English Language, Exams, Revision, Uncategorized

How to Revise: English Language GCSE

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Revising for English Language GCSE

Students often say that either they can’t or they don’t know how to revise for their English Language GCSE. Of course, your teachers will all be telling you that you can, and showing you how. I thought I could add a few words of my own.

These are things that you can be doing all the time:

  • Read regularly – a quality newspaper, a short story, a comic, instructions, a novel, a blog. You couldn’t expect to run a marathon if you hadn’t been running for 2 years, and you can’t expect to read and understand your English paper if you don’t practice reading.
  • Think critically about what you read and watch. When you read a book for pleasure, or watch a TV programme or film, think about what you have read or watched and talk about it with your friends and family. What did you think of the characters? Did the plot add up? Was it exciting? What made the ending good? If you can think in these terms about the stories you see every day, then it will make the questions you come up against in the exam seem less unfamiliar.
  • Talk to those around you. Learn how to recount what has happened to you that day, what you learnt in a lesson or what you found annoying about what you watched on TV. The better you are at explaining, discussing and recounting, the better your writing will be.
  • Write things down – lists, explanations, descriptions, a diary, a story. The more familiar you are with writing, the better you get at it.

To specifically prepare for your exam:

  • Go through exercises in revision books like Edexcel’s Revision Workbook or Target 5/9 English Language Writing.
  • Watch videos on Youtube about how to do certain questions. There are some excellent ones. Just make sure the one you find refers to your exam board.
  • Do past paper questions. The best way to do this is to take one of the questions on the paper and do that. The first few times give yourself as long as you need. Then work towards timing yourself to do it in the time required. Work up to doing full exam papers only just before the exam or occasionally to test your timings. (You can get past papers from the exam websites, as long as you are sure which exam board you’re taking.)
  • Know the exam paper. The questions are of the same type every year. Learn what is expected of you from each question, how long to spend on each one and how many marks are awarded for each one.
  • Read exemplars – work done by previous students – to get a feel for how to improve and what you can avoid doing as well. (You can see these on the website for the exam boards too.)
  • Look at the mark scheme. If you know what the marker is looking for, you will have a better chance of producing it.
  • If possible, get your practice work marked. Learning from your mistakes is key!

General advice:

  • Get to know your own strengths and weaknesses. Knowing your strengths should give you a boost, realising that there are lots of things you do well! Knowing your weaknesses can help you know what to work on. For example, do you struggle with understanding the text? Do you find it hard to develop your answer when you’re analysing the language and structure of a text? Do you find it difficult to write description in your creative writing? Think about what you find tricky, then practice that!
  • Practice little and often. Better 30 minutes every week than 2 hours every month.

Remember – this is a skill you’re learning. You can’t cram a skill! You must practice it! Read, write and practice the key skills of analysis, evaluation, comparison, creative writing and transactional writing.

Good luck! You can do it!

School, Teaching

The Dangers of Being Cool

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Of all the nonsense that we go through as teenagers, and of all the things that strangely hang on into adulthood, the concept of being cool is the most pervasive, and one of the most destructive. It’s hard to define what ‘cool’ is. It’s easier to see what it is not. And this comment on ‘cool’ will depend on my definition, as many will say that undeniably good things are cool, and that it is not the word or the concept’s fault if people take it the wrong way. But herein lies the problem. Cool can be defined as anything good – from stylish to popular, from confident to successful. Cool is what you think it is. And so in a closed society, cool is simply what the most powerful people in the room believe it to be. The only way to break this hold is to disagree and risk being hurt by the powerful ones who have a vested interest in their definition being upheld.

My short-hand for cool, in a school setting, is to take everything a parent would want a child to be and provide the reverse. Hardworking, kind to the vulnerable, thoughtful, independent, individual, respectful of others, respectful of both the law and the rules – cool is the antithesis of this. No parent should hope their child is cool. They will be more likely to be bailing their offspring out of difficult situations (too much drink, drugs and sex), more likely to be called in to the Head’s office, more likely to watch their kids do badly in their academic studies. We may hope our children are popular, but it seems to me that this is a very high price to pay.

However cool or uncool you are now or ever were, in the end we all hope we find people who will care about us because of who we are – who we really are – instead of having to put on an act to seem on top of things, confident and poised at all times. No one can sustain this, and the effort of doing so can be almost too much to bear.

