Only Fools and Horses
By Mark Greenow
I am back in Spain, and it is hot here. You have to stay dehydrated [Word Origins/Greek] in this weather! It is bittersweet [oxymorons] though as I am feeling a bit of a lightweight [compounds] because the rest of the team is still working hard, and age is just a number [expressions]. I am under a bit of time pressure though to put this story to bed [newspaper jargon], as I haven’t had time to get around to [phrasal verbs] starting it until now. The idea is loosely based on my reflections on a couple of books I am currently reading, but to be honest, I am not sure where it will take me (or you for that matter) other than that it is about the beauty, power and complexity of the English Language, human connectivity, life-long learning and with a splash of poetry, philosophy and comedy thrown in for good measure. It is likely then, to turn out to be, a Bridging Story, or do I mean Abridged [confusing words] or either or neither [pronunciation]? I can already see this turning into a giddy [slang] stream of consciousness [metaphors].
So, my onsite [compounds] consultancy finished last week with a visit to one of our sister schools in Team Orange [slogans], at Clayesmore School in Dorset. This school was the location for one of the most famous scenes in British Comedy History. A classic episode of the TV series ‘Only Fools and Horses’ called “A Touch of Glass” [pun] was filmed there in 1982. If you haven’t seen the chandelier scene [homophones], please look it up on YouTube. You won’t regret it. Then a couple of days moving my stuff [informal/uncountable nouns] three days driving back (via Wales) and a day celebrating my wife’s birthday and retirement here, with visitors to entertain, and a crazy scary news cycle to follow, I am under pressure [collocations] and just a tiny little bit under the thumb.
I did manage to read the first few chapters of what is promising to be a great book though. It is a biography of the Elizabethan poet (among many other things) John Donne 1572 – 1631 who also lived in a very divided age. I love this poem because it reminds me of why I have always loved summer schools. They are a microcosm of a hopefully better world that brings people together not drives them apart.
“No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were,
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s or if thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls,
it tolls for thee.”
How beautiful and prescient is that? We are all connected!
The book is titled “Super-Infinite” written by the super-talented Katherine Rundell. There are gems everywhere. For example, I didn’t know that attempted suicide was punishable by death [irony] in those days. Two strands to the book so far have got me thinking.
The first was about the nature of schooling. Rundell describes schools then as “grim”, “ice-cold metaphorically and literally”. Donne though was home-schooled. He read the bible and was quickly fluent in Latin. He also “taught himself” Greek! At the age of 11 he enrolled into Oxford University where he would have studied Aristotle’s Politics, Roman Law, Cicero etc. An education for the sons of gentlemen alone of course but still pretty [modifiers] amazing by today’s standards. My Radio 4 was a bit crackly [onomatopoeia] in France, but I heard somebody singing the praises of modern-day home schooling. She said for the first six months many of the students lazed around doing very little until something caught their curiosity and then they were off. All teenagers, not just Generation Z, go through that phase [colloquial expressions] when they are insecure, searching for meaning and direction. They feel things more passionately than they did when they were adolescents, and they will probably never feel more passionately about anything ever again. How, we as educators, can tap into that passion is key to 21st century learning. When everything else has changed so much, why do classrooms still look very much the same (without the rats hopefully) as they did 400 years ago? Why is the Finnish - no subjects - model so successful? With our innovative curriculum at British Summer School, we are trying to unbundle (a phrase I first learnt from Professor Vikas Shah in a talk in New York) some of this. Watch this space.
The second strand is a bit more personal. Rundell writes “Donne was born hungry, a lifelong strainer after words and ideas”. From early adulthood, Donne, along with many of his contemporaries, collected his “fascinations”, “scraps and shards of knowledge” in something I had never heard of before “a commonplace book”. In fact, the first recorded use of the word “commonplacer” in the Oxford English Dictionary is Donne’s. I can only try to describe it as something like an intellectual scrap book. “It nurtured (Donne’s) collector’s sensibility, hoarding images and authorities. He had a magpie mind obsessed with gathering.” She goes on “It was both a form of scholarship and, too, a way of reminding yourself of what, as you moved through the world, you were to look out for: a list of priorities, of sparks and spurs and personal obsessions.” Rundell believes the practice of commonplacing “a way of seeking out and storing knowledge, so that you have multiple voices on a topic under a single heading – colours Donne’s work; one thought reaches out to another, across the barriers of tradition, and ends up somewhere fresh and strange”.
This hit me like a bolt of lightning [similes/exaggeration] as it is pertinent to both my professional and personal life.
