spoke to him humanely.

"Why did you stop?", dribbled the streetman.
"Because you looked interesting", replied the beefy man, "and my brother lives just around the corner."

He offered the drunken man his hand, not to help him up but to shake it.
"My name is Andre", he told him.

The drunken guy started to shuffle about and his flat palm started to smack hard against the kerb. The beefy man got up and brought the drunken guy his hat and collected his belongings for him. In my cynical spectator state, I entertained the thought that maybe this whole event would be a charming robbery, or that the kind words were a Clockwork-Orange-like prelude to a violent shoeing. But no, Andre was legit.

As Andre gathered the drunk guy's stuff together, I could see what he meant by him looking interesting. The only possessions that this drunken man appeared to have were the hat on his head, an acoustic guitar and a vinyl record. The guy tried to lift himself up from the kerb, but with Bambi-like poise, he couldn't even straighten out his legs for long enough to support himself, and he barrel-rolled back to the ground.

"Come on man, again", Andre supported. He offered his arm to help the guy up, but he insisted on going it alone (with the aid of the car which he used to balance himself). With uncertain baby steps, the drunk guy was up on his feet and Andre stood by his side.

"You got somewhere warm to go? Come on this way."

Together, with their bobbing staggering shadow following them, they cut down the side street and disappeared.

Need I ask, but whose was the greater care? While I dithered over whether or not he was bleeding by having a good hard squint from up in my bedroom, Andre just powered over to him, sat himself on the kerb and, it seemed, was so supportive that the drunken guy could barely comprehend it. I wonder whether I am in the majority. I hardly think it makes me a good person for getting up and having a look.

Schadenfreude

2012-01-30T13:56:00.000-08:00

Oh it was schadenfreude alright, and a quite sociopathic strain of it. I walked by the train station and as I did so a car rattled by on the main road beside me. Part of the machinery on the underside of the chassis had come loose and was scraping along the floor. It made a din. The driver slowed down but was forced to continue driving, which caused the damaged part of his car to come loose and lie fragile in the middle of the road.

Seconds later, a battered dirty Ford Mondeo followed it down the road and drove straight over the bit of car, causing it to crack and shatter loudly. As his car part was crushed, the driver pulled into the side of the road.

I stood outside the train station through all of this, and when the tyres destroyed his car part, I couldn't even contain the upward curl of my lips if I wanted to. It filled me with a little trickle of delight. I caught eyes with two blokey men who were also laughing at it, and as I turned and walked into the station, one of guffawed to the other 'Look at him laughin' away'.

I was. It was great.

My uneasy childbirth

2012-01-20T14:37:00.000-08:00

After an arduous, tiring pregnancy it boomeranged within me, gritted its gums and abseiled out, clasping firmly onto the sinews which once secured it, and it tumbled into the frothy mess that lay below.

With no nurses to wipe it up and present it to me after a towel-down, the onus fell onto me to scoop the strands of myself from its shrewface and to pat it down. No nurse declared how beautiful it was, but even if she or he did, I wouldn't believe her or him. Was it worth it, I thought. Is it worth it?

Within only three short minutes, the little morsel was sitting bolt upright. Crooked it was, and its eyes were bearing down on me. Its flappy little lips pursed and unpursed whilst still it gawped. I bent forward to clean myself up when his first words boomed forth.

"Bepanthen" it declared, with a clarity of voice which cut through the stale meaty air.

I glared back, which it mistook for a lack of comprehension rather than the uncertain meagre tremors of affability.

"It's a brand of ointment" it added, blinking.

Cheeky little mite, I thought. Cheeky little thing. In my head, I committed myself to getting some Bepanthen. Mothers go and get things for their babies don't they. A bit of powder milk here. Bit of Bepanthen there.

It sat in the centre of the floor, shuffling about and peering up, toiling wistfully to dislodge a thin shard of womb from betwixt its crooked toes.

"Help then", it implored.

Half-hearted resolutions for 2012

2012-01-01T09:17:00.000-08:00

It's the dawn of a new year. The Olympic year. It'll be the twenty-second one I've lived in, and I still haven't fully accepted that I lack that internal drive and focus which would enable me to follow through on resolutions. Every year it is the same thing; I wake up with a slight glimmer of hope. 'Maybe this will be the year things change' I think to myself, with a limp trace of uncertainty even in my internal monologues. Maybe, with a bit of gusto, I can start afresh and ditch the bad habits. Maybe, resolution will become revolution!

It is with this self-awareness that I am putting forward my resolutions for 2012 forward now, despite the fact that I have broken one of them before I have even declared it.

1) Healthy food

Boring and predictable I know. Everyone in the country groans as they squeeze themselves into the trousers post-festive season.

Anyway, I want to snap out of comfort eating. Comfort eating as a phrase has quite good connotations - comfort is reclined on a chair, kicking of your shoes and taking relaxing deep breaths as you nibble on a Galaxy.

Of course, my reality is different. In the adverts, they don't have somebody like me squatting on a VDU desk chair in front of the computer in my dressing gown, stuffing Minstrels into my gaunt face. No, comfort eating isn't comfort. It isn't comfortable and it isn't comforting. The turnover time between binge-eating and self-loathing is now so short that barely has the last morsel pot-holed down my gullet when I am crippled by bitter remorse.

First resolution, stop binge/comfort eating. To be so enamoured of chocolate is infantile. I'm not Montezuma, I'm just a weakwilled man.

2) Dress better

Complacency set in towards the end of last term in school. Somebody said to me that I ought to 'dress for the job I want, not the job you have'. If I was following that logic, the job I wanted last half-term was some strange sort of seaside entertainer. Mismatched socks were worn more often than not. Kooky ties, like a bad uncle or an odd science teacher. I want to look good and individual, sure, but maybe at times my geek chic veered too far into in-patient territory. I will dress better. I will wear shirts more often. I will wear black shoes, rather than the white, blue and purple ones I have been wearing.

This is not abandoning my sense of self. I can let my mouth do the talking, rather than using my clothing as a canvas on which I paint my mental state.

3) Write

The good thing about being a teacher is that, no matter how life-absorbing it is, it still inspires new thoughts in you. It fertilises the imagination having to answer the off-the-wall questions which emanate from the faces in the carpet. I love writing. I have always written. My friend bought me a notebook in 2002 into which I was expected to write poems. I have, for the last decade. That notebook is a chronicle of my increasing literacy, eloquence and pretension and of my decreasing optimism and modesty.

Writing is great and this year, I intend to plunge back into it. I have survived the first term: now, I want to up the ante. I want to heap pressure onto myself and force myself to actually produce something. I have written loads of stuff, but it is all just patches. 2012, I want you to be the year to provide me with the thread, so that I can sew all of those shitty patches into a big dirty tapestry of substance.

The festive benefits of being a male teacher

2011-12-23T14:30:00.000-08:00

There are some disadvantages to being a male primary school teacher. Other staff presume you can help them with technical problems. Children are initially scared of you, which can clash with your own way of teaching. You can very easily be excluded from interaction with colleagues because you lack a propensity for eating salad. You can't dress too unusually, lest you look like a creepy man. If you raise your voice beyond a caustic whisper you get a reputation for bellowing at children, which makes more softly spoken teachers think you have lost all control over your class.

And there are some advantages too. You are expected to do lots of sport even if you aren't very physically competent, and if you take on that role you find yourself outdoors running around quite a lot, which is refreshing. You can easily gain a reputation for being funny, especially if you are. You can reach all the highest shelves and make displays that are high up the walls, because males a generally taller. Some say it is easier to climb up the greasy promotion pole.

These are mostly unjust rewards. I don't like unjust rewards, but having just experienced the end of my first term, I am willing to suspend my protestations until after Christmas.

The gifts I received were great. The teacher next door was very grateful for her gifts but my face was awash with smugness when I saw her caressing her new wrist-bangles as I lugged my carry sack full of home-made cakes and biscuits, a new aftershave and razor set, a tie and cuff-links set, some branded perfume, a Biryani and some boxes of chocolate.

I'm not sure of the point I am trying to make with this. I think I am just continuing to gloat, whilst letting you know that I know it is maybe unfair.

Reflections whilst watching BBC Look North

2011-12-23T14:25:00.000-08:00

A city councillor has been jailed for stomping cats and kittens to death. Bradford City Council he was. Serving 6 months. They were everywhere. He did tax fraud once before. They should have seen it coming. Unimaginable cruelty and horror they say. Dreadfully dismembered kittens in his fridge. A woman who rescues cats said it was abhorrent. Robert Paine has been in the council for more than three years. He is a Conservative (obvs). The leader of the council said it is extremely sick. Not the behaviour you would expect of anybody in public life. Fair point. He is going to be banned for life from keeping pets. Cats like Rufus are happy for having a non-deathy Crimbo. Thanks.

Dressing like a teacher

2011-11-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

When planning, assessment, target setting and the like begin to pile over me, my coping mechanism kicks in and I focus unswervingly on the most trivial and unimportant aspects of my teacher identity. Recently, this has manifested in a complex diagnostics of my outfit choices.

I’m a new teacher, fresh-faced and brimming with naive, bumbling inexperience, so the need to appear confident, competent and comfortable figures highly in my daily wardrobe ritual. Which style of dress will best conceal the fact that beneath my stoic, placid face, my limbs are flailing maniacally in a doggy-paddle towards the holidays?

Upon my emergence from my bedroom on the morning of my first day in school, a housemate described my appearance as ‘like a confused social worker’. My smart creamyish trousers combined with the blue short sleeved shirt – the look completed with brown casual shoes – seems to have reflected the dissonant panic of my mental state rather than the smart/casual ideal-type that I was aiming for.

After a day when I felt my behaviour management had slipped, my next move was to wear progressively more authoritarian clothing. From the mildly camp flourishes of my floral collars way back in the first week of September, I shifted gradually into monochrome by about the fourth week. The children’s appraisal was that I looked sad and as I reflect on what they must have seen through the classroom window at lunch time – as they peeped through from the playground and saw their teacher in black trousers, a grey shirt, black-framed glasses, and him being huddled nihilistically over the computer reading Guardian articles and eating a carrot salad – who can blame them?

That’s not the man I want to be, I thought.

I feel comfortable now as the first term slides towards its terminus. Some of the other teachers have now seen my true self in all its gormless, impression-making, silly glory and I feel I have invested enough in the teacher identity that I can experiment a little bit. It started with baby steps. My socks were the first to change – what began as tiny black sacks over my feet now ressemble tiny technicolour sheaths in the artistic style of Mondrian or occasionally, when I’m really feeling transgressive, Pollock. This last week I even had mismatched socks, one of them adorned with the comic book superhero Ironman, the other emblazoned with quiant pink bicycles and the word ‘AMSTERDAM’ reaching around like an anklet.

My current dilemma is a binary choice, where there can be seemingly no compromise. There are two thinks I like – chunky expressive knitwear and bold-branded sportswear. On the one occasion that I wore my bright green XXL chunky knit cardigan over my Nike tee, I caught my reflection in a window and nearly vomited on myself, so stupid I looked. Each style carries a desirable symbolic message and I don’t know which to prioritise. The chunky knits have won me compliments from other staff, who describe how relaxed and cosy I look. The kids like it too – when we do circle time and I perch myself beside them, they react as though Barney the Dinosaur himself has arrived to deliver them a half hour of safe sentimental sing-songs. I like the ‘Earth Mother’ type that the chunky knits cultivate. In contrast, I also like the sportswear. In my tracksuit and trainers I am the action man – the lively teacher starjumping and Charlestonning (yes, this happened) his way through the curriculum, as if the children’s heart rate was synonymous with their academic attainment. Being the sports-type makes me look like the sparky newby, the energetic livewire. But I can’t be both. Barney doesn’t wear Adidas Hi Tops.

Anyway, better get on with the marking…

The Gift of Western Gender

2011-11-22T11:39:00.000-08:00

The children in my class are putting together festive shoeboxes which we can send off to Somalia. It wasn’t their idea to do this, and only about 3 of them have cared about it enough to even mention it, never mind bring things in. Credit where it is due, one of the girls brought a beautifully lurid pink miniature dolls house and a tiara set, and the army camouflage speed boat was clearly very hard for one of my genuinely caring boys to part with, as he kept withdrawing it from the box throughout the day.

Out of a sense of guilt, which was brought on by low-level competitiveness with other staff members and the small sad Somali face I imagine every time I think of a child opening the immaculately wrapped box to find a bouncy ball, a well-used and worn out toy car and a tiny tub of Colgate, I decided I needed to supplement these boxes myself.
I trudged out of work early at quarter past five, after spending two hours listening to Outkast’s seminal Stankonia and eating apples. I walked to the bus stop, got on to top deck, sat near the front because the ‘patois’ that I fetishise only intimidates me when I have to sit beside those who emit it. I took the risky move to take a book out of my bag and have a read – it feels very different reading on the tube compared to reading on a bus to Stratford. Luckily, I was reading ‘An Average American Male’, which is so brilliantly coarse and filthy that if someone bullied me for being a bespectacled bookworm, I could highlight that it is so misogynistic (in a satirical way of course…) it was basically porn.

The bus arrived in Stratford and I made my symbolically rich passage past Westfield, with its Forever21 and its red carpet Twilight premieres and its Kurt Geiger and instead, I crossed the road into the Stratford Centre, which is far more my demographic given my current fiscal woe. Despite being spoilt for choice, or possibly because it, I passed by the Greggs and the Burger King that I craved, and moseyed on. I noticed that there was both a £1 shop and a 99p shop. I thought it would make perfect financial sense to go to the 99p store only, despite it being only 1p difference per item – looking at how busy each of the stores was, I think everybody made the same choice.
Now in the 99p store, I started to meander around the aisles, looking for suitable gifts for the Somali shoeboxes. Suitable gifts needed to match these criteria.

a) Nothing brazenly gendered would be entering the boxes, despite the
boxes being categorised as for ‘Boy/Girl aged 3-6/7-10’
b) The more gender neutral, the better.
c) Nothing too ‘Western’
d) No gifts which needed batteries or electricity.

As you would expect, this limited my options.

I got to the book section – the guidance said no novels, I suspect because of presumed illiteracy, so I look only for image rich books. They have Disney books and I know I am already on thin ice for criteria a) and b). Buzz Lightyear is too brawny and Cinderella…bitch please. I look through the rest of the small collection of £1 Disney books and my shortlist of ‘possibles’ is reduced to a car from Cars, Nemo of ‘Finding Nemo’ fame and Peter Pan. I decide Cars is too industrialised and I don’t want my festive box to sow the seeds of commodity fetishism. I notice that Nemo is a fish and I know that certain cultures have qualms with personifying animals, so I decide this little talking fellow isn’t appropriate. Two Peter Pans it is then.

Oh fuck. Toy cars. What to do, what to do? Do I get cars for the boys? And the girls? Am I forcing my gender agenda onto their Christmas? I have a weird collection of connotations attached to cars – cars is the spinning rims of wealth, it is the boy racers, it is Jeremy Bastard Clarkson. No. Neither the boys nor the girls of Somalia will be playing with cars. I bought each of them a xylophone.

Wandering about now. Feeling a bit listless. Balls! Children are forever playing with spheres, I’ve noticed – my kids loved Victorian marbles, they like basketball and every Children in Need video shows kids kicking a ball around. But a football wouldn’t fit in the shoebox so I opt for a cricket ball for the Boy box (yes, again, this was a game of Empire, but I was limited by the range offered in the 99p store) and I got a set of three Tom and Jerry bouncy balls for the girl box.

The box isn’t looking or feeling educational, so I grab a 30 pack of pencils for each box.

By this point I am tired and my a) and b) criteria got too relaxed. I decided my final contribution to my children’s generous gift would be mini stationary sets – the football themed set (an excessive 9 rubbers and a football-emblazoned notebook) is for the boys and my amigurumi kawaii rubbers and notebook are for the girls.

I gave in and caved, but the point still stands. It really is very difficult to attain gender and cultural neutrality when filling a shoebox with little gifts for Somalian children at Christmas time. I failed, and my self-loathing was catalysed by the entire share-size Dairy Milk I ate immediately after.

Westfield East - Aspirational Redevelopment

2011-10-13T22:44:00.000-07:00

Projects of redevelopment tend often to change, rather than improve an area. Often, this change is such that it inhibits and restricts access to those who, in principle, it is designed to serve. The architect Erno Goldfinger's brutalist-style Trellick Tower, the 31-story council flats in North Kensington, soon became a listed building. These flats, originally designed to house the least well-off in the area, now sell for at least £500,000 and the tower has become a cult icon.

Similarly, the redevelopment of Spitalfields market meant that its original function as a fruit and veg market was sidelined and moved to another site: the site became, instead, the heart of the revived East End, a venue full of mid-to-high end restaurants and a fashion and vintage market.

None of these changes are intrinsically bad. Certainly not for me, an individual more inclined to tuck into a restaurant meal than a Golden Delicious, if I was going to have to traipse across East London to get there. But it does not necessarily best serve those who live in the local area, who rely upon the provision of such amenities.

That is my grip with the new Westfield. Once I've settled into my job and pay packets start to line my account, I'll be able to reap its benefits but at the present time, I expect my sentiments towards it are similar to some of the residents of Newham's, who I've talked about it with. Yes, it's good for the area - as in it is better than nothing. But I can't really afford it.

It is not paternalistic or condescending to say that the people of Newham might need more than the 'gastronomic adventures' offered to them on Westfield's website. Newham is one of the most deprived boroughs within London, thus one of the most deprived boroughs in the country. It needs something more than a 32,000 square foot John Lewis. It is something of a paradox that the largest urban shopping centre in the EU has been built in the heart of the most economically stifled areas. But it's not really for the residents is it?

Maybe. It seems part of that time-honoured traditional of thought, whereby the poor can aspire themselves out of poverty. Maybe walking past TagHeuer every day will instill some backbone into them and make them realise what they could afford if they applied themselves. Regeneration of aspiration, you could say. And the horrible thing is that this logic is what drives consumer capitalism. It is the logic that saw the least well off kids in my class when I was in school be the ones wearing the most expensive Rockports, or Timberlands, or whatever was currently in fashion. It's the same logic that sees a 13 year old pissed off at her mum because she bought her Umbro. Strive for what you can't afford is the logic.

Or maybe it's not even that. Maybe it is the Spitalfields style regeneration where the outcome will be a complete different clientele. Maybe it is the burgeoning footsteps of a gentrification of the 'Far East' - the East is seen as a cool place to be, as far as Bethnal Green, but beyond that, it could be that Stratford is the catalyst.

On the week that the bombshell was dropped that the new Olympic Stadium will not go to West Ham, as Boris had promised, it becomes ever more doubtful that the Olympic inheritance will have much to offer for the current residents of the East End.

Soldiers in the Staffroom

2011-09-04T08:58:00.001-07:00

Many of you will have heard all the fuss about the new, slightly odd Free School that is going to be starting up in Manchester which is staffed entirely by ex-nurses and ex-paramedics. Michael Gove has been piping up about the lack of good-natured, patient and resilient role-models, particularly for boys, and the new school comes at a time when Gove is seeking to raise the numbers of teachers who are moving from other public-service sector backgrounds. It is hoped that these nurses, with their brilliant and laudable reassuring bedside manner, will be able to restore calm and order by taking a mild, empathic approach to discipline - 'this is particularly pertinent now, as youth run riot, desperately in need of having their voices heard and their living standards improved', Gove added, echoing the values of his recently appointed Special Advisor on children's welfare, Camila Batmanghelidjh.

Only joking of course. Only joking.

What is actually happening is that the new Phoenix free school is being proposed in Manchester, and it would be staffed entirely by ex-soldiers. Rather than the empathic and understanding approach, talk of this school is bubbling up at the same time as a raft of policies which seem oriented directly at 'masculinising' education. Men were put off by the legal quagmire around physical contact, Gove explained as he cancelled the obligation of teachers to record instances when they used physical force on a child. And it is part of a wider drive to get more male role models into schools, particularly primary.

I'm thinking of the soldiers school thing in relation to the male role model thing. Why does it seem so odd to think of a secondary school run entirely by ex-nurses? Are they not as strong a role model as soldiers - they work long hours in stressful conditions, are underpaid and deal with the messy, tragic and often dirty side of life. They keep calm in times of stress, the grit their teeth and get stuck in. But no.

The reason soldiers are seen as the missing members the staffroom is that they are presumed not only to be men, but to be a very particular sort of man. Soldiers are the sort of men that Michael Gove wet-dreams about when he calls for more male teachers, particularly in the primary school. Gove isn't on a crusade to balance the penis:vagina staffroom ratio, it's a form of masculinity that he wants - a masculinity he finds symbolised in the military rituals of self-discipline, order and force.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying soldiers are inappropriate to be teachers. I'm not saying they are appropriate to be teachers either. It's a question, as always, of 'some'. Some soldiers will be brilliant teachers. Some soldiers will be arseholes.

The same can be said of my theoretical nurses and ambulance workers. Some hairdressers would be brilliant teachers. Some mechanics would be brilliant teachers. Some factory workers would be brilliant teachers. Where is their parade? Where is their fast-track access to teach?

It doesn't exist because they don't fit the mould of what Michael Gove sees as the missing piece in the schools puzzle: the broad-shouldered silhouette of the 'real man'.

The Campus Diaries

2011-08-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

The diaries are down, pending review of their propriety on tinterweb.

Caught up in the Riots

2011-08-11T01:34:00.000-07:00

Monday 8th August 2011

This is a bad time to househunt. Four riot vans sped down Bethnal Green Road, turning off into Hackney, as we three nascent teachers moved between hostile and unwelcoming estate agencies. Our search for somewhere habitable for four people had so far been fruitless; once our collective considerations had been taken into account, we focused the search on the 'happening' Shoreditch and the cool poverty of Bethnal Green. This latter poverty stands in contradistinction from the less culturally esteemed poverty of Newham, where I'll be teaching. In my mind at least, Hackney had until this week enjoyed the cool poverty label - Guardian readers live there - but since it is currently in cinders, I fear I confused 'cool' with 'intimidating'.

I retreated to Cambridge from Liverpool Street, sauntering cautiously away from the hazy fog of unrest that the rolling news said was heading rapidly towards us. It wasn't only the sickly taste of curried cake which made the Chicken Tikka Passanda from Brick Lane so hard to swallow - it was the burgeoning fear of the reality of the poverty that I had, until only yesterday, merely idealised and fetishised.

Having scurried from Brick Lane with the unusual taste of sour milky meat still wallowing around my mouth, the train back should have been the vehicle which delivered me gently away to the safe calm of East Anglia. I had forgotten that the train passed through Hackney and Tottenham.

I got into Cambridge station around half past ten, and waited for a bus. I had the misfortune of being beside an ignorant woman - with traces of rah daubed on her plain face - as she explained to somebody on the phone that 'unemployment's nothing to do with it. If they wanted jobs they could get themselves to the fucking job centre. Mate, there's loads of jobs for people like that... cleaning toilets in McDonalds. We need the army.' I got the feeling she had little experience of the plight of the urban poor. I disagreed about the army, but it doesn't look like the police coped. Maybe Mark Duggan is this generation's Franz Ferdinand.

I'm heading back to Liverpool Street now, a foolish white person still wanting to pay £160 a week to live under the ashclouds of urban unrest because, says Pulp, poor is cool.

Tuesday 9th August 2011

It has been another day in paradise and today I don't even have dodgy Bangladeshi cuisine to blame for my feeling of nausea. Again, I'm writing on the train out of London and I am feeling on the brink of stupidity having now pretty much finalised renting a house in what, just before I boarded the train, became a no-go zone. The nice lady at Bethnal Green Library assured me it wasn't always like this, but she mentioned even the library was barricading itself closed at 4pm. It is bad to torch a shop, awful to torch a bus and sacrilegious to torch a library. I have spent today growing aware that a punitive mentality was developing in me, borne of fear. I'm not at the 'Kill the feral rats' phase that many have reached, but I think a real show of force will be needed by police tonight, if this is to stop. I'm sure I won't baffle a bookmaker with this one, but I imagine there will be deaths on the streets tonight.

As we pulled away on the train, the Big Smoke was not a metaphor but was Hackney. I was pretty anxious about it all, but was grateful not to have been caught up in anything. Why the fuck am I teaching in London? I was on edge when it was safe (by its own standards...) so I'm not even sure what to call this sentiment. Aptly, I can express it best through the phrase 'What am I doing?' I don't think I've ever been so keen to head back up North, where even the riots have a cheeky Kes-like charm. After Manchester riots, I would now retract the cheeky charm comment. Bethnal Green was a warzone as I left and I am bricking it.

Performing the Primary Teacher

2011-07-13T16:40:00.000-07:00

I am in my third week of teacher training and this week I met my children for the first time. Sure, I've met lots of children before but this little crop have the unique power to inspire genuine fear in me, despite the fact that they are - from what I have seen and what I've been told - a genuinely nice and well-behaved group of kids. What they have is the power to unwind me; they represent my first foray out of my comfort zone and into a world of responsibility and risk. Ultimately, my success as a teacher rests on how I am with them.

I returned early from lunch, got lost in the school and had to find a child to tell me where my classroom was. The girl guided me up the stairs and went back to play, and I pottered around the class, looking at how disarmingly vast it now seemed. All the kids were out playing cricket in the playground and their shouts were drifting up through my open windows. So strange. It is quite hard to explain the feeling - I may have been OTT when I said fear, as I wasn't actually scared. I was struck more than anything by a sense of surreality. I was so excited, but was trying not to show it.

I peeped out of the window once I had unloaded my bag and got my little moleskine planner out. I saw a line of kids winding back from the my class number, which had been painted onto the floor. I felt like Mr Bean on the top of the diving board.

This is when the drama started. Be a primary school teacher, I thought. I sat down on the chair in this dormantly quiet classroom. No. Too false looking and not authoritative. In a haze, I etched my name onto the whiteboard, loathing that I had relied on stereotype before they had even climbed the stairs. I tidied up the tucked-in shirt and moved towards the door. Lean on the door-frame? What am I thinking! OK, here they are.

Look serious.

I struggle to take myself seriously and I think my relaxed nature is my most valuable trait, but it is hard to shake off the vast choir of advice givers who collectively extolled the 'don't smile til christmas mantra'. They filed up to the door and looked up at me. They looked really excited and got loud and giddy. Somehow they knew my name already and were asking me 'Are you Mr Walker?', 'Mr Walker!' and I heard a hubbub of words like 'tall' 'man' and 'big'.

Internally, I had fallen into that unthinking autopilot that low-level excited panic can bring onto you. I smiled back at them, regretted it and then regretted that I had regretted it. Move on! OK. They all had crowded around me asking if I was going to be their teacher. I made the mistake of saying yes, thus inviting an impromptu question session about the precise details of my height and age. I sent them to their chairs. Teachers send their children to chairs. I slowly and amateurishly went through the register, mispronouncing the lion's share of their names and forgetting all of them instantly.

They had been quiet as I apologised for mispronouncing names and bumbled through the register but they still looked very 'coiled spring' and excited. One boy got up out of his seat and in a shot was stood beside me. Low-level rule breaker! Make an example.

"Sorry, why are you standing beside me?"

Before he could answer, the hubbub of the 29 of them explained that he takes the register. Ah.

Much to learn. Much to learn but I am going to enjoy doing it.

Between Prviacy and Pedagogy

2011-05-29T16:04:00.000-07:00

The combination of studying the social theory of privacy and the looming onset of my work as a teacher is causing me to agonise over aspects of my cyber footprint. There is nothing negative about me written on the internet, and by my own estimations, I've not produced anything particularly unsavoury. The problem is that 'my own estimations' will need to be de-prioritised, focusing more on how others receive me, if only to give me an easier ride as a young teacher.

Teachers have traditionally been seen as the flagbearers of morality, which is quite contentious for those who, for whatever reason, fall outside the bounds of convention. This could be expressed through religion, sexuality or subculture, for example, but could also relate to more stylistic aspects of selfhood, like whether you have tattoos, how you wear your clothes and so on. A tattoo is not revolutionary, but from my experience at least, it is 'unteacherly'. We live in a society that is far more pluralistic and individualistic than the teaching population represents, largly because it is felt - at an almost taken-for-granted level - that teachers are meant to behave in a particular set of ways. These expectations include professionalism, but move beyond that into personal lives outside the school.

The prospect of soon being a teacher got me feeling self-conscious about what I had written and my considerable cyber footprint. For one thing, I am going to be changing the name of this blog very soon in order to remove my name from the content. Nothing I've written is unsavoury but it is a matter of whom I am comfortable seeing my thoughts.

My original intention for this blog was to publicise it widely, but I decided against this in favour of making it a personalised talking shop, with self-referential comments that most people reading this - friends and acquaintances and their friends and acquiantances - might understand or at least appreciate.

I stand by the points I have made about children drinking alcohol and the need to mobilise against homophobia, but these comments were written in the context of an anticipated liberal thought-sharing environment. Not to say that the school communities won't echo these values, but simply, I wouldn't want to feel that I was obliged to defend these views as though I was a spokesperson for a nihilistic ethics or an egalitarian worldview. I will surely be expressing these values, but I wouldn't want to feel obliged to do so, as a result of my cyber footprint being understood as statements of my intentions, as declarations of my politics or as battlecries for justice.

I've got some pretty good stuff in my cyber footprint. Volunteering awards and creative writing, published articles and charity websites. Lovely me. But somewhere in the depths of the internet, I know there is a website I made about my love for the muppets when I was about 11. There was a cringey sports website we made for our basketball team. There are really bad instances of poetry. There are grammatical mistakes which now shame me. There are ill-thought out view points. There are hyperbolic responses formed from the ash of the heat of the moment.

The problem I am facing pertains to how this cyber footprint relates to me. Should it be understood as my constituent parts? Or is it more like an archive, its merits understood within its context? If the cyber footprint is to be inspected by future employers, should I be wanting to trim off all my more embarassing and retrospectively regrettable contributions to the internet, in order to appease some imagined other who will have certain expectations of me, or else should I attempt to maintain some integrity by keeping it all there?

It's difficult.

Judith Butler's 'Performative Gender'

2011-05-22T09:51:00.001-07:00

Image - Angela (Head) by Catherine Opie, 1992

There is a spectre haunting Cambridge - the spectre of Butlerian performativity. What this statement lacks in fluidity it makes up for in verity, as the bacterial spread of this particular theory continues to gain momentum (here I am thinking of good bacteria, like Yakult). Over the last few weeks, I've heard of more and more people trying to get to grips with Judy B in order to apply her to their various disciplines - History of Art, English Literature, Drama, Sociology, Politics, Queer Theory and Anthropology. I'm no expert on theory but I'm eager to fan the flames of this subversive zeitgeist, by introducing the idea of performative gender and its cultural inscription through what Butler calls the heterosexual matrix.