The lesson coolness at school teaches is that being what others want of you is more important than being yourself and being seen as strong and confident is more important than showing your weaknesses. At a time when young people are forming their personalities, learning strategies which will keep them well and safe throughout their lives, they are trying to squash themselves into the tiny box that the current version of cool has allowed them. Forget loving ‘70s glam rock, enjoying playing the violin, knitting characters from Doctor Who or getting into birdwatching. If it isn’t football, current pop and Love Island (or substitute any sport, music or TV programme here) then it isn’t acceptable. And this is the point. It isn’t that there is anything wrong with any of the things that are cool; they are just arbitrary choices from the myriads of options available. There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about cool or uncool things. The problem is that someone else has chosen it for you. It isn’t what you would want, or may not be if you gave yourself the time and freedom to choose.

I won’t even focus too much on how trying to be cool can give people serious issues with body shape, warp their sense of self to a damaging degree, and give power to people unfitted to deal with it while leaving others alone with rock-bottom self-esteem. I won’t even focus on the cruelty, bullying and nastiness it provokes in the cool and the miserable exclusion it provokes in those labelled uncool. I am not even going to talk about the terrible fate of those who try to be cool but can never be, rejecting people who could be true friends to chase after a group of people who will never accept them. But what I will say is that it is another facet of the terrible double edged sword of belonging. We will do almost anything to belong, including making sure that the others outside the circle suffer. Racism, sexism, xenophobia are all part of the same disease. It is the attitude that as long as we have what we want, what we need, we don’t care if others don’t have it. We can be cruel to the spotty boy trying to practise his French horn for the school play because we crave to be part of the inner circle and fear the cruelty of others. We can be cruel to refugees in a boat off our coast because we fear being the outsider, fear that what we have will be taken from us and long to belong with the powerful, long to be one of them.

The sooner we can teach children that to be yourself (with all the odd quirks, hobbies and interests) is the only way to be happy, the sooner we can eradicate the awful disease of coolness and foster love of diversity, love of difference, and acceptance of others. That’s how you build good human beings.

Those who hang on to their coolness once they have left school are like the 40 year old at the club, drinking too much and spending all their money on nights out. Understandable behaviour for the young, but something we ought to grow out of. It would be even better if we had not been enticed by the idea of cool in the first place. Try being you. As someone once said, everyone else is taken.

Teaching

Work and Fun

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Work and fun- they seem like opposites, don’t they? The way we think separates these two into mutually exclusive poles. I know that if we scratch the surface even a little bit, we find that it isn’t true. We know that you can enjoy working, and the luckiest of us love our jobs, and we know that loving something that is good for you is the best option, but, even then, we want it to be one thing or the other. Either, it’s not really work because you enjoy it – ‘I never worked a day in my life! I love my job too much!’ Or enjoying something is a way of getting the useful thing done – ‘If the children enjoy learning, then in every lesson they will behave and will progress.’ But why do we need to think like this?

The truth is, everything worth doing, that makes our lives mean something, takes effort and is pleasurable. If we want to sip the pleasure without making the effort, we will never achieve the value. If we believe we can only reach the goal by hard, serious work without loving what we do, then, not only will the joy of life be diminished, but it is likely that the result will not be as worthwhile. I’m sure we can all think of examples of both.

You could take this as a maxim for relationships, for work, for education. If you want only fun and don’t expect and accept difficult times and hard work in a long-term relationship, be that with a partner, a parent, a child or a friend, then your relationship is going to fail. If there is only an earnest ethic of work in your learning, it will be hard to persevere. As this is a reading and education blog, I will focus of educational examples, but I think it could be said to be true in all aspects of life. If a student wants to have fun, and exclusively do that, then they will not develop as they should academically. If a teacher focuses too hard on the work and not hard enough on the enjoyment, then no one will want to even begin to learn.

