Signs of the times

I noticed two signs in Birmingham as I was walking to the station tonight which amused me for different reasons. The first was a large advert for Ozzy Osborne's autobiography. The title of the book is "I am Ozzy". The sign was a large picture of Ozzy with the text, reproduced exactly below, punctuated as shown.

I am Ozzy. This is his story. Read it now.

This seems to be a rather schizophrenic phrasing with the "I" in the first sentence and the "his" in the second. Had the first sentence been enclosed in quotes to make it a title, I'd have accepted it, but as it is the sense is very confused.

The second sign was a small poster in the newsagents, near the chocolate shelf. It was an advert for Terry's chocolate orange. The only problem was that the apostrophe in "Terry's" had been replaced with one of those squares that display on your computer when the font you are using doesn't include that symbol. Most likely, what has happened is that the designer has used an unusual font and when the advert has gone to its computerised print that font wasn't available and it's substituted the square. What baffles me is how it ever went to print that way. Did nobody at all notice this odd character appearing? Did they notice and not care? Did they notice and care but think, "Oh bugger, nobody will notice"?

Hell in a handbsket time again

Over at the Mail it's that time of year again when we discover that education is being fundamentally eroded, standards dumbed down, English destroyed and that the end of society as we know it is nigh.
Yep, they're on the warpath again about English exams. It's nothing new for them, it's the dreary old topic of texting. Apparently there is a "new English exam*" that includes "sections on texting". It isn't an exam about texting, it isn't an English exam that consists solely of texting, it's an exam that includes a section on texting.
According to the Mail on Sunday they have to "write an essay on the etiquette and grammar of texting, using their own messages as examples". Why is this any different to writing an essay on any other topic? There is no suggestion that they should write it using txt abbreviations (though I'll bet some of the students try) and it seems to me to be a perfectly proper essay question.

I do have a quibble about it in that they will, apparently (you can't trust everything that you read in the papers), be required to use their own texts as examples. Although most teenagers use texting abbreviations not all of them do. Some of them text in whole sentences. With punctuation. They will be at a disadvantage. That's my only slight doubt about it. Otherwise I will say again what I have said before. A text is a text is a text. The skill of reading means the skill of applying appropriate strategies to a text. It would, as I have pointed out in response to one of their previous hell-in-a-handbasket scares, be as ludicrous to read a train timetable from start to finish as it would to read a novel by taking random sentences from it. And it would be just as ludicrous to apply the same standards of creative writing to a text message saying "CU L8R" as to a sonnet or a letter to the bank manager or a diary entry.

The world isn't going to be destroyed because someone writes an essay about the etiquette of texting.

(*It's also not a new exam. It's a GCSE from the AQA - one of the largest exam boards in the country. It just happens to have included an extra bit in the syllabus.)

To put away childish things #1

...Enid Blyton.

I've talked before about how I remember the library that used to be at the end of my road so well that I could still draw a map of it showing where every different kind of book was located. The Enid Blyton books were in two places. Noddy was at the back of the children's section where the books for very young children were kept in a more open section where the kiddies could play while their parents chose their books but the books for (slightly) older children were almost immediately behind the door through which the children's section was entered. The only things closer to the door were the authors whose names began with "A".
At one time or another I must have read most of the Famous Five books and most of the Secret Seven books and probably some of the others. They were enjoyable enough but even then I was aware that this wasn't the real world, wasn't any real world that had ever existed anywhere. It was a world of impossibly polite children who had holidays in the country with dotty old aunties who gave them ginger beer and cake; who said things like "I think that's jolly hard luck, old fellow" to each other; who occupied a perfect world; who battled with criminals and smugglers and spies; who romped through an eternal summer of blue skies and fluffy clouds. Even the names give the game away. Julian, George (a tomboyish girl), Dick and Anne and, of course, Timmy the dog. (Not to mention Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin!)
Frankly Hogwarts is far more realistic for all its wizardry and witchery.

Back then it didn't matter though. I would read anything. Anything at all. I was a fairly solitary child. I prefered the company of perfect fictional characters to the company of imperfect real playmates. The stories were short and pacy and utterly unrealistic in every possible way.

There is only one scene that I actually remember now from any of those books and that serves to show the values and attitudes that pervade the books. The children have, in one of the twenty or so summer holidays in which the books are set (during which they hardly age at all) a new friend. He is a scruffy urchin, possibly a gypsy* though it's a very long time since I read the books, who has a runny nose that he wipes on his sleeve. The children are insufferably patronising to him - insisting on giving him a handkerchief, and, if memory serves (which it may well not - it is over forty years ago) instructions on how to use it.