I am a proud, Waterstones’ [saxon genitive] card carrying, bookworm. I catalogue my books (this is 4828 – I have a lot more to do). My brother thinks this is a bit nerdy [word formation noun to adjective, suffix ‘Y’ meaning ‘having a lot of’]. I can, now, perhaps, be consoled, having just learned from Rundell that Samuel Johnson (one of my heroes) didn’t approve of Donne’s commonplacing “you find the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”. It is definitely not for everybody – one man’s meat is another man’s poison [proverbs]. I am also a collector. I have a lot of ‘stuff’, or ‘trinkets’ my brother would say. I prefer “knobbly Knick Knacks” [pronunciation silent ‘k’] as that chap on Antiques Road Trip calls them. I consider myself a bit of a wordsmith. I play scrabble and I like ‘Countdown’ - I invited Susie Dent who has been in Dictionary Corner on the TV show for 32 years now to give a lecture once. She was lovely.
Now I am not comparing myself to John Donne. What I wouldn’t give though to coin a phrase [etymology] like “no man is an island”. To have words you will always be remembered for. He did live in an exciting time for the English Language. (For the Spanish Language too. Did you know that both Donne’s contemporary William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes {author of Don Quixote or ‘Donkey Hote as one of my students once memorably wrote} died on the same day [interesting facts] - 23 April 1616?) William Shakespeare coined many a phrase too! “Brave New World” was one of his! How can both everything and nothing seem to change?
They don’t teach you much grammar in British Schools. When I ended up teaching English as a Foreign Language, I had to teach myself. The best professional book I ever bought was ‘A Dictionary of Applied Linguistics’ from which I learnt the metalanguage. I then started filling up notebooks with ‘lists’ of the things in brackets (the square ones/they are just called brackets apparently) and many more. I have eight largely full volumes of what I call my ‘Vocabulary Organisers’ They quickly became invaluable to me as both a learning and teaching aid. My Magnum Opus was to be everything you need to know about the English Language. Now completely useless though as everything you need to know, and more, is now readily available on the internet or by asking Siri. Or are they useless? Was the process of personally compiling them, from mostly written and visual sources, valuable to me and does it make [present tense/I am still adding to them] the learning experience more meaningful than just googling it? I would like to think so. What really blew my socks off though was to learn that back in Donne’s time corners were cut too. “As always with any intellectual pursuit, there were those who were anxious about achieving the ideal commonplace book, and, as it always does, the market seized on a way to monetize the anxiety. It became possible to buy ready-made prepared commonplace books with the quotations already filled in: years’ worth of work achieved without lifting a quill.” Wow just wow. I know only too well, how, those like Donne, who did it the hard way, must have felt!
What Chat GPT will never be able to replicate are the diaries/journals I have kept for most of my adult life. These are unique to me, my learned experiences, my human journey. The True Me! Unfortunately, Donne’s Commonplace Book is lost – what a find that would be! We know Donne gave it to his eldest son and it can be tracked to a couple of people after that but then it disappears from history. It is feared that like many of Donne’s poems and writings it may have been destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Rundell says “Donne wouldn’t have been Donne if he hadn’t lived in a commonplacing era”. My commonplace books (Vocabulary Organisers/Diaries/Journals) are amongst my most treasured possessions. I would fight hard to keep them out of any fire even if they are probably worthless to anybody else.
As Socrates said, “the unconsidered life is not worth living”. The way I examine mine is through my journals. It is not the only way of course. Through True Me at British Summer School, we are simply trying to introduce students to the power and importance of synthesizing and self-reflection.
I turn now to the other book ‘Travels with Epicurus’ (1662) by Daniel Klein which I am re-reading actually. A lovely little book about how to grow old gracefully and happily, the value of friendship, the Mediterranean lifestyle and much more. He talks about old age as being the pinnacle of life “the old man has docked in the harbor, having safeguarded his true happiness”. I am back in Spain!
So, to my ’Future Ready’ team, Steve, Yolanda (Glad the op went well. Get Well Soon), Danny, Rebecca, Tom, Ben and Maria. Also, to ‘Team Orange’ at Exsportise, Bram, Verena, Tom and all (good luck with the inspection), and to all the teams at the many centres. I want you to know I am now following from afar. I loved our new promotional video by the way and the feedback too. Keep up the good work the end is in sight. I want you all to know I am with you in spirit and that you too will be lucky enough to be as old as me one day! Sooner than you think, actually.
We have just had a huge thunderstorm “it rained more/than if the Sun had drunk the sea before” Donne. Epicurus advised shutting off from news and politics but it is not easy to do these days but we must try. Our thoughts now already turn to next year and how we can continue to build and improve our courses. By the way, please don’t google the rest of the ‘Only Fools and Horses’ [expression]. I don’t want anybody to get the wrong idea.