Normally, when we are talking about our own activities we want to have as much fun as possible. But there is an inescapable idea, in all walks of life, but particularly in education, that without miserable and stony-faced hard work, the results are not worth having. There is also an insidious idea that pleasure is the route to all things, and if only we can make things fun, all is achievable. It may be boring and middle of the road, but there needs to be balance in all things, this included. I have sat in meetings listening to the theory that behaviour problems in the classroom stem almost exclusively from the lack of ‘engagement’ provided in the lessons. ‘Engagement’ here means fun. Nonsense, obviously. As an NQT, that made me feel a failure  – ‘Not only am I unable to control my class, but I’m boring too!’. But I hope we all know that behaviour management is as much about school based structures, school-led expectations, personal relationships with students, routines, environment and a host of other things, as much as it is about ‘engagement’. Fun is not the answer to everything. On the other end of the scale, once out of primary, teachers feel they can’t read to classes, have library lessons, take time to do book reviews or talk about reading in class, except as a ‘fun’ lesson which has no true value in the great scheme of things. Activities which develop relationships between students, improve group work, develop confidence, give a sense of belonging – these are not given space in our schools. They are seen as frivolous and must take a poor second place to slogging through the SQI/PEE paragraphs or learning your times-tables. All this is because playing games, listening to students debate and giving time to work that does not lead to exam excellence is seen as ‘fun’ not serious work.

I’m probably preaching to the choir here. You’re probably thinking, ‘This is obvious, surely!’ But sadly, in everyday ways, in schools throughout the country, we are alternately relying too heavily on ‘fun’ to trick the students into doing their work, like the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, or we are excluding meaningful and valuable parts of learning because they have no countable value and so are frivolous. Is it completely fanciful to imagine that we can encourage students to value their work, not hiding that it can be hard sometimes, but add an element of enjoyment into the proceedings? In fact, it shouldn’t need to be added, because, if we can but be induced to admit it, work can be fun. Intrinsically. Not an added piece of ‘sugar’ to coat the bitter pill, but because work and fun are fundamentally linked.

Exams, Reading, Teaching

Killing The Classics

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I have had cause to think some more about what people are reading and confront again that knotty issue of whether some books, plays and poetry are more ‘worthy’ of being read than others. There has been a recent survey suggesting that children have read more books with higher reading ages during lockdown than in previous years. Unsurprising, I would say, since children have had more time at home, and potentially less time at various clubs, playing with friends, and travelling to and from school. But this raises the question of the importance of reading books with higher reading ages.

I wish we lived in a world where you could read what you enjoyed, and didn’t worry if the book was difficult or easy, worthy or unworthy. I believe that then, children and adults alike would read more, enjoy it more, and so get better at it, opening up worlds of books previously unreachable. Unfortunately we live in a world where, if children cannot reach a reading age of at least 16 (by the time they are around 15) then GCSE becomes a struggle. So, teachers around the country are trying to force children into progressing from Tom Gates, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and The World of Norm to Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare within a few short years. Even if I agreed that this was a suitable aim for our education system, I would not accept that we are going about it in the right way.

Increasingly, children are being taught classic literature at younger and younger ages. I do not see the point of this. It only alienates the majority of children while squashing beautiful and complex works into consumable nuggets for children who cannot cope with the original. Why are we doing this? I taught Year 7 The Tempest a couple of years ago. How ridiculous! There was barely a nod to the original text, so we taught a very strange story, missing out any interpretations the use of power, different forms of love, corruption, aging and death, to students who were too young to understand a play for adults. I am not saying the students didn’t learn anything. I just wonder if a play they could really relate to, act, and understand would have been a better use of time. If Shakespeare wasn’t on the GCSE curriculum, this would never have been even thought of. Animal Farm is probably slightly more understandable as a Year 7 text, as it can be understood on a purely basic level. But it grates that the children who could not possibly understand the political ideology and historical situation it was written to satirise are missing the key reasons why Orwell wrote it in the first place. It does not follow that if students study ‘classic’ texts in early Key Stage 3, they will be able to understand them better in late Key Stage 4. Even then, Shakespeare is pushing the limits of most teenagers’ abilities. All we do, is create a generation of children who feel that books, plays and literature in general are opaque, not for them, and divorced from anything they have experienced themselves. That sense of alienation rolls into disaffection, and disengagement.

Is it impossible to inspire students with a love of books and of reading? I don’t think so! I think we can, if we allow the child to choose the things they like and give them time and encouragement to read, and to help them feel they are not being judged. I have, in my time as a librarian, come across children who felt judged for reading something that was, frankly, too easy for them. And children who felt judged for trying to read something too difficult for them. This judgement is unhelpful and unnecessary. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t guide people to find books that will suit their interests and ability level, but we all need some sense of security, and pushing people to their outer limits all the time is counter productive. Furthermore, insisting a book is too hard – rather than letting the child find that out for themselves – is a way of saying, these things are not for you! You are too young, too stupid, too working class, too whatever… The child will fill in the blanks.

