I was listening to Any Questions on BBC Radio 4 on my long drive home on Friday. One of the questions was about whether schools should have to accommodate lessons on domestic violence as part of the National Curriculum. I think that the questioner thought that overall, no, they should get on with teaching children to read, write and count. The panel were of mixed opinion, as per usual and everybody got on with their evenings.
I didn't listen to Any Answers yesterday. I never do any more. For the most part, it's a succession of the confused, the ill-informed and the bigoted opining on whichever bee is currently inhabiting their bonnet. I used to listen for a while and gave up when I found myself swearing almost constantly at every remark a contributor made. It's not good for my state of mind. Anyway, I don't know whether anyone made the point I'm now about to make.
Overall, I'd rather that schools didn't have to teach children that domestic violence exists. A school should be a haven of self- and mutual respect where children get on with learning stuff, having fun and just being children. Unfortunately, there are issues alive in society which schools have to address. Violence and neglect are only the most destructive. Health and well-being and drugs awareness are all high on the list as well. Children learn more than just how to read, write and add up in schools. They learn how to interact with other people and how to apply themselves. Or not, I suppose.
The point has been well made in many other places that children should learn much of the stuff covered in PSHE at home and that is true; they should. Sometimes, however they don't and the schools have to pick up and modify behaviours learned at home. Overall, I think it's better for us all that the lessons take place in school. There are two alternatives which are worse. The first is that the lessons do not take place at all. I find that unconscionable. The point was made that two women die every week as a result of domestic violence. If some well-constructed lessons change the sorts of behaviours and attitudes which lead later in life to a man or a woman using fists to make a point in an argument, then so much the better. Let the lessons take place. Better that than nothing.
The second alternative is that the authorities take an ever closer interest in what goes on in our homes. They would need to come round and check that we are treating one another with the due amount of respect. I don't find that a very attractive option for all sorts of reasons. Those who say that something has to be done to reduce domestic violence, levels of teenage pregnancy, alcohol and drug abuse and God know what else sometimes also say that school is not the place to address the behaviours and attitudes which give rise to these social problems. I don't think they'd accept the invasions of privacy which would ensure that the lessons are being learned at home. There are few other settings in which we can all be sure that children are learning to be sober, productive and responsible citizens, as well as literate and numerate ones so sadly we're stuck with teachers having to teach that it's never acceptable to raise your hand to another.
My name is Richard and I love cars too much. I think that it's important to be honest with oneself and others and I have a thing for cars. I've known this for a ling time. I like to say that my first words were "broom, broom" but that's probably not true. I'd need to check that with my dad and I don't want another myth shattered, so I probably won't. Any of the projects I did at school had to be centred around cars and I've been compulsively buying magazines since I was tall enough to reach them on the shelves and hand over my money at the till, squeakily assuring the assistant that yes, I did want a copy of Motor instead of Victor.
My mum used to complain about the piles of car mags in my room. She said that if I'd saved my money instead, I could have bought a real car. She missed the point a bit and I couldn't really put into words at the time what I was doing. I was saving up fantasies. Teenage boys have other sorts of fantasies, and God knows I had those too but I thought even more about cars than I did about breasts and that's probably not normal.
I still save up fantasies. I have my classic fantasies of E-types and Ferrari 250GT Competizione Berlinettas. I have more contemporary fantasies involving different Jags and Porsches, Zondas and Mercedes Benzes and Aston Martins and Rolls Royces. I've even got a particularly guilty one about a Range Rover. In all of them, I'm not really driving anything anywhere. Instead, I'm just hanging out with friends who would enjoy them as well and talking about cars.
I have an odd sort of memory. It's filled with car fact detritus. There are several reasons I failed my Higher Maths at school. One of the biggest was the distraction caused by the very wonderful Jane Farquharson who sat behind me and passed me cartoons she'd drawn but I maintain that another major factor was that my head was full of useless information about engine specs and handling characteristics of early 80's Fords. I had no room in my brain for differential calculus on top of Jane Farquharson and the very first XR3s.
Just this evening I was driving home. I stopped at a set of traffic lights and checked my mirror. I was able to identify the car behind from its seats as a Mazda RX-8. I couldn't see the rest of the car and dusk was falling. The RX-8 has a metal insert in its seats which represents the shape of the rotor in its rotory engine and I remembered that from a road test I read when it was launched several years ago. I can remember crap like that, but I can't remember my nieces' and nephews' birthdays or to call my dad occasionally. I think I'm beyond help.
I used to suffer on Sundays from what Douglas Adams called 'the long dark teatime of the soul.' It was mostly because I always had work of some kind to hand in on a Monday. At school, all those centuries ago, I would have an English essay or some maths problems to do. At university, there were always bits and bobs due on a Monday which I'd not completed over the preceding week so I had to do stuff on a Sunday when I really wanted just to sit around and do nothing.
