Twitter In Schools? When Will They Learn...

So the Guardian announced today that a new shake up in Primary school curriculum will teach children how to master Twitter and Wikipedia. Isn’t that rather like teaching High School kids how to source tobacco pipes, or toss off to sepia stills of half-revealed Victorian breasts?

The little nippers will ‘get’ simple interfaces like Twitter as instinctively as they’ll understand how to smear chocolate on walls, and besides, by the time this legislation comes into practise Twitter will be yesterday’s fad (my Dad has a cautionary tale about assuming things will be ‘yesterday’s fad’ and that’s Madonna, but I think it’s safe to say Twitter won’t be still ‘reinventing’ it’s self in 50 years time, dancing around younger websites in a grotesque, air-brushed bid to remain relevant – it’s just not the way the web works).


Even if they replace Twitter with whatever comes next, I still think it’ll resemble that scene in Good Will Hunting when the teacher, all long-scarfed and learned-browed, gets himself into a right tizz trying to work out a blackboard equation when Matt Damon’s wrong-side-of-the-tracks genius blurts out ‘Do you have any idea how easy this shit is for me?’ and storms off, leaving the professor a crumpled, impotent mess. I imagine five year olds across the country doing the same: flinging their mouse across the classroom with contempt and telling their doddering custodians: ‘This is a piece of piss: don’t you REALISE you need to download the latest Java Script here?!’

The second money-shot in the Guardian’s report is that news that the Second World War and Victorians will no long be compulsory – outrageous! you may cry - but it goes on to explain that this is to prevent ‘duplication’ with secondary school education in which WW2 is covered extensively.

I remember with great poignancy being taken on that school trip everyone goes on to Belgium: the one where they show you the rows and rows of perfectly lined white grave stones and make you listen to the old bloke play the bugle at the same time every day to honour the fallen. Deeply moving that, tracing the engravings with your puffy little finger tips, trying to locate your own surname in the endless deaths sprawled out before you in the brittle stone… I remember looking out over the sea of graves and stumbling down the remains of the trenches with a lump in my stomach, over-awed with feelings of empathy and guilt and pity that I couldn’t quite understand... I also remember seeing my first vagina after Matthew Brown bought a porn mag from a dodgy Belgian newsagents and spending all my travel money getting vaguely dizzy on cans of lager from a vending machine outside the hotel – the point is, none of these experiences should be denied tomorrow’s youth by a right-on liberal curriculum, so it’s good news ole’ WWII is still on there.

Other proposals put forward by former Oftsed chief Jim Rose – a man with a name so rounded, wholesome and cheerful you’d probably nod warmly if he tried to introduce sadomasochism and bull-fighting onto the national curriculum – are apparently to teach children to “use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.”…

Does anyone else see the folly in this? It’s like showing them how to ‘use the answer sheet to a math test alongside how to pass without cheating’, or how to ‘cleverly smuggle a playback device in your pocket and mime during recorder practice alongside how to play the instrument with discipline’. Presumably in P.E. they’ll be showing them how to inject steroids into their thighs before getting the hula-hoops and bean-bags out, with the optional knowledge of how to train to develop geniune hand-eye co-ordination. At worst they’ll produce a generation of Dwain Chambers and at best a generation of me, who long ago decided learning to spell properly was pointless because the spell check does it all for you.

Finally, and perhaps most perplexing of all, the report contains a single line bullet point that frankly couldn’t be more incongruous, either in level of detail or in general spirit:

“Less emphasis on the use of calculators than in the current curriculum.”

What an anomaly! What a strange, dull note to sound in the midst of this hip melody of progressive reforms. ‘Less emphasis on calculators’, with no clear indication of what will be used instead: presumably just an abacus and a cane. It’s as though some aggravated conservative nipped into Jim Rose’s office the night before this report came out, heard the mounting footsteps of a security guard and hastily scribbled into the margins the first thing his fusty brain could think of before ducking out again. ‘Less calculators! They won’t have calculators when they’re buying their tights and dripping in the shop!’ Well they will, actually, on their touch-screen mobiles, but never mind…
All in all and taken into context, the full curriculum shake-up sounds like a good thing. I just wonder why when putting together these reports, the government includes such silly lines like ‘teaching them to use Twitter’, inviting off-focus headlines in papers and easy lampoonings from members of the public like me so that the essence of what they’re saying gets lost.