This is all so obvious, I wonder that it needs saying. Schools are so focused on exam results rather than actual achievement, enjoyment and preparation for life, that creating literate individuals who will carry on learning and reading for their whole lives is less of a priority than getting those teenagers a 4 in their English Language and Literature. I don’t blame individual teachers who all long for their students to love and appreciate the books, plays and poetry they are taught. I don’t even blame schools for focusing their attention on exams rather than long-term educational goals, but the system is so skewed that, however good your intentions, students continue to struggle with classic texts and unfortunately learn that they are not for them in the process. My aim would be to open up all literature to everyone. I just fear we are not going about it in the right way.

Literature, Poetry, Reading

Is Poetry Worth Reading?

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I have been reading about the Italian poet Alda Merini recently, and one of the things she mentioned in an interview she gave was about the future of poetry. She said, ‘I don’t see a future for poetry. I believe that in the new millennium it will disappear.’ (‘Io non vedo un futuro per la poesia, credo che nel nuovo millennio scomparirà.’) Perhaps she just wanted to shock the interviewer with her opinion, or perhaps she truly believed that, but it made me think about poetry and its role in our lives and in my life in particular. I have been thinking about it a lot recently in any case. I can’t help confronting the idea of the use of poetry in my daily life because I teach it to reluctant students. Over the years I have noticed that, overwhelmingly, poetry is the least liked part of the literature curriculum. It may be that young people are less likely to see poetry as an important part of their lives, but it isn’t just them. I speak to adults about poetry more than many people might, and very few of them read poetry regularly, and many – probably put off by English teachers of the past – hate it with a passion. Nevertheless, I love poetry and have found it a comfort, a key to understanding and a fascination since I was a girl. Having declared my bias, I am going to try and persuade you that poetry is, in fact, an important part of our culture which deserves more attention and can offer so much.

First I want to say that, though it is true that poetry receives a lot of negative feeling from a lot of people, there are more people who like it than I perhaps have realised in the past. In this past week, for example, one of my students volunteered the information that she loved poetry. At my Italian class, where we were learning about Alda Merini, the poet I quoted earlier, I asked my classmates and the teacher what they thought of poetry. All but one of them said they read poetry and appreciated it. It’s true that this represents a particular demographic, but it can’t be denied that poetry is used at baptisms and funerals more regularly than ever before as people move away from religious texts to secular ones but still long for an expression of meaning, pattern and of understanding. The poem read at Biden’s inauguration was rightly lauded as a message of hope and humanity. Poetry in the wild, if I may express it like that, is as popular as ever. What I think we lack is a way of teaching it which does not disaffect every generation as it goes through school.

You may notice I blame education for the lack of love for poetry. The GCSE curriculum has a lot to answer for. But probably one of the issues is that young boys and girls have not usually had those experiences of love, loss, grief, despair, joy and fear that the poets often write about. It is hard for them to stretch their minds to those terrible or wonderful experiences which are so alien to them. It is not impossible – though perhaps the choice of poems can help us here. But for those who have gone through difficult or amazing things, poetry can help you steer through and understand your own experience. One of the strengths of poetry is that it tells you what you feel; it describes your experience. It helps you explore your feelings and normalise them. You realise that this man or woman from another time or another culture has felt this same thing you feel. You are not a freak. You are not crazy. You are human.

I remember having read John Clare’s poem ‘I am’ many times in anthologies that I tend to flick through as I prepare to go to sleep. For years it meant nothing to me. It even seemed a little self-indulgent. Then one day, I read it again and I knew exactly what he meant when he said:

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes—

Suddenly it didn’t seem self-indulgent, but rather a normal human reaction, a feeling of isolation and insignificance which many of us have felt. When he says ‘I long for scenes where man hath never trod A place where woman never smiled or wept’ I felt seen and understood. Those moments when you want to hide away, pull the duvet over your head and pretend the world does not exist – that is what those lines described to me. Until you have felt like that, the poem means little. And even after you have, the moment it clicks into place may not come immediately. When it does, though, you suddenly feel not so alone. You know that you and the poet have shared something and it is an indescribable comfort.