You have two options here, you can continue to read my wanky but well-intentioned blogpost or you can follow this handy link to one of Butler's particularly insightful journal articles on JSTOR Performative Acts and Gender Construction: An Essay in Phenemonology and Feminist Theory (1988). If you're filthy keen, do both.

Butler challenges the notion of identity as a static category into which an individual places his or her self, or as a category imposed onto individuals. Life experiences, and the different identifications one will hold through their life, cannot be captured by the boundaries of 'identity'. The notion of subjectivity that Butler develops draws upon semiotics and sees gender as a floating signifier - a construct into which different meanings can be injected - because there is no 'essence' of gender within individuals, nor is gender something towards which one works. For Butler, 'gender' is a performative accomplishment brought about through the 'stylized repetition of acts'. So, gender, as an illusion, is created by the performance of certain acts which are deemed to be gendered.

This can be made more easy to understand by running with Butler's performative metaphor (one which is often invoked in sociology, known as 'the dramaturgical analogy'). The actor David Tennant received great praise for his performance as Hamlet on stage and screen - his was an accomplished performance, one which was validated by many of the critics and one in which he was able to capture something of the character of Hamlet. But Tennant does not have an 'Inner Hamlet' that he was expressing; the coherence of his Hamlet derives from the skill and craft of his performance. Tennant, after all, made a very strong Dr Who - his solid performance as Hamlet did not inhibit him in this. As an actor, he was able to perform numerous dramatic characters with his competence - he may have even 'brought his characters to life', but as vivid as indecisive Hamlet is, and as passionate his Dr Who, the happenings at Elsinore and the travels of the Tardis are fiction. Likewise with gender. For Butler, our 'gender identities' are characters that are made to seem real through the skill and frequency of our performances. To give the example of masculinities, certain of the dramatis personae are the main characters on the stage of gender - the macho, the heroic, the muscular, the leader, the powerful - whereas certain other characters are marginal - the passive, the sensitive, the thoughtful, the slender, the effeminate.

A strong performance of gender is able to convince the 'audience' that the 'character' being enacted is real - that it is not a performance but a reality. It is an illusory fiction, and at the intersection of gender performance and gender/power relations, certain characters become more desirable to enact. It takes artistic ability to be a strong Laertes, but when the audience looks through the programme, they want to know who is playing Hamlet.

Next up is the notion of the 'heterosexual matrix' through which one's subject position is rendered coherent if it consists of "a stable sex expressed through a stable gender... that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality‟ (Butler, 1990: 206). This is the idea of normative or compulsory heterosexuality, derived from Adrienne Rich. Deviations from heternormativity, which encompasses not only heterosexuality but normative gender performances and a normative sex, cause consternation, discipline and Othering. To be recognised as a normative individual requires a strict dichotomisation between male and female (when the distinction is not so clear cut for those who are intersex), it requires that the gender performed matches the sexed body (so a biological male acts masculine, a biological female acts feminine). Finally, the individual needs to desire the opposite sex. The straight bloke and the straight lass.

The 'policing of the matrix' can be found in how the three matrices (sex, gender, sexuality) are made to interact. I can give the example of pink socks as an example, referring here not to the sexual accident but the actual literal socks which are pink. In our society, pink is made to express femininity (female gender). You see this clearly enough in card shops and clothes shops (especially for children). What then of the boy who wears pink socks. What possible impact could come about from it? Having enjoyed doing this little experiment myself once before, I can report that I have worn pink socks one day with the kids in one of the schools I have worked in, and their reaction was far greater than if I had just made another fashion blunder. 'Are you gay?' was one of the first things asked. The subversive gender performance (wearing the colours of the 'other side') implies subversive sexuality. Now, I might be a bad example here, but a straight is just as able to wear pink socks without it nudging them into homosexuality. Gender performances are seen to express sexualities - in some of my own research, it was explained to me by 10 and 11 year old boys that 'wearing skinny jeans makes you feel kinda gay' and that if you zip up your jacket to the top, 'it means you like the bum'. It's a strange logic, but one that functions by its disguise within the model of the heterosexual matrix.

Bounce

2011-05-16T14:39:00.000-07:00

I thought the picture fitted my blog theme. It did.

Dear Jonathan, I Don't Think I Can Help You

2011-05-11T16:35:00.000-07:00

To those fellow students who now share lectures with me, it will come as no great surprise that I am in the habit of emailing sociologists for the purposes of chit-chat. This is no less geeky than being the kid who puts an apple on his teacher's desk on a morning (I didn't ever do that).

Out of a desire to avoid the abomination that is criminology, I started looking through my saved emails on my old account, and as well as finding a link to a porn site sent to me by a fellow thirteen year old way back in lower school, I also found this gem from 2007.

I quickly got besotted with conducting sociological research, but my knowledge of the social norms of academia had not yet developed that sense of shame I now have. So, thinking about what to do for my coursework, I emailed the legendary sociologist Howard S Becker and the short exchange is quoted here verbatim, in all its cringey but somehow quite sweet glory. Note the misuse of postmodern and the alarming (female naturally).

I like his patience with my blatant lack of knowledge about anything I'm talking about.

Dear Mr Becker

I am soon embarking on an Interactionist study for my A-Levels, most likely relating to labelling theory and the concept of the 'ideal pupil' and how this relates to social class. With the much documented 'social changes' in British politics and the supposedly more equal education system, would you say the concept of an ideal pupil has changed at all? Moreso, now I feel that as the profession of particularly primary education is attracted many W/C (female naturally) graduates, the social class of teacher must greatly impact the 'ideal pupilism'.

It is irrefutable that labelling still exists; since i first began volunteering in a primary school to complement my studies, I have seen amazingly blatant examples of your theory practically each day. What would you say constitutes the ideal pupil of postmodern Britain?

I appreciate I am unlikely to gain a reply to this due to your status and workload, but thank you for your your time regardless.

Many Thanks
Jonathan Walker
-------

Dear Jonathan:

I don't think I can help you. The question you ask is what is called in the trade an empirical question, which is to say someone would have to do the actual research to see what the answer is, you can't get to an answer by just thinking about it and having opinions. If you want to know the answer to that, the best thing to do would be to ask some British school teachers, since it is their ideas that you want to know about. I know this sounds simple minded, but that's the way science is, you know, it's mostly hard work of gathering data, finding out what is actually going on.

I wish you luck with your project.

Sincerely,

Howie Becker

--

Howard S. Becker
884 Lombard St.
San Francisco, CA 94133

Doing a Sociology Dissertation

2011-05-11T07:20:00.000-07:00

May this blogpost act as 'closure' on the dissertation that has been the topic of hundreds of bland Facebook status updates for the last ten months.

I intend for this post to be something helpful for those about to embark on a dissertation in sociology, though I am aware that it is likely to turn into a paean to the act of research, so might not be totally constructive.

I handed in my dissertation this morning; it was a mixed-qualitative methods project exploring how boys negotiate and perform masculine subjectivities within the primary school. It was a case study, based in one Year 6 class in an ordinary mixed state school; the class contained 30 children and my study focused on the social world of the 15 boys. Using an interpretative methodology, themes of analysis were grounded in the themes and topics emerging from observing and talking to the boys - the research used narrative description observations, two focus group sessions for each child, and concluded with individual interviews with seven of the boys. I would liked to have been able to conduct interviews with all fifteen, but this was unviable within the scope of the undergraduate dissertation time frame.

That is the background, and for the rest of this post, I'll just say a little about what I enjoyed about it and why I think you should do it, and how you can get the most out of it. I'm not an expert in any sense of the word, and much of my knowledge of research comes solely from preparing for and conducting this paper, but irrespective of what result the dissertation receives, I feel it was a really worthwhile venture, and one I enjoyed doing.

Here are the tips.

1 - INTERESTING TOPIC - Quite obvious really, but it should be emphasised that you should only conduct a dissertation on something that you are interested in. You will find yourself spend the best part of a year working at this one project, so it needs to be something that can keep you engaged. It is good though, to enter with an open mind, since good research does need to steer clear of unidentified biases. Don't enter research attempting to prove something; try and explore an area.

2 - START EARLY - Set yourself a realistic timeframe, and then bring every part of it forward two weeks. Having conducted a great deal of my literature review throughout the summer, once I had identified a general topic area, I was able to get back to Uni for the new academic year with lots of ideas about what I wanted to do, and had a headstart that benefited me throughout the entire rest of the project.

3 - EXPERIMENT - Try all different things out when you are thinking of methods - be creative and innovative. I tried doing a class exercise in which all the children had to write a 'diary' of what happened in the playground, so I could compare and contrast my interpretations (through observation) with theirs. I didn't use any of their work in my eventual write-up, but it helped me out with clearing my thoughts.

4 - WORK TO YOUR STRENGTHS - Account for yourself within your research. Sociology has moved beyond the idea that it needs to follow a scientific method, which is itself flawed. Obviously, this is open to dispute and sociology is not a paradigmatic discipline, but I really believe that for projects which are seeking to study individuals, their social world and the meanings they give to it, qualitative research is the best option, as it allows you to dig deep into interactions. You cannot rule yourself out of qualitative research - as an observer or interviewer, you personality, behaviours, characteristics, confidence and even your style of dress will all influence the flow of the research. You can't help this, and shouldn't wish to. Instead, account for yourself. At every stage, as well as a more formal or structured research diary, keep a personal one, tracking your feelings abut the project. My field notes were littered with phrases like 'started to feel exhausted and fell into a tired lull at about quarter past' and 'this boy is really annoying'. Sociologists are humans too and it's silly to try and dispute that - go with it. Play to your strengths. If you never interact with children, your ability to develop a rapport and trust with them is going to be restricted, limiting the aims of your research. If you would struggle to have a long conversation with a friend without zoning out, what makes you think you will be any different talking to any of your respondents. Again, choosing a topic that engages you helps out.

5 - NOTEPAD - When you have collected all your research you will be faced with the monumental task of sorting through all of the data you have collected. For me, this was days and days of observation notes, recordings of 9 focus groups, each lasting around one hour, and recordings of seven interviews, ranging from 40 minutes to 2 hours in length. Interviews were transcribed in full and focus groups were selectively transcribed. By this point, ideas and analysis will start to form in your head and you will be getting ideas about what to focus on. Record every single idea. If it is crap, you can ignore it. If it is good, you don't want to waste it.

6 - TRANSCRIBING - To begin with, it can be genuinely enjoyable, especially once it becomes almost automatic - I got to a stage at which I could just switch off and type. That said, it gets to be a massive pain in the arse when you end up with about 20 hours to transcribe, each hour taking roughly 4 hours to transcribe. Set aside a lot of time for it, but don't exhaust yourself. I found that having the recording on my iPod helped keep the interviews fresh, as you could listen back to them easily and transcribe away from a grim computer desk.

7 - WRITE-UP - Just write. By the time you come to doing a write-up, you are likely to invested a lot of intellectual and emotional energy into the work, regardless of the topic, and getting pen to paper can be really difficult. Having gone through and transcribed the interviews, I recognised how open some of the boys had been with what we discussed and in some way, that heightened the pressure, as I didn't want their insights to be in vain. I wanted to justify our conversations with a worthwhile piece of research, and perfectionism can be quite crippling. I started my write-up with a really leisurely meandering pace, and came to regret it when I was two weeks from the hand-in date, with only sketchy drafts to show for it. My advice is to write the areas of the dissertation onto post-it notes, re-jig them so the different parts flow well into each other, and get something written down on each section, even if it isn't ever goign to be the style or quality for submission. Once you have the basic frame of the dissertation established, it is far easier to ameliorate and embellish it with detail, extracts and links to theory.

8 - COMMIT TO IT - Final bit of advice in what is arguably my most boring ever blog post; commit to it. The more you invest in the dissertation, the more you are likely to get out of it but also the more likely it is to take it out on you. The dissertation is an unhealthy but normalised obsession and you should run with it. When it comes nearer to the hand-in date, you might find yourself slaving at the same document, day and night, as I did, but this is made tolerable if you have enough energy invested in it to justify the time spent doing it.

Doing the dissertation has taken up a disproportionate amount of my time and energy this entire year but I have no regrets whatsoever. I have learnt more, in terms of theory as well as research practice, from doing a sociology dissertation than I have in all three of my other papers. Isolate a good topic, choose methods that suit your personality, read up on research conduct and be creative with theories - work obsessively at it and by the time you hand it in, no matter what grade you get (though it should be a good one!), it is worthwhile.

Modern Architecture in Cambridge in the 1940s

2011-05-05T06:23:00.001-07:00

Second installment then, following on from yesterday's bit about Modern Cambridge - today, we look at what the writer makes of the 20th century architecture and spaces of a rapidly changing Cambridge.

The University Library
Walking due west from Market Hill, across King's Parade, down Senate House Passage, through Clare, over the bridge, along the avenue and on to the other side of the Backs Road, we enter the presence of the most controversial building Cambridge has had for generations: the New University Library.

To begin with, it has administered a violent shock to the Cambridge centre of gravity. Hitherto, that has traditionally been in the group formed by the Old Library, the Senate House, King's Chapel and the University Church of St Mary. The University Library is by its nature the cathedral of intellectual life, and the old site was the physical as well as the intellectual centre. The new site implies a new focal point across the river and widely separated from the rest of the university. That in itself was something of a disturbance, but the actual buildings are even more disturbing, for they have changed the whole balance of the panorama.

The main cause of trouble is the tower. Not only is it an unbeautiful object in itselcf, but there is no means general agreement on the necessity of a tower at all. With the tower placed at one end of the facade the trouble would be lessened, and with the tower left out altogether it would be lessened even more. But there would still remain the long narrow windows, running up from ground to cornice... they give the effect of a warehouse. In a sense, perhaps, a library is a kind of warehouse. But in a University Library, some observance of tradition and some reference to the Humanities might not be altogether out of place.

The interior looks, and doubtless was, very costly.

Cambridge has not taken kindly to its New Library and it is difficult to imagine future generations regarding it with affection. Still, taste performs its curious revolutions, which generally take about a century. Caius is due to be much admired by the avant-gardists of some twenty of thirty years hence, and perhaps the library will come into its own around the year 2020. By then, of course, some far worse things will have been put up.

Downing Site and New Museums Site
Its great characteristic is opulent heaviness, with an extraordinary mixture of Edwardian vulgarity and undigested learning... This extraordinarily depressing area is one of the most intense concentrations of scientific knowledge in England...Nobody would imagine, if he did not already know, that these meaningless shapes are really laboratories and museums which draw students and scholars from over the whole world. There are however, one or two of these institutions which do not actually hurt the critical spectator.

'Modern Cambridge' in the 1940s

2011-05-04T02:24:00.000-07:00

I bought a book from Cambridge market yesterday, embracing my graduands nostalgia pre-emptively, called 'Cambridge', written by John Steegman in 1940. When Steegman died, he bequeathed his life's papers - unpublished articles, letters, diaries and all - to King's College, but his Cambridge book is one which did get published. Flicking through it, it seemed pretty interesting but one part jumped out at me - Modern Cambridge. This part contains writings about Modern Cambridge c. 1940, Modern Architecture and, best of all, some predictions about the future of Cambridge. Here are some good extracts for us all to ponder over - and ask, what has changed and what hasn't. I'm going to serialise them, so I am. Today, we have Modern Cambridge (1940s). Next, Modern Archtecture (1940s). And finally, 'The Future of Cambrdige (1940s).

I've categorised them for you.

For those who went to Comprehensives
But there are other qualities about Cambridge that make it not the most suitable place in the world for the son of humble parents. Class-distinction is nowadays a thing "gentlemen don't discuss in public," but it exists and will survive in England longer than elsewhere in Europe. It is strong at Cambridge, as at Oxford, nowadays chiefly because it is a rather new phenomenon. It used not to exist because the universities had long since ceased to exist for poor scholars and had been gradually taken over by the priveleged class. As privelege has tended to disappear in the last two or three generations, attempts are constantly being made to open the universities to a wider world. The fact, however, remains that they do still exist primarily for people of a certain social rank, of a certain financial standing, or a certain standard of pre-University education, and with a certain domestic and family background. What all these "certain" standards are cannot be defined, but every one really knows what they imply.
The poor man from the elementary school really does not very much out of Cambridge. He is not likely to make many friends and will almost certainly remain a fish out of water. He would be much wiser to go to one of the newer universities where he would feel less discontented with his lot. Discouraging though it may be for social reformers, the man from the elementary school is unquestionably excluded from everything that makes Cambridge worthwhile. For him, Cambridge is not worthwhile.

For thespians
The A.D.C. corresponds to the O.U.D.S. of Oxford, but does not have to engage professional actresses, being content to rely on the wealth of talent to be found among the don's widows, wives and daughters.

For CULC and CUCA
Athletics and politics are indulged in by most young men at both the universities. The extreme cultivation of both activities is indulged in by minorities, which are always noisy and which, suffering from the arrested development which is the heritage of English youth, bring with them the habits and cliches of the school playing-field and debating-society... Undergraduate politics are not a matter of great importance or interest, and it is sheer nonsense to regard the Union debates as being barometers of opinion.

For Lefties
All young men tend to the left in politics if they are gifted with eloquence, and to the right if they are not.

For finalists
The aim of Cambridge teaching is not to show young men a quick route to success and not primarily to train them for a specfic type of job... The avowed careerist will probably find Cambridge unsympathetic to his ambitions, and the impatient man had better cut out the place altogether and go straight to a training school or a business-house.

For those MPs calling for the scrapping of the Oxbridge MA
What is Cambridge for? Not primarily to give a man the degree of B.A., as he can get that at London or Bristol and will have to work harder for it probably; not, certainly, to enable him to proceed to M.A., since that, happily, can be done by simply paying a fee instead of having to sweat for two years over a thesis. This is one of the few pieces of privelege which is left to us, and only a prig would sanctimoniously deplore that a Cambridge M.A. which is bought has a far greater prestige than a London one, which is worked for.

For us all
The parent who sends him son up to Cambridge must be quite clear about the meaning of "education"; he must realise that in these days it is something of a luxury, since one of the things it does not mean is "to train for a specific job or occupation." Among the things it does mean are "to form habits, manners, mental and physical aptitudes"; "systematic instruction in preparation for the work of life" and "the culture or development of powers and the formation of character."

'Interjections' - My First Publication

2011-04-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

Announcement, I am going to have my first book published. Now, we'll not be hasty here - as yet, I have no publisher and only I know anything of its existence - but rest assured, the book will happen.

'Interjections' will be a collection of micro-essays each with a common goal - to encourage you to think differently about the taken-for-granted social world around us. There is no revolutionary agenda here and no suggestions are made for how to bring about changes, where needed. The idea of interjections is that they appear spontaneously in the taken-for-granted flow of life, and in a short utterance, cause you to question the way things are, things which might not have registered as existing.

The essays are tiny problematisations and uneasy questions that lead not to a conclusion, nor to an answer, but to further questions.

I can't be publishing them all on this blog, or else I'd have nothing unique to put into the book, but to give a taster, I have included one interjection below.

Please spread this page like wildfire, especially to any friends you have who work in publishing.

---

Why shouldn't children drink alcohol?

If an 11 year old boy, standing outside the corner shop, implores you to buy him alcohol, the impulse would most often be to refuse. This refusal might not rest only on a sense of personal discomfort with the situation, or with the illegality of it, but on the commonsense logic that an 11 year old should not be drinking alcohol.

The arguments for why a child should not drink alcohol invoke all the arguments on why adults should not drink alcohol, but also all of the reasons why an adult should drink. So not only is it prohibited for children because, like for adults, it is likely to make them ill – short term through drunkenness, and long term through liver damage – and make them act dangerously, irresponsibly and aggressively, not only this, but a child should not need to drink alcohol to steady his nerves (adults might), a child should not need to drink to socialise (adults might) and a child should not need to drink to escape the base sorrow of his situation.

The conditions which justify alcohol – the lack of confidence, the feelings of depression, the nihilism and the need to help yourself ‘let go’ – are not conditions which you inherit on your 18th birthday. Ever more, the world of teenagers becomes moulded and merged on an adulthood which is directionless, tired and resigned.

Extra prohibitions against children drinking alcohol emphasise something about alcohol that we seldom admit to when we are thinking of adults drinking – alcohol is an admission of defeat. This is most clearly visible in those who are wounded by existence – those who are homeless, drug addicts and alcoholics, the solitary widow, the dispossessed and those deprived of liberty. Less apparent, but nonetheless a reality, is the pessimism inherent in the social drinking of the festive family gathering, in which individuals can enjoy/endure the company of their supposed nearest and dearest only by sedating themselves. Meeting for a social drink after work is but one small normalised fix of defeat. As a substance whose function is effectively as a numbing agent, and one which slows time, incapacitates the conscience and destabilises self-restraint, every swig concedes failure. From the solitary silent rage of the dictator’s drinks cabinet, the fatigue of the worker’s morning vodka and the rituals of bread and wine to the wanderer’s cheap cider and the victim’s attempt to forget.

Why refuse the 11 year old?

Is he immune from the spoils of existence? Is he insulated already against the cold truths? What, you will foist drink on those you love and call it a gift, without guilt. You accept the numbing agent as a present without feeling offended. Why not this anonymous young stranger?

We know that the history of humanity has been one of servitude and exploitation for the majority of those born here. Somebody keeps you in check, something denies you the full use of your agency – your faith, your master, your owner, your employer, your lawmaker, your neighbours, your parents, your wife, your daughter, your husband, you bank, your qualifications, your gender, your love, your ego, your poverty, your desire, your biology…

For millennia we suffer. Our parents did. And theirs and theirs and theirs. Our children will suffer. And theirs. And theirs. And theirs.

Is not society just the culmination of mankind’s long history of denying, glossing over or collectively ignoring the grey futility of it all? Eventually, a corpse is just a corpse, whether it once carried the automations of a master or a servant, a prophet or a sinner, a knight or a knave, producer or consumer, millionaire or a beggar. Social structures crumble into the soil.

Isn't the best gift that one could give to anyone the ability to numb oneself to the reality of sobriety and the sobriety of reality?

We tend to think not. Not for the little ones. Not for the lambs.

Generation after generation rests its hopes on those which will succeed it – the glitter of civilizations’ hopes rest always on the slim shoulders of the youth. We hope things can be different. We hope things can be better. We hope for the eternal trend to be bucked.

If we concede that the children are as hopeless as we are, we could go on no more.

A Personal Press Release

2011-04-23T13:07:00.000-07:00

23.4.2011

Absolute inertia has well and truly set in and I have currently been sat at my desk for five and a half hours and have absolutely nothing to show for it. Internal consensus is starting to make clear that I am almost disarmingly workshy and my inability to structure my time is becoming painfully apparent. The dissertation draft is due in in three days, meaning much work needs be done - this fact stands in brazen opposition to my mental state, which is veering sporadically between pining desperately for emotional stimulation - seeking respite in the horrible sage of the chimp eating a lady's face on Youtube - and satisfying physiological needs my stuffing my head with Fox's Jam 'n [sic] Cream.

For one of my papers, in which I will be examined in just under 5 weeks. I have attended only seven lectures and read precisely nothing. For another, I have developed a raging indifference to the discipline itself, best expressed by the other half of my brain here. For the final paper, Sociology of Education, I fucking love it but have not given it any thought for about two months.

To rapidly taxonomise everything else in my life, the awareness that I will be teaching my own class in under half a year is as exciting as it is surreal and frightening. Graduation will be a jolly old hoot. And to end on a cheery note, if I fail to get a 2.1, I actually fear for myself.

Until next time.

Unclassifiable Wanking Behaviours

2011-04-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

Picture the scene. Cambridge is currently in the middle of a heatwave and on Parker's Piece, the population is making full use of the green space. The place is heaving. Families have came along and three generations are playing frisbee together. Couple laze about together. Solitary individuals sleep or read. Kids run about playing games. But there is an anomaly. An anomic anomaly.

As a friend and I were sitting on the grass, a young man walked over - probably about my age - and he was wearing trainers, a t-shirt and some pretty short shorts. He was in our direct eye-line, so was pretty noticable to begin with. I mentioned to my friend that - yes - he has both his hands down his boxers. He was part of a group of around 7 or 8 men, ranging in age from him to probably about 30 - between them all, they were kicking a football about.

Being of the sociological inclination, my friend and I pounced on this and began to question it. I thought that maybe he was patting his genitals in a sort of 'comfort touching' way because he felt uncomfortable being around all these older masculinties. She thought there was something slightly homosexual about it. Both were pretty valid.

But he confounded these expectations with the rhythmical pumping of his right hand - slow at first, but gradually increasing in speed. My friend and I had nothing in our collaborative experience to account for this. Bright sunny day, public place, about 5pm - he's pumping fist.

There was more.

The football floated over to him and he ran to collect it and, in his haste to do so, his junk fell out of the now-unbuttoned front of his shorts.

"It's out Taz, his cock is out now!", I said to her, far too audibly. He span round, having kicked the ball and yes, to confirm, he had breached. Noticing, he just tucked himself back in and shouted over "It happen sometimes". So he had heard my exclamation but this was not enough to curb his enthusiasm and within a minute or so, he was once again shaking coconuts from the veiny love tree.

My friend and I spend an inordinate amount of our time people-watching and people-analysing, since we are among a small minority of students who can categorise that activity as being vaguely like revision. Usually, we have some analytic framework which we can apply to help explain what prompts an individual to behave in one way rather than another. Usually, from the way someone stands or from something in their accent, you can pick up some little hint about their background, some glimmer of experience which might help explain them.

Not this guy. This was more than the mildly well-known phenomena of the 'chav with hands down pants' as discussed here by our friends over at Scally Central. This wasn't some sort of laid-back masculine posturing and it wasn't directed for an audience. Admittedly, he walked over to a group of girls and asked for a cigarette, withdrawing one sweaty mitt only to prise the fag from her hand, but he also approached an Asian family with his hands plunged down there.

It was the pumping. Why would that be a desirable thing to do on the middle of Parker's Piece. He wasn't really that exhibitionistic about it - he wasn't looking for a reaction. He didn't seem to be doing it just for the pleasure.

There was some sort of code in his fist, but we weren't privy to it. Confused, we left the field and I cycled home.

Cameron, Immigration and Communities

2011-04-14T06:28:00.001-07:00

If I was to launch a full critique of the content of David Cameron's speech, as I would like to, I would be let down by my lack of knowledge on economics and statistics, so instead I'm going to isolate one part of it and leave those bits to those more capable.

Cameron mentions that people are getting sick of seeing those who do the right thing get punished and the wrong thing get rewarded - and what a reward it is for the people of the Daily Mail persuasion who are being so warmly appeased for that toxic combination of their xenophobia and their high likelihood of voting. As elections loom, what better time to blow on the ethnic embers with talk of a racial restoration?

The PM blames the previous Labour government for closing down the debate on immigration and ignoring people's fears - there is an element of truth in this.

I agree with Cameron that working-class people feel disillusioned with mainstream politics and that they don't feel listened to - I am presuming he means working class people, since the Latvians aren't coming over in droves to become accountants and teachers, but to take up the lowest-paid work with the most unsociable working hours. The working class have every reason to feel alienated and overlooked - they are overlooked and have been since 1979. Not only that, but the public services that many rely on are being cut, benefits cuts mean that poverty is rocketing again - in these conditions, what more can Cameron expect?

Is it cynical of me to question whether Cameron is only opening up the immigration/race debate again to detract attention from the more pressing issue of, you know, the slaughtering of the welfare state, the decline in living conditions and the lack of jobs that require few qualifications?

The focus on nationality and ethnicity tidily displaces that waking dragon of social class. "Yes, you'll have less money to live on, but at least there'll be less Pakis about."

Cameron says that
"I want us to starve extremist parties of the oxygen of public anxiety they thrive on and extinguish them once and for all."

They want all that public anxiety for themselves. It is jealousy, not equality, that has turned the Tories against the BNP in this situation.

They are not addressing the reasons for this anxiety, which lie in the economic patterns which have disproportionately affected the poorest in society. Certainly, chances needed to be made to move with the times but a good society would at least attempt to put something else in place for those who had lost their jobs.

Notably, racial tensions in communities aren't popping up in multicultural areas of affluence - so many problems which are dealt with as racial issues or, more euphemistically, cultural issues, all boil down into one group of poor people battling against other poor people.

So what is the destination of this new tough stance? Cameron merely flicks the vision of class-poverty into monochrome. The poor will still be poor, but at least they'll be white.

'The Gayest Kid Ever' - Gender, Sexualities and School

2011-04-08T13:44:00.001-07:00

When in primary schools, I've quite often heard it said that a child is really gay. More recently, it was said that one boy is the Gayest Kid in the World. When a teacher says something like this, I usually doubt it carries any malicious intent and it is rarely said in an overtly condemnatory manner, but it remains a fixed character judgement and one which is harmful.

It is a textbook example of the concepts of the heterosexual matrix and normative heterosexuality in action.

The heterosexual matrix is the lens through which individuals in society make sense of the world through presupposing a coherent identity - eg male (sex), masculine (gender) and attracted to women (sexuality). By thinking through the heterosexual matrix, any deviation from the norm is one category affects how people conceive of the others. For example, an individual with an indeterminate biological sex becomes suspected of having a deviant gender, or an abnormal sexuality - see the sexual fetishisation of Thai 'ladyboys'.

Normative heterosexuality works closely with the heterosexual matrix, and provides a hegemonic validation for certain sexual and gender identities - making some identities normal and some abnormal. The processes of normative heterosexuality may be quite difficult to identify; this is exactly why they are so potent. In the establishment of a sense that certain genders are abnormal or unnatural or immoral or ungodly, you see the deployment of different discursive paradigms - in turn psychiatric, biological/eugenicist, ethical or delusional - which seek to present heterosexuality as the norm.

Back to gay kids. The first hurdle is the entrenched presumption, ingrained in Western culture since Rousseau, of childhood innocence. The willful (willed?) ignorance of child sexuality is something which has been problematised by Foucault in theory, and by the research of Emma Renold, among others, in educational research. The lengths to which schools and adults go to prevent displays of child sexuality stand in hypocritical contradiction to the denial of its existence - why strain to prevent the manifestations something which doesn't exist?

Children have sexualities and sexual cultures - most of you need only think back to when you were 9,10,11 to know this - but this isn't the topic here.

When the teachers say that a certain child is - as I have recently heard from a teacher - 'the gayest kid ever', they are quite clearly not talking of sexualities whatsoever. They were not implying anything about the sexual practices of the particular 7 year old boy - instead, the teacher makes the potent conflation of sex/gender/sexuality.