Perhaps the reality that politicians reluctantly face up to these days is that without inserting these ready made headlines and mild controversies, no one in the media would give a shit and award any coverage to their hard work at all. Maybe they ought to start releasing their important papers with an appendix of naked celebrities - now there might be a way to politicise an apathetic generation - they'd just have to make sure it's someone like Chanelle from Big Brother, and not a chubby 1860's burlesque model.

London.

I've often heard people talk about the 'Comfort Zone'.

You know, as in:

‘A family trip to Alton Towers? Hmm… you know how Granddad doesn’t like to be out of his Comfort Zone…’

For me the term conjures visions of some fluffy alternative universe where you can come to no harm – a world where the clouds have fallen to buffer the roads in moist cotton, and the buildings are all bouncy castles minus the deadbeat dropping coins into a bumbag, and sheep lollop in ‘Z’ formations in the rosy hue of a constantly setting sun.

Actually though, the ‘Comfort Zone’ is not another dimension but an abstract concept pertaining to personal boundaries of security and confidence. And the place where I step outside of mine, it would seem, is London.

Now I love London. It fascinates and excites me in a way that it probably always fascinates and excites wide-eyed kids from Northumbrian bog lands. I reckon if you went to Piccadilly Circus right now you could probably find an earnest Northumbrian runaway trying to explain to a policemen why they have a pick axe with them, a puzzled glint in the corner of their malnourished eye as they look down and wonder how gold can be so dirty and dull in real life.

The sense of purpose and activity in the air is intoxicating in London, whereas up North it tends to only be the intoxicants that are intoxicating. But despite all of this, I still feel out of my comfort zone because I take my Northern tendencies there with me.

When someone charges rudely into my shoulder, knocking me a foot backwards before striding ignorantly onto the tube, I instinctively stutter into a series of grovelling apologies that stops only inches short of choking on my own teary snots and promising them things can be different next time.

Even when I manage to traverse the ‘Underground’ with reasonable confidence, remembering to keep to the right and pausing all but imperceptibly to consult the maps, I feel like everyone around me knows I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing – an impression rarely rectified by referring to it accidently as ‘the Metro’… (Note to self: the Newcastle Metro is a twee little chug-a-long in a rickety old yellow cart, the London Underground is a white-knuckle ride on the inside of a bullet headed for Satan’s heart. There is really no excuse for getting them mixed up.)

I feel intimidated too by the sheer size of the thing. Trying to contemplate how big London is and how long it would take to learn your way around it all is like one of those hypothetical exercises people dream up when they either need a metaphor for impossibility or they’ve taken too many magic mushrooms: ‘counting every grain of sand on a beach’, or ‘reading every book ever written’ or ‘accepting the Pope’s point about not using condoms to combat HIV in Africa’ – you just can’t do it, not unless there is something very wrong with you.

Despite these discomforting characteristics, London is where I want to take myself next in this jaunt we call our ‘youff’, and I think it’s because trying to expand your ‘comfort zone’ is a natural thing.

My Granddad may not fancy a trip to Alton Towers these days but he sailed the seven seas as a young man, his comfort zone encompassing the four corners of the globe and the humbling, treacherous blue depths that weave across the continents between them. I fancy he’s earned the right not be bothered from the greenhouse, because he took his comfort zone and spread it as far as he could while his youth allowed him.

I’ll bear that in mind when I finally get to London, and try to stop yearning for the lolloping sheep.

Money, Vanity & The Dentist

I’ve never handed over hundreds of pounds for anything as saddening or defeatist as a new television, or a sofa, or a deluxe latte maker simply because I cling churlishly to the Marxist dogma that material wealth does not equate to happiness. Well, that and the fact I have no where to put anything.

Instead, on the odd occasions that the God of Chaos stumbles drunkenly into the game of my life, rolls a hazy six and I end up with expendable money (as the God of Grinding Fiscal Normality storms off in a huff) I’ve always proudly squandered the coins on ‘experience’.

‘Experience’, of course, adds up to little more than getting drunk somewhere different to normal – at a music festival, or in a Cuban youth hostel, or between the prickly thighs of a nameless prostitute on a bed of desecrated tulips in a Turkish graveyard (never again…).