The word ‘indescribable’ is key to my experiences here. I try to express myself; I write of how I feel. But I do not succeed. But the poets succeed where I fail, and put into words I could never have conjured my exact feelings. They say what I cannot. Through them I can express myself. I believe it is a human need to express yourself – otherwise why would Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and the like be so popular? Poetry helps you do that.

At the same time, and this may seem like an oxymoronic statement, poetry makes unfamiliar the things which are most familiar. It can make us look through a lens which distorts or focuses on one tiny detail and through that defamiliarisation we can finally understand something we have looked in the face for most of our lives. The most overt form of this I can think of is in Craig Raine’s poem ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’. It looks at our familiar world and comments on it through the eyes of someone who is outside the experience. Though the first description in the poem is my favourite (1), this is his explanation of a watch or clock: ‘But time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.’ However, most poems defamiliarise things enough to help us see things a different way without moving our sights so far as to imagine the viewer a Martian. Instead, they help us see our own experiences through a different lens helping us to understand them and assimilate them.

For me, though, the beauty of the language of poetry is its strongest draw. The sounds and rhythms, strange imagery and the perfection of a line create in me a sense of satisfaction and, dare I say, happiness, that is hard to improve upon. Lines come back to me over years. These are two examples which have stayed with me:

The wind flung a magpie away and a black-

back gull bent like an iron bar slowly.

This line from Wind by Ted Hughes bends the gull’s wings across the two lines (enjambment) which, along with the repeated ‘b’ sound (alliteration), creates a beautifully impossible image of movement and sound.

All their eyes are ice.

This is the last line from Wilfred Owen’s poem, Exposure. The men have died of cold at the front in the First World War, and in this line their open eyes are iced over. The shortness of the line, it being the last one of the poem, and the repetition of the ‘eye’ sound (assonance) gives the reader a thrill of shock and terror. I can still see those eyes, staring unseeingly, with their blueish film of ice, after all the years I have been reading this poem. Of course, I could go on. And over successive blog posts, I probably will! I don’t expect you to love those lines as I do, but I hope you can find lines of your own that resonate in your head.

My last argument, for today at least, is that poetry (along with all other types of literature) deals with the parts of life that matter most. It speaks of love, joy, loss, death and every other important aspect of life. It is not that it is generic and so could apply to any situation; usually, in fact, poetry is very personal and specific. But at its heart, it explores what it is to be human. That Dante, the 14th century Italian, could also feel lost in a dark wood in the middle of his life’s journey (2), or the Victorian poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins felt that he hung from the mountains in his mind (3), makes me see that, in all our struggles, we are not alone. If we don’t need that now, after a year of isolation, when will we? If you have never tried poetry, or been turned off it by unsympathetic English teachers years ago, maybe it’s time to give it a go?

Literature, Poetry, Reading, Uncategorized

Is Poetry Worth Reading? Footnotes

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  1. Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
    and some are treasured for their markings –

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

2.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.

3.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita

Uncategorized

Boredom

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Boredom is a choice. Or so people say. I have often been irritated with students who find everything boring when there is interest in every subject if you have the curiosity or will to look for it. The world is full of fascinating things, from the natural world to the products of the human one. And now we have it all at our finger tips. In my childhood, if you wanted to know about something, you had to find a book about it. That meant going to a library or a bookshop, looking for a book that might be relevant, searching through indexes and scanning pages to tell you about the thing you wanted to know. It wasn’t easy. It took time and trouble. Now, with the wonders of the Internet, all you have to do is type a few words into Google and there it is. We can argue about the reliability of the information you might find on random websites on the web, but the amazing availability of information is incredible. You can become an expert on anything from the human body to ancient Greek literature. Strangely, this has not made us less bored. We seem more bored than ever.