The problem is that Sundays are not really sit around and do nothing days, in spite of the Lord's admonitions. Many people spend Sunday mornings running around daft to church, shops, visiting wrinkly relatives and doing God alone knows what else. The more dissolute among us spend the time recovering from whatever excesses they inflicted on themselves on Saturday night. Both are usually finished doing what they're doing by about three o'clock and then have to come to terms with what to do next. You can't take on too much, especially at this time of year when there is so little daylight left and besides, tomorrow is Monday. (Sad face.)
It gets worse if you happen to pick up a newspaper. Sunday newspapers are uniformly dreadful. There must have been a law passed in Scotland which stated that every household had to buy a copy of The Sunday Post whose only redeeming features were the page which had the Oor Wullie and The Broons cartoon strips and the lack of any mention of meaningful politics whatsoever. There were no boobs, which made it safe to leave lying around. I can't think of a single reason to buy any other Sunday newspaper these days. The tabloids haven't moved on from sensationalism and the content of the so-called 'quality' Sundays is depressing. Every political, environmental or social problem is raked over in exquisite detail to the extent that I don't have anything to lift the gloom which inevitably descends as the light fails on a winter's evening.
My inner conspiracy theorist tells me that it's to provide me with an incentive to get up off my arse and get back to work on a Monday morning; after all, what else could better take my mind off the tedium of Sunday afternoons than the joy of work on a Monday? Well, lots could, if I'm being honest. My inner conspiracy theory is an idiot. I just want Sunday afternoons to be less dreadful and having a decent balance of information and entertainment from the papers might help a little. At least for the next few weeks I can look forward to Top Gear but that's not on for hours yet. Might as well go back to bed...
If you've been following me on Twitter, you'll know that Bertie died a week past Saturday. In the end, his heart gave out. He must have experienced a final catastrophic bleed. His vets were able to resuscitate him, but he had no brain function. He was finally put to sleep shortly before ten o'clock in the morning.
Anne's previous cat was called Saturn. She was an adventurous soul who spent a lot of time out of doors. She was killed in a road accident on Christmas Eve, 2005. Since my cat didn't get on with other cats, I was worried about introducing yet another one to the house. I needn't have worried. When Anne said that she missed having a cat of her own and wanted to get a couple of kittens, I just said that Kick would have to get used to the idea one way or another. She decided on Burmese because she's always liked them, I think.
Anne calls him the best cat ever, and I have to agree with that. We picked him out of a large litter. We more or less arbitrarily chose him because he was the palest of the young toms in the litter. We'd already chosen Madeleine who was the oddest kitten in the room. She was the smallest and when we first saw her she was licking the wallpaper. The others in the litter appeared to be picking on her and I felt sorry for her and that was that as far as she was concerned. I wanted to look after her. Bertie was just a little bundle of energy and fun. We could have chosen any of his brothers. We decided to take either the darkest or the palest of the brown kittens and on a whim, we chose the lightest.
He was called after Bertie Wooster. Madeleine is of course called after Madeleine Bassett. We picked the names for them in a little hotel room in Southwold where Anne had taken me for my fortieth birthday. We'd been tossing ideas back and forth and I couldn't come up with anything sensible at all. I'd called my own cat Kick the Cat, so it was beyond hope that I'd be of use in choosing names. It's probably just as well I have no children. We collected the kittens the day after we came back from the Suffolk coast and they became part of our lives.
Bertie was a bit of a daddy's boy. I called him all sorts of nicknames. He was my big, beefy boy; the original chocolate log; a bit of an Oxo cat. He was remarkably even-tempered. I never saw him lose his temper and beat up his sister. If anything, she tended to get the upper hand in any arguments in spite of her comparatively diminutive stature. When he was particularly content, he would lie on his back waving his front paws back and forth in the air and purr. His only bad habit was his chewiness. We think that he thought of himself as a labrador puppy. He would chew cardboard boxes and bits of paper. If you let him, he would also gently gnaw on your fingers. I'll probably miss that more than anything else. He was also a cat with a healthy appetite and would stomp around the pillows in the morning to wake us up if there were nothing in his food bowl. He and Madeleine would chase each other around the house, have a bit of a wrestling match and then fall asleep curled up together.
I shall be for ever grateful for the chance to have had him in my life for the past few years. His was the least malicious soul I have ever encountered and I shall miss him terribly. I haven't felt able to write about him until now and I have to say that I'm feeling a little wobbly and slightly teary as a result of writing this short appreciation. I'm very grateful to Simon Tappin and his colleagues at Dick White Referrals for the care they gave him in his final days. They gave him every chance to get better but his body let him down in the end. Simon sent us a very nice card last week with a message of condolence. Anne and I thank him for that too.
Bertram Lyle
b 26 January 2006
d 7 November 2009