A wreck less, selfish bout of sententious whimsy comes over me whenever I receive a windfall – I always want to defy the significance of having money by immediately blowing it, not on something tangible and practical, but on something I romanticize as being ‘better’ or ‘more important in life’ than the dough itself. It’s the same idiotic rebellion that causes me to stuff fivers in charity boxes when I know I’m approaching the end of my bank balance - I think I try and defy money because I’m afraid of it ever controlling my life, a high-minded notion I hope I outgrow long before I come to reproduce.

How exactly this daft relationship with money applies to today’s visit to the dentist is something I’ve been pondering, mouth in hand, ever since I left the sour-faced receptionist counting out my two-hundred sheets onto the tabletop of her unfulfilled, Formica-studded life.

I’ve had a dead tooth in the front of my smile that’s been bugging me for years – winking at me in the mirror and gate crashing flash photographs and making me look, to all intents and purposes, like I’m chewing a dead wasp. It’s ground me down, over time, and so it was vanity, simple vanity, that lead me to spend such a princely sum on what can be considered a ‘commodity’ for the very first time in my short, shabby life.

God knows, lying back in the dentist’s chair as a pair of distant eyes ground my front tooth to a sharp spike ready for its new ‘cap’, I knew that for once I hadn’t paid for ‘an experience’ – unless the experience was the novelty of getting a woman that close to your mouth without first listening wide-eyed to her hopes for the future and subtly plying her with Chardonnay.

As an experience, it was vile – as a commodity, it will function to make me feel more complete and attractive as human being. A shiny new tooth. Is it really any different to purchasing alloys for my (non-existent) car, or a touch-screen mobile phone, or a pair of sunglasses with Somebody’s initials built authentically into the frame?

Where do I go from here, now I’ve entered the murky waters of cosmetic improvement? When Chaos next kicks me some money, will I find myself cruising the aisles of a nose supermarket, or flicking woozily through a penis-enlargement catalogue? What happened to the man who has been previously so resistant to aesthetic improvement that he’d bought no new clothes in two years, and regularly denounced bars of soap as part of the ‘beauty industry conspiracy’?

Maybe it’s the first step in developing a mature relationship with money. Now, rather than impulsively spunking any I have on the slippery notion of living a life worth living, I’ll use my new tooth as a building block to bigger and better things.

‘Things’ being the operative word. As shaky recollections of unremarkable hedonism dwindles, tangible wealth will sprout up around me like the well-kept blades of safely fenced lawn.

Food blenders, and digital cameras and nice suits will keep me indoors to bask in their warming presence. As the digits in my annual salary steadily roll upwards they’ll unfurl an infinity of glistening trinkets to sooth the natural impatience of my soul.

And at the centre of this circus of objects, I’ll be grinning, with my two hundred pound tooth wedged firmly in my big, empty head, as the Gods roll 6, 6, 6...

The Ambivalent Agony of the Fashion Show Gawker

If the ratio of beautiful to average-looking people that existed in the basement of our student’s union the other night (80:20) were to somehow ripple in sultry waves out of the doors and spread to the real world, we as a population would be sentenced to years of ugly civil violence within a generation.

While the lucky majority who would suddenly resemble the attendees of the Fashion Rocks fashion show on Thursday night rejoiced, allowing industry to grind to a forgotten halt as they fawned over each other and masturbated furiously in hastily-arranged rooms of fresh mirrors, the 20% left without shapely noses, straightened hair or adequately rimmed sunglasses would be driven underground like the proles in 1984 (I mean the ones from the book, not miners) to squander a decade in confused self-loathing before a unifying average-looking leader (later played by Mel Gibson) emerged to lead them to a bloody coup. The beautiful people would provide resistance by their number but ultimately capitulate via their reluctance to blemish their perfect faces with sweat. Beautiful heads would roll.

Stood in a £2 Primark t-shirt (with a shandy stain on the left sleeve) I contemplated this dystopia and my probable role in it as before me, on the ‘cat-walk’, another 9-foot monument to mankind’s aesthetic potential strutted and pouted in some sort of dress I was vaguely aware I was supposed to notice.