In my time in schools, I have not once heard a teacher refer to any of her young female pupils as a big lesbian, certainly not the biggest lesbian ever. In only a handful of schools can I recall girls policing other girls so explicitly, using terminology of female homosexuality. It appears to be a phenomenon curiously weighted against male children that they must prove their straight sexuality, rather than have it presumed or rendered invisible, as with girls. The Gayest Kid Ever's gendered identity is only problematic because of his biological sex, and because of the 'asymmetry' between the two. Male (sex) children should act like boys (gender); sexuality is called into question for those who don't.

In terms of gender identity, the school and the playground are dangerous places for a boy in the process of constructing his sense of self, his subjectivity, in the situated context of the different masculine identities available to him. Most boys will play the game of masculinity. They will go out into the playground or sports field every lunchtime without fail for an hour of football: they might not be in the mood for it, it might have been played unfairly for years, they might want to do something else, they might (shock horror) dislike football, but most will still play. Not the Gayest Kid in the World though. Having seen the procession of injured peers pass by him, and witnessing the bullying and fights, he decides he'd rather have something else as a hobby. But if football is a site for the construction of masculinity, to be playing outside the touchlines positions the Gayest Kid in the World alongside the other excluded people - the girls, the younger kids, the women, the disabled and the bullied.

When a teacher says that a child is the Gayest Kid in the World, what I think they are trying to do is somehow 'apologize' for the gender of the child - the hushed-tones way in which the 'information' about these children is given to me, as an outsider, almost seems like I am being given a disclaimer. There isn't usually any overt malice, but the child is nonetheless barricaded into this paradoxical master status. The atypical gender performance of a 7 year old boy - be it through something as stereotypical as being 'overdramatic' or things like disliking football or being tactile - calls into question their sexuality (which is thought not to exist).

Nobody benefits from this. From being told about his 'gayness' I know nothing more about the child, other than that the teachers perceive him to be different enough from the rest of the boys that he warrants his own label. As male children (sex) who perform their gender differently by not behaving like the other boys (gender) are gradually pushed to the side and silenced, all that remains to be seen is a narrow vision of boys doing their gender 'properly'. These boys get into fights, argue, don't voice their frustrations except in outburst and the same teacher who would label the Gayest Kid in the World would explain away these conflicts with "Boys will be boys".

So long as teachers are complicit in constructing the one-sided battle between Real Boys and the Gay Kids, boys will be boys, but these boys might not want to be boys in this way. So long as schools perpetuate the heterosexual matrix, gender violence will be inflicted on their children.

Failed Chat and Marxian Alienation

2011-04-03T09:49:00.000-07:00

Like most of our species, I find myself frequently in situations that, for a whole range of reasons, present themselves as awkward. So much can go wrong in an interaction between two people - so many tiny cues, miscommunications, skewed gestures, false interpretations - that sometimes you find yourself short circuiting. Your wit is not to be found, you struggle to make eye contact, you garble your words, you feel acutely stupid.

I experience this quite a lot recently. Contrary to what some may believe, I am usually fiercely socially adept and my chat is usually shit-hot; sometimes I just get into the perversely playful mood where the spinning of a web of shiftiness seems desirable. But not recently. Recently, I have found myself completely stumped and caught off-kilter.

A parent of a child I have worked with was sat in his front garden as I walked by, and he shouted over to me, perfectly normally "Alright, how's it going?!". Offguard, my interactional autopilot flicked into action, retorting "I'm off to bed!". It was 6pm, yesterday. Tied into my pointless and obvious lie, he replied that he'd 'already been there today' and we both laughed hollowly at each other's stagnant mendacity.

In the school, the kids asked me what I'd be doing over the Easter holidays. Honestly, I knwe I'd be doing little more than my dissertation, but to the kind enquiring child, I replied that I was going to stuff my face with chocolate and cake until I vomit. Laughter ensues at silly Mr Walker and his greedy false persona, despite his slim, if distinctly un-maintained, body. On that occasion I was able to withdraw a Bakewell Tart from my coat pocket, which was an apposite prop, but to extend this to categorise my entire holiday was, again, a pointless lie.

Thinking back to university, now to a situation that was intentionally transgressive of Grice's Maxims, my college wife one afternoon asked me what I was going to do that evening. Famously in the corridor folklore, I replied that I was going to wank into my hand and moisturise my back with it. Needless to say (I should hope), another unsolicited unnecessary lie.

Why does this happen?

Marx's 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts detail the young Marx's theory of alienation - within these pages lies the explanation for why the pleasantries of mediocre conversation occasionally elicit from me a poetic regalement about my carnal habits and loin spoils.

The result of alienation is that the human being (the laborer) does not feel himself to be free except in his animal functions: eating, drinking, and reproducing, at his best in his dwelling or in his clothing, etc., and in his human functions he is no more than an animal.

I would not go so far as to say that I am an archetype of alienated labour; not at all. As my CamCors testifies, labour is low on my agenda. Rather, behind the unctuous performances of selfhood, my volitions and wants are those not of the thinking rational man but of feral vermin as it scurries between its survival tasks.

Day to day interactions with near-strangers or those for whom the face is familiar but little else bring out this inner animal in me. My lack of freedom is manifested in my failed banter, which presents itself as an audible Rorshadt test - my alienated and wounded self whispering its name beneath my mumbled declarations about my consumptive, nocturnal, defecatory and reproductive actions.

Eating, drinking, and reproducing, etc., are real human functions. However, in the abstraction which draws them out of the circle of other human activities and makes them the sole activity to be sought after, they are animal.

Here is the saddest part. I like to think of myself as a heaving mass of ideas and potential, a healthy plant in fertile soil, a creative and innovative social agent. My autopilot mode throws me into sensationalising my actions or into subverting expectations - I refer again to my response to my college wife's question.

Is there not some mundane tragedy in the fact that my flights of fancy, in which my imagination goads me on to visualise a situation more exciting than that in reality for the sake of better chat, only extend as far as imagining myself over-satisfying my essential mammalian needs.

No new realities conjured up. No fantastical beasts. No new identities. No positive self-presentation. No self-aggrandising speech. No. Just lathering myself up with my own guck.

Not feeling myself free in my social interactions, all I have to fall back on are tales of my animal functions. Estranged from my labour, from my self, from my species and my species-being, I continue to alienate each casual passer-by.

Doing Starbucks Differently

2011-03-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

It's very easy to make the argument that British society and culture are stultifying and homogenising; talk a walk through your town or city centre and chances are, you will be seeing the same shopfronts as would anybody else walking in their town centres. In terms of cafes, a cursory glance through Doncaster town centre yields Starbucks, Costa and Nero, as does Cambridge. The staff outfits are the same. The tables and chairs are the same. The background music is the same. The drinks are the same.

But the Starbucks experience is different. Starbucks Doncaster and Starbucks Cambridge, despite their aesthetic similarities, each reflect back the characteristics of the micro-cultures and norms of the locations in which they are situated. This irrevocably alters the normative behaviours of Starbucks and, as I found today, subtle differences in expectation alter the ways in which people practice Starbucks.

For me, Starbucks is first and foremost an overpriced, noisy thinking space. The silence of libraries sets off my internal monologues, or even worse my internal singing of Rihanna's 'Unfaithful'. So off I toddle to Starbucks with a backpack full of laptop, books, articles, notepads and my portable foldable lectern (yes, yes, I know).

In the Cambridge Starbucks on Market Square, you can go in for your morning coffee at 8am, safe in the knowledge that it will be packed out with students. People's shoes come off as they settle themselves, mocha in hand, for a cross-legged power-read of Austen, or Bourdieu or whoever. If the music stopped, all you would hear is the scribbling of pen and paper and the whirring of laptops - the soundtrack to a lecture hall. Buying your 8am coffee and croissant justifies your occupation of a table for the rest of the morning. Friends work together in silence, each doing their own work.

I naively entered Doncaster Starbucks today with similar expectations. I skulked around the store in the quest to find plugsockets and was alarmed to find there were only 3. I got a Chai Latte and perched myself at a table, plugged in my laptop, whipped out my two notebooks and placed them on a chair. I would have benefitted from the lectern, but I knew it would cause too much of a fuss. I became aware, as I worked away, that I was receiving quite hostile glares from other customers, as if to ask why I thought I could monopolise a table with my books. People stick around in Starbucks far less in Donk than in Cam; they drink it down and leave.

On Maslow's hierarchy, Doncaster Starbucks satisfies the physiological need, whereas in Cambridge Starbucks it is all about self-actualisation.

Ultimately, this reflects the way in which citizens of each town utilise and interact with their built environment. For the Cambridge students, whose disposable income is boosted either by parents or by bursaries, the town centre isn't just a place full of shops but is the place where they live, learn, sleep, socialise and rest. Thus, in Starbucks as one of the few places,there are a multiplicity of functions that can be served.

But for Doncaster, the town centre represents solely a place of commerce. Shopping is not conducive to leisure, certainly not to leisurely academia. The way in which Starbucks is used is as a break between shops.

This explains why people looked at me today as though I was a table-hogging twat.

Prose and Cons

2011-03-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is misleading - it is actually about prose and poetry but who am I to resist a pun. And of course, there are no cons to writing! Among the many things I have learnt from an intellectual diet of Foucault this last year is the idea of 'epimelesthai seauton' - the care of the self. Rather than the more well-known gnothi seauton, meaning know thyself, to care for oneself depends upon a different set of principles. To care for yourself is to be acutely self-aware and, for the purposes of this winding intro, a key constituent is the need to write. To write your thoughts, anxieties, ailments, worries, woes, desires, sins, hopes, fears - everything.

I've only gone and done it haven't I?

This term I have found an engagement with knowledge so much more enjoyable for simply writing about everything. Essays and dissertation are, of course, prerequisites for the passing of the degree, that tiny obstacle, but through writing about writing the dissertation, for example, fresh ideas come flooding in.

I have always been a sporadic poet, usually only when being the angsty adolescent back in the Danum days, but have made a more concerted effort to write more and to write often. My old book of poems is unfit for human consumption, but I've been lucky with more recent things and have had a positive reception. I was honoured to have my poem 'Escape to the Orchard' judged the winning entry of the Elizabeth Fletcher Prize 2011, an annual award, funded by the parents of Elizabeth Fletcher, a former Homerton student who tragically died in a motor accident in 2006. The ceremony in Homerton was a thoroughly enjoyable evening and I was humbled to meet Elizabeth's parents, and to have received their kind gift.

In terms of non-fiction writing, I weathered the turbulence of being a weekly columnist on Cambridge Tab, which I thoroughly enjoyed mostly because it bolstered my already inflated ego to know how many people were reading my scribbled reports of my essentially eventless life in the University. I have also been writing for a number of Cambridge magazines/journals about gender and sexualities, online and in paper copy: a few for Gender Agenda, the brilliant forum for feminism, gender, sexuality and anything related which is part of the CUSU Women's Campaign. I've also written for No Definition, which will be coming out (ha) early next term.

The final thing to report, I guess, is my crossed fingers about my prospects of getting published in The Mays XIX - I have submitted two poems, one comic-tragic and the other littered with wordplay, and a piece of unusual prose. I am being guarded about them now as they are considered anonymously, but will stick them up later if the judges fail to be enthralled by my nauseating imagery.

Leaving Cambridge - Cambridge Tab

2011-03-16T03:35:00.001-07:00

Published by Cambridge Tab - 13th March 2011

I guess this is goodbye. Like many of you reading this, I will be hanging up my gown for good after we graduate this summer. Maybe I’ll only ever get it out of the loft as part of some novelty act to entertain grandchildren, or maybe I’ll sometimes return to it, look at the wine stains, and smile in blissful retrospection.

I realise it is only early March, so you might think these words are premature. But, for many of us, the end of this week will be our social death. We will return to our hometowns, and after a few days of liberal access to the food bought by our parents, shit will start to get heavy. Exams. Careers. Training Contracts. Grad schemes. We will realise that exam term requires nothing less than an emotional and intellectual burnout if we are to remedy the unrestrained laxity of the previous eight terms.

I don’t want to say farewell to Cambridge in the midst of exam term anxieties, and I don’t want my lasting image of the university to be the menacing empty frames attached to Senate House, awaiting their chance to present our fates to us. So, I’m going to start my goodbyes now.

I’m going to miss weaving through Chinese tourists on King’s Parade, as each of them makes his own version of the images of the chapel identical to those on Google Images. I’m going to miss hearing a chorus of church bells to remind me that the lecture I should be attending at Sidgwick site has begun. I’m going to miss a city where I am so settled that I recognise café staff when they are out of their uniforms. I’m going to miss feeling safe enough to walk home at any hour of the night.

I’ll miss the libraries, where I’ve enjoyed plunging into the depths of human knowledge maybe twice a term. I’ll miss the idiosyncrasies of the lecturers, who have morphed from the distant celebrities of first year into the three-dimensional stop-and-chat partners of finals. I’m sure I’ll even pine for Homerton.

On a more personal note, I’ll miss Cambridge SCA, the local charity I’ve been involved with since first year. It has insulated me from the worst excesses of the bubble. I’ll miss the two kids I visit each weekend on Big Siblings, whose disregard for genteel social norms rivals my own, thus making them perfect companions. I’ll miss the organised chaos of the Bounce project, which I’ve done since first year, in which we put on a sports session for kids aged five to 15 in the apt location of the Pro-Am Fighting Centre.

Next year, if I want to talk about something, or share a problem, or rave about an idea, I might have to arrange to meet with somebody, rather than just knock on their door since they live 10 metres from me. This thought is unsettling to say the least.

And, I suppose a final farewell ought to be to you, The Tab. I shan’t lie, I thought you were all going to be intolerable twats – the other writers, the editors and especially you: the readers. I thought I was going to have to defend myself, as you systematically ripped the shit out of me every week, and denigrated my autistic non-appreciation of your drinking culture.

But, the overwhelming majority of you are absolutely not twats (by which I mean you sometimes validate me). Even those who are twats are okay, because I see you as my twats. My own loveable Tab-twats. It has been a pleasure.

To Cambridge as a city and a University, to the people, and to the redtop I unexpectedly grew to love, this is a fond farewell.

Getting into Cambridge - Cambridge Tab

2011-03-08T03:53:00.000-08:00

This was published by Cambridge Tab on 6th March 2011.

My week has been unusually steeped in politics. I spent a hefty gobbet of it pestering academics to sign CUSU petitions in order to protect maintenance bursaries. The thought of students from ‘non-traditional university backgrounds’ arriving in Cambridge and being unable to spend their time and others’ money with the same wanton disregard as me is despicable.

Admittedly, I’m being facetious in order to boost my authorial voice, but seriously: the cuts to bursaries are savage, and will present a huge obstacle to raising access.

Everyone knows that Cambridge is pretty intense, and this intensity extends beyond the listless cravings for validation, which see us taking blankets and toothpaste to the library. As graduation beckons, I’m starting to get the first pangs of future nostalgia and I’m beginning to see the city with alumn-eyes.

Before arriving in Cambridge, I was annoyed that I couldn’t get a job. Now, I don’t know how anybody would survive balancing paid work with study. Even this – the ability to have three years to dedicate to learning – is an absolute luxury. It didn’t feel like a luxury two hours ago, when I was embroiled in a tempestuous hissyfit in Starbucks because of my inability to develop a ‘new angle’ on the interplay between sexualities and eugenics. But, it is a luxury – one that should be accessible to anybody who loves learning.

So, what got you into Cambridge, good reader of The Tab?

Money definitely counts. A furtive glance down Trinity Street is enough to prove that most Cambridge students haven’t been dragged face-down through poverty to get here. I disagree with the idea that some social groups are intrinsically more intelligent than others. Money is no substitute for intellectual success, but it certainly acts as its catalyst.

Money can buy you financial stability in your home life, private tuition, private education (if you like that sort of thing), the entrance to cultural events, the ability to mingle in the right milieu, enriching holidays, school trips, and The Gap Yah. Of course all this stuff has a huge benefit. The point is: culture counts.

So, what got me here? It certainly wasn’t money, but I would be bullshitting to the extreme if I said I worked hard. I didn’t get here because of natural intelligence either. I think I got here because of my curiosity: priceless, but limitless, curiosity.

Curiosity can open doors for you regardless of where you come from. Mine wasn’t an Enid Blyton-like inquisitiveness, and I didn’t have any amazing rites of passage from it. I was just interested to know about different people’s lives.

Curiosity impelled the 14-year-old me to make the naïve and potential life-ending blunder of taking a video camera into Doncaster’s red light district in order to interview the women who were working as prostitutes. It made me ask questions. It made me enter competitions. It made me write poems and stories. It made read books.

I’m beginning to think that being successful is all about having belief in your ability, and surrendering yourselves to your passions. Most kids have stuff that fascinates them, but then they grow up, get Facebook, spend their time moping about, and start being all pubertal. Our culture is so staid and docile.

The best thing we could do to get more people to consider Cambridge is to encourage more people to cling onto their interests and passions. We need to demystify our weird university and welcome curious people, regardless of their background, with open arms. Cambridge is their turf.

Gender Trouble - Cambridge Tab

2011-03-08T03:51:00.000-08:00

I quite conclusively fall within the boundaries of being male in terms of my biological sex. Recent inspections have shown that I am wholeheartedly hetero-gametic. This much is certain.

But, my gender is harder to pin down. According to my text book, “gender is the particular identity you perform and how it relates to established ideas of what is normal behaviour for a male or female”. The problem is: I simply don’t match the traits that fall within the brackets of a mainstream masculinity. I’m under no delusion that I am a brooding Clint Eastwood type, or a muscular man-mountain, or a bloke, or even a lad. When it comes to ‘man points’, I loiter around the relegation zone. I don’t like beer. I don’t like football. I think Jeremy Clarkson is a xenophobic twat. I don’t care about cars.

But, then again, I don’t see myself as particularly feminine. I may not care about cars, but when I cycle, I am prone to dropping the c-bomb at any driver who kindles my road rage, and … I’m finding it harder than I thought to list my masculine traits.

It’s pretty easy to list my feminine traits, however. The majority of my friends are female. I am good with kids. I study sociology, and have studied languages and literature. I once shrieked with joy because I saw a boy-duck chasing a girl-duck on the lawn outside my room in college. I sing a lot, sometimes with alarming spontaneity. From time to time, I flounce.

Despite being thoroughly aware that I don’t think or act in the same way as most men, or the same as most other boys when I was in school, I have never once seriously considered myself to be feminine.

Instead, I have clearly held on to a self-serving notion of manhood which has insulated me against any gender confusion. My sort of masculinity is the sort that can recite a story or poem with a characterful voice and that can make people laugh with inappropriate humour. I have always considered it masculine to do well in school; which was handy, what with me being such a pasty-faced, homework-doer.

I am 6’2″, which certainly helps me to put up at least a weak veneer, if only because there aren’t many Amazonian 6′ women about. I’m not threatening as a person, but for quite a while through my teenage years, I thought that my body was. From what I can gather, it almost certainly wasn’t. Kids laugh at me when I try and discipline them.

The Tab isn’t the traditional home of gender theory, but today I’m going there.

Is it the body itself, or how you adorn it that sculpts its gendered reception? I feel different when I think my body looks different – for example, I went out cycling last night in a sporty garb of trackie bottoms, trainers, sports jacket. I looked more convincingly ‘masculine’ than my attire usually presents – and I felt it too, I felt as though people passing me by were receiving me in a different way.

How much do we conform unthinkingly to this view of masculinity or femininity which society says is the right one, and deny ourselves some extra little freedoms? Walk around Cambridge and you’ll see many men being masculine. From the students engaging in drunken manhugs as they stagger out of Cindies, to the middle-aged lecturers dictating from their plinths in a very self-assured manner. Is everyone just acting, or should I stop soul searching and just man-up?

Envy - Cambridge Tab

2011-02-20T13:18:00.000-08:00

I am quite alarmingly competent – nay, gifted – at the overwhelming majority of things I attempt to do. This isn’t because of any innate superiority I have and Übermensch I most emphatically am not. But, I do hold tightly to the pragmatic dictum that if you try something and fail at it, you might as well resign yourself to that fact, and find something else to do.

In this respect, Cambridge suits me quite well. I am able to use my ‘badboy writing skills’ to dash off an impressively academic essay, or scribble down some Tab-worthy thoughts for a column without much toil, and at relatively short notice. I can utilise my patience and stupid sense of humour to work with kids through student charities. Generally speaking, I am quite able to wear the uniform of the hyper-competent human when I’m within two miles of Great St. Mary’s, but take me out of this comfort zone, and I quickly flounder.

In situations that require more than the knowledge I can reap from the shelves of the PPS library, I am lost. When the chain comes off on my bike, I just stand and look at it. I regularly have to fish out the packaging of Super Noodles from the bin to check through the instructions for cooking them. Once, I paid a child 50p to re-thread my shoelaces. I have trouble operating photocopiers. I don’t know what a dongle is. I don’t even know what a mortgage is.

But, I tend not to think about these flagrant incompetences; I am just about wise enough not to attempt to validate myself and sculpt my self-identity out of the things that I am shit at. So when being asked in a job interview “What do you do in your spare time?” I am inclined to mention the writing, the sporadic bursts of creativity and the social work. A truthful, but psychologically self-flagellating, alternative response could be: “I sit in my room and swelter in my unclean clothes because, one: I can’t bleed the radiator which has been on full-blast for five weeks now, and two: I don’t know which slot you pour the Lenor into on a washing machine, so I just let my clothes fester.”

But, honestly, what is human greatness if not the ability to cover up one’s flaws? Most people are well adapted at self-presentation, and can carefully cultivate and sanitise the view that other people have of them. We can all take solace in the fact that most successful people just aren’t as fucking marvellous as they make themselves out to be. What if the girl with the beautiful ‘just got out of bed’ look actually spends half her days subsumed by the anxiety of needing to make her raggedy style look authentic? Or, what if Jeremy Twat, who has intellectually reamed you all year, is only so dominant and impressive in supervisions because his inability to make friends has left him with nothing but Wikipedia and RedTube for company?

The social world becomes a less hostile place when you realise that, at the heart of it, every skill, competency or favourable trait that an individual has is tempered by the heinous, depressing and sociopathic inadequacies that they hide from us. It is always easier to see the dazzling and the impressive in what people do, but don’t forget that they, like you, are crippling failures in most other aspects of their life. So, for example, Cheryl Cole might well be seen as a talented, beautiful role model for young girls, but let’s not forget that she was somewhat less inspirational and dignified when she punched a black lady in the face and called her a ‘Caribbean jigaboo’.

A great character can be the perfect disguise for the bad actor – a good mask hides an irksome face.

Glasses, Manscaping, Fancy Dress

2011-02-13T01:34:00.000-08:00

Published 12th February on Cambridge Tab

I pulled myself out of last week’s nihilistic rut soon after my column was published, largely thanks to a lax employee in a supermarket whose ineptitude on the tills gifted me my coveted four-pack of Strongbow for the tidy price of: nothing at all. Whether this gift was due to carelessness or some tiny act of rebellion against his supervisor, I neither know nor care. Either way, his monetary misdemeanor perked me up no end, and I guzzled that fizzy piss on the walk back to Homerton with a little spring in my step.

I am now able to focus on matters far more pressing than the tear-soaked pillow, and my pre-occupation has moved onto the murky ethics of fancy dress.

SCA ran a ’90s themed club night at Kambar this week, and as much as I was in the spirit for cheese and fundraising, my own role as Sporty Spice for the night was potentially perilous. Somewhat inevitably, the sight of my hairy gunt repelled everybody in there, and certainly did not encourage their donations.

When it comes to fancy dress, I am always fine until it comes to the intricate details. With the Sporty Spice outfit, for example, I had cause to reverse whatever slim chance there was of people realising who I was trying to be, by my need to wear my glasses. And sporty is the opposite of glasses, as every primary school child knows.

The only situation in which glasses are more problematic is in the context of swimming baths, when my choice is either to go without glasses and squint and splash around the pool, failing to recognise anybody (like a wet Evie Prichard), or else I can wear them and float around in my tortoiseshell frames like a drowned accountant recently drudged from the riverbed.

Normally, I go for the squint, but this has changed since the incident on Campus Children’s Holidays this summer, when I enthusiastically approached a couple of eight-year-old girls and asked them: ‘shall I take you up the flume?’ I soon realised that they weren’t our kids and my turn of phrase was grammatically uncomfortable. Regarding glasses, I now think it is better to err on the side of caution. Hence, it was Specky Spice who graced Kambar last night.

Back to the hairy gunt – a puerile word I am unlikely ever to tire of. When I arrived at Queens’ to meet Posh Spice and her friend before gracing Kambar, said friend suggested I should have waxed my stomach, to which Posh shouted: “No, we haven’t got enough time.” She understood the gravity of such a task. The task would have been more ‘clearing the rain forest’ than ‘trimming the lawn’. And, as nice and forgiving as my brilliant cleaner is, she would surely resent having to spend her working day unblocking Henry the Hoover’s sinuses of my shorn torso.

The bitter curiosities of youth taught me that what starts as a little snip-snip of an unwanted patch of chest hair becomes the first act in a ritual which leads eventually to, five years later, having to inspect the yield on a twice weekly basis. The harmless snap of the scissors needs now to take place with the care of a surgeon, since one cut too far necessitates having to shave the whole thing off, just to attain some consistency. Better not risk it. Again, erring on the side of caution then, I think I will leave my shoulder blades unshaven and exposed for all to see under that tiny little tankini.

For only the second or third time in my life, what I wanted most in the world was to resemble Melanie Chisholm for one night.

Psychological Decline - Cambridge Tab

2011-02-04T01:47:00.000-08:00

I am feeling unapologetically morbid right now. Rather than allow this feeling to fester until week 5 and synchronise to everyone else’s grim misery, I will – to use the only new word I have learnt since I matriculated – ‘expunge’ my bleakness now, and make this my ‘psychological decline’ column.

I like to think of myself as being pretty outgoing, but lately I’m finding it ever more difficult to convince myself of this. You see, outgoing presupposes going out. The melody and pizzazz of my speech only really translates into a character-forming trait if I speak among other people. And, at the moment I’m forcing myself to realise that no matter how much satisfaction I get from interacting with the mirror in my bathroom, it should be no substitute for, you know, genuine, human interaction.

I first realised I had a problem when I was late for lectures last week, because I was trying to teach myself ventriloquism. I don’t think I’m being too much of a hypochondriac when I question whether this was symptomatic of something. Or, maybe everyone in this little cobbled asylum we call home has got these disconcerting habits when forced into solitude? The only difference is that you are all wise enough not to broadcast your habits on an Internet tabloid. You, unlike me, will be able to find employment in the next decade.

I spent this evening watching Shameless on 4od. Shameless makes me jealous. Maybe this is some side effect of my current flux and confused sense of place within the class structure, but for a few minutes, every part of me wanted achingly to be living on the Chatsworth Estate. Sure, they might not have much money, or jobs, and they might be a little lacking in charm or morals or sanity, but I don’t think people in Cambridge have these things either. The difference is the Gallaghers and the Maguires are happy.

I look at the sour panoply of sullen faces among fellow finalists, and I certainly don’t feel like we’re drifting freely through a bastion of privilege. I sit in seminars alongside Masters students, and I see the uneasy way they carry themselves: the way they look to be detached from any semblance of care for their body, which has become a mere vehicle to transport their pulsating mind between lecture hall and library. I stare at these breathing cadavers as they note-take impulsively, and I think: ‘I’ll probably end up like that.’

Things could be different. My school friends are now getting paired up, getting engaged and eying up their first homes – they are settling into being functional grown-ups… in relationships. The only thing that wraps its arms around me at night and whispers in my ear is the sense of encroaching sorrow as the inexorable sands of time flitter down my pillow, making little gritty embankments in the fabric streams of my now stagnant tears. Some of these old school friends get woken in the night by the sound of their children calling them – presently, some high-heeled skank is stood outside my window in Homerton yelling drunken obscenities in RP at some unseen other who will inevitably look exactly the same, preventing me from entering the land of Nod.

So, this is my cheery week 3 update for you: my life is, at present, a cold-scarred wilderness, barren of smiles, in which I sit transcribing children’s voices for my dissertation, eat Go Ahead wafers and wait eagerly for some neighbour to make the mistake of knocking on my door, thus providing me with an opportunity to regale them, face to face, with all of the above.

If you are reading this, neighbours, tiptoe down to 215 – if I’m not at my desk, I will either be at the bathroom mirror fashioning a hoody as a puppet for Stage 2 of the ventriloquism education, or my head will be planted deep in the salty tear-grooves of my pillow.

Kids - Cambridge Tab

2011-01-29T12:58:00.001-08:00

Published on Cambridge Tab - http://cambridgetab.co.uk/columnists/jonny-walker-2

On Sunday, as I reached into a rabbit hutch to retrieve my favourite scarf from the bed of tiny poos onto which it had been angrily thrown, I was forced, yet again, to question why I work with kids. You see, I spend my weekends visiting two 11 year old boys with the SCA Big Siblings project.

And, yes: there have been numerous incidents which have left me wondering why I do it. During the summer, I found myself teary eyed in a rock-climbing centre near Liverpool after a boy decided to ‘Jackie Chan’ me in the bollocks – this involved racially stereotyped shouting and an ungodly level of speed and accuracy. I was left crooked on the crash mats, trying to explain to him that not only was it a stupid and horrible thing to do, but he had violated the sacrosanct doctrine of The Man Code.

But, I’m used to it. Children regularly embarrass, degrade or injure me, and they constantly seek to lower my self-esteem. One of the boys from the Big Siblings project habitually drums ‘knick-knack-paddy-wack’ onto my face. A six year old girl from Yorkshire has vomited into my hands. This Christmas, a 12 year old from Liverpool lucidly called me an ‘ugly specky receding hairline paedo softcunt.’ I thought that was a bit personal.

I’m sure you’ve already anticipated where I’m going with this, but the answer is: I do it because the good bits outnumber the bad bits.

For starters, social norms seem like less of a barrier when you’re looking after kids, and it is refreshing to be out of their thrall. I knew I was challenging the behavioural orthodoxy when I saw the looks I was receiving as we tried to balance McDonald’s chips on a pigeon’s head in the marketplace. The kids are the perfect excuse for a junk food binge, since there is a widely held assumption that kids enjoy an unhealthy diet – I feel fully content in KFC with them, safe in the knowledge that people will think I am taking the kids out for a treat, rather than the cold truth that I am simply striving to assuage my own insatiable appetite for chicken grease and spiced gristle.

The more you invest in it, the more you get out of it. And that’s why I spent 16 hours of my weekend catching up with the Cambridge kids. With Saturday’s kid, I played a few games of pool, which turned into a public spectacle of my flagrant inability to hit a ball with a stick. Afterwards, in one of the most Zen-like experiences I’ve ever had, we chilled out with one of Roots Manuva’s dub albums playing in the background, as we painted onto canvas for a few hours. The resulting paintings were nothing special (though my neighbours concurred with each other that the kid’s was of superior quality, whereas mine was ‘inadvertently impressionist’), but we both appreciated the calm.

