No ordinary sock

 

It's true. I have big feet. So sue me. I always had big feet. Currently size 11, they are happy in size 12 shoes.

What you see above, gentle reader, is a standard issue size 11 sock.

It isn't the lower one. The top one is a generous size 11 and has served me pretty well. So the lower one is... er, what ? Crafted for a yeti and salvaged abandoned on some desolate Tibetan trail ?

No, it's a Dickies size 11.

Look, I know nothing about socks and sock technology, and don't often think about them. But this is surely no ordinary sock. It's a monster sock of epic, almost mythic proportions. It would have had a leading role in the Iliad if the Greeks had known about socks. It would have belonged to some glittering hero, swathed in armour and whizzing round in a swanky chariot.

A sock such as this might even had had its own epic written about it.

The trouble is (touching earth briefly again), that it won't fit in any of my shoes. Well, it will, of course, but not while my foot is in it. Either it makes my toes feel as if they are surrounded by foot bullies, or else the heel is somewhere around the back of my knee. Neither is a good look.

Wearing said sock with sandals would probably get me arrested, and not just by the fashion police.

It isn't just designed for the fuller foot, for the slightly aging foot that just likes to be cosy and cut no dash at the dance-halls. It's isn't created fort any known foot, wth the possible exception of one that got caught under a road roller and miraculously survived, doomed to wander the planet forever in search of a specialist cobbler.

Hard to imagine the foot Dickies had in mind. Maybe the machine got carried away and coughed out a couple of thousand before anyone noticed.

Now I am HUGE Dickies fan. The make all my best and most comfortable outfits. For sheer elegant durability, shrugging off of stains, and adaptabilty, Dickies cannot be beaten. But clearly their sock technology needs a slight tweak, a teensy recalibration. Sock-wise I have some tiny doubts about Dickies.

Illusions

Hans Klok popped up on my YouTube recommendations yesterday.

I am not a huge fan of magicians and illusionists. Life is tricky enough to understand already. But watching Hans Klok’s act was breath-taking. Here he is, rushing about the stage, brandishing fire, diving into boxes, waving fabrics, assisted by a bunch of women (wearing more make-up and fewer clothes than were strictly necessarily), and generally posing Byronically en route.

His illusions are staggering. You watch attentively, looking for the tiny flaw that will explain how the lower half of a glamorous assistant just walked effortlessly across the stage. There is no flaw.

Illusions are not my favourite thing on YouTube. I watch music, building and politics. Not necessarily in that order, and not in equal parts.

And watching Hans last evening, I was struck by the similarities between his act and the performances of Trump and Johnson.

Both he and they are fooling the public, using distraction and glamour to divert attention from the sleight of hand. All three are visually striking: Hans giving an air of wild and confident reckless ness, Johnson bumbling along with a carefully crafted clownishness (who could ever ask him a question expecting a serious answer ?) and Trump with his belligerent and arrogant swagger.

But the creator of the staggering visual tricks calls himself an illusionist. We join in the fun, and are willing to suspend common sense in the interest of being entertained, thrilled, amazed, even shocked. Both Hans and the audience know that what they are seeing is not real, actual, factual. Both Hans and his audience are in on the conspiracy. He is fooling us, and we are happy to be fooled.

With Trump and Johnson, we know we are being treated like fools, bur have not willingly volunteered to have our intelligence abused. And the dishonesties and illusions they create leave us aghast and wondering whether even they themselves believe their own magic.

If Hans came on insisting that what we were about to see was completely real, true and actual, his act would change. Or at least our attitude to it would change. As it is, we are on the edge of our seats, wanting to collude in being fooled. We have given tacit permission and guaranteed our credulity. Trump and Johnson merely treat us with contempt. It isn’t funny, and it isn’t thrilling. It isn’t even right.

Half the battle

 

 

This is a hand-out for a staff meeting I attended years ago. It was just before the computer age, but not before the type-writer age, and the headteacher wrote it with the best intentions.

I saved it because it made me laugh so much at the time, and still does. It makes me feel oddly happy. It seems wonderfully funny to me. Not in a cruel way at all. The man behind the pen was an absolute inspiration to me, and a great mentor. He was someone who cared passionately about providing the best education possible for all children, regardless of need.