On one of those evolutionary scales that shows a monkey gradually getting his shit together and becoming a man, this girl would occupy a space six places to the right of the first straight-backed one, two spaces to the left of a great swirling orb of transcendental purity so beautiful and true it can only be seen by babies in the first 30 seconds after they emerge from the labia. ‘She’s hot’ was my dry-mouthed observation – as adequate a summation of a person as it would have been to tell Hitler: ‘you’re a bit of a tinker Adolf, aren’t you…’

There is no ambivalence quite like that which afflicts a man when he is confronted by a woman so unattainable she might as be perched on top of a 300 foot high greased pole, boxed in a force field of searing agony and orbited by angry crows.

Far be it for me to reduce people to merely the sum of their looks, but when seen for the first time from an unassailable distance that is precisely what people are - and so perhaps it is not too trite to compare a beautiful man or woman to a wave breaking on rock dappled by the first ascending shadow of dawn, or a summer breeze snaking through the tips of a corn field, or a really, really nice tree. They all make the same eloquent case for a God, after all.

The problem for men is that in the case of seeing the beautiful woman (rather than the wave or the wind or the tree) is that seeing is not enough: the compulsion to ‘capture’ resonates suddenly in your core with an aching jolt. Herein lies the ambivalence. You never feel simultaneously more alive or more dead than at the sight of a woman you know wouldn’t give you any more than a bemused smile if you ever hiccupped your way over to talk to her.

This isn’t because she’s shallow, unapproachable or even necessarily that put off by the fact you obviously only own one pair of jeans. It’s because the sheer disparity between her physical beauty and yours would manifest its self in negative ways: in my case, most likely, a cringing effort to over-compensate with abstract gags and lots of animated shuffling, like a tearful crab trying to make its self walk like all the other animals.

Best not to try. Best to stand in the basement of the union, a crude chip of slate strewn upon a glistening infinity of bright, colourful pebbles, washing back the ambivalence with a plastic cup of beer, gazing up in a suspended sigh at beautiful impossibility, silently thankful that the ratio is the freak, not you.

Roller-skating: another one for life's two great lists...

They tell you the world’s your oyster and you think - great, they must mean life is a merry jaunt beset with luxurious possibilities. They don’t. They mean it’s a never ending sequence of anticlimaxes slurped from empty shells in which you can always see your own, crying reflection.

Don’t get me wrong - I enjoyed the Roller Disco last night tremendously, it’s just here I am, reaching with an arm both black and blue for that eternal list of things that I’m rubbish at, ready to add yet another entry. And yet - I was so sure I’d be good at it. I mean, why wouldn't I be?

I tied up my roller shoes and approached the skate rink with all the surly confidence a boozed up moron enjoys, only to witness my legs flay out in front and behind of me like the spindly pins of a newly born giraffe, who would have at least have had simultaneously becoming aware of its own empirical consciousness as a sort of excuse -

‘Fair play Spotty - you might have been gash at skating but you were experiencing experience for the very first time, so you’ll hear no more on the matter from us, son. That daft student with half a mullet on the other hand had no fucking excuse…’.

Not matter what combination of leg-pushing, weight-shifting or composed launching I tried, I either startled forward like a horse you’d just prodded up arse or wobbled out for half a yard like a toddler playing in a pair of its Mum’s high-heels.

Occasionally, in the waves of fluid motion that had formed like a jeering carousel around me, I’d pick out a friendly face and latch to them like a tragic middle-aged divorcee who’d entered the desperate final third of a night out on the lash.

Like her, I wanted answers – answers to why life is so cruel, why it is so hard, why you can give and give so much and get so little in return – but it wasn’t love or even a kebab that I was after, it was simple motion. To experience, just for a brief moment, a successful glide across the floor, to fan the beads of sweat from my face in a breeze created by my own ability to cascade.

Instead, I’d generally bring them tumbling down with me. That was the only move I perfected in two hours.

And so as my stubborn, outraged mind tried to get its self around the concept of being monumentally shit at something an entire room of people were performing with general competency, I began to cling to the thought.

The thought that while spinning around on the spot, leaping off stuff or just going quite fast are impressive aesthetic feats in the world of drunken roller-skating, there is another, somehow more honourable move in the reportire that I could hold my head up high and say I was good at.