Harking back to my childhood again, it was not always easy to find things to do. Genuinely, on a rainy day, I had the choice of playing with my toys, reading, writing, drawing or working. The TV was off-limits until the evening (Presbyterian mother), but in any case there was no children’s TV until the brief slot in the late afternoon on a week day, and some chaos that passed as entertainment in the morning on a Saturday. There was the radio too, of course, but there was only one set in the house, in the living room. I don’t imagine my parents would have wanted to listen to the same things as I did, but, to be honest, I never put that to the test. I was often bored. I had friends to visit, a huge back garden, lots of lovely toys and books, a field with horses and a pond at the end of the garden, and the sea only a few fields’ walk away. But I was often bored. I think it probably made me pick up a difficult book and read about other worlds to escape from my boring one. It probably made me write stories to create a world I would rather live in. I spent hours taping my singing on a little tape recorder, then recording my recorded voice and my live one onto the family’s tape recorder, thereby building up harmonised versions of hymns and songs. Am I arguing that boredom made me creative?

People now have YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Netflix and so many other entertainment sources. How could anyone ever be bored again? There are people to find out about, locals and celebrities, places to discover, stories to watch, ideas to ponder. Yet here we are, in this world of every possible interest, and again I am bored. The lack of input in my childhood pushed me to do things that were valuable, I think. But the overload of input now may do the same to this generation.

In these pandemic times, I have a short attention span. Today, I could not watch the usual YouTube clips, read the usual snide, vitriolic, self-centred tweets, look at others’ perfect or banal lives on Facebook. I could not be bothered watching the series I have been into on Netflix. I could not be bothered to clean or tidy the house, read a book, do some work. Instead, I ponder boredom. It deadens, though the despair it brings can push you to do something worthwhile in the end.

It’s a bit of a pathetic enemy, to be frank. If we compare our situation to what people suffered in war time, being bored does not come close to the horror and fear that war inspires. And there was plenty of boredom around during the war as well. If all we have to suffer is being a bit bored, then surely that is a small price to pay for the safety of people in the community. We should be thanking God that it is boredom (and not death, disease, pain, suffering, grief) that we have to contend with. So many people in these times have so much more to bear.

So forgive me if my boredom has not this time led to creativity (unless you count this meaningless exposition). I come to no conclusions. I simply say that to rebel against it can produce amazing things, but to give in to it leaves you eating a whole packet of biscuits, drinking a bottle of wine before dinner, or whatever your chosen vice might be. I have to hope my creativity kicks in soon…

Literature, Poetry

Nature, The Healer

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How we view nature has changed this year, I think – at least for the majority of us. For most of my life, I have lived in beautiful places. And at the times I have lived somewhere lacking in that natural beauty, I have missed it more than I ever would have foreseen. However, I still don’t think I appreciated nature as much in the past as I have this year. When things have been so difficult, when we have been contained within our houses, have had our journeying curtailed, the natural world has taken on another role in our lives. It has become more central. Once a walk in the park or by the river is truly the only thing you are allowed to do outside (barring a trip to the supermarket) the experience takes on a higher significance. We start to appreciate more the rhythm of the seasons, the habits of the wildlife, the vagaries of the weather.

During the Autumn, I noted each falling leaf, each berry-laden hedgerow, each star-studded sky in a way I had not done for years. It may be because I was less busy, had fewer distractions, fewer entertainments, but I can’t help feeling that noticing and revelling in the season did me good. The Romantics felt nature could calm and heal, could restore the tired mind and refresh the despondent soul. But they also spoke of the terror and the power of it, the awe and majesty of it, and its cruel and blind indifference. They related to nature, however, in a completely different way from those who had gone before. I don’t know whether it was because, for the first time, they were separated from it as people rushed away from the country into the dirty, polluted cities, but there is a nostalgia and sublimeness they associate with it which does not come from getting your living from working with it every day.

Keats in On the Sea writes:

who have your eye-balls vexed and tired,

Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea

When I visit Druridge Bay – the eight mile stretch of golden sand between Cresswell and Amble in Northumberland – I have often thought how the sight of the restless vastness of the sea washes your mind of your daily worries in just this way. Wordsworth wrote of how when he was ‘in vacant or in pensive mood’, his ‘heart with pleasure fills’ at the memory of the ‘host of golden daffodils’. He was saying that even when the moment of being with nature was past, even the memory of it could benefit him. He went even further than that in his poem ‘Tintern Abbey’ where he says that this relationship with nature has ‘no slight or trivial influence’ on the ‘little nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love’ which he regarded as ‘that best portion of a good man’s life’. In other words, this communion with nature can be linked to how we act with others, in kindness and in love. 