One day when he was a young teacher he got up early to make his way to school in impossibly thick snow. The roads were not clear, and no buses were running. He walked the ten miles to school, only to be reprimanded for being late, and was sent home as soon as he arrived.

He was tireless, and put huge energy and time into out-of-school activities for kids. I would have walked off a cliff for him, and he gave me opportunities that changed my career.

One of his talents (clearly not presentation !) was gathering together a staff who were diverse, smart, awkward, achieving, passionate, hard-to-handle, and united in wanting to do their unceasing best for children. He fostered talent wherever and whatever it was, both in teachers and in children. There was a vast range of teaching styles in the school, and children were carefully routed through so that they experienced a good mix of them.

The standards the children achieved were eye-wateringly high, and parental support was similarly stratospheric.

At his funeral, the great barn of a crematorium had nowhere to sit, not even on the floor. Every available space was taken. Friends, colleagues, ex-pupils, and family crammed the aisles. Those who could not squeeze in remained outside, silently striving to hear the service. It was love, and not mere respect.

I realise now that the wonky staff meeting notes make me feel happy as they remind me so warmly of a man who inspired love in so many.

 

Christmas now and then

Sue loves Christmas. Decorations, tree, cards, presents, the lot. She is not keen on tinsel, it’s true. But apart from that she loves the whole thing. Of course, no Christmas is complete without watching It’s a Wonderful Life, and in a normal year she likes to pack as many members of the family in as the floors will support. In fact, on one occasion I spent time in the cellar supporting the living room floor with timber props in case it gave way under the combined weight of visitors.

Me ? I don’t like Christmas. A house full of visitors is my idea of a nightmare. Being a vegetarian non-drinker completes the picture. You can see that the house is divided and Christmas is the dividing line.

‘Why are you such a misery ?’ I hear you ask.

When I was a kid, Christmas was magical.

Christmas at home was the one day in the year when we ate together at dinner-time – that’s 12 noon for families like mine. All the other days the shop was open and people were popping in and out to serve the customers who unknowingly disrupted life behind the shop.

There was always a bit of a struggle on Christmas Day. My mum would encourage my Dad not to open the shop, and he would agree. But on Christmas morning he would be in the closed shop peering disconsolately through the blinds looking for ‘passing trade’. After frequent visits, and becoming subtly agitated at the thought of losing business, he would come into the sitting room and announce that he thought he should open the shop to catch passing trade – rogue customers who had run out of things they had forgotten to buy in time.

Everyone accepted this, and the shop would open for Sunday hours only.

Christmas was also a time when there was a complete embargo on visitors. Nobody was invited, and nobody called. Even relatives were unwelcome. Especially relatives. I can’t remember anyone ever coming round on Christmas Day. It was somehow exclusively private time, punctuated by the shop bell and stray customers in search of fire-lighters, bread, tennis balls and other essential Christmas items.

We had a discouragingly moth-eaten tree which we later folded up and stored on its high shelf in the shop storeroom. There were lights, huge pear-shaped bulbs painted in matt colours and strung on cloth-insulated cables. There was an annual attempt to make them work well, followed by the ritual acceptance that they were a lost cause. There was an attractive cottonwool snow scene under the tree, where various and random small figures – Santas, shepherds, angels – cavorted in imagination under the glass balls looming in their sky.

Of course, we made sure our kids enjoyed Christmas magic, but somewhere along the way, Christmas lost its mojo for me.

But we found a solution. We now do an on-Christmas and an off-Christmas in alternating years. This is year is an on-Christmas for Sue, so the house will be packed with decorations, starts, puddings, cards, holly, tree. You name it. It will be like Santa’s grotto in here. There will be angels, stars, a nativity scene. It will be a scene straight from Charles Dickens.

Next year is my turn, and Christmas will look like any other day. There won’t be any sign of the virus next year (I hope) and there won’t be any sign of Christmas either. Ah, bliss.

However you celebrate, make sure you have a wonderful, happy, peaceful and laughter-filled time.

Tom

I was very lucky, as a young teacher, to work in some interesting schools. But the best school was both interesting and a very happy place to work. The staff were an eclectic mix of talents and personalities, and we were all united behind the head in trying to make it a good school.

 

One year Tom, another teacher and myself were in adjacent mobile classrooms (glorified huts) sharing the top juniors. Tom had always taught the top juniors.