Falling on your arse is easy, but managing to get back up quickly, and to not seriously injure anyone or yourself on the way is certainly not.

And so while I must have spent at least 20% of my time clinging on at the sides – in the line up of the shamed that is the roller disco’s equivalent to the queue at the GUM clinic – the other 80% was spent honing the art of the relatively painless tumble in which remarkably few people were up-ended by my pathetic flailing.

So although I may well be reaching for that list of things I’m shit at to add yet another of life’s simple activities, the list a fragile ego keeps to console a simple man is only ever just folded up somewhere in another pocket, ready to restore your faith in yourself - and in a world of oysters, if needs be.

The One Entirely Recession Proof Industry. Being Broke.

I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying the Credit Crunch tremendously.

I have no savings – never had. Once I collected a King’s ransom in fifty pence and pound coins for the NSPCC by taking my cherubic visage door-to-door (risking exposure to paedophiles whilst raising money for children was an irony lost on me at the time) but that money was never my own - although I must confess - and please don’t judge too harshly – I dipped into it from time to time to aid my Arthurian quest to find the Newcastle United shiner in a packet of football stickers (the only conspiracy theory I fully believe is that Merlin deliberately distributed the David Ginolas and Phillipe Alberts South of the great divide and sent the Klinsmanns and Viallis in other direction to ensure 10 year old boys kept spending, charity fraud or no charity fraud).

I have no assets – never had. I don’t mean anatomically, where girly eye-lashes and a chopping-board stomach serve me reasonably well, but in terms of tangible things like property, or cars or signed first prints of any Harry Potter novels. I got so far once as to photograph odd bits of junk that lay around my room (a pocket calculator, a book on palm reading, an Our Lady Peace album) to sell on Ebay, caught in a similar rush of capitalist fervour that falls over people when playing Monopoly, only to be overcome swiftly by a crippling existential numbness as I contemplated the prospect of actually posting the silly things to Norwich all to make a couple of quid. It was too depressing, so I left the site and have never returned since, though I suspect my approval rating is the one area in which George W. Bush and I could empathise with one another.

I don’t drive so the price of fuel doesn’t bother me, don’t play the stock market so Sesame Street still seems more pertinent than Wall Street in my eyes (incidentally, I wonder how The Count is dealing with the downturn…). ‘When you aint got nothing, you got nothing to lose’ said Bob Dylan, presumably referring to the period before he was given the responsibility of embodying liberal social protest, something he’s seemed keen to try and shake off ever since. Well I still stumble through the final days of each month borrowing tenners from tolerant friends and have absolutely no mythical status as the embodiment of anything – I wonder if old Bob is jealous, in his own private way.

I have, however, adopted the parlance of the Credit Crunch, much like people who normally don’t have a clue which football club Wayne Rooney plays for suddenly had a line or two about his metatarsal and enduring significance to the England set up during the last World Cup.

I’ve been spraying banal conversations with the same guff about ‘things being as they are’ and ‘everyone being affected by it at the minute’ as everyone else (bollock by the way: I’m not affected, the Queen’s not affected, that bloke who wears newspaper for trousers and pushes a shopping trolley down Northumberland Street isn’t affected…), all delivered in that peculiar cadence that seeks to imitate a world-weary global businessman, rather than someone to whom the ‘FTSE Index’ sounds more like a brochure for frottage aficionados than something to do with finance.

If anything, the whole palaver seems like a good thing for my current situation. One thing I do find interesting is the concept of ‘this only happening once in a life-time’ – gives the whole thing a glossy touch, does that, like a nice quote on the front of a DVD. If it only happens once in a lifetime, then I’d rather it happened now before I have any dosh, assuming I ever manage to sell the novel I’m planning to write this summer (boy meets boy, boy loves girl, girl sleeps with other boy, boy cries) and see it turned into a moderately entertaining British film (starring Martin Clunes as my Dad – sorry, the Dad – sorry, Dad).

The person I feel most sorry for is all Barack Obama, who seemingly couldn’t have a worse shit-storm to enter for his first term as the sexiest, coolest (and certainly blackest) American president of all time.

Well, best of luck to him, and best of luck to all of you. For me it’s just another day whistling cheerfully, wading through my own rubbish bin.