I don’t know if I would go so far as to agree with that, but I would say three things. Firstly, if appreciating the amazing power and beauty of the natural world can help us survive the rigours of what has been (and continues to be) an unbelievably difficult time, then let’s do it! Secondly, though this was not noted by the Romantic poets, taking care of our natural environment may be the only way any of us will survive into the future. This is probably our last chance to cherish the amazing, but fragile, world around us, and hope we can turn the tide which the Industrial Revolution began. And thirdly, the world needs kindness and love more than ever – and to give that without expecting return or acknowledgment adds the most to the sum of everyone’s happiness, I would argue. So if by caring for nature, loving it, appreciating it, spending as much time in it as we can, we can also improve our attitude towards each other, then let’s give it a try. What have we got to lose?

New Year

Divisiveness

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Is it just my impression, or have we become more divisive recently? I know we didn’t used to agree over every aspect of things, but there is vitriol in the arguments that did not used to be there. In fact, the arguments or discussions are all but devoid of facts or evidence and mostly are simply an exchange of sound bites and insults. We can’t argue logically in the way that reasonable people might whose minds are open to changing their opinions. We can’t even agree to disagree. Why have we got ourselves into this situation? And what are the consequences?

I think I want to start by blaming social media. It’s not that I’m a luddite; I use and like social media as much as the next person. But being able to be both anonymous and distant from the person who you are disagreeing with (and insulting) certainly fuels the fire. As we all tell each other several times a week, people wouldn’t say that to someone they disagreed with in the pub, unless they wanted the night to end in a brawl. The other striking issue is that we wrap ourselves up in the cottonwool of groups with the same beliefs. Our friends on Facebook are likely to think like us, we only follow those on Twitter or Instagram who don’t offend us, and so we reinforce our own ideas without questioning them. In the past, and I’m thinking of my own past here, we had to spend our time with an odd assortment of people, those we happened to come across at school or work. Views tended to differ, and we somehow learned to accept that ours wasn’t the only way of thinking. We may have to do that still, to some extent, but it is easier now to create virtual communities rather than physical ones, and we often choose to live in a comfortingly reaffirming one. Even as we listen to those we disagree with, as we all know, we gather the information which proves our point, or mould the information to make sure it fits our narrative.

It is an age of crises. We are at the brink of ruining the planet for ever and irreversibly. Globally we are all struggling through the most horrific health crisis seen in our lifetimes, and we, in this country, are on the brink of separating ourselves off from our European neighbours. It is an age of division. In addition to these, the terrible difficulties we face in our own lives, from illness and bereavement, to financial insecurity and unemployment, inspire in us a fear and panic which translates into vehemence in our discourse which moves from passion to hate and alienation. Our divisions are not simply political, although everything is political in the end. We are divided in our race, our religion, our class, our gender, our age. People who agree on 90% of their ideas, are issuing death threats and hate-filled diatribes to each other, instead of trying to see the others’ points of view, aiming to convince them or opening their minds to be convinced. At the bottom of all of this is a petty, mean-spirited view of others which is catching. It moves from a feeling of superiority to a sense of being right, then on through to an objectification of the person and things disagreed with.

What that means is that instead of feeling disinclined to berate others, or feeling guilty if we have, we can easily forget that they are people like us. They have feelings, are vulnerable, are in every way our mirror. Not only does this hurt and further alienate those people we attack, but it does something to us too.

I think that our actions shape our character. Moral philosophers throughout history will have good and thorough arguments about why this may or may not be so. But, just now, until someone convinces me otherwise, I believe that every bad thing we do, and every good one, has an effect on who we are. Not only do negative consequences have negative effects (as positive consequences have positive ones) whatever our original intentions were, but hurting others not only has an effect on them, but also on us. It makes us more likely to hate those we have hurt. It makes hurting easier next time. It twists us inside a little more, until the cruel taunts and nasty thoughts become natural and normal to us, rather than the occasional result of pressure, stress and fear. We no longer see them as morally repugnant, but instead as something everyone does.

What I have struggled more and more with this year, is watching people I revere go down this path. Their ideas may be correct, they may be right in their views, but that is no excuse for the nastiness, the cruelty, the disregard for the humanity of those they attack. We have long used the argument, if he does it, it must be wrong. If she does it, it must be right. But this was never sound logic. Indeed, we weaken the strength of our arguments, the more cruel and divisive we are.

