Ongoing #51/Harrow Daily Poem #8

The next doodle in The Telephone Doodle Book shows a chameleon.

Of course human beings are also chameleons: social chameleons. Our personalities alter subtlely as we move from one social situation to another. I am not quite the same person in a professionl work setting as I am in the pub. Neither of them are the same me as in conversation with my father.

That line of thinking prompted this.

All Things To All Men

He's the picture of the Everyman;
His talents know no end;
His popularity is limitless;
He's everybody's friend.

Nine to five, five days a week,
He teaches in a school.
His colleagues think him erudite,
His pupils say he's cool.

He often spends his evenings
Down in the pub with mates
Who've known him since their schooldays
And they all think he's great.

He's a font of funny stories -
Tales both coarse and clean.
Call him erudite or cool
And they won't know what you mean.

His parents and his siblings
Think of him as shy,
As reticent at best,
As a bird who'll never fly.

On the terraces on Saturdays
He's with a cruder crowd
But blends right in by being
Both partisan and loud.

When he goes on holiday,
He's a traveller and more,
With tales of all the countries
That he's visited before.

The neighbours in his street
All say, "A quiet chap -
Never causes any fuss,
Never gets into a flap."

A description that is chilling,
For therein lies the clue
To this chameleon's nature,
To the colours that are true.

The way that he is seen,
By the servants of the law,
Is formed by what was buried
Beneath his kitchen floor.

It's been fun, Guy!

Every year I come down for my summer school in Harrow filled with optimism that this will be the year that the chef retires and is replaced by someone who has less of a  fondness for the dreaded mushroom. Every morning I walk into the dining room and find my skin prickling in allergic reaction to the steam from them. I suffer for as long as it takes to eat some breakfast and then depart. I scrutinise the lunch and dinner menus in detail to identify anything that might conceivably contain them. This year is harder than usual as my recently diagnosed gout means I am, by and large, also trying to eat a more vegetarian diet. Yesterday's menu contained, I thought, the ideal thing. I was looking forward to it but now I find I have another question.

What kind of maniac puts mushrooms in macaroni cheese?

tick...tick...tick...

Time is, as you may surmise from the title of this post, ticking away. It does that a lot just lately and a conversation in the pub garden last week, as we sat supping in the warm afternoon, made me realise just why it seems to tick by faster for some than others.
It's all down to the markers we use to measure the passage of time. I don't mean the seconds, minutes and hours. They are just the units. I mean the semesters, the annual contracts, the birthdays. They are the things we notice.
There goes another 3,153,600 seconds means nothing much to anybody. It's another year gone since my last Summer contract at Harrow School is far more telling. And one marker makes me think of  the others. I did my first Summer School in 2001. Good grief! That's a lot of time passed by.
As a teacher my time is marked as start of year, half term, Christmas, half term, Easter, half term, end of year, start of Summer contract, end of Summer contract and on and on in an endless march. The days, weeks and months don't actually matter. When I was travelling, I had no regular events to mark the passing time and it didn't feel as if it was passing quickly. Of course once it was over it felt as if it had passed quickly, but that's a different thing entirely.

It all makes me feel old. Not as old as that concert last night did of course, twenty eight years since that band played together, thirty since I last saw them. One of my friends brought his daughter with him. The band split up six years before she was born.

So another year has passed, has it?
Two more days and I'll be back on that Summer contract. I'll be slogging up and down the hills of Harrow, teaching English to teenagers and trying to fill the rest of the time with some kind of activity. The Hill isn't exactly brimming over with entertainment possibilities and this year that ticking clock has been taking its toll. I have developed gout and that has quite a number of implications. For a start it will make that slogging up and down the hills a lot more painful. Worse than that though is that my doctor has made three recommendations, none of which will make the filling of the hours any easier. I can, and have, cut down on the amount of meat I eat. Most of the vegetarian options (and most of the non-vegetarian ones, now I think of it) at Harrow involve mushrooms and I'm allergic to them. There's always the salad bar.
I also have to lose weight. That's a bit harder to do when people give you three very large meals a day. I know I don't HAVE to eat them but willpower is harder when it's all, quite literally, handed to you on a plate. Worst though is the cutting down on alcohol. When I said that the Hill isn't brimming with entertainment possibilities I was praising with faint damnation. What there is, is one pub. My habit of popping down for a quick beer on most evenings, just to pass the time and see who is about, will have to be curtailed. I suppose as I do only have one there would be no harm in having one fruit juice instead - just as well as it takes a stronger stomach than mine to drink orange juice in any quantity.