 

Tom had been in the tank regiment in the war. His brother had been killed in the Far East, and Tom had neither forgotten nor got over it.

 

After the army, he had gone onto teaching, like so many others. He was coming towards the end of his career when I knew him. He had taught in only the one school, and during his thirty or so years there he had taught in the same classroom.

Tom was old school. He had no fancy views about education. His classroom was just that: an empty box to teach a class in. Though he had been working in the same room for decades, it carried no personal touches, nothing to indicate indwelling, or even habitation. There was not much work on the walls, and 'display' was limited to a few curling papers artlessly drawing-pinned to fawn notice boards. It was not a room busy with the hum of excited learning.

Children feared Tom, who had taught their parents. Many of the parents STILL feared Tom. He had on his desk the sole of a plimsoll. He had cut the upper away. This dusty relic wasn't used as in former days, but the sight of it kept the class in order.

Tom taught hard stuff. His class were 10 and 11 years old, and very mixed ability. He taught from the blackboard (actually green). Conic sections, volume of a cone, box analysis of sentences. All stuff he had remembered from his own secondary school and kneaded into some sort of inexplicable curriculum for his annual performance. If the children were not interested, they did not dare mention it. If they did not understand it because they could not actually read much, well, that was their problem.

Tom was both gruff and strict, and had a fuse so short you never saw trouble coming. And trouble was terrifyingly volcanic.

With staff he was much the same, but on a franker level. You knew where you stood with Tom. It might be uncomfortable knowledge, but you knew alright. He was not a man to mince words, to dress up the obvious truth.

He had a couple of friends on the staff. He was still, in his sixties, a handsome man, and could be charming. He had clearly been a devastatingly attractive catch when he was young, and had retained the charm long after the looks had begun to wrinkle.

You didn't argue with Tom. The best you could hope for was a dismissive grunt as he turned away, stalking off in a famous mood.

Tom could laugh, and his yellow teeth and a noise like gravel in a faulty mixer betrayed a lifelong love of smoking. A lesson was the longest he was ever away from a cigarette. When he laughed, it was almost as if he was testing to see if he still could.

 

Children, staff, parents all feared Tom. Even the head was wary of upsetting him. Tom took this for respect. 

 

Tom was not sure what to make of me. If he could have fired me, I am sure he would have. I was a teacher so different from himself as to be unrecognisable even as a teacher. He thought I was soft on the kids, and probably soft in the head. I did for the dress code what the Luftwaffe had done for Coventry. I seemed to have a talent for annoying him, not least when I wanted to keep pet rabbits under his classroom where I had identified the perfect spot for a row of hutches. He could have made more effort to hide his view that I was a complete idiot, but he did not feel the need.

 

He did not care for innovation of any kind. Things were fine as they were, and the more familiar the better. Nothing new should be allowed to ripple the surface of his safe predictability of coming to work.

At the end of the summer, I wanted to have a disco for the kids in our year. They were about to leave the school and it seemed like an obvious thing to do. Nobody had done this before and though the idea did not affect Tom, he was more than clear in his views. It was a mad idea. It would give the children ideas. Modern music was dreadful, and the volume would damage the kids' ears, leading to an outbreak of premature deafness in the area. The parents would think it was crazy. It would demean the school. It was extra work for the staff (though he wasn't involved in any way). It wasn't what the school was about. It wasn't what ANY school was about. It would have a negative impact on behaviour and he would be left to pick up the pieces.

He made his views clear at a staff meeting, and pulled no punches. It was simply a mad project and would jeopardise us all.

The week before the disco, Tom popped into my classroom, politely ignoring the apparent chaos of lunchtime activities. Would I like some lights for the disco ? He happened to have some that he had used at home. And how about the sound system ? The one in the hall was pathetic and would not be loud enough for a disco. He could bring in a much better system if that would help.

You bet it would help.

Tom and I spent hours after school rigging the place up, climbing unsafe ladders, testing the equipment. He was the only member of staff to help me cross the t's, dot the i's. He was infinitely patient. We even joked together when things went wrong. When it was all set, Tom disappeared. He wanted no part of the disco. He did not want to be tainted by it. But the success of the disco was in large part due to Tom's hidden collaboration.