The best part of it is, I guess, the hardest to describe, because it doesn’t really manifest in anecdotal stories or in one-off events. Rather, in the awareness and rapport you develop over time. I’m experienced enough to know their tricks now, which is a useful tool in my armoury of self defence and it maximises my enjoyment. If I am asked whether I have seen the weather forecast, I know to retreat quickly because the child brings news of a ‘tornado’ (nipple cripple) in ‘Bangkok’ (punch to genitals). I have a stock of retorts to their tomfoolery, so when one of the kids points at the ground and shouts “You’ve dropped your gay card!” I now just shout back: “It’s okay… I keep a spare!”

So, when I was standing in the garden peeling off the sawdust and carrot from my favourite scarf, I knew as pissed off as I was, it was just part of the process. And anyway, what’s a bit of soiled knitwear between friends?

Cafe Culture - Cambridge Tab

2011-01-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

For the next eight weeks, I am a columnist with Cambridge Tab (www.cambridgetab.co.uk) and I will reproduce these columns on here. They're not explicitly sociology, but nor is most of the blog. Happy days.

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Published on Cambridge Tab - http://cambridgetab.co.uk/columnists/jonny-walker

Waking up on a typical weekday, I open my wardrobe and look for something to wear. I look for something that suggests I’m intelligent, in an effortless way, with a smidgeon of eccentricity if I’m feeling bold. I walk around town with pomp – the only form of elitist posturing I can just about pull off, since I’ve not got the right body or face for flounce, dandy or rugbyboy. Thankfully, I am not rich enough to be an authentic twat by Cambridge standards. Rather, I fit into that ‘happy medium’ margin, and lie somewhere between being a bland, inoffensive, background character and an egocentric joke who considers himself Messianic.

I’d like to say I spend my typical afternoon as a sort of 1920’s Parisian intellectual, in smoke filled cafés. I’d like to say that I am often surrounded by similarly minded others, and we often throw down our copies of Le Figaro and get angry; lambasting the system. In reality, I spend my typical afternoon flitting between Starbucks and Nero like a moth drawn to two overpriced flames, and reading social theory at 15-minute intervals. This week, as I sat alone drinking a tepid £3.40 beverage and attempting to absorb some Habermas, a couple of girls on the table next to me advised each other how best to tame their overflowing groin fringe. I wanted to learn about the public sphere, but all I got was the pubic triangle.

Why waste my time and money drinking bad tea to the soundtrack of feminine grooming? The answer is simple. More than family, more than Doncastrian friends, more than having a self-replenishing food supply, the thing I miss most about home during term time is a comfortable chair. I really am a man of simple pleasures, and the jaunty swivel desk chair upon which I am now perched emphatically does not satisfy them. This problem can’t be solved by reclining on my bed and working, as any cant of more than 30° tells my body that it’s naptime, which inevitably lasts a solid five hours.

The library isn’t an option. The library is full of books, which intimidates me. The library is off limits. So, in this vainglorious quest for lumbar support, I find myself hovering in the queue for Nero CostaBucks, with its faux-leather sofa-chairs, with my despicably well-used loyalty card resting exhausted in my palm, begging for mercy as the stamp batters it yet again.

When I went home at Christmas, I realised that my twattish pursuit of the café culture had left my bank balance unhealthily overdrawn, and I had nothing to show for it. It felt like emerging from a heavy drinking session, and feeling slightly uncomfortable about how stupid your vodkalogic was. Why did I ever justify indulging in a cardboard beaker of hot froth on a daily basis?

In this spirit of reflection and revaluation, I tumbled into the abyss and began to question how and why I even ended up in this strange little city. What led me towards this idle pursuit of padded furniture when everyone else is pursuing training contracts and grad schemes?

As a teenager, I played a lot of basketball. But, when I reached the end of my GCSEs, I had got bored of having to train every day. This put me in a difficult situation, because my entire friendship group was founded upon our retrospectively amusing Americophilia, and our liking for DMX and Fubu. I had a lot of respect for the coach, so felt I wanted to let him know that I was quitting.

“Why, Walker, why?” he plead.

What could I say? “Thanks for the free sessions every day for three years. Thanks for employing me as a coach on £20 per hour aged 14 (which remains the best job I’ve had). Thanks for everything. Unfortunately, I’m so lazy that I’d rather be friendless and watching Beauty and the Geek repeats than do anything that involves kinesis.” I didn’t actually say that. I said: “I’m going to try and get into Cambridge.” That was the seed, a mendacious impulse.

Cambridge was never actually an intention. Truthfully, I never really thought about university at all. But, Cambridge being Cambridge, it was the perfect get out – it made me look ambitious, intelligent and was the perfect alibi for non-committal responses: “I would wash the pots but I’m revising for a chance to climb the slippery pole of social mobility.”

Given time, I actually started to believe my own protestations and considered applying. Cambridge was the place to learn. And I guess it is, but from week 1, term 1, year 1, I found myself becoming more inclined to just mope about doing fuck all – stalking my friends’ family members on Facebook, watching ‘Baby Monkey riding backwards on a Pig’ on YouTube and establishing my previously mentioned quest for the perfect chair. ‘You’d only fall asleep if you went to the lecture’ became the mantra tattooed all over my every waking thought.

That slippery slope of demotivated indifference is what ultimately led me towards the coffee shops. If it looks like I’m intellectual, maybe that will spur me on to work – that was the theory. But in practice, no – it’s just me, a Frappucino and vaginal topiary.

Virus

2011-01-13T02:22:00.000-08:00

We're pushing trolleys franticly
Right through the shopping centre
Where swirling hoardes of people panic
Maniacally, they push and shove
And surge towards the open doors
Unsure of their next move but yet
They follow the crowd in trying to
Escape from it.

Distrust in frenzy, darting eyes
As shoulders clatter against shoulder
Legs intertwine and arms press against
Backs. The logic of the messy crowd
Whispers of the virus, a new strain,
As in the corners of our eyes
We see cadavars slumped in Poundland
And abandoned by the bargain rails.

Tunnel vision with the empty trolley
Carrying more nothing than anyone else.

Where to go, we unthinkingly think
As we surge out of the centre and
Into the open beating air.
It kills you in an hour the
Disembodied lilting voices call
And its the most infectious strain
We need to lock ourselves away.

We three rabble on the rubble
Motorcade our empty trolleys
Desparately, in idle folly
Searching for a quick salvation
And a decent looking man
With little child join our convoy.

The main street here is quiet and
Two churches face us, one, with queue
Of young and startled African
Young men looks like the general choice
But straight ahead, before our eyes,
There lies the grim facade of
A far more white church and so
We enter, leave our trolleys by the door
And no less panicked, settle down
Amid a group who know no better
And we sit.

I do not know what is wrong with me, but for the last three nights I have been having the most horrible, epic and nightmarish dreams. This one was characterised just by a relentless driving anxiety. I dreamt the happenings of this poem.

Jack Straw, Pakistani Men and White Girls

2011-01-08T02:56:00.000-08:00

Jack Straw has made headlines with the bold claim that Pakistani men sexually target vulnerable white girls in the UK as 'easy meat' as a result of the values of their cultural heritage. In the wake of the arrests of Abid Mohammed Saddique and Mohammed Romaan Liaqat, the 'ringleaders' in a gang of Pakistani men alleged to have befriended and groomed vulnerable 12-18 year old girls in Derby. He acknowledges that it is not a problem isolated to the Pakistani community, but goes on to state that there is a specific cultural problem emanating from the Pakistani cultural heritage.

I cannot accurately say whether he is right or wrong in his claim but it seems to me as though he has turned a sex issue into a race issue - is it that the exploitation of women is somehow a more worthy point of discussion if the women are presented through a racialised lens as the white victim? Different cultural backgrounds do inevitably carry different notions of masculinity and different views of women - social attitudes about the 'proper place' of women and the correct mode of man-wife relations will sculpt active lived behaviours.

Straw said "These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they're fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically". Testosterone is here conflated with a heterosexual desire which needs to be dumped inside somebody for their own sake, before that 'fizzing and popping' explodes like a firework. The way Straw phrases it implies it is better for these men to use girls from Pakistani heritage as the outlet for their raging hormones, as though this is the proper order of things and it is only once this particular 'usage' of women affects white girls that it become exploitative and problematc.

A few days ago, Cameron stated that 'We should not be put off by cultural sensitivities or anything like that. Pursue the evidence, pursue criminality wherever it leads.'

It isn't a matter of being 'put off' by cultural sensitivities, as though the sole purpose of them is to obstruct 'normal' culture - this statement betrays a rhetoric of cultural blindness which though it may appear egalitarian, serves to reiterate the white native cultural imperative.

What about the normalised practices of gender which don't activate cultural sensitivities? Jack Straw speaks of older Pakistani men plying vulnerable white teenagers with gifts as part of their racialised grooming ritual but is it much better to locate your 'easy meat' straining to hold herself up in a bar or club?

Cut Feet

2011-01-02T18:30:00.001-08:00

Yet somehow once again it seems
As though all goes to shit
Despite the fact that things aren't bad
There's something wrong with it.

We clatter fall and shudder
All colliding tumbling far
Freefalling, gliding dropping
And don't know where we are

Or even where we should be
We're just clashing about
Restless aimless and painless
And we cannot get out.

Clattering on shattering
Ridges, now with cut feet
Panting breathless, staggering
Grasping blind, incomplete.

Inheritance

2010-12-17T00:24:00.000-08:00

The fat young mums console
Fat young sons and
Fat young daughters
And remember the time
When it was they who ran
To their fat mum
And cried about
What the others had said.

Slacktivism and Vocaltruism: Children's Cartoons

2010-12-05T02:04:00.000-08:00

Slacktivism is 'the desire people have to do good without getting out of their chair'. Slacktivists are those who perceive their mentioning of a certain cause in a certain situation, or the committing of some low-effort act like changing a display picture or joining a Facebook group to be some cog in the revolution machine. Ever fond of a self-made neologism, what I'm calling vocaltruism is the assertion (true or not) that one gives their money, time or thought to a cause, but it is an assertion that is aired publicly, widely and often with a self-aggrandising edge.

It is uncomfortable to 'argue against' people's support for an unquestionably necessary cause - the fight against child abuse, help for war-wounded ex-soldiers, a student protest against encroaching fee increases. I am not suggesting that the mass of slacktivists and vocaltruists should not make efforts to get involved in issues and causes, not at all; my hope is that if people are as sincere in their public delcarations as they proclaim to be, they ought to equip themselves with methods which will enable the changes that they are calling for. My fear is that slacktivists come to see their Facebook display pictures as positive action itself, rather than as an attention grabbing opener to further efforts to combat whatever ills they are rallying against.

I tend towards skepticism with regards a number of campaigns to raise awareness because, often, I feel people are acutely aware of the wrongs which abound in society. It is not awareness but mobilisation that is lacking. People know that alarming numbers of men abuse their partners behind closed doors. People know that a sad number of childhoods are blighted by neglect, abuse and bullying. People know that in the town centre, there are people shooting up in alleyways, drinking themselves into a stupor and there are people shivering on the floor without a home to go to. Campaigns, and viral issue trends on social media such as Facebook and Twitter, that hold their sole aim to be 'spreading the word' are missing an opportunity since this 'word' that they spread is often reduced to a hollow sequence of syllables: the meaning - the rich narratives, the cold statistics and the brutish realities - are often left aside when tidal zeitgeists begin to gather froth.

The current zeitgeist on Facebook is to change your display picture to an image of a children's cartoon character as part of an awareness raising campaign against child abuse by the NSPCC. As viral campaigns go, it is cleverly conceived as the current young generation of 15-25 year olds, whose existence is firmly established on Facebook, has an unprecedented nostalgia for its own recent past. It strikes me as strange that 18 year olds in University attend 90's themed fancy dress parties. In a mediated visual culture, TV unites us - we might be from different towns and we might have had different school backgrounds but when we were both aged 8, we probably watched Live and Kicking and we all know the significance of the phrase 'I dropped the screw in the tuna'. Right?

But how does this help children? The effect seems to be that people have thought long and hard about cartoons, not about children in the real world being abused. The feeling of gratification that comes from changing your display picture to Angelica from the Rugrats or Dennis the Menace will not be the prelude to the setting up of a direct debit and it is unlikely to compel individuals to take up voluntary work or charity work.

The problem may well be the medium, not the message. As I have written previously, Facebok is a site of self presentation which can have long term effects. As such, any collective action on it will be tempered by the necessary egotism that is attached to a website which has, as its aim, the connection and presentation of oneself to the selves of others. Glossing down my Newsfeed, I notice not only the wide range of cartoon displays but also a number of conversations about the trend and about individual choices. Less important than the NSPCC cause (which, in fact, I cannot find evidence of - is it actually an NSPCC thing?) is the presentation of self that takes place through it. In only four instances could I find mention of child abuse and three of them treated it as an opportunity for an oh-so-subversive joke about the trend being so annoying it made them want to hit children. Also raising the 'Like' count were people whose choices of cartoon alluded to child abuse - Pedobear, Homer strangling Bart and Herbert from Family Guy.

I suppose the most annoying part of these campaigns is the disjuncture between the serious cause and the trivial trend; the result of this is a hypocritical self-righteousness that, importantly, holds the preservation of self-image over a commitment to the cause.

The incoherence between cause, actor and motive is what is wrong. Viral campaigns can work fantastically well when genuinely raising awareness of issues that may not be so well-known. The recent Movember campaign of men growing moustaches through November carries the interesting significance of raising awareness about prostate cancer ("Why are you sporting a handlebar moustache, son?" "Dad, it is about raising awareness of Prostate cancer") by subverting a fashion trend and making a small mockery of masculuine posturing. What is especially relevant is that the campaign, although mocking it with facial hair, does acually challenge the masculine normative silence around health, the body and vulnerability.

The difference between these two campaigns is that the man on the street can do little to combat prostate cancer, other than to donate towards scientific cancer research and to know what to look for in his self. Child abuse, as a cause, is different. In every town there are volunteering groups, youth centre and mentoring projects through which individuals of any age can actively make a difference to the lives of disadvantaged children and young adults. People see child abuse in the streets, but cross over. People hear the shouts from the house next door but turn up the TV to counter it. People can maybe think back to the neglected children they shared classes with at school and remember how they were bullied for it. Visibility breeds opportunity and more can be done; people know this.

If the people who change their display picture to show publicly that 'I, the owner of all the information on this profile, am opposed to child abuse', if all of those people actually acted on this opposition, a great deal more could be done to help the children. I may not be in a position to make inferences about any one individual's motives, but taken en masse, the imbalance between proclaimed care and practiced care is vulgarly apparent.

The Reality of Teach First

2010-11-22T08:02:00.000-08:00

I have just been in a lecture in which a comment from the floor led to an interaction with the lecturer about the differences between a PGCE and Teach First. The student's suggestion, which was agreed with by the lecturer, was that a PGCE showed a greater devotion to 'being a teacher' and that Teach First is used as a gateway to a better-paid job in the city.

There was a general consensus around this point, which is borne most likely out of 1) the majority of students in the lecture being members of the established Education Faculty, 2) a considerable number of the students in the lecture having applied for PGCE. Feeling the pressure of looking up and seeing people looking towards me, as the tokenistic Teach Firster. The lecturer repeated the point about it being a stepping stone to high salaries in the city and I joked with those beside me that that was my reason - but it quite obviously isn't.

First criticism, the idea of a PGCE showing a better devotion to being a teacher. What does this actually mean? I might go along with that to the extent that 'being a teacher' relates to a particular sort of teacher role, sacrosanct in the collective consciece, of the teacher as a straight-and-narrow, this is my life, I'm in it for the kids attitude. Maybe so. Long term devotion to being a teacher does not imply an ability to teach. Not to tar all with the same brush at all, but drawing from my own experiences, the best teachers I had were those who didn't see teaching as a devotion to their role as a teacher; the better teachers were in fact those who had wide knowledge base, were engaged and interested in what was going on in the world outside the school and were actually quite brutally cynical about being teachers. Those teachers who seemed to enter out of devotion stultified their own creativity as their focus was on themselves - on their role as teacher and their role as teacher-with-pupils - rather than on the furtherance of the genuine knowledge and intellect and innovation of the pupils. Some of the teachers most devoted to the role make the best teachers, but this devotion is not in itself a merit - the merit of a teacher should be in their capacity to teach and although their enjoyment in the job is quite obviously beneficial for all, it is not, as an isolating thing, going to bring any benefit whatsoever to the education of the children.

Second, the idea that it is the permanence of one's role as a teacher that qualifies one's capacity to teach is flawed. The criticism of Teach First as a gateway to the city reflects the mirror image of the PGCE as a door which slams behind you as you enter. Experienced teachers certainly amass heaps of practicable knowledge from their time within the school, but again, the overarching notion of 'experience = ability to teach' is absolutely flawed. An independent study of the effectiveness of Teach First, published only last week by a team from the University of Manchester, yielded this, among its key findings.

Observations that the teaching practices of Teach First teachers in their first year are good to excellent – in international comparisons they were generally on a par with or ahead of more experienced teachers.

Teachers who are in the school for at least two years (and it is useful to remember that the majority stay on beyond those two years) are able to make a huge impact, to the benefit of their pupils - 'partnering with Teach First explains between 20% and 40% of the between-school variance in pupil performance at GCSE. This difference – the researchers estimate – equates to approximately a third of a GCSE per pupil per subject'. Simply put, the fact that a teacher may or may not intend to continue in teaching into their foreseeable future has no impact on their skill and competence as a teacher.

And a final appraisal of Teach First against the fallacies which support the PGCE relates to what often appears as the most contentious idea: that of the teachers specifically moving on to high paid work in the elite corporations of the city. Undoubtedly, a considerable number of teachers in Teach First move on into better paid, high-status roles in other spheres of professional life - this is not necessarily a bad thing. It could only be seen as a negative in itself if one holds onto the view of teaching as some individual act of passion and this, although most often well-intentioned, does not always benefit the children one teaches. The teacher is not beholden to the future generations of children he or she may or may not teach - their loyalty and their mission is to inspire, educate, empower and facilitate the pupils currently under their watch. The fact that you want to be a teacher after graduation does not automatically make your essays inferior to those of a peer who wishes to work in academia.

The effectiveness of a teacher should be judged upon the impact their teaching has on the pupils in their charge - this impact could be academic, but could also be pastoral, aspirational, social and mental. The reason they go into it and their future plans may well affect the impact they have on their pupils, but these impacts will be as varied as the individual teachers themselves.

It is all very well and good to want to enter education out of a devotion to being a teacher but that is not why I want to do it - I want to go into teaching because I want to teach and I would like my pupils to learn: they sound similar but are very different.

Facebook and your Future Selves

2010-11-06T10:06:00.000-07:00

This was originally published in the paper edition of Varsity on the Friday 5th November 2010, issue 728. It can also be found here, on the Varsity website.

I was one of those textbook, weedy, milksop boys whose misspent childhood was spent in the glare of television screens. Borne mostly out of overexposure to WWF wrestling (before the panda-huggers re-appropriated their acronym), as a nine year old I started to fetishize tattoos as symbolising a forceful masculine identity.

But when I got to the age at which I could legally get one, I found myself unable to; it wasn’t that there weren’t any designs that I liked, the problem was that unshakeable obstacle of foresight: would I really want that tattoo as a young man or as a grey scale pensioner? A similar thought process ought to be on our minds as we negotiate our precarious existence in Cambridge. We must ask ourselves the question: how accountable are we being to our future selves?

When Nick Clegg was an undergraduate at Robinson, he had some dalliance with Cambridge University Conservative Association. Whilst this isn’t altogether surprising given his puppetee/puppeteer relationship with the Prime Minister, it must have proved quite embarrassing for him as he climbed the ranks of the Liberal Democrat party machine. But of course, he wouldn’t have known then what he would become in later life; and nor do we.

In the Facebook generation, we are all the more constrained by our present when thinking about our futures. So as you stagger your way to Gardies dressed in full black tie, and you gurn in joyful vinolency into your friend’s SLR, remember quite how permanent that image is going to be. You might lose contact with that friend; just next week he could sleep with your girlfriend and you could become determined enemies. Cambridge is famed for its elitist grasp on the professions and the higher you climb, the greater the fall. What if you become one of those dowdy, pontificating Conservative MPs, arguing about the problem of binge-drinking youths in 30 years time? What if your snap-happy friend becomes a journalist?

With Facebook, we actively diarise our every whim, every thought and every activity, and these facts, which we disclose freely ourselves, are out of our control as soon as we press ‘send’.

How lucrative a trade would some conniving young Cantabrigian forge if he befriended us all and saved copies of those compromising pictures, made copies of all those political and religious slurs you have aired all over your status and noted which events you have attended!

All he would have to do is wait for you to enter the professional world and the power he wields could be immense – a future prime minister could be jelly-wrestling this May Week, an aspiring head teacher could be brought down in later life by the pictures of him dressed as a Nazi guard in a bad taste bop when he was just a starry-eyed Fresher.

Our generation is more accountable for its actions than any previously. Whereas public figures today can explain away the deviant foibles of their youth by talking euphemistically about having a ‘full university experience’, we shall not be spared such liberties. It is all documented. Every uploaded photograph, every blogpost, each tiny tweet has the potential to rain down a torrent of shit on you in your professional life depending on which path you take.

Be you Tab Totty, be you parading in Champagne decadence or be you shagging your way across the sticky dancefloor of Cindies, keep in mind that you don’t know who you and those around you will become.

Pennying: A sociological defence

2010-10-31T06:44:00.001-07:00

This article is available here, on the Varsity website.

Changes in government regulations mean that the customary game of Pennying is, generally speaking, a bit illegal now. This would bring only small benefits to us as students – coy penile jokes would no longer need to be made to explain that yes, indeed, that cylindrical pocket bulge really is a ‘roll of quarters’.

In any case, it is not as though something being illegal automatically prohibits you from doing it. We are selective about which laws we get uppity about. Whilst cycling, I jumped a red light and an old man, with alarming aggression, bellowed the Highway Code in my ear. Then, his feet neatly in the stirrups of his high horse, he proceeded immediately to cycle through pedestrians on the pavement to avoid the road traffic. A hideous hypocrisy that proves a point; laws are to be negotiated, not obeyed.

Like that decrepit velo-maniac Methuselah detouring onto the curb, we ought not surrender the tradition of Pennying for the sake of obedience: instead, we need to defend it from its detractors and recognise the symbolic virtues of social harmony that are borne of dropping the face of the Queen into the wineglass. There is more to pennying that the Senior Tutors acknowledge – it is not solely the prelude to tomorrow’s lingering staircase scent, nor only the tentative foreplay to a hangover and the loss of one’s dignity/phone/self-restraint.

Contained in that cheeky drip-drop of coinage are enshrined the values of our student community.

Despite the grandiose idealisations of Oxbridge elitism as unerring hedonism to the soundtrack of Received Pronunciation chatter and popping corks, the truth is generally more mediocre. The sight of students mindlessly trudging about the New Museums Site day after day with their two-strap backpacks loaded with essentially pointless facts is so grim it kills any pretensions of Cambridge being a bastion of high-IQ joy. We are generally depressed, knackered and overworked. Traditions like pennying, with the unspoken compulsion to comply to institutionalised drinking, provides a short-term solution to the building anxieties that bubble up throughout term. Without such opportunities for emotional release this highly strung atmosphere would destroy us. Pennying is a social safety valve.

The idea that people might be forced into drinking against their will isn’t quite grounded in social reality. Formal hall is not some egalitarian lottery where you could be seated with anyone – you sit with your social group and the pennying norms modify according to your allegiances. The chance of Henry the leery drinking-society bruiser emptying his wallet into the unwilling wine glass of Jane the shy socially-awkward member of RepressedSoc is slim. Generally, the piss-heads will incapacitate each other and the sensibles either don’t penny or do so in a tame and prim manner. Colleges all have strict social divides and pennying locates itself between their differences. It reinforces a sense of social solidarity which brings group members together.

Here it is worth remembering the wise words of Mary Douglas, that ‘dirt is matter out of place’. Formal dinners are the right location for drinking – the very notion of formal hall should evoke the Bacchanal spirit of the medieval banquet, not the respectful bread-breaking of a monastic friary. A certain red-faced sense of abandon is meretricious in its own right. It would be a different matter if some randomer from John’s unloaded his shrapnel into your Evian in the library or dropped a couple of Euros into your soup-flask in a lecture. But no, formal hall is the rightful home of Cantabrigian joie de vivre.

Pennying is more than just a physical act. Inside the interaction of pennying partnerships are contained the social ties which bind us together, so we should not let them be impinged. You have nothing to lose but your inhibitions!

Mobilise Against Homophobia

2010-10-14T16:14:00.000-07:00

In this video, Joel Burns, a councilman for Fort Worth in Texas, delivers a heartfelt and impassioned speech to the council in which he pays sad tribute to the far too many young adolescent gays who have recently committed suicide. He speaks of the need to challenge the ritualised homophobic bullying, ubiquitous in schools, which is driving teenage boys and girls to despair, and worse. Not only those teenagers who identify as gay are affected; the potency of the homophobia in schools is such that someone presumed, incorrectly or not, to be gay are equally at risk. Burn's final call is that 'Things do get better'; this is an important message, and one that I and many other will certainly vouch for, but it is equally important not to allow a 'boys will be boys' mentality to blind us to the fact that the homophobia in schools ought to be challenged, and it can be challenged effectively. Things will get better, certainly, but we needn't lose sight of making things better in the present.

Inertia is one of the largest obstacles. It is far easier to wallow in the status quo, even if you appreciate its flaws. Teachers are exposed to the rituals of homophobic bullying on a day to day basis and they see it as much as anybody. It does not bypass them, they are not blind to it. So what, are a huge proportion of teachers happy to be complicit in the homophobic culture of the school? No, I would think not. There certainly are many prejudiced teachers, in the same way that generally there are prejudiced people, but teachers have a particular influence - if one of those minority of prejudiced teachers happens to take your sex eduation lesson, you will not be provided with a view of hope that things will get better. In such a classroom, the teacher is more likely to simply permit the raucous humour that would abound if homosexuality was even mentioned - which very often, it wouldn't be.

No. It is far easier for a teacher to keep his or her head down, much in the same way as it is far easier for the victim of homophobic bullying to keep his or her head down, much in the same way as it is far easier for the classmates witnessing homophobic bullying to keep their heads down. It is far easier, but it is wrong, and for every class which takes place in which homophobic bullying is ignored, perpetuated or performed, those pupils who are questioning or who have to come to terms with their sexuality are forced into the margins, forced into silence and forced into complicity.

Many people I know don't see homophobic bullying, by my definition of it, as a particular problem. To call a lesson, or a pencil case or somebody's trainers 'gay' is just the same as calling it crap. This is half of the argument, but most stop there, putting the use of gay as a derogratory synonym as mere semantic shift. It is easy to ignore the impact it has on a child who is raised to comprehend of gay as bad - gay as a put-down, gay as boring, gay as pointless, gay as shit - only for them to then realise that, if they have feelings for the same sex, they become another definition of gay. They themselves can be counted alongside the other negative meanings of gay - crap, worthless, pointless, a joke. It is just plain wrong.

It rankles with me, working in primary schools, to hear children using gay as an offensive term. Very often it is in the meanings above, and the tendency could certainly be to think 'they don't mean anything by it', and on an individual level they don't (usually), but on such pandemic levels, these comments amount to a massive prejudice, so engrained as to become naturalised and unquestioned. But it is not only this; children use more venomous deployments of homophobia. Bullying another child for being a 'gayboy', taunting them "What are you going to do about it faggot?" One I remember particularly vividly is a boy laughing as he told me a boy on his street got beaten up really badly, but it was ok because he was gay.

And I sit there, and say nothing. Or I say something that essentially amounts to nothing - "Don't speak like that" or something similarly limp. Silence is complicity; in the position as an educator, it is your responsibility to teach children out of their prejudices. This doesn't make you a militant, but somehow there is still such a 'politics' attached to tackling homophobia. Any teacher can stand up and praise Martin Luther King, any teacher can decry racism, any class can openly express their disavowal and rejection of this prejudice. Homophobia is different. Any teacher who specifically singles out gay role models for their pupils can easily be seen as 'advancing' an agenda. A teacher who makes a point of challenging homophobia will most often be presumed homosexual - this is a fair presumption, but this is not desirable.

In an fair society, in which almost all people believe in equal rights, why can't a straight teacher stand up and challenge homophobia? Because they will become tarred by the same brush.

Unity can bring the change, and whole school approaches to tackling homophobia will be the most effective. After an afternoon in a primary school in which I had felt increasingly uncomfortable as the children made homopobic comments, bullied eachother and made jokes about gay people being murdered - all under the inertiatic auspices of the teacher - I asked her whether the class had ever been taught about homosexuality. The teacher informed me that it was illegal to mention homosexuality in primary schools. It isn't and I daresay she knew it - it was easier to do nothing, and regardless of whether or not she harboured homophobic views, she felt uncomfortable providing her class with what is an absolutely imperative part of their social education.

On the other hand, another primary school has a full system of work, workshops, cross-curricular topics and community speakers come into the school to work with Year 5 and Year 6 pupils to educate them on discrimination.

The fact that there is even debate about whether homophobia needs to be tackled in schools is telling of its status as a lesser, more passable form of discrimination. As is being seen in America, week by week, more 12, 13, 14 and 15 year old children are killing themselves because of their sexuality. But it isn't their sexuality is it? It is society's intolerance of their sexuality that blinds them to the prospects that lie far on the horizon. The child growing up gay deserves to be educated in an environment which supports and accepts him or her, not one which denigrates, marginalises, bullies and ignores them.

Act.

The Presentation of Self in Facebook Life

2010-10-10T08:21:00.000-07:00

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about how the posters you put up in your bedroom carry symbolic meaning, making each choice a message. If you were to put up one poster, that one poster can be considered a singular representation of self - a cultural message specifically selected in order to communicate a message.

The same can be said of Profile Pictures on Facebook; to further allude to Goffman's work 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life', the profile pic can be considered as part of the personal front and any individual social actor (Facebook user) must choose an image through which they are initially represented. True, users have many pictures but that one picture is the one chosen above all the rest as the representamen of the self.

I will be looking through the odd smorgasbord that is my own contact list to see what sociological trophies I can unearth.