In hindsight it's difficult to explain the popularity of the books although the fact that the Famous Five began publication in 1942 may have some bearing. The war was still on and even later in the post war years it was a time of austerity and the sunny skies and optimistic adventures may have appealed to children of the time. By the time I came to them the series was reaching an end (the last was published in 1963) and the bad times were (or so everyone believed) behind us. For children of my generation the unbelievability was starting to win out over the escapist optimism.

Still, I remember them fondly and if I see any cheap reprint editions may well get some just for the nostalgia. Who wouldn't like to be six years old again?

(*Reprint editions may also be scarce because of this kind of thing. There are casual streams of racism, sexism and class distinction throughout the books that would sit very uneasily on the bookshelf today. There would need to be substantial editing, though it was a reflection of the times in which they were written.)

To put away childish things #0

There is a question that has been asked at wordcraft about whether Enid Blyton has ever been a popular author in the United States. The answer appears to be "Enid who?", and, bearing in mind that we have children's librarians among the membership, this is quite interesting. It doesn't actually surprise me all that much as even many of the British find them unrealistically twee, portraying, as they do, a life of upper-middle class jolliness, ginger beer and cake, and impossibly polite children. They are not popular nowadays because they are almost impossible for children to relate to. It's easier to believe in Hogwarts than it is to believe in the eternal summer of Enid Blyton.

That's not the point of this post though. The point of this post is to introduce a new series of posts in which I want to wallow unashamedly in nostalgia. I want to recall some of the childish things that have long since been put away - Enid Blyton, the Doctor Syn novels of Richard Thorndyke, Etch-a-sketch, the Rubiks Cube, Airfix, the John Bull printing set : all of the hundreds of things that were important when I was five, or six, or nine but that I haven't considered much for years. The things locked in the attic of my mind.

And we''' start with...

Hi, whoever you are.

According to Google Analytics I've had a bit of a surge in readership in the last couple of days. I never know how they calculate these things so I don't want to put too much trust in it but if you are a new reader then can I just say thank you and please stick around. And feel free to leave comments, even if they are only to say "Hi".
If photography interests you there is also my photoblog and for a longer travel piece my unpublished book. Both are linked at the side of the page.

You might also like to take a look at some of the older posts. There is rather a lot about travel, quite a bit of poetry and lots and lots of pictures by different artists who have illustrated ALice in Wonderland.

Thanks again for stopping by.

Wargames

Once again I am sitting working at my computer on a Sunday morning while the BBC discussion program "The Big Questions" is on. The question that they are discussing is whether violent video games are harming society. They are talking specifically about the game Modern Warfare and creating more hot air than the Montgolfier brothers. There are so many things wrong about the debate that it's tough to know where to begin, so let's begin with the way that so many of the anti-gamers seem not to know the difference between evidence and hearsay. They talk over and over about the amount of evidence there is showing that violent games make people violent but never cite anything that actually IS evidence. Their evidence is always that "people know" that it's true, that they have "heard of" people who have commited violent acts, that they have "seen" children acting out violent scenes.
None of this is evidence. This is speculation and hearsay. It's claiming that opinion is fact to support your own viewpoint. In the whole debate no one has actually referenced any kind of study into the issue.
I am no wiser now that the debate is coming to an end than I was at the start of it as to whether studies support or contradict their viewpoint.

One other aspect of this that has been mentioned by one panellist but subsequently ignored by host Nicky Campbell (who has a habit of only pursuing the points that will generate heat rather than light) is the historic aspect. One of the panelists pointed out that when he was a boy the same charges were being levelled at horror comics. This is part of an important wider point. There is always something that is "destroying the values of society". I'm a little younger than the panelist and when I grew up it was violent horror films. I remember the fuss that surrounded films such as "Driller Killer" or "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". The Sunday papers were filled week in and week out with stories about how those movies were making people violent and how they should be banned for the good of society.
In the case of comics it led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority and the censoring of comics for many years.

The fact is that the game in question is designed for adults not children. If children are playing it then that isn't a reason to ban it, it's a reason for exercising better control over how easy it is to get hold of. The logical conclusion of going the other route is that everything should be made child-friendly - books, theatre, magazines, films and TV as well as video games. The historic fact that all of these things have been blamed at one time or another for an increase in violence makes computer games just the latest scapegoat.
I, for one, have read a few horror comics and seen an occasional horror movie - though I can't claim to be a fan - but never played a violent video game. I don't want to live in a world where everything that I am exposed to would be suitable for a ten-year-old.

