Misunderstandings

All the world is not as we think it is. Sometimes, Dear Friends, we make assumptions about the fact that the centre of our world is also the focal point of everybody else’s. I do have to bring myself up short when I indulge in that particular piece of hubris. There are a great number of people in the world. Why should people have heard of President Macron or Gordon Downey, for exammple? I certainly hadn’t heard of the latter until the sad reports of his impending death. As those of you who have read my previous blogs will know, I am just returned from 5 weeks in the UK. This is a country with which I am familiar, having grown up there. But, Dear Readers, nothing stays the same and nor should it.

Growing up with poor customer service was the norm for me. I did not dislike the fact that unlike the rest of the world, in Britain the customer was always in the wrong. There is something strangely attractive about honest rudeness as opposed to false ‘have a nice day’-ing bonhomie. Sweet sickly textured ‘perfects’ when one has ordered at a restaurant are obviously imperfect as I have written about before.  But, sadly, Britain has now caught up with the rest of the world and very few people now subscribe to the traditional cultural stunning directness that were such an essential part of my growing up. But recently, on BBC Radio Scotland, I did find glimmerings of hope.

“Off the Ball” is a two hour lunchtime radio show which takes place on a  Saturday and Sunday on this esteemed radio station. The presenters have all the silky smoothness of a sandpapered tongue after a night on the town, totally respectful to their guests in a sniggering guffawing disrespectful way. Stuart Cosgrove and Tam Cowan take us on two elongated journeys of absolute tosh, inane rubbish, and silly banter. This all helps me to get in touch with my amoeba-like qualities of which there are a quantity. “I am a life-form and I am listening to this!?” I mutter to myself but I don’t change the channel. This radio show is so refreshingly and fantastically good, simply because it isn’t. For instance, they find nothing to like in a sporting event which hosts 100,000 spectators and everything to adore in a football game in one of Scotland’s lesser leagues which has been stumbled upon by a guy walking his dog. Motherwell nil St.Johnstone nil is a football result that seems to excite them more than anything that happened on their wedding nights. It brings new depths to the phrase ‘to die for’.  So the interview with Punny Penny who writes and performs poems on ‘You Tube’ in her native Scots was well worth the listen. (So many Scots words purloined from the French, ‘a tassie of tea’, ‘the ashette to put the cooked turkey on’, ‘the corbie cawing in the back garden’ and a ‘pertrix in a pear tree’. Who knew? Scots is Doric, Doric is Scots. (Worth a ‘google’, maybe not).  But the starring interview for me was the one with the socio-communist older man who had had a terrible week sometime back in the day. He had suffered from diarrhoea, the bottom was not only falling out of his world but the world was falling out of his bottom. But, Dear Reader, there had been a silver lining in his misery. That toilet ridden week had also brought him the happy news that Maggie Thatcher, the Conservative Prime Minister, had resigned, bringing him some morsel of joy. On the path to this story’s conclusion, one of the presenters asked of his diarrhoea. “Does it run in your genes?” I had to do a double take when I heard that particular gem as it seemed to pass over the heads of everybody else in the studio. Such scatological humour gets me in touch with my childish self.

Talking of children, some of the best misunderstandings landed on my plate when I was a teacher.

As a loyal support I was sat next to two little boys at the back of a class as a colleague of mine was explaining something at the front. She told the class that if they did such and such then ‘there might be a glitch’. One little boy quietly asked of his mate what a glitch was. His friend frowned, nodded his head wisely and announced confidently that a glitch was a female dog. Out of the mouths of babes!

Away from school but training to be a responsible adult.

The UK has roundabouts on its roads. Generally I found drivers very adept and disciplined at managing their entries and exits from these. There is hardly a plethora of them here in Western Canada but I have experienced the new one near us and the change of traffic flow that it caused. No roundabout that I had experienced before ever had a “Stop” sign and yet here one was before me. Thank goodness it was not a busy roundabout otherwise nothing would ever have moved. Somewhere North of the City of Oxford when I was a student (Not at the esteemed university I hasten to add, that requires intelligence, but at a nearby teacher’s training college), Eric was driving a group of us to an event. Being taller than most I was often given the front seat on such trips. On this occasion I wish I hadn’t. No traffic was in the roundabout system as we approached. It was unusual that it had no vegetation on it other than grass. So Eric took it upon himself to drive his Morris Woodie straight over the top. It was bumpy and sudden but we were soon out the other side and back on our way. I was terrified and demanded of Eric angrily why he had not gone around it like he was supposed to. I despaired and slumped back in my seat when he said,

“Roundabout, Pete, what roundabout?”

Back to school to finish, Dear Reader.

The task for the class of 9 year olds was to write a piece of ‘unaided writing’. The purpose of this was for we, the teachers, to assess what the writing skills of our pupils were like. On the front of the paper was a sketch of an old fashioned pirate ship. It had been grasped and was slowly being dragged under the water by a giant octopus. I settled down that evening to mark and assess these pieces of work, something which I was never very good at as a teacher. I was even less capable of such a task when it required me to fill in tick boxes on such things as grammar, punctuation, spelling, format and so forth. Vocabulary was a category too. I suppose that I was relatively good at finding out whether a child was a reader or not depending on their knowledge of words. In this current task it became obvious that this one little girl was an avid reader. Indeed her sentence structure, her descriptive language and so forth suggested that she was reading way above her grade level. The story was reaching it’s climax, a crescendo of descriptive language, ‘stormy seas’, ‘hurricane force winds’, ‘fearful pirates’, ‘a rocking ship’, ‘a galleon about to be dragged under the water by the eight massive testicles of a monstrous octopus.’ Oh dear, hoh hum, side splitting laughter as I spilt my post prandial cuppa tea.

OK, one for the road.

George, Dear Friends, was 16 years old when he turned up unexpectedly in my classroom one day.

“Shouldn’t you be in your Provincial English Exam, George?” said I with alarm.

George approached with serious confidence and an irrefutable explanation.

“No, Mr. Davidson, I am exhumed from English.”

So, Dear Friends, these misunderstandings could become a part of a certain type of Christmas cracker. I had prepared a serious blog to go out this time but thought again because of the time of year. The last thing that any of you need is to have a cup of Christmas cheer diluted by a sad tale of everyday folk. So I reached into Santa’s sack, fumbled around and found all the good gifts gone and so you ended up with this piece of dross.

“The most petty and ill-informed football show on radio’.  This is how Stuart Cosgrove and Tam Cowan advertise their two hour specials of “Off the Ball” on the weekends. You may well substitute ‘blog’ for ‘football show’ and that will give you a pretty fair description of what you’ve just read.

Seasons greetings to you all.