1 - Smiling
It seems too common sense to really question it, but when people want to represent themselves to a potential new acquaintance, such as over Facebook, on a first date or at a job interview, it is in their best interests to be smiling. This smile need not communicate anything essential about one's mental state or one's actual happiness - rather, it is a signal of intent; specifically, the intent to communicate amicably. Whether the individual is alone or with others in the image, they are likely to be smiling. From my contact list, the only time people have images of themselves not smiling as their profile are when the mouth is obscured by alcohol bottles or in art-style photographic pouts.

2 - Coupling
Those facebook users who are 'In a relationship' tend often to be in the profile picture with the other half of their partnership. This is a show of unity and a public declaraton of the relationship status. And if there is not a relationship between the individuals in a photo, it remains a show of solidarity. The image capturing the two together, when made into a public profile image, is a publicisation of the friendship.

3 - Political
As a Labourite, I have a number of political types among my facebook friends and the display picture becomes a billboard for cyberspace activism. Through the display picture, political messages can be broadcast - at present, among my friends, a number have replaced an image of themselves with the words of a given cause; protesting against the government cuts, 'Keep Calm and Carry On' and so on. Also, with Ed Miliband having been elected, a number of friends have display pictures showing themselves alongside the new party leader - the message this carries is two-fold, at least: both that the individual is in support of Ed and that one has been in his company. This, in itself, carries the message of social competence and the dalliance with the power ranks.

4 - Actions
Some of the profile pictures are not 'posed' photographs which might well have been taken specifically with Facebook in mind, but are action pictures showing the user 'doing something'. This could be wielding a baby from a disadvantaged country, thus indicating that he or she has been to Africa/India and that he or she does charitable things like that. A similar psychology underlies images interacting with the camera in front of notable landmarks or sites of beauty - the message shows what the user has been doing in their free time and thus they become subject to the touristic gaze which reduces geographical space into tiny, boiled down adjectives. An image beside the Eiffel Tower conveys the emotions of Frenchness - the romance, the accordion etc. Sat cross legged outside the Taj Mahal - inner peace, the ruminating voyager etc. The activities people show themselves doing illustrate how they wish, first and foremost to be seen. Scanning through I see instances of powerlifting tournaments, motorbiking, riding a horse, having sponges thrown towards oneself by disadvantaged children, powerboating, kissing a seal post-taxidermy, being interviewed on TV... each instance the individual conveys something of themselves through their chosen image.

5 - Children
This one is more of a post-scriptum, but it is particularly interesting to see the facebook self-presentation of children and teenagers, whose identities are, theoretically at least, in greater flux than those of adults. I only have a few kids on Facebook and those that are do seem to follow some or all of the above - certainly the smiling. In case you need reminding, my dissertation is on expressions of young masculinity and my Facebook friend requests unearthed an interesting thining point. An 11 year old boy from a primary school I have worked in has added me - I can't accept as I'll be going back to the school, of course - but his profile picture is a testimony to boy's inevitably fruitless pursuit of an adult masculinity. He stands before the camera, in a photo I presume he took of himself, with his shirt off, flexing his muscles with a fierce look on his face. And it is farcical, quite funny but also tragic - boys strive for the raw masculinity they see in action films (I know that seems overly reductionist, but among most boys I've worked with, the brawny physically dominating body is the one they aspire to). But an 11 year old boy will never achieve that; hence, the boys will contort their scrawny bodies into the caricature of what they think 'masculinity' is. And, of course, this fierce powerful masculinity, as their display pic, becomes the image of themselves they wish to project to all.

Talking with 'lads' - part two

2010-09-17T06:38:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's post I outlined why I think boys should be encouraged to talk, in order to combat the silence they often are forced into in order to appear masculine. Today, I'm going to say how I think it should be done.

The picture accompanying this post has a story behind it, which is one of the reasons behind this diatribe. This summer I volunteered on a project where we took children from inner-city Liverpool out into the Cheshire countryside and gave them a week long holiday, full of activities like kayaking, climbing, swimming, camping, mountain biking and Alton Towers. It is student-led and you spend every waking hour with the children in your group - for me, this meant a group of 4 boys aged 11-13.

I hadn't worked with secondary school kids before, and was quite unsure of myself at first - the chat with the boys was very predictable. We talked about football and motorbiking and even on the first night we ended up having playfights with the kids. I was putting up something of a front, I don't normally do this with kids even when they are younger - the kids I work with in Doncaster know me well enough that the boys don't try and engage me in football talk, instead they ask me what cake I intend to buy at lunchtime. Back with the Liverpool kids though, the interaction with the boys was still in that strange stalemate - I was talking to them in a stifled way about football and violent films, they in return did the same back to me.

As the week went on though, the role changed bit by bit - the questions and the types of conversations gradually changed. I felt a lot more comfortable dropping the mantalk and this, in turn, led to them doing the same. One boy started to tell me about his future aspirations and how it annoys him that he doesn't get any support at school - he also said he was worried about his health, as he only just stopped smoking. What was really important in the interaction was that there is a brutal honesty and no hierarchy - it wasn't my role to reiterate that smoking is bad for your health and re-condemn his choice. He knows it is bad. Likewise, he wasn't telling me about what he wants to do because he wants career advice - by not making it into a question and answer session, but into a balanced conversation, it valuates his own contributions as equal, and places merit on his own thinking about himself. Sometimes, you need to speak to somebody else but only to use them as a medium through which to communicate with yourself - to make yourself realise things about yourself.

By a later point in the week, I was getting on better with this boy than the others and we had had some more conversations that seem incongruous for a (it has to be said) violent and angry 12 year old to be having - about the existence of God and the devil, about the purpose of schooling, about psychology. One evening we had taken the lads to a park and disaster struck when one of the other boys desperately proclaimed in broad scouse "I need a fuckin shi', right now". We were in the middle of nowhere and he refused to go in a bush, so he and I set off down the road in search of a pub we could commandeer: strangely, this gave a massively fruitful opportunity for chat. We were in a very affluent neighbourhood and as we wound down this long path, mansions were rising up from behind their steel gates. I pointed a really impressive one out to him and said something along the lines of "Look at the size of that". He was astounded that it was just one house, and ran across the road to the house's open gate. For those of you who have seen the film Matilda, this turned into the scene where Matilda runs off into the Trunchbull's house and I was left there like a weak Miss Honey. He ran up the drive and I asked him what he was doing - "Looking what cars they've got!" He was duly impressed and came back down the drive. We carried on and he started to talk about how to get rich - this led to talk about school, which he hates. He told me about how he doesn't enjoy any of the lessons (apart from Sex Ed, he added later in quite coarse detail) and that he has been kicked out and isn't allowed to go back - he is in a behavioural unit from this September. The conversation wasn't about me condemning his behaviour (he punched a teacher), not was it about only expressing my sympathy - instead, I asked him whether the teacher deserved it. His answer shows why this approach to interacting with the boys is really beneficial - "No, he didn't really, but I'd asked for help all year - he wasn't fair".

We got to the pub and it was a symbolically charged image. It was a very posh country pub full of clearly very well-to-do people and there was a grand piano taking pride of place by the bar. We stepped through the door and he ran straight to the bar, jumped the queue and cut off the guy being served mid-sentence - "Where's ya toilet?!" She directed him and he ran off into it, as all the heads swivelled to look at us stood there with dirty faces and tracksuits caked in mud from our days activities. The humour of the situation really got me as we looked really really dodgy - let's not forget the incongruity of a 20 year old wandering around with a 13 year old either. I got more weird looks as I just had to loiter as he was in the toilet for literally 20 minutes - I called in "You've not fallen down have you?" and the locked door laughed at me and shouted loudly, so the paying customers could undoubtedly hear, "Jonny mate, this is the bigges' shit I've ever 'ad!" Classic.

When he emerged, we walked back and talked more about school and he said more about home as well; in summary, he made it clear he isn't very happy and it certainly seems like he has valid reasons not to be. Later that night as we were all getting ready for bed, I asked him about the massive bruises all on his upper arms - it was from the boys giving eachother 'digs' all week and he told me he hates it. It's sad how this masculine physicality of friendly punching is hated by the boys who do it, but they feel they have to just carry on. He was close to tears. My point is that unless I had dropped the masculine front and just talked to him as a person, allowing him to do the same back to me, neither of us would have felt able to have that conversation. He would keep his emotions to himself for fear of looking weak, and I wouldn't have said anything for fear of seeming like I'm prying or trying to therapise him.

On then to the picture at the top of the post, this was late on in the week, by which time we were all getting on really well in our group. The two boys I have mentioned are there - the boy I've just mentioned is sat beside me and the other boy is stood up on the left. That evening we had gone for a walk through a forest for a picnic and we overran massively - we stuck as a group for most of it, so me and Kev and the 4 boys. We went off the beaten track and cut down near some farmers fields, saw a few donkeys - well and truly in the depths of nature. We got lost. The sun started to set and the kids were getting really excitable - this led to them trying to summon Satan to what was already a quite scary place, and there were pentagrams carved into the dirt with sticks and reverse Hail Mary's being shouted from the mountaintops. When we got back to the clearing, I could see the sun was setting and I went unapologetically feminine and told them to come and watch the sun set by the cliffside. Sat as we were on that picture, the boys and I spoke about the existence of God - one of the boys believed and the rest of us didn't - about Heaven and Hell, about the universe and the existenece of aliens. I pointed out to them that from where we were, seemingly a world apart from their lives in Liverpool, you could see the towers of the refineries in Liverpool on the horizon - they really liked that. These are conversations that you just would not expect boys that age, and from those circumstances, to have.

It is through this relationship that boys can come to realise that they don't need to play the macho performance all the time in order to survive. It doesn't make them 'feminine' either; at the same time as we were having those conversations intermittently through the week, I had to restrain them and break up their fights which they chose to have with seemingly anybody. Their masculinity is the intersection of their pride, but they need to realise that this need not be the case - any dent to their pride, they responded with a macho show of violence and aggression.

Masculinity itself isn't necessary the problem, only the unthinking deployment of a particularly aggressive form of it to defend oneself. This performance allows boys to put a shield around themselves and fight off the outside, when very often, they need also to be able to tend to their own needs. The macho performance is far less harmful if it is protecting an individual in touch with his emotions who is rightly standing up for himself - it is worse when the boy has no free will, when he feels he has no choice but to put up the shield and not let anybody in.

I am sentimental and I am also a hoarder, so a result of these two facts is that I have kept quite a few of the things kids have made for me over the years. A lot of it is shit, but some if the things are among my favourite possessions. One of these items is a thank-you card from one of the boys in the school I work in in Doncaster. I have worked with this boy from when he was 6 years old and he gave me the card this year, so when he was 10. He is a boy who gets himself into trouble quite a lot, but is well-liked by all the adults for his politeness and his character - he gets in fights and he is physically a lot stronger than any of the other kids. In the school last year, the class was doing a circle time activity and they each had to go around and say what they were going to miss next year, and he brought up a time when I came to his help when he was set upon by a group of teenage boys at the local shops who were pushing him about and hurling racist abuse at him. Since that, I tried to keep him out of trouble, but I think that horrible experience tied us together a bit. I left the school this summer and he gave me a card. On the front cover he did an amusing caricature of me dressed in a 50-Cent style outfit, captioned 'Mr Walker, gangster 4life man" but on the inside his message just said "When you are board he always comes over and makes you lagh all of the time he talks to you when you are in a bad anger with someone else. he is very special'

I'm not saying this as part of an egotrip but to illustrate how much boys gain from being able to express their emotions with another male. It shows them that they do not have to take the burden of whatever life throws at them as their sole baggage. It teaches them that it is ok to be upset, rather than fighting back tears and denying themselves their emotional lives. It shows that understanding themselves doesn't equate to weakness.

And they enjoy it - it is like giving them another sense. The real voyage of discovery comes not from seeing new landscapes but from having new eyes.

Talking with 'lads' - part one

2010-09-16T15:14:00.000-07:00

I've had a lot of experience of 'working' with 'difficult' boys; those boys who get into trouble all the time, who get into fights, cause problems in their classrooms and, almost always, have a lot to contend with at home. When I say working with them, I really mean talking with them, and this talking shouldn't be underestimated. It is only through letting children express themselves that they can be helped, and very often their expression is stifled. It goes against the codes of boyhood to talk about things that have upset you or the things that worry you, it is seen as a sign of weakness to show your vulnerabilities, and a result of this is that all those anxieties are turned in on themselves. So if a boy is having a hard time at home - if there is domestic abuse against him or his mother, for example - he will be disinclined to talk about it, but it manifests in more hard to deal with ways. It could come out as violence towards other children, it could come out as an incapacitatingly low self-worth. These boys often feel that they need to keep the armour up at all times; they may certainly want help but they don't want to ask for it.

Getting children to talk about themselves is, in some quarters, quite stigmatised. That horrific statement made by John Major that society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less seems to be drifting back into fashion - to question what drives children to commit serious crimes such as those of Jon Venables and Robert Thomas in the murder of James Bulger or the 'Doncaster torture boys' is seen as somehow letting them off the hook; it is as though understanding itself is some form of weakness that no state authority would want to demonstrate. This conflation of understanding and weakness is the same one experienced by boys in the thrall of their developing masculinity - for a boy to be popular with other boys, he can't be the sensitive one by the playground fence, he needs to be the one who smiles and laughs away the tears as he tumbles across the playground concrete.

I really believe, and my experiences back me up on this one, that boys benefit from being able to talk about things: all things. In an ideal world, or certainly in my gender-egalitarian utopia, boys and girls would both be able to express their emotions to eachother, to their friends, and they would have a stronger relationship to their own emotional needs. As it is now, one of these difficult boys who you will find in every classroom and on every street is unlikely to talk to their peers - typically other 'lads' - about the things that might be troubling them. I don't want to seem overly reductionist here and obviously there will be variation, but in my experience, the more 'difficult' a boy is - the more he bullies, fights, gets excluded, fails in school and the more he has to contend with at home - the more isolated he will be, emotionally. The lone warrior, he may only let his guard down when he is on his own.

So it falls to others to help boys talk. In my eyes, it is now up to the teachers, social workers, volunteers, counsellors and mentors to provide boys with opportunities to talk. And parents too, though I feel it probably helps them to discuss things with someone outside of their family, especially if family is what they wish to talk about.

This talk doesn't need to be overtly therapeutic, it doesn't need to be following some pre-determined protocol like a clinical interview. It doesn't need a warm, gentle environment with beanbags and soft voices. This is often the view people have, hinting at their idea that by allowing boys to talk, you are somehow attempting to feminise, and thus corrupt them.

Before stating what I think is the most beneficial way to talk with boys, I will say a little about what I see to be potentially detrimental and very commonplace. There is a pervasive idea that the only way for adults to engage the disaffected and troubled boys is through being a laddish male role model they can relate to. The first presupposition is that it needs to be a man - I think this needn't be the case, but I do definitely think there are immense benefits for the boys who can be made aware that a man can remain a man in absense of a typical macho masculinity. I think back to the lads who were excluded from my own secondary school and the ways the school tried to keep them engaged - joining the boxing clubs, taking them out of the classrooms and away from the education they need and often onto the sportsfields. Politics affirms this view - bring back national service they say. Bring in ex-soldiers into the classrooms to bring some discipline back.

But it is obvious to me that combatting youthful macho masculinities with adult macho masculinities is doomed to fail. It is wrong. A boy is failing in school and is being disruptive and aggressive - the school excludes him and places him in a behavioural unit, often single sex so only with other excluded boys, where they might receive a more vocational, hands-on, education. The best prospects for a bad-lad are, so it is said, to 'channel' that anger and aggression into something constructive like sport, boxing, the Armed Forces.

Why are we seeking to 'channel' anger and aggression in these boys rather than alleviate it with them?

If you allow boys to talk, they will talk. The caricature of the inexpressive male is true only insofar as the surface level - bubbling away behind that mask are worries, wonders, questions, aspirations, hopes and fears, and very often, these boys will not drop the mask on their own. It is too risky for them to do so. Through engaging with boys by talking about them, their lives and their experiences, you are helping them and allowing them to tend to their own needs.

I don't want to make this post too long, so I will make this 'Part One', which explains the theory behind my views on talking with boys, and tomorrow I will write one giving lots of personal examples to illustrate what I have found to be the best ways to allow boys to express themselves.

Read on here - Part Two

Walk Straight

2010-09-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

About growing up to be a man

Watch the way you walk, my boy
And straighten up your style.
A feeble posture may well foster
Talk about you child.

First of all let down that smile
The muscles of your cheeks fall down;
You will not convince anyone
Unless you wear a frown.

And when you pass another man
It's vital you ensure
Your eyes don't meet, so watch your feet
And stare straight at the floor.

Don't let your head tilt either side
But stiffen up your neck
And keep it straight, anticipate
You keep yourself in check.

Knuckle up those slender hands
Contort your fingers into fists
Perform your power, make them cower
Wield your manhood from those wrists.

Puff up your chest and soldier on
Deeply gorge on each inhale
In through the nose, and you'll impose
A quite convincing male.

Do not allow, at any cost
To snakelike-wind your hips
But trudge with force and this, of course
Ranks high among my tips.

The length of every manly step
Should roughly be the same.
A lengthy stride, feet parted wide,
And you should meet your aim.

Go placidly amid the boys
And you'll be weak and mild.
Go forcefully, walk straight and frown
And be a man, my child.

by Jonny Walker

Crying at Toy Story 3

2010-09-07T16:16:00.000-07:00

Spoiler Alert - I'm talking about the end of the film in this post.

Like most individuals who considered themselves to be more or less 'adult', I found myself sat in the cinema, crying into my £9 vat of popcorn, as Andy waved farewell to his toys after passing them on to the little girl for the next generation. But unlike most individuals, the reason I was crying wasn't out of the gentle realisation that I'm not a child any more nor the warm emotional fug of remembering the happy times playing with my toys. No. Although I did have some of those tears, they were matched by missing my Hoob, who was back home in Doncaster while I was visiting my little sib in Cambridge.

Toy Story 3 was great, but I would be lying if I said I fully and authentically related to it - I've not yet reached Andy's stage. Sure, I've gone off to University and experienced the situation of packing up your room while your mum's voice gets more strained and she goes off to sniffle in the toilet - but hell, the toys were the first thing in the box! I had a lot more toys and they are facing the situation that Buzz and Co nearly did, gathering dust up in the loft. But not Hoob. Hoob is a latecomer - my brother bought me Hoob for my Christmas present this year, aged 19.

For me, Toy Story 3 needs a sequel. Andy, despite having had a great time at University, begins to feel slightly alienated from the world and feels as though something is lacking. He would then come to realise that he isn't ready to live in absense of his toys - he dreams about Woody. He returns home, finds the little girls house and would rip Buzz and Woody from her bleeding fingertips if she refused to yield. Having done the deed, the film would follow him back to Uni where he lives the semblance of a normal life, except the toys are there - on the shelf as he writes the dissertation. And yes, so maybe his cleaner will come in and find Mr Potato Head and the Slinky lying limp and overloved under the duvet every now and again, fresh from a lonely spooning on a cold night on Campus.

Wow, this is getting heavy. So basically, my relationship with my Hoob - which is a plush toy - is getting to depths that I never even reached when I was a child. No word of a lie, I had a nightmare last week and my first waking thought in that panic-stricken and sweating state was to reach out and find the Hoob. "Hoob?!" I would call, as I grabbed him close and hugged the demons away.

It gets worse. When I'm left home alone, even if he is up in my room, I still talk to him. The Hoob is in my mind. I offer him breakfast sometimes. I made a 7 minute video about him that I am too ashamed to put on Youtube.

This is a revelation - I'm being facetious about it but I am acutely aware it is probably symptomatic of some fucked up regressive state I am easing myself into. Should a 20 year old man be crying at a film, partly because it reminds him off a plush figure he has a deeply unhealthy sentimental investment in, definitely not. And I complain, but I won't do anything about it - what would Hoob do without me? I'm trying to go cold turkey on him; he is sat on the stairs now, and I'm trying that parenting technique where you just ignore their cries. I see the way he looks at me as I walk by and don't ask him what he's been up to. I'm going into therapy when I get back to Cambridge, I'd be curious to hear what the therapist thinks of this.

My Global Day (Indoors)

2010-09-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

I was just reading about how the globalisation of the economy has withered the nation state and fundamentally reshaped the aims of our education system. I don't know why, but I have always had a vague distaste for globalisation rhetoric - I tend to think that it is prone to hyperbole and in its quest to cross borders and universalise itself as a theory, it glosses over the inequalities it further entrenches. The fact that the world is more 'interconnected' becomes the focus - I've heard Blair on about this this week - and that does tend to avert the eyes from the massive ruptures between and within societies. We might be more connected, but this isn't priveleging everyone. And as I say, I thought it was a bit of an exaggeration - we don't live 'global lives' do we?

Today, I left the house only to get lunch - how global has my day been?

I got to sleep very late last night, probably around half past two. I would love to be able to regale you of a hedonistic binge or some late night romantic tryst, but no, the reason I was asleep late is that I stayed up, alone, playing Fifa on the PS3. As enjoyable as it is to be beaten by Wrexham when you are as Brazil, it does get tedious eventually but luckily on the PS3, you can connect to the internet and play online. Through that bulky black box in my living room, at 1:30am, I was playing against some unknown individual - Liverpool vs Chelsea - who could have been sat on the floor of a living room anywhere in the world (or anyone who can afford a PS3, which does cut out a majority of the world population).

After demonstrating my inability to play football, even on a screen, I went up to bed at about 2am. I laid there for a while but was unable to sleep - my Slovakian neighbours had just got back from their late shift at the Tesco warehouse. As has become custom, they congregated loudly in the back garden, outside my window, and had a loud conversation and a piss. But it was neo-Fordian politics that kept me up - the system that made it more profitable for Tesco to strike up a deal with an agency, who would house these Eastern-European workers on condition that they keep to their 10-12 hour shifts at what must be, surely, underpaid laborious work.

"Bastards!" I thought, intolerantly. I was getting really tired, so tried to drown it out with my iPod - some soothing melodies to ease me gently to the land of Nod. I had a little bit of cultural hybridity with my Dub remixes of Roots Manuva, sampled a bit of the North with Morrissey before settling on the Austrian composer Mahler's Fifth Symphony Adagietto. Let's not overlook the globality of the iPod itself and all the labour that went into making it - here.

So, before I even slept - I had consumed the products, experience and cultures of Brazil, Slovakia, Japan, Jamaica (second hand through Roots' parents), Austria and more.

Well, this blogpost would have been a lot longer had I not treated myself to an epic lay-in. At 12:45pm, my Snorlax-self evolved and I rose from my dormancy! For your information, the dream was based in England - I remember playing basketball at some point...that was invented by the Canadian James Naismith. My and my multicultural subconscious)

So yes, I woke up and came downstairs to find my post waiting for me. The Labour Leadership Election papers! I logged on to my Facebook and checked what is going on in the world. I could keep in touch with friends from Cambridge who are living or visiting all the corners of the planet - in every continent. I wasn't feeling massively social, but if I was feeling chatty, I could have chatted in real time with friends in Ghana, Sri Lanka, Australia or anywhere, from the comfort of my big old living room chair.

2pm, I started to feel hungry and this led to my only excursion outside of the house - to Sainsbury's Local! I wasn't sure what I wanted but I didn't have much change so my options were limited to £2. I wandered about a little bit and decided on some discounted Sushi that was about to go out of date (79p = win), some Dorito's (variation on a Mexican theme) and some Coke (the epitome of transnational capitalist marketing) to wash it all down. And back home - nom nom nom, all gone.

My brother is ill and for that reason he is even more sedentary than usual - since he wasn't going to move out of my chair, I felt I ought to make the best of a cramped living room situation and decided to put a film on. We watched Almodovar's 'Bad Education (La Mala Educacion) in Spanish.

I'm getting a little bored of myself now, so I will say only that my dad made some Chicken and Chorizo pasta for dinner.

You see my point. We live in a society that places high virtue on one's autonomy and self-reliance but even on a day in which I barely left the house, nearly every aspect of my life was dependent upon a distant Other. Food, Neighbours, Music, Film, Language, Technology, Production.

Maybe our the core of our sense of independence is that we just don't need ever to meet the people we rely upon to sculpt our social existence.

What is my gender?

2010-08-04T04:43:00.000-07:00

I have few doubts about my sex; upon my last inspection, and in line with all previous examinations, I was undeniably male. But my gender has been proving more difficult to 'classify', not that I want specifically to compartmentalise my identity - it would just be interesting to think about it.

My dissertation is going to be a look at the embodiment and performance of masculinities and opportunities of subverting and transcending the gender order - among primary school children. I will be doing this through observation, classroom activities, group discussions and individual interviews. I can't wait.

The stage I'm in now though is the meaty substantial theoretical overview and literature review which is taking me on a grand tour of Foucault, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, RW Connell and a whole range of other writers for whom I have to devote around an hour to get through a paragraph. But by god is it interesting, and by god is it making me question the fragile nature of my own gender identity.

So. What is my gender?

I have phrased this question in a different way once before: am I bitch or butch? Ignoring the horribleness of this phrase, it does capture this strange non-understanding of my self in how I am perceived sexually by others. I find it quite hard to gauge whether I am perceived to be 'masculine' by any of the many standard definitions. I'm under no delusions that I am a brooding Clint Eastwood type, or a muscular man-mountain, or a bloke, or a lad. When it comes to 'man points', I would score quite low. I don't like beer. I don't like football. I think Jeremy Clarkson is a xenophobic twat. I don't care about cars. I don't have many straight male friends.

These traits are some which fall within the brackets of 'hegemonic masculinity' - that is, the behaviours, interests and so on, which are seen to be the accepted 'norm' within our society for a man to possess. I don't match them at all.

But then again, I don't see myself as particularly feminine. I may not like beer, but I like cider and am a god of vodka. I may not care about cars, but when I cycle, I am prone to dropping the c-bomb at any driver who kindles my road rage. I wear a tracksuit... OK, clearly I am finding it harder than I thought to list my masculine traits.

If I was to list aspects of my self which are not typically masculine, I would find it far easier. The majority of my friends are female. I am good with kids. I study sociology, and have studied languages and literature. I once shrieked with joy because I saw a boy-duck chasing a girl-duck on the lawn outside my room in college. I sing a lot, often wearing very little. I've been told I am camp.

Funny as this might sound, I have never once seriously considered myself to be feminine. I have always been quite self-aware but I have clearly held on to a quite self-serving notion of manhood which has insulated me against any transgender leanings. My sort of masculinity is the sort that can read a poem out loud effectively, or which relishes in telling stories. I have always considered it masculine to do well in school; which was handy, what with me being such a pasty-faced, homework-doing obedient and pliable milksop. Even in my now dormant relationships with girls, I considered it more masculine to be caring and sensitive, rather than to look forward to ploughing her.

I guess my gender quandary comes about because of the way in which I have deployed 'masculinity' as though it was an empty word, wholly decontextualised, in order to legitimate my existing behaviours, proclivities and interests.

A really interesting aspect of what I have been reading and researching is theorising 'the body'. A lot of recent feminist work has focused on the perceptions, deployment, modification, commodification, adornment and identification with the body. Something I have found particularly engaging was Arthur W. Frank's work on 'bodily use in action' and the different ways one can relate to one's own body. I don't really appreciate it enough to blog about it yet, but will do shortly. Instead, I'll just talk about my body a bit. One thing I do remember from Frank's work is the notion of a 'mirroring body', which is the relationship whereby your relationship with your body is largely visual. You see your body as a vessel, as something observable, to be controlled and sculpted, made to react, made to perform. It is interested in the external. This is the part that pre-occupies me. My perception of my body is based upon how I perceive others perceive it - which is difficult. If ever you see me contorted and in need of help when I'm on my bike, it will be because I am attempting - again - to see what my legs and arse look like from behind whilst cycling.

I am 6 foot 2, which certainly helps me to put up at least a weak veneer of masculinity, if only because there aren't many Amazonian six foot women about. Six foot ought to be the preserve of the masculine body, but I still feel I would fall short if I was striving to put forward the hegemonic body. I am not imposing as a person, but for quite a while through my teenage years, I thought that my body was. From what I can gather, it wasn't. I don't have a dominating physical presence - I notice this mostly when children laugh at me when I try and discipline them, even though I cast a shadow over their entire body when I stand.

Is it the body itself, or how you adorn it that sculpts its gendered reception? I feel different when I think my body looks different - for example, I went out cycling last night in a sporty garb of tracky bottoms, trainers, sports jacket. I looked more convincingly 'masculine' than my attire usually presents - and I felt it too, I felt as though people passing me by were receiving me in a different way. Without wanting to turn this into a soft-porn fiction though, I got back from the bike ride and stripped off for the shower and saw myself in the mirror. Naked, I noticed that despite the height, despite the cock, lack of breasts etc I have quite a feminine shape. I have a really pronounced curvature in my lower back. Interesting.

I feel little closer to understanding my gender - society says feminine, brain and body say masculine.

Let's fly back briefly into childhood. As I mentioned, my dissertation is going to be looking at the performance of gender in primary schools, so a lot of my reading has focused upon gender, identity and sexualities in both the primary and secondary school spaces. This has brought back a lot of memories, some of them quite painful, relating to my gendered self in its emerging state.

One thing I had forgotten completely, and was surprised it came back, was that in Year 7 I did a gifted and talented art project for a week, which involved a visiting sculptor coming in and working with selected pupils from 3 or 4 different secondary schools. Five were chosen from my school and I was the only boy. I remember that the majority of students from other schools were boys, and I remember also that I stuck with the girls from my own school. I remember hearing the boys from other schools ridiculing me every single day, and I remember doing nothing about it. I remember on one day, one of them shouting from one side of the room to the other - "Oy Jonny, are you gay? Are you actually gay?" Naturally, no teachers intervened on this one. I felt victimised, but more than anything, I was left wondering how they could tell. How, after not having even spoken to me, could they make such an observation?

And a few more, since this is basically the therapy I can't afford. I remember one maths lesson, when my weak weak masculinty shines out like a permissive beacon of timidity. The teacher was talking, and this boy - a 'hardo’ (what I would today call a heteronormative hegemon or something like that) – he just got up out of his chair, walked across the classroom, leant over me and reached into my school bag and took a packet of crisps out of it, and walked back to his chair and started eating them. Then he looked over at me and crushed them. I did absolutely nothing. My coping mechanism (well, mechanism) was to ignore it – guided maybe by the logic of the milksop “It takes a bigger man to walk away”. Many many more like that. A boy stamped on my shin, intentionally, in a PE lesson – the PE teacher saw it but ignored it, I did nothing but try and hold back the tears.

The weird thing; I didn’t think then, and don’t now, that I was bullied. I know the kids who got bullied and I was fine compared to them. What I went through was just the daily grind of any body which doesn’t ‘fit’ the mould of being a ‘boyo’ or whatever. I wasn’t victimised, relatively. The boys who had it worst must have endured a living hell.