 

Much later, we discovered a shared love of music, and I was invited covertly round to his house with my guitar. He was an enthusiastic and skilful organist, though at school this was never revealed. Like Wemmick, he shrugged off his home life somewhere on the journey to school in his battered and ancient Volvo.

I still do not know why he helped me with a project that was such anathema to him. But he taught me two things that have stayed with me all my life. You have to help people do what THEY want to do, not what YOU want to do. And respect. He had earned that. In spades.

Tom. I owe him way more than disco lights and loud music.

 

It doesn't HAVE to end in tiers

The tier system to control the virus has not worked, and the next version of it won’t work either.

The impact so far is a clear upward drift. If you were in tier 1, you moved up into tier 2, while those in tier 2 moved up into tier 3. Once in tier three there was no way out.

If the tiering approach was working, you would expect to find areas moving downwards into a lower tier. It would be a bit like watching a hot-air balloon land: there could be bounces, but eventually areas would find themselves landing in tier 1. That has not happened.

Why ?

It seems that in every tier, people have taken a pick ’n’ mix approach, deciding which restrictions to stick with, and which to modify to match their needs. Some are willing to take more risks than others, and some simply see any restrictions as an infringement on their freedoms. This latter group, by the same logic, must have an urge to drive on the right and never wear a seat belt. But then logic is not their strongest suit.

In effect, this means that the tiers are probably all exactly the same, each with a population comprising the extremely cautious, the tier-accepting, and those largely ignoring all restrictions. No wonder they are not working.

Maybe there is a solution there.

Think for a moment how easy it would be to stay healthy if we could actually see the virus, if it was obvious to the naked eye. Avoiding it would suddenly be easy. As it has no visual impact, we don’t have that as an option.

The next best thing is to avoid people most likely to have the virus, and those taking risks while ignoring the scientific advice. And we could make this very visible, very cheap, and very effective. Visible risk would be easier to assess and avoid.

If we issued every person with three badges – traffic light badges, one green, one amber, one red – we could reasonably ask everyone to wear one during every public moment out of their house. The three colours would represent the degree of risk the individual was taking that day. The colours could be defined like tiers:

Green: super-cautious and taking the virus very seriously; obeying tier 3 restrictions at all times; verging on a personal lock-down; remaining socially isolated whenever possible; have not hugged anyone in the last 3 years; wear a mask at all times; remove visor only to clean teeth; would do virtue-signalling but don’t want to waft the virus about

Amber: flexibly cautious; seeing family under the radar; bending restrictions to suit personal circumstances; taking small risks; wear masks whimsically; only hug people who familiar and never in shops; dangerously and haphazardly well-meaning

Red: ignoring all known restrictions and finding ways to subvert them whenever possible; proud to be libertarian; convinced of personal invincibility; risk-taking no problem; negative altruism; sociopathic loose cannon; hug promiscuously uninvited whenever possible; have a daily target for invading others’ personal space; masks are for wimps; have heard about science and want no truc with it;

In a household, all members would have to wear the badge of the highest risk person in the house. Two greens shacked up with a red would all wear red outdoors.

If you saw someone without a badge, it would be easy to assume that they were in the red category and avoid them. There could even by peer pressure resulting in reds re-thinking their behaviour.

The badges would make it easy to join or avoid queues, and to assess risk more easily. Cleary joining a group of greens would be a safer bet than a group of reds. It would be easy to identify the former and avoid the latter. People would be nationally in voluntary tiers on a permanent basis until the R number shrank away like a hibernating snail.

This would allow the lunatic libertarians to do their thing while allowing the rest of us to avoid them until they self-culled.

Supermarkets could arrange red, amber and green checkouts. Petrol pumps could be colour-coded. Risk would suddenly be visible. The R number would plummet.

There would not be the hassle of trying to enforce tiers against strong public resistance, and everyone could feel that they were taking appropriate action to do their bit to reduce the virus.

And at the cost of three badges per capita, the cost would be low.

It won’t work because you cannot trust people to behave with integrity ? Well, the same can be said for self-quarantine. The same can be said about people slipping over the tier borders for a drink or two. The same can be said for mask-wearing. The same can be said for anything non-mandatory, and there are some who even flout mandatory measures. The badge approach has some advantages, and it is cheap.

Come on, let’s give it a go. It can’t be less effective than all of the government’s current strategies. Oops. Did I say ‘strategies’ ? Slip of the tongue.