We shall see. Since I started this post another thirty minutes or so has ticked away. I'll be in Harrow before I know it. And then, just as quickly it will all be over and I'll be back at the start of the new year for my regular job.

tick... tick... tick...

Hey, Jozef

Whenever I start wittering on about this blog (usually in the vain hope that someone else might actually read it) the responses fall into three groups. The majority of people are utterly indifferent and wear the pained expresion that you see when someone decides to get out the holiday photos of their fortnight in Alicante.

A few are interested and ask for the blog address, which is so long that they have zero chance of ever actually remembering it.

And some request (or even demand) that a name check should be included. So far this response has happened twice, both times in Harrow. Last year it was Andrew, this year it's Jozef.

So, here's your name check.

Jozef is a House Parent. This either means that he has had a liaison with a building resulting in his fathering a pile of bricks and mortar or, which I confess is far more likely, that he looks after one of the houses currently occupied by the rampaging hordes of children that descend on the town every year at around this time.

Hi Jozef.

Now comment. (Click the comment button below this post and follow the on screen instructions.)

Then go start a nice new blog of your own so that I can comment on it.

A curious sense of time not passing

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to have another blog that died from lack of attention. One of the entries that I put on it was about a Mensa* party that I went to that turned out to be uncannily similar to the same party the year before. I titled the entry “A curious sense of time not passing”.
The sharper-eyed among you will notice that this entry shares the title. In fact it applies even more aptly to how I spend my summers than it did to the party.
When I first passed my CELTA – literally on the day the course ended – I was immediately offered a summer school post at Harrow. The result was that I found myself, only one day later, standing up for the first time to teach in earnest and facing a class of mixed nationality teenagers who were expecting to have a professional teacher in front of them. After all, it’s what their parents had paid for. Somehow I muddled through and I must have done a decent job because I was asked if I’d like to come back the following year.
I’m in my eighth year here now and each time I return I’m seized by that same sense of time not passing. I see many of the same faces in the staff room, similar (and in some cases identical) faces in the classroom, the same faces in administration, on the activities staff, in the dining room and around and about on the hill.
By and large I get the same level classes and teach similar lessons in similar ways. I make the same conversation with the same people and go at the same times to the same pubs. This year I even have the same room with the same curtains, the same square of torn poster too high on the wall to remove and the same inexplicable red marks on the ceiling.
Time not passing, indeed.

Right now on the radio there is the mournful and melancholic Lord of the Rings theme that so perfectly evokes the towering grandeur of the mountains, the immense open sky, the bone-deep ancient knowledge that the world is vast and that you are too tiny to even be noticed.
But I am in a room in Harrow, a student’s room with a bed, a chair, a wardrobe, a desk and a shelf and the world doesn’t feel vast. It feels tiny – collapsed to this single point in time and space; into this sense of time not passing.

Strangely though it is accompanied by a simultaneous sense that time has passed. That great sections of my future have raced past me with the irresistible force and destructive effect of an avalanche. I had passed forty when I first came here. I’d already had one life as a computer programmer and systems analyst. Now I’ve passed fifty – but that isn’t time passing, it’s time passed; time gone; time vanished. And I find myself at a loss to work out what happened to it all because though eight years have clearly come and gone there is still only that sense, that curious sense, of time not passing.

*I'm not actually a member of Mensa, I was there as a guest of a friend who is.