Jon Venables

2010-07-26T15:10:00.000-07:00

Criminal cases involving young children really rankle with me not only because I work with them but also because, to those who notice such things, they magnify and illuminate the social tensions, mores and norms which undergird our taken-for-granted, lived experience of society. In cases where young children have committed crimes or have exhibited deviant behaviours, the traditional rhetoric of childhood innocence, which serves to infantilise, de-sex and deny subjective agency to children stands in contrast to society's often heinous, punitive recourse to justice. Very often, the media become the arbiters who effectively 'decide' on the approved moral response for society to take.

To give a recent example of how fixed and concrete becomes the mediated arbiter's perception of events, think back only a week to the undeniably sad story of Raoul Moat. The hero-worship of him was absurd, I agree, but the response of David Cameron to the small outpouring of sympathy for him was symptomatic of the prescriptive nature of the media's message. The PM stated that there should be no no sympathy for the callous murderer, and that all sympathy should be for the victims. I feel sympathy for anybody with a history of mental health problems who finds themselves subject to a police manhunt, which is broadcast 24/7 to an enthralled audience desperately waiting for the next installment, forced out into the countryside and in such a position that he knew his life was over. To sympathise with his situation does not condone his actions, nor does it condemn them - sympathy, without exploding into a fireball of closeted Quakerism, is a human emotion which one feels when one can place oneself in the position of another, and realise the hurt they must be feeling.

This is important to remember throughout the rest of this post as I go on to look at the case of Jon Venables. I sympathise hugely with him, and I feel no personal discomfort in doing so, because I know that the opposition 'perpetrator/victim' is not equal to 'good/evil' as the media so frequently sculpts it. The murder of James Bulger was horrific - nobody contests that - but this absolutely does not legitimate the media free-for-all over his life, nor does it give Bulger's mother any legal grounding to comment on his every move until either one of them passes on.

Venables is a 27 year old man and the only picture to have been used of him in the media, for 17 years, is the picture that I am using for this blog - paradoxical, I know, since I am criticising the repeated use of it, but I think it will be pertinent for you, as a reader, to be able to really look at it as it is discussed. A letter in today's Guardian questioned the effects of the media's continued use of this image - So long as it is taken for granted that we, the public, have some kind of unquestionable right to look at and be fascinated by this image of Venables without even considering that its publication or transmission may be causing him further distress, we should not be so shocked at the revelation of Venables' own fascination with images of children in distress. The Independent's Melanie McDonagh refers to a Dorian Gray in reverse; Venables will age and change outwardly, but the image of him in the public mind will be always that of the boy who killed a boy.

James Bulger is the perfect victim. There is absolutely no way in which a two year old child can be held responsible, in any way, for what happened. He was too young to have put himself in a vulnerable position, too young to have provoked any response from his killers and too young to have, in even a minor way, a 'blemished character'. Having such a completely innocent victim enables the demonisation of his killers, regardless of whether they were also children. The purity of the victim allowed the story to be easily mediated as good versus evil - Biblical, Koranic, universal - and who questions why the Devil does bad things? Nobody. He does evil because he is the Devil, and he is the Devil because he does evil.

The media scale and publicity of the murder of James Bulger, and the immense (mediated) public response to it means that Jon Venables, as soon as he and Robert Thompson led the toddler out of the shopping centre, ceased to exist. Jon Venables ceased to be a person and became real only when he fulfilled the personage attributed to him.

Now; think how many times you have seen the image of Jon Venables. As you flick through channels, as you walk past newsagents. Imagine now that you are Jon Venables, out of prison for the first time in 11 years, aged 21 having served your sentence. Nobody can know who you are, regardless of how remorseful you may or may not be, as the vigilante sentiments run so deep that you will be forever at risk. Imagine being 21 and being perpetually condemned for what you did as a 10 year old.

This might appear an irresponsible comment, but it is no wonder he went on to sexually fetishise the suffering of children: he has been forced into remaining the 10 year old murderer, he cannot move on and the public will not let him. Ours is not that sort of society.

When Venables and Thompson were tried in 1993 for the murder, in an adult court (this was illegal, was it not? Lawyers?), the judge, Mr Justice Morland, pronounced that the boys had committed "an act of unparalleled evil and barbarity" - as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes in today's Independent, this is one of the most irresponsible statement ever to come from the mouth of a judge. And this was fuelled by the political pressure, with Prime Minister John Major's harrowing statement that we need to 'condemn a little more, and understand a little less'.

Condemn a little more... Demonisation may sate the bloodlust of the masses but it leads to further marginalisation and further transgressions, as can be seen as Venables returns to prison this week facing child porn charges. It begs the question of what our media is doing, what they hope to achieve, by continuing to shape the reporting of crimes such as those of Jon Venables within a moral framework of 'good versus evil'. I'm reminded of W.I. Thomas's sociological dictum - if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. How much are the media to blame?

TV is stultifying life

2010-07-13T11:18:00.000-07:00

This isn't going to be particularly articulate - TV is awful. What could be something wonderful with the power to inform, educate, unite, diversify and entertain has, bit by bit, been reduced to mind-numbing, lowest common denominator, characterless, conservative and mollifying shit.

A look at prime time terrestrial tv, the most watched broadcasts, is always and invariably a perfect example. Presenters on the two biggest channels, BBC and ITV, must fit a number of criteria. They can be of any ethnicity, although usually of British nationality. More and more, there is a representation of different regional accents, though dialect has no place. But there is one trait that is rarely absent - the presenters must be innocuous, unthreatening and lack any opinion (see Richard Hammond). Matt Baker has recently joined The One Show and he is one of the worst - there is absolutely nothing about him. He is so bland I struggle to express how it even frustrates me. There is no place for opinion among presenters: why is this so? They just have to be middle class and nice. Gah!

What particularly infuriates me is how TV programmes that might be remotely interesting have to be bubblewrapped from themselves by use of 'familiar' faces. On The One Show just now, ex-cricketter Phil Tufnell was being shown around the Royal Academy and was being shown a painting of a cat in a hat - "I like the fur." Riveting. There are plenty of other examples of this; the most popular topical programmes are all comedy panel shows. The more serious coverage such as Working Lunch are shown at times when few people would be able to watch it anyway. I massively dislike how anything remotely informative is fronted by characterless 'everymen', whose man-on-the-street credentials are for some reason favoured over genuine expertise, or even remote interest.

I can't quite express it. I'll probably end up deleting this post, but what I am trying to get across is that things could be so much better and if the BBC had the backbone to make a change and stop patronising its audience, that audience wouldn't be so easily pacified and maybe, just maybe, 6 million people would be tuning into something other than Jeremy Clarkson and that intolerable shell of a person Richard Hammond.

Hoobitus - Pierre Bourdieu and The Hoobs

2010-05-24T16:36:00.001-07:00

Episode 232 of 250 of Series 1 of children's TV Show 'The Hoobs' and the female pink hoob Tula opens the microwave and carries her baking to the table. Enter Groove, a green male Hoob, "Ah Tula, you make the most hoobalicious hoobnip tart ever...when will the hooby cookies be ready?". Ivor runs in, also wanting some of that hoobnip tart, the ambrosia of hoobland, but Groove, the little bastard, has eaten it all. "It's ok Ivor, Tula can always make some more." Tula drops her spoon "Oh no she can't!" The boy hoobs are confused why she is cross - "I'm tired of making the hooby cookies, hooby fizz, hooby buns." The lovably camp Ivor excuses his lack of help in the kitchen, he does the cleaning and the tidying up. It is the lazy laddish Groove who does nothing. They decide to take her to a restaurant, but she is too scared, so they decide to set one up together.

There's some learning to do!

And so begins our foray into the world of the Hoobs - the world reversed - a simulacrum of social reality and a practice of acute symbolic violence.

The concept of the Hoobs is that they are outsiders to human social life - they speak the same language as the peeps (adults) and tiddlypeeps (kids), but they don't have the same cultural concepts, and lack the basic understanding of the social order. Bourdieu speaks of a habitus - an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it was constituted - the social life that the peeps take for granted, their latent contentedness and practical mastery of their lived environment, is something that the Hoobs lack. Raised in Hoobland, they haven't acquired the skillful mastery of the social intricacies, so when they encounter a problem, they head over to earth to see the tiddlypeeps, who inculcate them with an artificial 'practical logic'; this will only ever pale in comparison to the doxic experience of the peeps themselves, who see life through the lens of a pre-conscious and taken-for-granted world.

As they journey over to see the kids, the music plays a song, the same each episode. "We're off to see the tiddlypeeps, on the road we go. We're off to see the tiddlypeeps, they're smart, they're fun, they know. If we need to know, who what when why where and how, we ask them and they know." Thus we see, from the ritualised chanson, that the culture of the tiddlypeeps, and by extention peeps generally, is constituted in the hoobacious mind as the legitimate culture. The knowledge of the peeps is a 'fait accompli' - once the Hoobs have consulted the tiddlypeeps, they can cease questioning 'Why?'; the legitimate knowledge of the peeps is accepted as correct.

In this particular episode, the pedagogic authority is a pair of boys. The fatter of the two tiddlypeeps instructs Groove on how to be a waiter, and, with the confident authority of Sun Tzu, imposes a panoply of cultural arbitaries - an arbitrary that is posited to be concrete and natural through the legitmacy of the interlocutor. The first lesson from the rotund pedagogue is the 'correct' laying out of cutlery on a table. This is followed up by the second pedagogue who asserts that then you need to put flowers on the table, to make it look pretty. Little Ivor, subject to this peep-ocracy, eagerly notes down the teachings - "flowers, water...".

Groove assimilates the teaching and attempts to be a waiter - he gets the food and throws it onto the table in front of the tiddlypeeps. They laugh at him and point in his face - he looks around, startled and aghast! - this is what Goffman, in Stigma, referred to as a shaming ritual and as a blemish of character. It similarly links in to Foucault's concept of discipline - transgressions against socially normative behvaiour are avoided through adherence to the cultural arbitaries, and are monitored through omnipresent surveillance.

So the children laugh at Groove, who cannot perform easily as a waiter due to the constraints of his own boisterous Hoob-habitus (for which I coin the neologism - Hoobitus). This situation finds it's parallel in the amusement of children seeing an African woman carrying a basket on her head or the schadenfreude of watching somebody from China trying to pronounce 'lollipop'. Although cultures are equal, objectively, some are valued higher than others and those individual who considers her own to be the legitimate will thus denigrate other 'deviant' cultures - she will discipline those cultures which differ from her own.

The tiddlypeeps instruct Groove that to be a good waiter, he has to be polite and speak in an affected manner. He tries again - "Here you are Sir...and here you are Madam." The fat tiddlypeep pedagogical authority's doughface beams - "Very good Groove!!" Thus the legitimate authority corrects and controls the deviant Hoob, and is able to do so through such pedagogic action as befits a pedagogic authority.

Like this, in the 249 other episodes, the children sat in their homes, who watch The Hoobs are given a show of deference to their own culture. The naive Hoobs who gallivant into the tiddlypeep world on-screen can be seen as a simulacrum of the symbolic learning the children make in their pre-cognisant state, as their habitus is forming and before it displays itself in their hexis. The Hoobs ask the questions that the children don't need to. The children learn that the correct way to eat is with a knife, fork and spoon. But also at a table, whilst sat on a chair. Also in a designated room withing the abode. And at a designated time.

What the children viewing 'The Hoobs' see is a representation, vivid and engaging, of the idealised form of their own world, as seen from the perspective of the mores of the status quo in their society.

Cambridge as Total Institution

2010-05-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

Erving Goffman defined a total institution as a 'place of residence and work where a large number of like-minded individuals, cut off from wider society for an appreciable amount of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life'. Institutions he had in mind were mental asylums, prisons, prisoner of war camps, concentration camps; as well as less punitive others, such as sanatoria, leperosaria, army barracks, monasteries and even some boarding schools.

'Cambridge is a total institution. Discuss.'
This is the question I've decided to set myself, out of a deteriorating sense of academic purpose, an inability to revise and a need to find new and less guilt-inducing ways to procrastinate.

*

A prerequisite for a total institution is that sleep, play and work take place in the same place. In society generally, it is a fair assumption that one might wake up in his house, go to work at the office, retire to the golf course to chill out for a bit, before returning home to family and his bed. The central feature of total instituions can be described as a breakdown of the barriers ordinarily separating those 3 spheres of life.

I woke up at 11:30 today, in my tiny cupboard of a room in Homerton (incidentally after having a range of weird dreams but no matter). I switched on my laptop and staggered off for a piss. I sat down at my desk and read some Erving Goffman. I got hungry; I ate in my room. I worked for a while this afternoon. I chilled out here, watching 4OD, and now I'm listening to Eels whilst dubiously revising/procrastinating by writing this. Then I will hop off my scummy desk chair into bed. If I went and stood on the lawn outside East House and looked up at the windows, I daresay there will be many others doing the same. Working, living, relaxing, sleeping, playing, reading: all in their confined spaces.

*

In a total institution, the fulfilment of human needs is dealt with bureaucratically - all you need to keep you alive will be provided for by the institution.

I direct you to CUSU, where you will find your political rights, your sexual health, your mental stability, your academic services, your official information and your every faxing and photocopying whim catered for. Hungry reading this? You can go down to hall or to the buttery. Wearing dirty clothes? Go to your on-site laundry room. Preggo? Call your welfare officer. Ill? Visit the college nurse. Religiously ambiguous? Chaplain.

*

In a total institution, activities that carried direct gratification on the outside are made fruitless and seemingly futile. Thus the soldier may find himself cutting a lawn with a pair of nail clippers as a disciplinary punishment. The prisoners may be forced into labour, pointless or otherwise, for which they get no material reward. In the total institution, work does not lead to a dispensible wage; instead, fear is instilled in inmates about the consequences of NOT doing the work. This is coupled with incentivising things that would be taken for granted on the outisde; for example, a prisoner may behave perfectly for a month in order to be granted a phonecall.

In Cambridge, which students haven't begged the question of what in the holy fuck is the point? In no occupation would you expect to work over 12 hours a day for no other incentive than for your own good. So we work towards exams... what do they measure? Only how much work you have done. It's exam term and a girl who lives on my corridor has mentioned that she will get up early to start work so that she can allow herself an hour to watch Over the Rainbow. Is it really worth it?

*

In a total institution, whether there is too much work forced upon them (as in the forced labour of a Nazi death camp) or too little, so that they fall into extremes of boredom (as in those who rock to themselves, retreatist, in a mental asylum), those who enter the institution being work-motivated are likely nonetheless to be ground down and demoralised by the persistent work culture of the total institution.

This one needs little elucidation. All I will say to elaborate is that in the September before I matriculated, I found myself pre-reading in Doncaster Library, thinking keenly about how the Cambridge experience will expand my academic horizons, entrench my convictions and push me to reach my potential. Two weeks after matriculating, after gulping from the ceremonial Homerton Horn, I found myself sat in my pants at 3pm missing lectures only to eat Ryvita, watch Youtube clips of japanese scare pranks and bash myself off. If ever there was a case study of demoralisation, it lived in 333 West House in Michaelmas 2008.

*

New inmates (read: freshers) enter the total institution with a personal identity and a unique way of life and set of experiences that set them apart from other inmates. The institution sets about a process of DISCULTURATION - an 'untraining' which renders the inmate less capapble of managing certain features of daily life in the real world, if he ever leaves.

Can you remember your first supervision, when you realise that despite being top of the class for the 13 years leading up to this pedagogical stand-off, you are actually brainless, ineloquent and pathetic. And gradually, the cultural currents of Cantabrigia catch you and sin you around - you probably don't evn notice it happening - so that when you return back to your hometown you feel somehow alien. My own experience of returning back to Doncaster, my genuinely much-loved hometown for all my life, was this sense of unease at how fat everybody was and a distrust of shopworkers. Further examples of disculturation can be found in the SPS library, where, after reading Foucault and Lacan for 4 hours, students leave unable to socially interact: my own experience of this was telling a Big Issue seller I wanted him to bite me, in a skewed pursuit of banter.

And there is more; but regrettably the panopticon is conditioning a sense of guilt into me as I'm writing this; that unseen but omnipresent force of the institution incorporeal, whsipering into my conscience, breathlessly, "Stop writing blogposts, and do some fucking spider graphs"

So I leave you with the 4 tactics Goffman identifies of how inmates cope with life inside the institution. If you agree that Cambridge is a total institution - bedfellow to Belsen, Bedlam and the barracks - maybe this will be useful for you.

- Situational Withdrawl - becoming completely insular and withdrawing entirely from all semblances of an external reality, living only within the confines of your mind. Think along the lines of a mental patient who does not communicate but merely moves around silently in the ward, the Romanian orphan who has not been spoken to who is closed off to the social world, or the stereotypical CompSci.

- Intransigent Line - adopting a flagrant refusal to obey the institution and its rules. These people often do not last long; in many total institutions, physical pain, torture and even death may been inflicted upon these transgressors. In Cambridge, these rules essentially constitute doing academic work; so such transgressors can be considered to be practicing what Homertonians may understand to be the Gadsby Effect.

- Colonisation - when the inmate builds up a virtual experience of the outside world from the few external influences that remain for them. This could be the soldier in the bunkers who is motivated by the thought of returning to his wife. This could be the prisoner who keeps his sanity by merely thinking of the beauties of freedom and counting down the days. Or, in Cambridge, it could be the Lawyer who works themself to the extent of autism with their eyes fixed solely on their life after leaving the oppressive manacles behind.

- Conversion - accepting the rules and striving for perfect. This could be the perfect prisoner, who follows the rules without question, is subservient and helpful to prison officers and who thus incurs merits such as small but significant freedoms, such as special duties. Here, it could be the student who grafts away, eternally mindful that they must be on time, of passable quality, diligent in supervisions and getting the most from their time here.

*

Anyway, I must get back into my cell; revision beckons.

The Student as Sisyphus

2009-11-12T11:29:00.001-08:00

In Greek Mythology, Sisyphus was a cunning mortal. When Hades, the God of the Underworld, came to take him down to the kingdom of the dead at the end of his life, Hades came prepared and brought handcuffs, which Sisyphus cunningly got him to demonstrate on himself - Sisyphus kept him locked in a closet. For this, and other crimes against the Gods, he was given an eternal punishment of being put to hard labour.

His task was to push a boulder to the top of a hill, and when it reached the top and fell back down, he had to climb back down, and begin to roll it back up again. Exertion. Toil. Sweat. Ennui. Sisyphus was resigned to his fate, and had little choice but to continue - pushing the boulder up the hill only to be forced to start again once he had reached the top.

The French Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus saw this as a fitting metaphor for life in a futile world without meaning such as our own. In 'L'Etranger', translated as The Outsider or The Stranger, Camus' protagonist Meursault is the Sisyphean, absurd hero. Camus postulates that there is no objective purpose to our existence, but that this needn't necessarily be a source for pessimism.

He identified three ways in which an individual could react, faced with the futility of their existence. They could deny that it lacks meaning, by creating false idols through religion, for example; by creating a God-as-purpose. To do this is to lie to oneself though, and to deny oneself the dignity of their autonomy, however futile their existence might be. Alternately, one could commit suicide, and suicide is the major theme in his philsophy - "there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide" - but if one's life is pointless, so would be one's death. If life is futile, it is yet more so to try and escape it. The third option, and the one which Camus and the existentialists generally promote, is to embrace the futility of life, to find those small insignificant acts in life that indulge you in sensorial pleasure, albeit subjective, and accept that life is meaningless.

We're alive to the extent that we are conscious of ourselves, we don't have any obligations, we don't have any purpose, we don't have any 'meaning'. Whether you do good things or bad things, in the grand schema of life itself, it doesn't really matter. Any recognition or status acquired is subjective and is grounded in life itself - in terms of existence, it is meaningless. The fact is, we're here at the foot of this great bloody mountain and the boulder is there, waiting to be pushed, and there is no reason not to push it.

This is pretty much life as a student here in Cambridge. Sisyphus had to push a rock endlessly up a hill for eternity, undergradutates have to write essays, make deadlines, make it to supervisions... But do we have to? Not really. Most students here are locked into Camus' first option of how to cope with the futility of our existence: denial. The NatSci grafts towards a new pathos in understanding the structure of plant cells, the Social Anthropolgist attempts to diagrammatise and bifurcate culture into binary opposition, the Philosopher ponders metaphysics, the Medic develops ways to keep people alive, the Lawyer memorises tomes of rules... but why? It is not the 'meaning' of the Plant Scientist to theorise on stomata. Structuralist analysis doesn't make the social anthropologists life any more meaningful... But nonetheless, we push on in our quest for knowledge, for a better career, to satisfy our parents, to keep ourselves from ennui, to avoid the job market.

The legions of Sisyphean students sit in their accomodation and if you stand outside and face the windows, you can see them, hundreds of them spread over numerous floors - like Bentham's Panopticon - all sat at their desks, typing, reading, researching but ultimately, distracting themselves and constructing a subjective meaning for the inessense of their existence.

Doing this only makes it more difficult to push the boulder. Whether we do it in acceptance or in denial, we have no choice but to push the boulder up the hill.

So students, citizens, humans, find what pleases you, embrace it wholeheartedly, always remembering not to take yourself too seriously, and carry on heaving through life.

Doncaster and the National News

2009-10-23T16:21:00.000-07:00

OK, I've had another experience of deja vu. Once again I'm at University down south and have stumbled upon a link to a news item, from the BBC News at Six, about Doncaster on the BBC. Experience has taught me to quell my hopeful optimism for a positive story of any sort - it won't be about a child who has learnt to walk on a prosthetic limb, a tale of a dog that rides the bus every day or about the town's new ranking as the Cosmopolitian Town of Culture. Nothing positive.

Since my being at university, Doncaster has been in the national news for these things. Peter Davies - a controversial English Democrat (?) who is seen to oppose the rights of homosexuals, who is against diversity and is concocting a war on politial correctness - was elected as mayor. Two boys aged 10 and 11 tortured, attacked, sexually abused and left for dead two other boys aged 9 and 11. A drug addict father murdered his baby daughter by snapping her spine over his knee. Doncaster Children's Services were rated among the very worst in the country, as bad as Haringey, home of Baby P, and it has since been taken over by the central government.

All chirpy stuff I'm sure you'll agree...

But what I think now, is that the BBC may possibly be constructing a misleadingly negative view of our town. Nobody is saying Donny is the Garden of Eden, but it's not quite as bad as recent news items show it. Today for example, the BBC chose to show a piece about the Question Time with Nick Griffin from Doncaster, with its reporter roving around the town's particularly bad shit holes. The BNP have never been elected in Doncaster... why Doncaster? Because the media is appropriating Doncaster to become its symbolic town of decay? Maybe?

Every time I see this happen, I'll do another post like this one.

These are the images from today's piece - I don't think I need to say too much about the images themselves, but for a piece which lasted little over 2 minutes, there was a high density of pushchairs, prams, boarded up shops, mud and grey. The first image below shows a social club with the camera shot taken through a muddy puddle - Buckingham Palace would look pretty dirty if the image was taken with the lens placed by a strategically chosen lump of dogshit. Shots like this are really misrepresenting Donny. Doncaster really isn't great, but it's not like this...

The Problem with Posters

2009-10-09T13:32:00.001-07:00

Homerton College's accomodation is like Barratt Homes meets Ikea, and is as close to mass production as Cambridge colleges get. The new buildings in which all freshers, and most other students on campus, live are very non-descript. The interiors of the rooms are all the same - the only difference between rooms is whether the bed is on the left, or whether the desk is. It's quite stifling. So people try to personalise and the quickest and easiest way that we do this is through posters.

But the problem with posters is that they aren't just decorative but they are communicative. The posters you choose to put up may have symbolism themselves, but by the fact you have chosen it, you are adding your own message. A picture of Barack Obama being inaugurated is symbolic itself of the progression of African-Americans and of democracy, and of hope. But if I put this image on my wall, it has the added message that I support his politics, I consider myself a democrat and so on.

In my room at the minute, I have only one poster, a very small one, which is directly facing you on the back wall as you enter. It is of Billy Casper from the film Kes, in the iconic 'two fingers up' pose. My own meaning for this poster is manifold - Kes is inextricably linked to Cambridge for me, quite paradoxically. The essay I sent in with my application was about the Sociology of Billy Casper's Failure, which I have since posted on another blog. I am studying Sociology largely thanks to a very good, dedicated teacher I had for A level, and he too was slightly obsessed with A Kestrel for a Knave. In a quite excessive way, it is a comment on my own background and success, compared to young Billy. And another, more profane reason, is that it is a fantastic iconic image, but not one that is too popular.

But if you look at the picture, and its place in the room, it gives off a very different message. For those who maybe haven't seen the film Kes, they are faced with a slightly grim black and white image, at face-height, which is pointing two fingers at them as soon as they enter the room. It's hardly any wonder that fewer people are coming to visit me in my room this year - I am effectively telling them to fuck off as soon as they enter.

But my main dilemma is this - I have a large wall to fill and I want to have one poster and one only. To choose it though, is to choose the one biggest message that I will give to anyone who enters my room. I wanted something literary and found a collection of vintage book covers of pieces of great fiction. One of my very favourite novels was amongst them - Lolita. As much as it is a great piece of fiction, and again a very iconic image, I would effectively be saying to guests, of all the things that I could use to represent myself through the reshaping of my living space, I chose a 14 year old girl sucking a lollipop coyly. So Lolita will not adorn my wall. I want some art, but I don't want to appear pretentious so nothing too highbrow, else people will think I'm trying too hard. But at the same time, I don't want to conform by having Daffodils, or Guernica, or that photograph of the workmen sittig on scaffold in New York. In fact, I want none of those many New York images that people seem to like if they are never realistically going to visit the place. Something to oggle might be nice, a talking point - having said that, I don't want a nude lady from classical art on my wall. Since people don't see me as being interested in art, they might presume I'm debasing what ought to be a high culture into a base cheap pornography. I could have a nude male, but again, it's sending out overtly sexual vibes and its not the message I want the bedder to receive as she wipes the yoghurt from my desk. If I were to choose something, it would have to have a meaning behind it, but nothing too realistic - something abstract but not so abstract that it becomes a hollow Foucauldian simulcrum. Difficult eh?

To buy one poster to decorate your room is one of the most taxing activities for the identity - we think of ourselves as complex, changeable, fluid and in a constant state of flux. We are many different people effectively - I'd be happy for some of my friends to see Lolita on my wall, but if my grandparents came to visit - less happy. My grandparents think of me as a different person to the one my friends see.

The poster is less a physical item than a symbolic one - rather than being static it communicates and interacts. To shop for posters is like clicking a drop down list of one word personality traits and choosing the one that best represents your concept of self.

And for that reason, my wall remains bare.

The Elderly - A Septuagenarian Cyborg Dystopia

2009-09-14T08:42:00.000-07:00

Surely I am not the only one who is frightened by this advert. In the age where children are openly branded feral in the national media, without need of justification, where shops and public buildings have installed The Mosquito in order to psychologically torture 'loitering youths' and in which the clothes of the young are a cultural by-word for criminality, it seems that in the battle of the Ages, it is the fearful elderly who have been victorious. With the marginalisation of the young on the increase, could this advert be a moving snapshot of the not-too-distant future. A real life dystopia.

The elderly, no longer subject to the fetid vicissitudes of death and declining mobility, will reclaim the streets. Filling their wretched bodies with artificial drugs each day, they cheat pain. Having surgeons cut through their skin to replace the old mechanics with more durable substnances - steel legs, plastic hips, lasered eyes, electronic ears - they cheat declining mobility and death itself.

And just look at them - the happiness! No longer are the spoils of youth causing a slalom along the footpaths; gone are the condom wrappers from the 11 year old's first romantic tryst, gone are the punctured footballs in the gutter. Instead, we have a flowing suburb of tall trees and only the 50s +. No longer do they have to look down at the concrete as they scoot on by in their leg-defying motor chariots - instead they wave at everybody, safe in the knowledge that only desirables are now able to walk the streets, and no 'feral youth' is going to jump out, earpod blazing, spitting all over everything, not knowing they're born, disrespecting everything and threatening break their face.

Have they won?

Chocolate, Sperm and Sigmund Freud

2009-09-09T11:51:00.000-07:00

There are some foods which you know are bad for you, but they are just so good, you can't give them up. When life starts to go to pot, when you're down on your luck, certain foodstuffs seem all the more desirable. Think of crying, remembering a lost love, with a massive bar of Galaxy. It's funny with these products; their 'naughtiness' is half the appeal.

Sigmund Freud developed the theory of the Psychosexual Stages of Development, and it is through these stages that a normative child must pass through in order to become a normative adult. If a child is unable to progress from a given stage, it sticks with them into their adult life and leads to symptoms. In this tihnking, if a child is unable to progress out of the Oral Stage, in which the mouth is the focal point for stimulation, they are more inclined to be smokers, to be nail-biters or to be a heavy drinker. What goes in the mouth is the most instant source of gratification.

There are other phases. The Anal Phase develops when a child is being toilet trained, and at this stage, the chief gratification for the infant comes from having a poo, or from stopping themselves from doing so - exerting their control over their own body. The Phallic Stage focuses on the genitals, and the child gets pleasure from touching themselves.

I'll focus on 3 main excessive 'naughty' foods - foods which are considered to be somewhat more than food. The sort of food that you consume whilst slouched on the sofa, relaxed and at peace. Or the sort of food that is respected as a delicacy. This isn't food just to satisfy the need to fill the stomach - they have a more special quality.

Chocolate. Champagne. Oysters.

The rich gloopy thickness of chocolate screams pleasure. Who doesn't want to get a healthy dollop on their finger as they lick the bowl of freshly baked cake? Lovers, if they are inclined to use food in their sexplay, are more likely to use chocolate than any other food.

There are no foods that more resemble poo than chocolate.

Champagne is one of the most culturally value-laden drinks available - it stands for luxury, for wealth, for celebration - for success. In Formula 1, after the victor crosses the finishing line, the first thing that happens is the drivers who come in 1st, 2nd and 3rd go to the podium, where the victor sprays champagne all over his vanquished rivals. When life gets hard, many turn to alcohol - it gives a quick lift, it is predictable, it sends a little shiver down the spine.

Champagne has the same colour and density as piss, and although Champagne is considerably more bubbly, there aren't really any other drinks that resemble piss quite as well.

Oysters. You can probably envisage where this one is going. Oysters are widely esteemed to be the archetypal gastronomical aphrodisiac. The eating of an oyster poses so many questions for etiquette. That strange yolk like consistency makes it difficult to consume - there are few other foods that, in polite company, you are expected to pour directly into your mouth from the shell and maybe even knock your head back. Men in dinner jackets, champagne in one hand, oyster in the other, will slurp down this uncommon food and smile as they wipe of its silvery snail trails from the side of their lips.

