Another furious letter

Michael Gove and Gavin Williamson are both eager for children to be back in school this term, and Michael Gove is insisting that local authorities look to their responsibilities and re-open their schools.

If only it was as simple as that, and if only the government could be trusted with our children’s well-being.

Local authorities and schools have a responsibility to meet children’s needs, and to keep children safe from harm. Harm may result from more than the virus alone. Does the government have any evidence that small children will suffer no harm from a largely asocial school experience at a stage when socialisation is a large and integral part of the educational process ? Can the government reassure teachers and parents that all surfaces and equipment handled by children can be guaranteed virus-free before the next day’s use ? Can Mr Gove be certain that children’s anxieties will not be increased by such a strange and unfamiliar education as they are likely to get ?

“We are confident that children and teachers will be safe,” says Mr Gove. What is the basis for this assertion ? Mr Gove’s confidence is built on guesswork rather than facts. It is the same confidence that sacrificed the elderly in care homes to shield the NHS, the same confidence that testing was not necessary when the infection started, the same confidence that NHS staff could continue working safely without PPE, rewarded by clapping rather than by decent pay and conditions.

If the government’s record had not resulted in the highest death rate in Europe, and the complete lack of care for key workers of all kinds, I might feel more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on our children’s safety. At the moment, Williamson and Gove are talking in the same terms that must have been used by nineteenth century mill owners, determined that parents should hand over their children to useful employment. They are gambling with children’s lives on the basis of their meretricious ability to make guesses sound convincing. Until such time as they assemble some relevant coherent facts, we should reject the bet, and schools should remain closed until they can be guaranteed safe.

Eloquent silence

Did you ever see our earliest ancestors smiling ?

Attempts to re-construct recognisable faces from bones, fossils and data were always going to be tricky. But the faces scowl informatively, as if suddenly startled by scientific intrusion. They rarely smile, or betray and emotion we might link with.

And in our imagination, do our cave-dwelling ancestors sit together and gaze at the moon ? Do they sing gently to wakeful children ? Do they worry about what tomorrow might bring ? Do they hum enchanting melodies by their fires or whistle a happy tune to embolden themselves in some deep and scary forest ?

We might just be underestimating their intellectual and emotional capacity. While they lacked knowledge of so much that we take for granted, they were capable of the same sort of emotions as we are. If we survive even 200 more years a species, our cutting-edge knowledge will look crude to those who come after us.  But they should not underestimate our capacity for poetry, care, empathy and grief.

And occasionally we freeze in time. We become a confusing still from a movie. And the freezing baffles communication. When Pioneer was launched it carried a plaque to explain to intelligent life out there who we were, who had sent the spacecraft. This is it:

Things were simpler then with only two genders. Today the plaque would need to be right down the side of the space-craft. The raised arm was to indicate that we had articulated bodies, and the figures show our size relative to the capsule. It also maps some astronomical scientific information, and gives the state of our knowledge at the time of the launch. It’s hard to know what intelligent alien life would make of this.

Kurt Vonnegut imagined an alien on the earth. He was super-intelligent, and carried a vital message. But Vonnegut’s alien could communicate only through a combination of farting and tap-dancing. Someone brained him with a golf-club.

This cave painting reaches across time, and touches our imagination. The artist or artists painted this about 40 000 years ago.

Why ? Maybe because s/he had just discovered that you could blow paint through a hollowed bone, and the spray was interesting. Maybe because s/he wanted to record all the people in the caves, and have them smile as they walked past.

There is not just one hand here. There are large and small hands, both left and right hands, women’s hands and men’s hands. This was a group painting, a Neolithic selfie on a huge scale. Where you see a hand, someone stretched out their fingers on the rock and waited for the cold paint to be blown on the back. Imagine the delight of lifting their hand tentatively away, only to see the shape on the rock, outlined in paint.

They must have laughed, talked about the process. Wondered whether the artist who had the idea was nuts or some kind of crazy person.

None of them will have thought that their hands would be so affecting 40 000 years later across unimaginable oceans of rolling time.

But there is still something immediate, joyfully random, wonderfully gratuitous about the image they created. It reaches out to us, to our imaginations, and is very direct.

Frozen in time, the humanity of the image sings a song we all know.

Folding screen

This is the screen I was talking about yesterday.

There were 17 windows originally. Most of them had some damage - broken and missing glass here and there. The glass is from the 1920s, and you can't quite match the colours and textures nowadays.

Though they did clutter up the garden for several years, it was a piece of good luck to get all this glass more or less intact and usable.

A few years ago, a Victorian pub in Chesterfield was being gutted and refurbished. It had huge glass panels in all the ground floor windows, each over 2m tall. There were  8 panels, and they were glorious. Victorian glass, all matching, beautifully made, gorgeously rich. They were art.

Driving through, I saw a skip at the roadside. I could see two panels still in place. Set on rescuing them, I found the nearest place to park. Parking in Chesterfield is tricky: you often have to park in Barnsley and get a train back. I ran to the pub just in time to see four guys throwing the last panel into the skip with a crash and the sound of breaking hearts.

Seduced by glass

This is the late evening sun catching my glass screen on a north-facing window. I am the world's most inept photographer, but had to try to catch the warm glow on the landing.

Many years ago all the stained glass was removed from a house in a village near here. It was due to be thrown into a skip, but I had done some work for the owner, who asked if I would like the glass.

Would I ?

It was stored, much to Sue's understandable annoyance, in the garden under a tarpaulin and still in its wooden frames for maybe 5 years before I suddenly realised that I could make this screen with it. It's a two-panel folding screen and hinges back aganst the wall when not in use.

I love glass, and am not sure why. I love the clean sparkle of glass, and the coloured pattenrs it creates on floors and walls. And there is something special about the way it reflects and refracts in different kinds of light.

But that doesn't explain the obsession.

A friend who has majored in self-improvement and has attended courses for this and that all her life showed me some stained glass she had made. This would be about 1990. She had created two beguiling panels, one brooding and mysterious, the other an optimistic boat prowing through the waves to a distant glow. I was hooked.

It took a lot of learning, and some seriously clumsy mistakes, but once the veils were gone, the naked art revealed itself as just a concatenation of very simple skills which look impossibly complicated when they combine.

Right now I am working on a panel for a 1912 apartment building. It is the second of a series of 6 panels, designed by the owner of the apartment. The aim is to make something that is simple, and that looks as if it might just be original equipment.

The first panel in place above its door

Second panel just begun

Standing here, looking out over sunny fields and making glass ... well, it feels like heaven.