Green Unpleasant Land

When I was in Mexico some years ago I wrote the essay reproduced below as a column for my local paper. It was, as you can see, a description of a problem that pervades the region. litter. Today I took a stroll across the fields to the supermarket. Usually I take the car but I only needed a couple of things and fancied a walk. When I last did this the fields were covered with snow and looked pristine and beautiful. Without the snow it's a different story. There is litter everywhere - empty crisp packets, crushed beer cans, plastic bags, chocolate bar wrappers, cigarette packets... even a shopping trolley. It's a depressing sight. I am constantly baffled as to why people seem to take so little care about the world that they live in.
Only this week, as I walked home from the station, I noticed a half eaten bag of chips (that's fries to the US readers) on the pavement and a half drunk can of extra strong lager in the grass next to it. It's all rather depressing really.
Mexico may have the problem, but we have it too. There is detritus everywhere, in the streets, in the fields, even in people's front gardens where drunkards on the way home have carelessly tossed it, unwilling to wait five minutes and stick it in their own bins.

By way of cross-threading, the next few days on my photoblog will take a break from documenting my travels and illustrate today's walk.

*

We entered Mexico at Nogales and immediately found ourselves trapped in the ten kilometre limbo between the United States and Mexico border posts. We sat for several hours on the flyblown litter strewn car park thinking up increasingly desperate ways to pass the time. Some tried reading. Others bet on which would be the next car alarm to go off. A few of us in a more competitive spirit vied to outdo each other in the number of beer cans we could crush with a single swipe of the foot.
Every passing vehicle slowed to allow its occupants to observe the antics of the loco gringos clinging to their diminishing patch of shade.
The problem was both simple and apparently insoluble and it came in two halves. Our half had begun when we sailed unchallenged past the US border post and drove to the Mexican one. There we had had our passports stamped and bought our tourist cards. To leave Mexico you have to go to a bank, pay a fee and get this card stamped. That was where the other half of the problem lay. Before the truck was allowed into Mexico we needed documentation that we didn't have. Charlie had gone on ahead to obtain it but had never returned. Without him we couldn't get in but unless we got in we couldn't get out. So we sat on a filthy car park that stank inexplicably of drains thinking up ways to divert ourselves.
The car park was our first exposure to one of the biggest problems that Mexico has :- rubbish. The whole country is rapidly being buried under a mountain of it. Eventually Charlie, who had been searching for us at the US border post, arrived and we crossed into Mexico but by then it was too late to hunt for a proper campsite so we pitched camp at the side of the road, watched over by the illuminated statue of a saint high on a nearby hill.
Next morning, seeing it for the first time in daylight we discovered a wilderness of broken bottles, empty cartons, rusty cans, cigarette packets, human and animal faeces and every other conceivable form of detritus. It wasn't a rubbish dump but it might as well have been. It would be facile to suggest that poverty is to blame for though it certainly plays a part it isn't really the cause. It's more that people don't seem to care. They have too many other priorities to worry about the rate at which the tidal wave of waste is destroying their ecology.
There is overpopulation - Mexico City alone has 22 million people - and over-industrialisation. There is the iniquity with which the indigenous Indian peoples are treated and the corresponding problems when they - in the form of the Zapatista movement - strike back. Mexico has too many other problems to get concerned about what is seen as 'litter'.
On the other hand the extent of the problem shouldn't be underestimated, a point made pointedly and poignantly two weeks later when we visited the Canon el Sumidero. This is tourist country, the kind of place where you show your best face to the world. Boatmen take visitors along the river and through the canyon. It is a spectacular and beautiful place with dramatic waterfalls plunging down from precipitous cliffs watched by the crocodiles as immobile as sand sculptures on the bank. At one point water cascades down for hundreds of feet over the trees washing the leaves and branches down as if the foliage were dark green blankets draped in layers across the hillside. The force of the water fills the air for dozens of yards with a fine cooling mist, like a gentle balm against your sun scorched skin. It is a gorgeous and magical sight.
Until you look down at the river.
It isn't the greasy unhealthy sheen that stops you dead, nor the sickly vivid green of the clogging algae. It is the sheer volume of the flotsam. there are plastic bottles and bags, pieces of broken furniture, rusty cans - all drifting slowly towards an ecological catastrophe. Where the eddies and currents wash it into the caves and crevices of the shoreline it is worse still. In places the water is scarcely visible at all such is the density of this grim tide.
For one night I thought we had avoided it. We made camp on one of the beaches somewhere on the gulf where there is a small turtle sanctuary. The water and the sand were clean. In the early evening we watched as a large bucketful of day old turtles were released at the water's edge to swim away into the ocean.
I wandered away up the slope of the beach to where the dunes were covered in grass, where they started to turn into swampland. There, just out of site from our encampment were more plastic bottles and more discarded food wrappers. Who I wondered could have come all the way out here to dump this stuff ?
I went to bed feeling depressed by the inevitability of it all.

The following morning there was a more optimistic coda as I watched a group of men clearing some of it away in black sacks. I only hope they weren't taking it to dump in the river.