Oysters are, comparatively speaking, pretty cum-like. It takes some effort to even prize open the shell, the foreplay of consumption, making the slippery ambrosia that is the reward all the more special.

The naughtiest foods, the ones which for this very reason are everybody's favourites, correspond to our psychosexual hang-ups. The child who gets a little bit too much pleasure from forcing out a poo on the potty can be found 20 years later licking chocolate body paint from their partner's torso. The child who sat with their hand down their trousers too often, can be found 20 years later putting up the pretence of being dignified in polite, sexually inhibited company, as they drink the symbolic nectar of their old genital fixations - champagne and oysters.

Politics and Tall Poppy Syndrome

2009-09-06T08:29:00.000-07:00

Populism is, I suppose, a good thing. Typically a politics of self-representation for 'the people' as opposed to the elite, there is something intrinsically democratic about it. The problem of this populism at present is that it is going too far - shifting casually towards anti-intellectualism.

The MPs expenses scandal has exposed a hidden truth about our political process, but was nonetheless blown out of proportion by the press, especially the Telegraph who, it could be said, have ulterior motives in denigrating all of the major parties, what with their sympathies with UKIP. The result of this has been a backlash against politicians - they are now treated as a having homogeneous pathology. "They're all as bad as each other" opens the door to a new generation of politics - the 'politics of the people'. The term 'career politician' is highly derogatory now; overlooking here the fact that being in the profession for a considerable time is sure to lend itself to expertise. The consensus seems to be developing that a good politician has to be one of the people and this is lending itself to UKIP, BNP and the beast of burden for Doncaster, the English Democrats. English Democrat mayor Peter Davies fought his campaign almost entirely upon populist policies - he cut his own salary to £30,000, asserted that he is a 'common sense' politician and emphasised transparency. This is all well and good, but obstructs the fact that his policies and ideology are illiberal, unintelligent and averse to substance. He proudly decried, for example, that he 'doesn't subscribe to that religion that we're all supposed to believe in these days' - this religion being the scientifically-backed truth that we are causing global warming.

The growth of this populism is leading towards a 'Tall poppy syndrome' - Someone is said to be a target of tall poppy syndrome when his or her assumption of a higher economic, social, or political position is criticised as being presumptuous, attention seeking, or without merit. Alternatively, it is seen as a societal phenomenon in which people of genuine merit are criticised or resented because their talents or achievements elevate them above or distinguish them from their peers. Effectively, what could develop is a situation in which learning and social mobility, even one's interest in politics, could all become detrimental to an electoral candidates chances. Cutting salaries and expenses is part of the process - it will devalue the position of being an MP. In the same way that teaching became devalued as the entry standards dropped, less capable people will be more willing to stand for office.

In the words of Morrissey, we hate it when our friends become successful...if we can destroy them, you bet your life we will destroy them.
Listen on Spotify.

A member of a community, in order to represent his neighbours, would have to be as similar to them as possible. Any who get too big for their boots; who try too hard, work too hard, know to much or are too capable, will be frowned upon. In effect, the tallest poppies will be decapitated in order that all the poppies are the same height. This move towards the democracy of populism should be watched carefully, to make sure it doesn't go too far.

Birthday - Is this why you are as clever as you are?

2009-09-01T11:37:00.000-07:00

Today holds a special significance if you were educated in the UK. If today is your birthday, that means you were the certainly oldest pupil in your class, and that you have had this status from when you first entered the nursery school.

The significance of this is huge, and is even greater, the earlier the school year you choose to examine. If you consider Reception-age children, the child born on September 1st (5 years old) has been alive for 20% longer, than her classmate, born on August 31st of the year after. The developmental, cognitive and physical capacities of a 5 year old are far superior to those of a 4 year old. And of a 6 year old compared to a 5 year old. Of a 7 to a 6... The pattern goes on to this day, as a second year undergraduate.

Why should being older have an effect? One would think it beneficial to be born younger in the year, as the pupil will be in school earlier in their life than the older child, thus receiving more education. In fact, there is much to be said for gaining the reputation of being the brightest in the class. Consider once more the Reception class of mixed 4 and 5 year old children. A September born five year old is going to be much better able to retain knowledge, to pay attention for longer time spans and so on. This child be rewarded for these abilities - this reward is likely to reinforce their behavior. Over time, the child comes to internalise the identity of being intelligent, and of doing well in school. And it all goes on from there. What the teacher believes, the pupils achieves.

This may seem a little far-fetched as an idea - surely factors such as type of education, 'natural intelligence', parental support and parental education all influence academic performance. Undoubtedly they do, but I did a little study myself to test it, using everyone favourite timewasting tool, Facebook.

Using only my Facebook friends educated in the UK, who are currently studying with me at University of Cambridge, I can infer that all of my sample attained at least AAA at A Level - this seems a suitable enough measure of academic ability, if not that elusive entity, real intelligence. I have a sample, then, of 111 students. Taking membership at Cambridge as an indicator of academic performance through education, you'd expect more of my friends/fellow students to be born in September than any other month. Then October, then Nov and so on until we reach the youngest in the annual cohort, the August borns. Here is the result.

As is quite clear, the theory holds true. September has the highest number, with 16 or the 111 being born in the first month of the academic year. The lowest number is the group born in July (the sample in which I am one of the 5 members). There are fluctuations, notably in January and June. These can be explained by my small sample.

As for the proliferation of June births specfically, it is worth remembering that this is not a random sample but is a sample made up of my friends. Being a July baby myself, I am statistically more likely to have similar educational experiences to those pupils born in June, July and August. This mutual experience could be a meeting point for friendships - if one's educational identity has, as I suspect, an influence on one's personality, it is perfectly logical that people naturally seek out those similar to themselves. This could explain why I have more friends born in June than would be expected by the theory.

So if you were born in September, congratulations, it will undoubtedly have served you well through your education. And if you were born in the summer holidays, keep up the effort.

Chucking Punts! - The Battle on the Cam

2009-08-23T01:50:00.000-07:00

We live in a world riven by conflict, riot and genocide and thankfully for the average Cambridge student, no news of this manages to permeate that resilient old defence mechanism, the Cambridge bubble. Traditionally, Cambridge has been a self-sufficient microcosm in its own right: news comes in the form of Varsity gossip, not the BBC - and traditionally, this has preserved the city, and the university, as a little shelter of tranquility. But tradition is vulnerable and angry, being humped and reamed on the riverbanks of the Cam. A spectre is haunting East Anglia - the spectre of Punt Wars.

Punting on the River Cam is a £2.5 million business, targetting the 4 million tourists who visit and it is as susceptible to the gritty spoils of capitalism as any competitive industry. Two boats owned by 'The Punting Company' have been sawn in half with an electric jigsaw. It is reported that the arsenal of the punt saboteur would warm the cockles of any Dick Dastardlian supervillain - stink bombs thrown into boats from bridges, washing-up liquid squirted on the back of the punt, making for a slippery surface for the pole-wielder.

The punt operators may adorn themselves in boaters and waistcoats, but behind the facade of stereotyped attire lies the phrenologically suspect skull dimensions of a social menace. Their hardcore misdemeanors are not being peeped at askance - this social ill is being approached with the gusto of an American oil war. Cambridge City Council has deployed 3 'punt police' officers who swan along the riverbanks in high-visability vestments. It may be working. Sam Matthews is the unfortunate owner of the two punts that were sawn in half by, one would presume, a rival punt company and his views are thus - I think, even though I am the victim of the most heinous crime in punting history, that the enforcement officers are doing a good job.

And away from the riverside, touts can be seen harrassing potential customers from Kings up to Johns; here competing for custom with the myriad Big Issue vendors. One is reminded of the Gauntlet event on TV's Gladiators, as you are forced to criss-cross the narrow walkways of Kings Parade, Trinity Street and St Johns Street to avoid being accosted by these clipboard-grasping manstallions. These men too are not strangers to dirty skullduggery - a nurse had her hip broken as she was caught in a fracas between two rival touts. Police have had to investigate 31 altercations between touts, and a knife has been used. Is nothing sacred?

So allow this to be a warning. The noble tradition of the punt is being eroded by the scraping claws of capitalist moneyspinning and no-one is left unscathed. The punt-owned petit bourgeoisie are having their boats sabotaged. The touts are beating seven stages of fiery hell out of one another outside Fopp. Nurses are having their pelvises (pelvi?) shattered. And more than anything, the Cambridge Bubble is being burst from within and all Cambridge students deserve the chance to live in a carefree microcosm where they can be entirely oblivious to all that goes on in the real world. It's tradition, and we should allow it to be raped no longer!

Well done Scotland for freeing Lockerbie bomber

2009-08-20T18:03:00.000-07:00

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted for the Lockerbie bombings has been released from prison in Scotland on compassionate grounds. He has not completed his life sentence but has prostate cancer which is set to kill him within the next months.

America disagrees with this compassionate release because they have a warped concept of justice and punishment - compassion does not come easily to the mass American conscience. Scotland's decision has been opposed publicly by Obama and byHillary Clinton and these two represent the upper echelons of the Democrats, the liberal ones in America.

For the Americans, the purpose of punishment isn't as much to prevent further crime or to punish the individual who has committed the crime, as it is to satisfy the insatiable bloodlust of their paleoconservative populace. It is of no consequence to them whether a criminal 'sees the error of his ways' or straightens up and changes his behaviour - what matters is how much this criminal should be made to suffer, how many liberties can be taken away and how to ensure that everyone is aware of it. What sort of mindset are we breeding where we imprison and kill people people, essentially out of respect for their victims' families? Fuck rehabilation; they'd rather see a stoning.

al-Meghrahi is dying of cancer and I cannot see what the Americans seek to achieve by letting him die in prison. Contrary to popular belief, and to common practice, prisons aren't supposed to kill people - certainly not prisons in Scotland. It would have been very spineless to allow him to die in prison in order to 'send out a message' that terrorism is bad - that would have shown a disregard for his humanity and isn't this 'lack of humanity' what al-Meghrahi is being punished for?

'Time for change' seems a fleeting memory now - Obama's not that different after all is he. I applaud the Scottish government for making this compassionate decision, and especially for them to stay true to it under intense scrutiny from the mob across the pond. The Lockerbie bomber is a bad man but if we are to deny him human treatment, we are opening the door to greater evils within the mainstream of society. If the US can't see that through their sullied patriotic tears, it really is their problem and the decline of their global cultural hegemony ought to be welcomed with open arms.

Fact in Fiction - William Golding and Lewis Carroll

2009-08-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

William Golding, in the summer vacation whilst he was an 18 year old undergraduate at Oxford, 'attacked a 15 year old girl'- in his own opinion, he tried to rape her. This has emerged today in the Sunday Times, as extracts begin to be released for the upcoming biography of Golding by John Carey.

Aside from the arguments about whether he did actually rape Dora, the 15 year old girl, it's interesting to note the obvious parallels between his experiences in that summer, and the experiences of his character Oliver in 'The Pyramid'. In the novel, Oliver is wiling away the time during the summer before he starts his studies in Oxford. Oliver pursues Evie Babbacombe, a younger girl, through the summer, culminating in a messy and aggressive session of sex in woodland near the village. The new biography, built upon private writings by Golding, tell also of his suspicions that Dora had plotted with Golding's father for him to see them having sex in a field through binoculars. This scene can also be found in The Pyramid.

Many writers form their fiction from their own experiences - for Golding, one feels his fiction serves the function of allowing him to unburden himself. And many other prominents writers do the same - be it self-consciously or sub-conscious cathartic.

Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland' is probably the most famous example of life inspiring fiction. When an Oxford Don, he befriended a new Dean, Henry Liddell and his family, including the youngest daughter, Alice. Although he denied it later in his life, it is generally accepted it is this Alice on whom Alice in Wonderland is based. Many biographers comment on his passion for female children and his total lack of interest in the adult world. Again, like the details of Golding's rape, it is practically impossible to decisively state Carroll's sexual tastes (or Charles Dodson's to give him his real name). What is interesting is the relationship between the life of the author and his fiction. For Dodson, his fiction was a gift for Alice - some biographers see him as a celibate and repressed paedophile and in this respect, the importance of his stories become more important. It can be seen as one of the main communications of his relationship with his obsession. His muse?

This raises 2 interesting points.
- A writer's fictional creations often speak volumes about the thoughts and experiences of the author.
- Oxford may attract 'sexual deviants' who go on to be esteemed literary types. Think Philip Larkin's obsession with pornography.

But seriously, sometimes the best stories are those behind the fiction.

Who Wants To Be A British Citizen?

2009-08-04T09:31:00.000-07:00

I also blog at Cambridge University Labour Club Blog - www.cambridgeunilabour.blogspot.com - and this is a post originally from there.

A new Home Office paper on tackling immigration is proposing a "points test for citizenship". These points come out of a speech given yesterday by the Immigration Minister, Phil Woolas. There is so much I dislike about how they are going about this, but I'll try and keep it short.

First, potential migrants can increase their chances, and the speed of their application being processed if they canvass for a political party. This is pretty low of Labour. Migrants are quite naturally going to vote for the party in government - it's the 'Do not bite the hand that feeds' principle. Labour are more sympathetic to immigration than are the Tories, so Labour are essentially blackmailing the migrants into canvassing. Who else would the migrants vote for? Most British don't know what the Lib Dems are, so migrants are less likely still. By encouraging this canvassing by aspirational citizens, Labour are getting a few more dark faces on the street, with use a few more languages thus increasing the numbers of people they can contact. Something just doesn't seem right with it.

Next, so-called 'Orientation Days', which the aspirational citizens will have to attend, where they will be taught about British values, norms and customs. I can think of nothing more precise to say here than 'what the fuck'. Who really defines themselves as British? I don't think there really is a Britishness at all. Any geographical identity is much more tightly focused - Yorkshieman, Londoner, Country Bumpkin, Welshman. I wonder what these 'British values' might be - I dare say these will be values that are pretty rare amongst the general population. I'd hazard a guess it will consist of telling them to respect others, queue politely, please and thank you and other such condescending crap that exists only in the mind of the dementia-addled elder generations and in the rhetoric of middle-market journalism. These orientation days will essentially be preaching passivity and compliance. And as for norms and customs... by god. Binge drinking and getting reamed twice weekly in an alleyway? Competitiveness in every sphere? Not knowing your neighbours names? Giving your kids a good smack around the chops if they do something wrong, or more likely, if they just piss you off? These are the real 'norms' we face.

On from this, an 'active disregard' of UK values will lead to penalisation for the applicants. Isn't this just the spirit of multiculturalism? You WILL do things our way, or else we won't let you in. Phil Woolas has said that migrants would be expected to show their allegiance to Britain. Bollocks to this! All I'll say is that I'm lucky I was born here, else I'd never get in.

Essentially then, our Labour government are here saying that unless migrants do as we ask and expect them to do, support our government and indeed canvass for it, unless they support our actions and do not protest, their chances of entering the country and receiving a passport will be hacked down.

And there is more. Upon their arrival, migrants can expect to wait 3 years before they receive citizenship, but this can be cut down to a year if there is proof that they are demonstrating integration into British life. The government proposes 'active citizenship' - getting involved in institutions such as being school governers, joining Unions, doing voluntary work and joining political parties. But oh how quick people would complain if they DID truly integrate into British life! If they integrated with white British life by climbing the career ladder and taking the well-paid jobs. If they integrated into the working-classes by joining the fight for the meagre rations of employment that are occasionally thrown into the estates. How quick people complain, and how quickly then the government will pander to their whims, when communities become as racially ghettoised as they are along class lines.

To bring this to a close, there is also the existing Citizenship test which must be passed (Life in the UK), but there will also be a 'more challenging test on British politics and history'. My knowledge of British history consists of sitting with grubby knees after playtime in Year 4, reciting the names of Henry VIIIs wives. And heaven forbid, a true appreciation of British politics, and few would want to come!

And the price of all this - just seven hundred and twenty of our Queen's (pbuh) own pounds. And of course, it is the migrants themselves who will be paying for the privelege of having their feet walk upon Englands pastures grim - or probably not, since the majority will be turned away for having 'bad character'. Unlike the 90,000 Brits in prisons of course...

The whole thing makes me feel dirty.

Intake, Doncaster is full of tramps!

2009-07-29T02:41:00.000-07:00

Trampolines, to give them their proper name. Who knew?!

I'm currently reading Lynsey Hanley's book 'Estates: An Intimate History', about the development of council housing in Britain and what the social and psychological effects of the architecture have on those living in them. I'm sure that once I've finished the book I'll have something more comprehensive to say, which will probably warrant its own blogpost.

In the part I've just read, she mentions the ideal of new postwar council estates as suburban 'Garden Cities' and this got me to thinking quite how much greenery was built into Intake, the estate where I've lived all my life. Quite bizarrely, in Google searching Intake, I stumbled across this piece of research by the National Trust of Australia, which examines the social reality of living in council estates and which used Doncaster as its case study.

http://www.nsw.nationaltrust.org.au/conservation/files/Suburbia%20Hughes%20Owen.pdf

Yet more amazingly, there is a diagram of Intake in its strange symmetrical glory. I've never seen a map and was quite astounded to see it's shape, and quite how obviously artificial and 'planned' it is, as opposed to neighbourhoods which quite gradually develop over time.

Allow this to be a taster of what is to come - I intend to look in more depth at Intake as a Garden City once I've read the books completely. I was speculatively looking on Google Maps at the area and I noticed something far more unexpected.

Practically half the houses in Intake have trampolines! It was quite strange looking at the map as back garden after back garden had a black circle with blue trim. I'm not quite sure why its so strange to me - I could blame 'Keeping up with the Joneses' I suppose. It just doesn't make sense to me - I've never heard any talk of trampolining as a hobby. I appreciate, with blissful retrospect, the joys of jumping (both up and down) but its the sheer number of houses. Knutsford has swimming pools and Intake has trampolines. Amazing. Here are some of the unexpected findings.

What can explain this odd phenomenon?! I had a quick peruse of neighbouring and local council areas like Edlington, and didn't find nearly as many. Who'd have thought that Google Earth, which can map the world, would only become interesting to me once I look from above at what is pretty much outside of my window.

The Admirable Confidence of Bored Working Class Teens

2009-07-27T14:42:00.000-07:00

I was walking through Sandall Beat Woods today with my friend Naomi after a game of tennis. We needed to cross a bridge over the rail-lines, but there was a group of young teenage girls, probably about 13-15 years old and about 6 of them, sitting on the steps, blocking our path. We went to walk through them and Naomi and I knew what was likely to happen, and happen it did. "Going for a game of tennis?!" "Alright Blonde head!!!" "greasy!" and something about our underwear. We didn't say anything back but we weren't intimidated either - there comes a time when it is so predictable as to be funny, even admirable.

In few other situations can I think of people being so confidently outspoken without fear of consequence. I'm hardly the doorframe-filling man-stallion, but I am 6ft 2 and 19 years old, but this didn't mean anything. Their insults are not discriminatory - they would be equally as harsh and rude to those their own age, those older and those younger. Indeed, they were; we heard "skinny bastard" being shouted and a minute later a middle-aged jogger ran up behind us from the bridge.

The disregard for age barriers is quite an important distinction that I'd identify in kids in working class areas. In the classrooms, I find it far easier to teach once you stop 'being teacher' and talk to them at their level. It's not a matter of acting like a child, but it doesn't aid communication and understanding for the child, if the teacher isolates themselves in order to maintain an intentional distance. And in any case, the kids quite often seem not to consider there to be a huge divide. I know that after Michael Jackson's death, an 8 year old boy (ironically one feels) told me the one of the most horrific and graphic paedophile jokes to me that I've heard (he didn't understand it and knew only that it was rude) - the fact that I'm a 'grownup' just made the joke even funnier for him. When I worked in Year Two, I was asked by one of the kids if I am a 'sekshual luv sheep'. The confidence is not only quite often funny, but it leads to better chat and ultimately in the classroom, a better mutual appreciation of the characters of the child and the teacher.

But back to the teenage girls on the bridge - their level of self-confidence and arrogance is commonplace among those bored teens hanging about on council estates, but you have to feel it's a misused and misplaced skill. If that anger, and that enjoyment in being rude to people, could be directed into other forms of expression - such as politics - it would be nothing but admirable.

It seems that only two types of people can fairly be stereotyped as being self-confident, arrogant and rude - the very successful and the very poorest. For the successful it is a virtue, but for the poorest, the bored working class teens on the bridge, it is most often perceived as nothing but menacing and threatening. Me, I think its admirable and their outspokenness, their anomie, is something to be quite arrogant about - I'm certainly nowhere near as confident.

The Lucky 10 Snails - Did I Defy Darwin?

2009-07-20T08:40:00.000-07:00

Last night at about midnight I was walking back home from the cinema. The weather during the day had been pretty grim and wet, and it was drizzling as I was walking. It turned out to be quite an unusual journey.

Following on from hearing Stephen Fry extol the merits of audiobooks, I decided to buy some of my own; so on my walk, I was listening to the excellent Christopher Hitchens reading his book, 'God is not Great.' The topic of this post came about because of a moment in my journey in which Hitchens was regaling the tale of his nanny teaching him about Nature and Faith, telling him to praise God for the beauty of nature. Hitchens, even aged 9, refuted this as nonsense. This was all in my head as I rounded the corner onto a path which was skirted by grass on one side, and soil at the other. Nature, God and Darwin were all in my mind as I began to walk this path.

For the entirety of this path, snails were crossing from the soil on the left to the grass on the right - each snail thus crossing my walkway. I was first struck by the mish-mash of events - the rain through the day, the drizzle now, the time of day, Hitchen's childhood - all focused on this odd moment of movement for the snails.

Taken in by the mood of being the only human about, I took extra caution not to stand on any of the snails. My walk slowed down, such was the multitude of snails. This got me thinking. Is it wrong or is it right for me to kill the snails?

Darwinian 'Survival of the Fittest' theories dictate that evolution happens almost dialectically - two species or beings facing off, entering a conflict of sorts (who is the most well adapted) and the winner surviving to the detriment of the loser. In the conflict between myself and the snails, I am obviously more likely to win. My choice is not kill or be killed however, but kill or don't kill.

The interesting point though, is that no other animal would have this thought process that I had - the reason I did not kill them was out of a strange respect for their existence. My choice was not kill or don't kill, but think or don't think. It was my thinking that stopped me from killing them, instead taking a meandering slalom route. The unthinking route would have been to arrive home as planned taking the straight route, ignorant of snails - whether I do or do not stand on a snail is inconsequential to me.

But by avoiding the snails, am I asserting the evolutionary superiority of the human race, or am I defying evolution by consciously attempting not to kill these lesser beings? Consider it this way - if I kept my head held high and walked the path without looking at the snails, I would likely have killed about 10. If I had intentionally set out to stamp on them, I could have killed hundreds. Instead, I consciously did not kill any at all - zero.

What of the lucky 10 snails that got away last night? As their evolutionary superior, is it expected that I should have, albeit unintentionally, ended their lives? Is it 'natural' of me to question this? Humans are still animals and are still inexorably locked into the competition with other species; we're just very good at it now.

In acting against probability, did I act against nature? Did I defy Darwin?

Child Protection - "Outrageous, Demeaning and Insulting?"

2009-07-18T16:23:00.000-07:00

Over the last week or so, debate has erupted on the issue of vetting in schools, after it became widely known that the Independent Safeguarding Authority will vet all individuals who work with children from October this year, requiring them to register with a national database for a fee of £64.

The controversy, the furore, surrounds a flotilla of prominent childrens authors who are experiencing varying degrees of personal insult and incredulity at the fact that they will have to be vetted before going into schools. Philip Pullman called the plans "outrageous, demeaning and insulting" and he cites, as a main reason, that there are no circumstances in which a visiting author would be left alone with individual children. - "How on earth – how on earth – how in the world is anybody going to rape or assault a child in those circumstances? It's preposterous."

Numerous others, including Anne Fine and Adele Geras, voiced outrage. Fine and Pullman have declared that they will no longer be visiting schools; refusing to undergo this 'demeaning' procedure. Geras calls for changes in the status of those working with large groups of children.

*****

I can appreciate the concerns that these writers are raising - they are, in fact, the concerns probably shared with many many in our society whose professions require close contact with children. Teachers, healthcare professionals, medics, volunteers, social workers, nursery nurses, sports coaches; all undergo these procedures, such as CRB checks, which effectively are used to check that an individual is not a known paedophile. So many individuals in the public sector have to undergo this procedure, to prove one isn't a paedophile, in order to practice their professions - the people in our society who work closest to help children are seemingly the prime suspects for potential abusers.

The fact that the outcries of this offended little group, which fellow childrens author Robert Muchamore called "the usual grey-haired mafia of 'renowned' kids' authors", has received such coverage is quite telling of suspicions in the system. It can be fairly called 'preposterous and absurd' for these esteemed childrens authors working with large groups of children to be vetted. What about your average Joe primary school teacher - specifically a Joe as opposed to a Josephine? If a male primary school teacher refused to undergo vetting, thinking it unnecessary, preposterous and absurd, he will find himself not only jobless, but would certainly be the topic of many a whisper between parents and member of the local community. Sadly, not all in society are in positions where they can afford to make such bold statements - vetting is wildly more demeaning for the normal people who might be genuinely suspected if they do not comply, and whose livelihoods depend upon their 'proving' they are not a paedophile, in order to do the job they love and are trained to do.

Something we are overlooking here is the fundamental awkwardness which undergirds much of our social policy as a result of the pervasive influence that the hatemongering print media has over the political process. Ours is a society, like America, that values individual liberty almost more than anything - nothing riles up the collective conscience more than speed cameras, nanny state, CCTV, monitoring chips in bins, and so on. But at the same time as placing ultimate merit on individual liberty - The Liberty of the moderns, the liberty to be left alone - our society is equally fueled by the venom of the lynchmob mentality in dealing with punishment. In the wake of the Soham murders, the fear of paedophiles has been exacerbated - the result of this being a suspicion of those working ith children, a general mistrust of strangers, a tighter parental grip on infants wrists and higher sales figures for the print media. Herein lies the problem - people want children to be protected from paedophiles, but they themselves feel morally wounded when they must undergo checks. The stigma of paedophilia is such that even undergoing a check is perceived to be tantamount to suspicion and is, as such, an insult.

Pullman may be correct that the procedures are 'Outrageous, demeaning and insulting'. But they are outrageous, demeaning and insulting for the swathes of people employed particularly in the public sector too - these vainglorious authors merely shout louder than those bogged down by the government's other obsessions such as targets and standards. I do not in principle disagree with the anger of these authors, but they are channeling it in the most self-righteous of manners. Should not these prominent figures use their positions of authority to question the extent of vetting procedures in general, rather than what we have now - a situation in which each of them are either calling for exemptions, legislative change so that they can carry on unvetted, or else they will simply leave the country?

There was understandable public concern about schools vetting procedures post-Soham, but these fears were moulded into a folk devil for media profit and the result has been a highly suspicious society. Vetting is necessary, absolutely necessary, but it's extent ought to be questioned and considered. Current child protection policies may actually be founded upon an exaggerated fear equating to a moral panic however well-intentioned they may be.

Autism and the Daleks

2009-07-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

"The metal is just battle armour. The real Dalek creature is inside."

I don't want this to be interpretted as being a light-hearted joke-essay, and although it might seem odd to write about Autism and Doctor Who simultaneously, I shall be looking seriously at the links between autistic behaviour and Dalek behaviour, as a way to explain how and why our own society stigmatises and judges them both.

There are, of course, many more reasons why Daleks are NOT like autistic individuals, but that does not negate the interest that can be found in their similarities. Essentially, what I am saying is that autistic people, unlike Daleks, don't pose a threat to human existence and in fact, this essay will be showing how society generally mistreats people with Autism by its misinterpretations.

More so, I see the link in the way in which, when watching Doctor Who, we almost instinctively attribute character and conscience to these supposedly insentient beings – not because we are led to do so by the scriptwriters but because it is part of our inbuilt psychosocial constitution: we constantly strive to attribute meaning and purpose to the actions of others, and in this, we are guilty of speciescentricism. We strive to ‘make human’ the Daleks, in the same way that many in society try to ‘make 'normal'’ those individuals with autism by applying their own value judgements.

Let us now investigate the ways in which the Daleks share similarities with aspects of Autism.

When one thinks of a Dalek, one is likely to conjure up the image of the metal shell (as in the above image) – when in fact, the Dalek itself is a betentacled ‘pink and greenish blob’. It is the outer aesthetic presentation of the Dalek, with its polycarbide peppershaker armour, eyestalk and gunstick, that strikes fear – the Dalek itself is considerably less intimidating. The large disparity between the outward appearance of the Dalek and the actual inner being is similar to the effects of Mindblindness, a concept developed by Cambridge’s own Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen. The autistic individual can conceive of the affective experience of others – their emotions and thoughts –only in the same way that a colourblind individual can ‘appreciate’ the colours are. The colour-blind individual may know what ‘pink’ is, but they cannot themselves experience and thus truly understand it. Similarly, the autistic individual, mindblind, may often inadvertently, and at times inescapably, present himself as socially aloof, or as unresponsive and socially awkward. Likewise, the Dalek inexorably presents itself as ruthless and callous. What both the Dalek and the autistic individual share is the fact that they are bound to their genesis – what goes on in their heads is, to a large degree, a product of something outside of their control and for this very reason, their actions are wrongly perceived to be negotiated when in fact, they cannot do things any other way. This links in to the Nietzschean concept of the ‘Lamb’s Anger’ – it is reasonable for a lamb to fear and hate the birds of prey which circle it from above, but it is wholly unreasonable to expect the bird of prey to do otherwise. In the same way that one cannot reason with the condor about the emotional repercussions of its predation, we resent neither the actions of the Dalek, nor the behaviours of autistic individuals.

The next parallel is the reliance of both on logic and machinery as a way of explaining and experiencing worldly experience. Tragically, both the Daleks and autistic individuals are aware of the weaknesses of this, and recognise its shortcomings for themselves. Uta Frith, in ‘Autism: Explaining the Enigma’, emphasises the tragic paradox that very often, the thing autistic individuals may feel themselves lacking in most is social contact, and their social behaviours tend always to marginalise them. They are aware of how their reliance on logic affects their capacity to function in the pragmatic world of conversation. This is comparable with the Daleks, whose reliance upon a strict hierarchy stifles their individual personality – they see their shortcomings but, being ruthless, they enslaved non-Dalek species to compensate. The virtues of logic are not to be underestimated – the disregard for the subjective allows the Daleks to focus single-mindedly upon their goals. The disregard for the subjective similarly enables autistic individuals to occupy themselves in solitary activity, to develop and foster huge skill in the objective sciences and such like. But despite this, the reliance on logic makes it difficult to function socially, which in reality, proves itself to be hugely important in day-to-day existence.