The last thing to consider, after having thought about why we can’t agree, and what are the consequences, is what we should do about it. We can already see that the consequences of this phenomenon are disastrous, both globally and personally. Nothing is changed, no one is moved from their position; all that happens is we all become slightly worse as people and more and more likely to do similar and worse things in the future.

The truth is, I don’t know how to change, except by not engaging in it. I refuse to condemn people, in groups or individually. I refuse to hate and to spread that hatred. I will try, instead, to understand the other point of view. If I need a resolution this year, that can be the one to focus on. Will you join me?

Christmas

Don’t Expect Too Much

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For my Christmas blog post, I suppose I wanted to write a comforting, little homily, perhaps with a tiny sting in its tale, perhaps with a challenge in it. Instead, I find I am unable to bring something bland and clichéd to mind. Christmas, this year, is likely to be extremely difficult for a lot of people. Some have said that it is right that restrictions should be as tight as they are – and I probably agree with that. In fact, I definitely do. And we could get into discussions as to whether we can compare this year’s Christmas to Eid or Diwali, or whether the tighter restrictions could have been avoided, or at least foreseen, with better planning, but in the end, this is where we are. And as in every other part of life, what we will experience this Christmas is not merited or worked towards, but rather out of our control. Many people have planned to spend a quiet Christmas in any case, many people have prepared themselves for being alone, or for missing people they love. Sometimes that is through loss, and this year has brought more of that than anyone could ever have predicted. Sometimes, it is as a response to the sensible caution which we have been exhorted to exercise. However, there are those who planned, after a difficult and lonely year, to be with those they love, and now they can’t. This, it seems to me, is so hard to bear. I would like to say it is the hardest thing to bear, but who am I to rank pain and difficulty? Bereavement, illness, loneliness, pain – who wants to rank these in order of things they can most easily suffer? Suffice to say, there will be those who feel more alone, more bereft, more desperate, this Christmas time than ever before.

The question I have been asking myself is why? Why do we feel so strongly about what we do and who we are with at Christmas? Why is it a time for us to contemplate our lives, assess where we are? Why do we feel the need to be in the middle of the John Lewis/M&S/Bisto/Sainsbury’s advert? Why do we imagine the Christmas of a thousand songs and films?

This is the problem. And this is the answer.

We are bombarded with these images for months before Christmas, and for every year of our lives. The snow, the children throwing snowballs, the group of friends around the fire, the jolly family playing charades and eating an enormous turkey, the little children laughing, the toys, the sweets, the puddings – how could anyone’s Christmas live up to that? Even in a normal year, if there ever was such a thing, we could never live up to that. We all have things which are difficult to cope with – family disagreements, illness, death, loss, money worries, or something equally disturbing and upsetting. It is almost impossible to get through life without every gathering having some or all of these things. Even if our Christmas did look like those adverts from the outside, the feeling we would have living the experience would always be flawed. But, as we all know, life is not as simple as these pictures of perfection. Every family is unique. And so is every group of friends. Probably, we would not want to reduce our strange, multi-faceted, idiosyncratic loved ones to the distillation of what an ad-man sees as the ideal Christmas. We might groan as our parents fight over the turkey, Granny fusses over everyone, or Uncle Peter falls asleep having drunk too much before lunch is even ready, but this is what our memories are made of.

The gap between reality and the image we have in our heads of Christmas is where we all come unstuck. I’m not saying that some people, and especially so this year, do not have, or will not have, a truly awful time, from whatever perspective we look. But I am saying that things look worse because we compare ourselves and our lives to an impossible standard. We do this at so many points in life. When a new mother is exhausted, sore, terrified and lonely, she may see the saccharine pictures of new mothers in her head and wonder where she went wrong. When a newly married couple first start to get used to each other’s habits and eccentricities, they might think of the ‘love nest’ everyone is talking about whenever they see them and wonder if they are doing something wrong.

I don’t want to give anyone advice. I have always loved Christmas and made the most of every mince-pie-filled moment. We have to admit that our real, jagged Christmases are not perfect, and perhaps they are all the better for it. This, though, is the year when we have to lower our expectations, if any year is. I hope we can all gain a tiny sliver of hope from the coming vaccine, and reschedule our Christmases, however flawed and quirky, to a better time. However you spend your Christmas time this year, I hope it is better than you expect – just make sure you don’t expect too much!

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