There are more examples that I could state – the ‘electronic voice’ of the Daleks which, for its lack of emotion, appears so strange and chilling, is comparable to the monotony of many individuals with certain types of autism – but for now, I shall leave just these two points.

To summarise, there are links between the two which can be used to explain the behaviours of each of them. The Dalek, though frightening in its single-mindedness, cannot be expected to behave in any other way. The autistic individual, though not always subscribing to socially normative behaviour, cannot be blamed, nor should they be reprimanded, for it. The negative image that is held of Daleks and autistic individuals, though the two are, and I emphasise once more, very different, is that they are mysterious because of their difference – what makes both appear strange to many people is that they defy some of the characteristics which are perceived to be normal.

The Prototype of Awkward Chat

2009-07-15T08:09:00.000-07:00

Below is the dialogue between myself today and a 9 year old girl whilst we were, for some reason, colouring in some Islamic art patterns. The context was that the kids and I had been talking about films, such as Hotel for Dogs, Freaky Friday and 'Coyote Ugly'.

GIRL - Well, Mr Walker, have you seen that film '18 Year Old Virgin'?
ME - I have yeah, but it's called '40 Year Old Virgin'. It's pretty funny -
GIRL - Noooo! It's DEFINITELY called '18 Year Old Virgin'.
(awkward silence )
ME - What happened in it? ... What sort of film -
GIRL - (abruptly) I can't remember!
(awkward silence)
ME - Oh my god.

Blake's Jerusalem for a Modern England

2009-07-03T16:29:00.000-07:00

For those with Spotify, have the music too. You'll have to sing my lyrics over it.
http://open.spotify.com/track/5x8AeTGvkZ6BvJvwMzNXRK

Why don't all feet in modern times
Walk upon England's mountains green?
Why aren't the poor, of every skin
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
When will the harsh bright light of truth
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was equality buried here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me the Beveridge Report:
Bring me our England from the mire:
Bring me all people, young and old!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have forged equality
In England's green and pleasant land.

The Virtues of 'Bad Education'

2009-07-02T10:09:00.001-07:00

Back in Doncaster now, I've retreated back into my pre-Cambridge existence which revolves around cycling, volunteering in the local primary school and reading books at a very slow pace. Nonetheless, and despite the repetitiveness of it all, there is something great about being back in the community in which you were raised; about seeing those familiar faces, even those to which you cannot put a name. The biggest of these is being back in the primary school I've volunteered at continually since 2006, and with the same group of kids too. I love my Cambridge self, but it is incompatible with Doncaster - the neckscarves can stay in the south, you could say. Arrive at the Don, the trackies are on and this is how life has become this last week. Sportswear and smiles.

I've been in the school today and it's been quite unconventional itself - the entire day has been spent in the art room making hands out of rolled up newspaper and papier mache, with a sight to doing henna on the completed hands. It's been a fun day - I've basically just been chatting with the kids all day whilst rolling up Daily Mail's into shapes vaguely resembling fingers.

But as well as my usual tattle with the bairns, I had an interesting talk with the artist who had travelled over to come and run the henna thing. We were stood at the back of the artroom, overlooking the quite distressing sight of 30 kids wearing XL adult shirts back to front, covered in all sorts of colours, amongst a floor covered in cast off plaster finger tips and scraps of newspaper, and she began to talk to me about 'educational backgrounds'.

She mentioned that she grew up on an estate like that of these children (incidently this is the estate I grew up on, going to this same primary school) and went on to comment on the usual things about the kids - obvious lack of respect, undisciplined, about parents paradoxically having too much power and too little interest. She wasn't being unreasonable at all though I myself have different views on what is the purpose of discipline in schools, which in turn alters what I perceive to be its result. Discipline is used when the teacher is displeased, it is used often and usually to the same children - this is not to blame the teachers of course, for they are merely acting how they are expected to act. I prefer listening to the kids and actually talking to them, yet i am aware that I am only able to do this because I am a classroom assistant rather than the time-pressed teacher. But through doing this, there develops something more solid, more resembling respect, between teacher and child.

But back to the artist, she went on to say how she was lucky enough that her parents sacrificed a lot in order that she and her siblings could go on into private education. She is now very content in her job and her siblings have grown up to be successful and quite well off at what they do. She looked over at the children and mentioned that, even though she loves working in schools like this, she is glad that her children inhabit an educational world far removed from it.

My retort is one familiar to my friends, who are privy to my socialist gripes. I myself was at this school, in the same year group as these kids, just 10 years ago. The community has barely changed either - in 1999, a small Kosovan community had moved into the estate and their kids were starting in the school; to my knowledge the number of children who weren't white could be counted on one hand and this is by-and-large the same today. Not that exams are the be all and end all, but I got straight 5s in KS2 SATs and in secondary school (also a comprehensive), I got 7s at KS3, A*s and A's at GCSE and A's at A Level before getting into Cambridge. Clearly, the kids are not a total lost call, if only by my own, admittedly abnormal, situation. But my parents were not that different from many others - the differences came about in terms of the value they placed on learning.

But it is not, as I said, about academic performance. I went on to state how I saw virtue in this sort of school, and it may seem a weak argument, like victory in defeat, but I see truth in it - a community like this can be an adversity over which the child can triumph. Looking defensively over the kids I gave the example to her of one of these kids - not necessarily the brightest academically - who I feel convinced will do well in the future. This little girl, it seems, has much to contend with, and has been in this situation for some time - she is not in any way emotionally defeatist from it though. She is tough, and with this she is resolute and determined in what she does. It is sad that she has been involuntarily made this way, but it is the best adaptation for her to develop. To note the virtues of a child's resilience is not to condone the conditions that necessitated the adaptation - without bringing these reasons into it, the character she has developed is one that will allow her to brush her shoulders off after setbacks. I have high hopes for her future, for she has been regrettably forced into being strongwilled - the adversity that is faced by children in communities such as my own is neither legitimate nor justified, but these obstacles make success an even greater achievement and thus provide more fruitful rewards.

We agreed to disagree, as is often the case in my arguments.

Thinking in terms of the prospects of these 9 year old kids, who I've worked with since they were 6, I thought I'd write down quite honestly the advantages and the disadvantages of our shared educational and social background.

PRO
- Diversity - these children are used to a mixed bag of children. This isn't merely ethnic or religious diversity but diversity of behaviours and experiences, many of which will have been negative.
- Social awareness - This is the argument that my private-school friends react most forcefully against, but I stand by it. Admittedly, regardless of which school a child attends, they become aware of that particular social setting. For affluent private school children, they become socially aware of their affluent subculture, which is wildly unrepresentative of the lives of the majority of those in our society. From my own experience, my school background has taught me, first hand, about the difficulties faced by the council estate residents who populate swathes of the country.
- Radicalisation - struck with the realisation of their own educational setting, the challenge of triumphing over adversity is a stimulus to learn itself.
- Success - this may seem an odd inclusion here, but being successful, and being told this by a teacher, is a huge stimulus toward pro-school attitudes. It is easier to rise to the top in schools with many children of low-ability. Being the top creates the 'successful personality' regardless of how hardly fought for is the success itself.
- Freedom - the lack of parental interest in education is one of the greatest problems in state education, and is a concept alien to those in private education, whose parent's interest is confirmed by their very place in the school. The upside of this for the children of these areas is that they are less constrained by parental expectations and are thus able to flourish more independently.
- Childhood! - there is a greater outlet for unstructured fun. I would say a childhood spent playing with friends, even if this is in the street, is as beneficial as sending one's little gems off after school each day to a tirade of extra-curricular lessons, varying upon what a parent can afford. Piano, ballet, stage school, rugby etc

CONS
- Anti-school environment - What i cannot deny is that the consensus, in both primary and secondary, was largely anti-school. Student did not place high value on learning (nor did I - I tended to do well more out of my permissiveness to authority figures than anything else to begin with) and for this reason, involvement in intellectual activities such as reading is less 'accepted' and thus less practiced.
- Class Sizes - the class sizes in my educational background have been so large (30 through all of primary and in ks3 secondary), that the Cambridge supervision system seems all the more amazing. The problem of state education in poor areas, such as that of the kids, is that they have little outlet to be seen by the teachers as an individual. This is a problem, because the attachment between child and learning is best mediated by an encouraging adult and this is not as easy with 30 children in a class.
- Confidence - on from the previous point, the childs individual confidence is often much less than that of more affluent peers (peers who most are unlikely to ever come across). What use is personal presentation and confidence - what matters is ability, and in a large class size, this is best expressed through the number of ticks in a work book. Similarly, this skill is just not developed - the state education doesn't teach public speaking which is in fact a hugely important life skill. The only time children in these schools have to stand up alone and speak to the teacher and other kids is when they are being disciplined.

So as I think of the educational prospects of these kids, whose futures I genuinely do care about, I am probably accentuating the positive and who can blame me? I have faith - I have to hope. I really dislike the idea that is often propagated that education is wasted on many of these children and this is an argument I heard about one of them just today. The majority of these kids have got pretty huge obstacles in their paths and a few have very dark clouds hanging over them already but this difficult situation CAN be overcome and it needs little more than emotional support for the children within education, to come to realise that they CAN be successful.

And there are few things I'd like to hear more, in future years, than that my bunch of kids are doing well for themselves.

Reel Around The Fountain - The Stereotypical Pervert

2009-06-27T17:24:00.000-07:00

I was today in the Peace Gardens in Sheffield City Centre and the sun was shining bright. It was hot and busy in the city and people were milling about everywhere. In the gardens themselves there is a large water fountain that is the focal point and in the summer, kids splash about in it. It's like an urban seaside in a way - I certainly remember going there when I was younger.

Whilst sat on the wall with the family - resting our legs, having a drink, or some such activity - we could see all the kids frolicking about. In fact, all the benches face inwards onto the fountain. There were probably about 4 or 5 kids playing in the fountain, all of whom were either in their underwear or were naked - they were probably about 5-8 years old or something.

But notable in this scene was a man crouched on the pavement, just away from the fountain, taking pictures of the kids with his SLR camera. This man had a grizzly and unshaven face, quite thick glasses and was pretty overweight. He had a ruddy complexion and was dressed pretty scruffily. For about five or ten minutes, as the undressed kids were playing in the water, he was crouched on the periphery taking photographs.

I walked over to the bin to get rid of my coke bottle, and as I did so, I passed by a group of student-looking pepole, and I heard that they too had noticed this strange and creepy man. I also saw a couple; the man appeared to be alerting his wife to this man taking pictures of the kids. Clearly people were thinking the same as me - they were quite unnerved by this middle aged pervert.

The man taking pictures seemed to be taking them mostly of a little naked girl. Then the little girl ran over to him and gave him a hug, he dressed her, put some suncream on her face, stood up, took her hand and went and bought her an icecream. He was her dad.

This seemed to say something quite profound about the fear our society holds for the welfare and safety of our children. Possibly I am wrong in thinking so, but I often consider myself to be less susceptible to such social judgements and stereotypes.

But on this situation, seeing a man taking photographs of a child (photographs which with the benefit of hindsight, you can see would be just a parent's family photographs showing his daughter in a state of total happiness on a sunny summer's day) - on this situation, my first thought was that he was a paedophile. On seeing a man taking pictures of a child, my initial label of him was as a criminal rather than a father!

Now of course, this isn't to say one ought to presume every seemingly suspicious scenario has an innocent explanation, but at the same time, not only are we too quick to judge using stereotypes, we delude ourselves in the process. Those adults in society who prey on children are bad and, thankfully, there aren't nearly as many of them as their prevalence in the parental conscience would suggest.

Effectively, the thought process I had was that he was an adult male who looked unkempt and because of this profile, I thought him more likely a threat than a father - I'd hope that those who shared my misconception might take heed of it too and be less quick to judge.

The Etiquette of Cambridge Stash

2009-06-22T16:10:00.000-07:00

The most obvious place to start here is to define 'Stash' for those non-Vulgarian Cambridge students - stash means branded clothing, such as hoodies stating 'University of Cambridge', 'Leeds Met' etc.

The item in the above image is the best-selling stash, but it is, despite its simplicity, one of the most culturally and symbolically laden items one could ever wear, if one is a Cammy student.

First up there is the awkward dichotomy between the stereotypes of Cambridge and the stereotypes of hoodies. The stereotypes of Cam students run far and wide, but a general consensus rests around excessive-privelege, arrogance, confidence and, essentially, wealth. Quite how justified these stereotypes are is beside the point in this case. Then you have the stereotype of the hoody - it is now a term in the political lexicon. 'Hug a hoody' has the same aversive connotations of shaking hands with a leper or being stuck in a lift with somebody in an overcoat. The hoody is the symbol of vandalism, of disruption, of intimidation, of gangs of youths, of evil juvenile delinquency ... and a loads of other old bollocks. The 'Cambridge Hoody' is then, in itself, quite an absurd idea. Sure it would be better to have University branded elbow pads, or Tailcoat-stash... But no, Cambridge Hoody it is and it is due to this awkward bifurcation into the contradictory connotational worlds of privelege and delinquency, that the social mores and messages of wearing it are so bizarre.

We go first to Cambridge itself, that sexy little city in the otherwise non-descript area of England known as the East. In Cambridge, the majority of people you will see in the city centre are students at the University of Cambridge. Nonetheless, a walk down Kings Parade will inevitably lead to passing by a multitude of 'University of cambridge' hoodies, there are a few explanations for this. 1) If the wearer is Chinese, there is a greater-than-average chance it is a tourist, 2) It is a practical item, 3) inferior college?

Ooh contraversial! I propose that those students who are wholeheartedly ideologically integrated into their college are more inclined to wear their college stash. Thus, if one wears a 'University of Cambridge' hoody in the city itself, chances are you are at a 'lesser' college. The hoody then comes to represent an assertion of one's belonging in the institution.

The message that is given out by wearing the Cambridge hoody whilst in Cambridge is one of a need to assert one's group membership, and an awareness of this risk.

This is very different when back on provincial turf. I refer specifically to Doncaster, previously home of mining, horse racing, railways, now home of an English Democrat mayor, a BNP MEP and 4 poundshops. The Cambridge hoody in Doncaster is a wholly different cultural symbol. I daresay I am more dubious about wearing my Cambridge hoody in Doncaster, than I am about wearing my Labour Club hoody in Cambridge! One has a right to be proud about making it to Cambridge surely? The town centre populus is dotted with 'University of York St John' hoodies and 'Univeristy of Hull' hoodies yet nobody bats an eyelid. But what of the Cam hoody?

By wearing the Cambridge hoody in Doncaster, it is effectively dividing the wearer from the group - to compare with Social Anthropology, it is like Malinowski wearing his Victorian garb whilst in amongst the Papuans. The Cambridge Hoody thus symbolises difference in the same way that does a sari, a turban, a hijab or ... a kimono.

Another difference when back in Doncaster is people's interpretation of the wearers intention. People may consider why would an individual wear such an item. My reckoning would be that there may be presupposition that it is a manifestation of vulgar pride, big-headedness. This is something very much against the folk culture of Doncastrians! Any writing on the chest, male or female, effectively invites people to observe you and judge you, as they would a book. And what messages you see?! When I see people wearing anything with the lame French Connection puns - FCUK fashion, FCUK my life, FCUK my wife etc - I instantly categorise them as a twat/idiot. When men wear the intentionally offensive shirts with messages like - On Your Knees, Suck it and see - I instantly think they are lower class. The wearing of University of Cambridge on one's chest in a poor area may be tantamount to bragging.

I find this interesting because we now come to the realisation that the 'University of Cambridge' hoody has adverse social and cultural effects for the actual Cambridge students who wear it, whether at Uni or at home. Thus, the people best adapted to wearing the University of Cambridge hoodies are those not in any way linked to the university. In this way, they are not representative of their own identity, but the tourist wearing of the Cam Uni hoody is testimony to the powerful identity of the University itself. People effectively become billboards.

Yet still I own one. Yet still it remains tentatively on my coat peg on my bedroom door in Doncaster. Dare I do it? Dare I?

Chav Hatred = Class and Race Hatred (long long post)

2008-12-27T16:59:00.000-08:00

Does it strike you as hypocritical that our society views itself to be so tolerant, when actually, much of our solidarity draws upon mutual hate? It strikes me as even more strange that so many people would be quick to highlight that they themselves are not racist; it is seen as insulting to call somebody a racist, particularly if they are one. "I'm not racist but..." is a common prefix to an offensive comment. It is wrong to declare your hatred for black people, for Asian people, for foreign people in general. Racism does happen and there is a lot of racism about; I'd say this is heightened in the current economic climate where people look for someone to blame for how bad things are.

It strikes me as bizarre that a particular breed of racism is not merely ignored and overlooked but is positively encouraged and mainstreamed into our modern thick jingoistic culture. This racism is against the white working class - the new scapegoat.

Chav.

Everyone knows of chav culture (of lack of ... because they don't have one because they are unculture, the underclass) - chav is one of the most widespread terms in the modern lingo. What does chav mean to you - when somebody says chav, what do you imagine? Chances are, the chav you imagine is white - a runtish scruffy male in a tracksuit or if female, pregnant, smoking, big cheap ear-rings? Chav is a word as much as any word; the fact that it is often used jokingly does not detract from the meaning behind it.

The rich in our society tend to be intermingled and cosmopolitan. Richness is, I would imagine, overwhelmingly white in our country, but I do not think there is much stigma attached to the successful from their successful comrades. The main characteristic of the rich is their wealth; the main characteristic of the poor is their colour. When racist stereotypes spread around society, they invariably also carry the burden of being working class (or underclass because they don't work...) So when the media fanned the flames of the 'black mugger' folk devil, people didn't expect to be mugged by the suited and booted black men with respectable jobs, they expected to be mugged by the 'gangsters' of the inner cities. The Kosovan rapists who were thought to be out on the prowl in the Northern towns were not successful economically but were on benefits.

The hated groups in our society change frequently - black, pakistani, arab, gypsy. What never changes is that they are poor.

Chav is a term for a white member of the working classes who is scapegoated as being the scourge of society. Nigger is a term for a black member of the working classes who is scapegoated as being the scourge of society. Chav is equally as offensive as Nigger - it is just much more acceptable to victimise the white working classes because it isn't seen as racist - as the racists are themselves white. Chav hate is class hate in disguise.

Let's clear up some facts before I give some examples of class hate that it is oh so acceptable to perpetuate. Recent studies have shown white working class boys to be the lowest performing group within secondary schools. 93% of people residing in Britain are white. There are pockets of deprivation within our rich country which put us to shame - untouchable groups of individuals in certain areas who play no role within society; that is to say they are not included. In the inner cities of Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, the North East - not to mention inner city London - where there are families that have been completely dependent on state benefits for generations. There is the idea that the working class has fragmented - the 'working' class work, the 'underclass/chav class/ scum' do not.

On to chav hate; this blog post has been inspired by my noticing somebody's groups on their facebook. This male, a fellow student in Cambridge, is a member of several charity groups - against cancer, child abuse etc. This enlightened and intelligent (world leading undergraduate...) male is a member of both of these two groups.

I bet I can find 1,00,000+ who hate the BNP
STOP CHAVS FROM HAVING CHILDREN

He can join a group against the BNP because victimising people because of colour is bad (bad meaning stigmatised). He can join a group for Chav-Hatred because victimising people because of class is fine.

Let's have a deeper exploration into the murky world of chav-hatred and see what's being said in these groups.
A charming young man in the university of York (one of the top tier of universities in the country) leaves this post - I found a petition to kill all chavs
91 signatures so far.
Do your part for your community, sign now.
I wonder if it would be as acceptable to call for the black, Asian or any other ethnic group to be killed. Of course not. I'll leave some more extracts for consideration...

why should we be handing out benefits for them to go and smoke and drink and spend on themselves whilst their kids start school with behavourial problems and learning difficulties because they haven't had any stimulation from their parents "cos they can't be bovered" . Not to mention the free housing they get .... whist we struggle to pay our mortgages especially in this "credit crunch"
(from the same York University student who posted the above link) Bring back eugenics.
While I do not condone violence, a simple strategy would be to remove all welfare benefits handed out to single young mothers as a way of removing their incentives to procreate. Do we need anymore evidence that society in the UK is heading towards a morality crisis that will last for at least another two generations? Baby P, Shannon Matthews?
Just after as many benefits as they can get their wothless, jobless, skanky hands on. Some older, married couples who are desperate for a baby can't even have one, yet we see these chav children flaunting their kids about like it's something to be proud of. They should be ashamed of themselves. Their kids should be taken off them and put into good homes, and the chav mums and dads should cast out onto the streets for everyone to throw things at!

All chavs should be shot. All chav survivors should be shot again. I, too, am all for vigilante chav beatings.
All chavs should be shot. if the government had any sense they would see the link between chavs and the failing economy. Maybe chavs should be given injections to stop them having kids. i am all for vigilante chav beating

Doesn't this make you proud? Welcome to mainstream consensus in our society. They would argue passionately against being called a racist but will stand proud amongst the masses and profess their wishes to kill the chavs. How can this be tolerated? The question it makes me pose is who does this hate benefit? It certainly take the strain off of the government if those in the lower echelons of society blame eachother for the governments failings... This isn't merely an internet based expression of carefree freedom of speech.

Look to Jeremy Kyle, making a daily freakshow of the white working classes whilst jeremy, 'the man of the people', tells it like it is. 'Stop having children.' ' Get a job.' Well done Jeremy, you really are the voice of reason aren't you? Programmes like this serve the same function as the madhouses in days of old - allowing the 'normal' to observe, scrutinise and draw enjoyment from their inferiors from a safe distance. There is the lynch mob mentality as seen in the comments like 'i am all for vigilante chav beating'. It's shocking - what's more shocking is how 'unshocking' it is to everyone else.

What chance have we got if those who are supposed to be the educated ones are equally susceptible to this media-fuelled hateful bullshit? Those who are espousing lynch mob mentality, who suggest eugenics, cannot be pooh-poohed as narrow-minded idiots - they represent a far too common viewpoint and are the future top-tiers of society. Is it stupid to view programmes like Jeremy Kyle, the godawful Daily Mail (and increasingly the redtop papers) as pseudo-propaganda? They are more powerful at spreading hate than much wartime propaganda.

There are distinct overtones of fascism and capital punishment that fuel the entire chav-hate agenda. Does it seem as though I am overanalysing and overstating the point? It may seem so but this is wrong - it is no longer even questioned that chavs are the scourge of society. In the same way, it became 'common-sense' amongst the German public that the Jews should be eradicated. The language is even reminiscent of the mechanisation of hate - eugenics, eradication, the 'procreation'.

'Chavs' are more and more perceived to be emotionless and instead embody certain traits. Like the Jews were said to be innately greedy, the chavs are innately lazy. the chav is a lay-about - stealing from your hard earned labour. Chavs have children so they can play the welfare system and get more benefits ? Surely that level of strategic foresight is too much for their feeble cider-addled brains to muster. The entire bundle absolutely stinks of hate - if the public agrees with an idea, it becomes very accessible for a government to put it into action.

To leave this off, here is a big extract from the facebook group 'Get off your Chav Arse & get a Job, you Scrounging Social Parasite Bastard'. Note the political rhetoric of 'them versus you'. It's as worrying as it is frustrating.

Sick of the work shy, benefit stealing scum? Annoyed with the shirkers of society who insist on milking the system of any cash they are so called entitled to?
No wonder this country is on its knees. And it's no thanks to these scrounging bastards who mercilessly continue to rape the shit out of the welfare state with no intention on repaying their debt to society by getting a job.
These bastards are content in laying back and reaping the benefits of your hard work - your toil, sweat and effort.
Fed up of the Gimme, Gimme, Gimme attitude that these fuckers have effortlessly adopted due to years and years of slip shod management of the welfare state?
This group is for you.
Let's turn the tables on these bastards once and for all.
POLITE NOTICE:
If you don't agree with the principles and viewpoints of this group, please do not join. It really is that simple.

Watch out for Chav hate and be careful not to fall into it yourself as it becomes more and more acceptable in the mainstream. The less serious the hate is taken, the more serious it is becoming for it becomes 'a given' to despise a certain group of people. I notice the abundance of 'Chav Nights' - the new fancy dress theme.

The chavs may not appear vulnerable once they have been besmirched as drug taking, alcoholic, immoral, criminal, interbreeding vermin, but in reality, the poorest of the white working classes are defenceless. Failed by education and by society, they are well and truly outsiders.

It seems over the top to end on this sentence but beware of the hate.

Poem - In Hell

2008-12-26T18:21:00.000-08:00

Poetry will become an integral part of my little blog; I hope to write about 1 in every 5 of my posts in poetic form.

My poems tend usually to be quite self-indulgently dramatic. I find it strangely alluring to slip into another character; I find it easier to do so when writing in the poetic or lyrical form. I'm sure I'm overstating the case here; as well as probably overestimating my abilities as a 'poet' to control readers emotions etc, but a little disclaimer is to remember that the poems are taking on a characterised persona - this coming poem in particular isn't a plea for help or anything - it's just fun to write in the guise of a maniacal prisoner.

Here's the little background to this poem. I cannot remember for the life of me what the book was that I perused, but in an antique bookshop back in Cambridge, I found a little collection of odd and unsettling poems. There was one that was called 'Captain (or maybe Colonel) ... then a surname' but I distinctly remember it was labelled as anonymous. It had a really creepy technique of repetition that I didn't expect to find in a collection of acclaimed poetry. The line that I use, from which I take the title 'In Hell' is direct plagiarisation (or as I prefer to view it 'comprehensive allusion'). The idea of the poem I read was very good - the stream of consciousness of a desperate and dying criminal. Basically, this poem was my own exploration of the idea - the intention being to throw a character into the face of whoever reads it and to be so up-front and uncomfortably blunt as to develop a sense of vague curiosity about the ... troubled narrator.

In Hell (if you copy or reference this poem, it may or may not be legal. I'd advise against it, on account of it being altogether a bit shit. It really would be your mistake.)

Now they're locking the door, locked the door, locked the door
Now they've locked the door, locked the door.
And I'm hitting the walls with my fist, with my head,
With my cut and damp fist and my head.
I just want to be dead, to be dead, to be dead
Oh my life, how I wish to be dead!

Now I'm punching my neck and my head with my fists
Now I'm hitting the walls with my fists.
Now I'm banging and banging my face on the floor
On the floor, on the floor goes my face.

Now the man he comes in, he comes in, he comes in,
Now the man with the badge he comes in.
Now he's dragging me out to the nurse, to the nurse,
To the nurse with the squiggly hair.

And now I'm alright, I'm alright, I'm alright
With this drug in my gut I'm alright.
Now I'm falling asleep, fast asleep, deep asleep
To my slumbery sleepness I'll creep.

OH now I'm awake, I'm awake, I'm awake
Not asleep in my dreams, but awake!
A small knife, their mistake, I'm awake, I'm awake!
This small knife, what a treat, I shall take.

Now I'm back in my cell, in my cell, in my cell
In my cell, in my hell, in my cell.
Now they're locking the door, locked the door, locked the door
Time for knife, time for knife, time for knife.

Now I'm stabbing my thigh and my feet and my knees
And my chest and my throat and my ears
And my hands and my eyes and my nose and my lips and my...

Now I'm in hell, I'm in hell, I'm in hell.
And now I'm in hell, I'm in hell.
There's the man and the nurse here as well, in my hell
In the hell, here as well, in my hell.

* * *
Just so we don't leave this festive post on a down-note, for I am in a great and happy mood, I will leave you with some nice little noun-phrases which can be used to perk up the mood.
Jim-jam banjo. Floofy noodles. Mushroom snuffleys. Leafy leaves. Smiley old Mabel. Cabbage Pudding.

Being at Home

2008-12-19T16:36:00.000-08:00

I'm puzzled by the fact that I am drinking a lot more alcohol, a lot more frequently, at home rather than at uni. There seems to be no logical reason for this; at least none that jumps out, so I'm going to have a thoughtsplurge (my neologism) all over this fresh little blog.
At university, I am free to do whatever I want whenever I want, theoretically. Before uni, one of the main reasons I would give to myself for why I don't go 'out round town' was that my parents would bemoan me coming in late. I think even then I knew there was an element of pseudo-consideration going on there, but this is beside the point.

Why am I drinking more? At first, independence appears to be the reason, though sure then I would drink more when at Uni than now - now that I am once more cozened in the parental influence. So maybe then it is some level of consciousness that permeates into my sense of independence - a 'self aware independence'. I am here aware that I am independent and am hence able to drink as an act of maturity inflation - castigating my child-self?

I'm not even remotely like an alcoholic and I'm sure my drinking habits are actually pretty close to the norm - maybe even below it - but it's all relative I suppose. This is an on-going thought - this whole idea of the paradoxical Doncaster/Cambridge self is quite perplexing. In fact, forget sleep, I will do this.

OK, when I first got to Uni, in Freshers Week etc, I was striving to not be typecast as a Northerner. I am pleased to be 'du Nord' but I don't and didn't then want it to become me. So at first I was in a weird flux where I was trying to be this 'Cambridge' type I didn't yet know nor understand.

As the term went on, I became much more self assured - I enjoyed the modest eccentricity of allowing my bizarre hair to wreak havoc and grow in what can only be called a horizontal style. I found it easy to make small talk and banter; vodka helped this, but it became less of a necessity as the weeks went by. What started to emerge was a sense of my Doncaster identity moulding itself into the Cambridge form. The occasional vulgar joke or three about murder, snobbery and rape became more possible as I became less self-regulatory. This is good; liberating and character building. This was the second stage.

The third stage is what I am experiencing presently, and it is arguably the easiest and most enjoyable. Now in a stage in which Doncastrian personality and cheekiness has branded itself alongside a Cambridge sense of eccentricity, outspokenness and the insatiable appetite for challenge, it is the end of term and time to return to Doncaster. It seems pathetically predictable that change would come; silly to think it was only 8 weeks. But here, one can bask in the provincial glory of having left the province and returned willingly. Coming home serves to rejuvenate the ego that may take a battering in such a friendly yet blatantly competitive environment at uni. Coming home, people you know can hear about all the quirky things you've done and the people you've met and how everything is so much different [read better]. Coming home is like staring into the lake of Narcissus - lovingly gazing back is the altered you, altering yet more so simply by being self-aware.

As for the next stage, I predict going back will be very interesting in a social psychology sort of way. All of the qualms and worried that accompanied the first term have been quashed. I predict a heightened sense of self-worth amongst the majority, coupled with the amalgamation of many new years resolutions founded upon status anxiety and raw ambition. I can barely wait.