Tag: Recovery

For study until 3rd of November 2024

Subject: Halloween

Audio: On usual social media platforms.

It is Halloween and as usual my town has a parade which takes place on the closest weekend. Usually artists create a monster which looks like its hanging over the town hall, but as everything has gone digital, there isn’t actually anything to see unless you attend the event where monsters are beamed on to the walls of the town hall after it gets dark. It is kind of sad that there aren’t any installed monuments to visit anymore during the day. As movie makers say “It’s all in the can”.

I went to the town centre and was upset that there was really nothing to see. Preparations were well underway, complete with loudspeakers. They were loud enough to wake the dead if you excuse the pun. I don’t mind a bit of Kelly Clarkson but I take exception to Celine Dion. My opinion of her is so bad that I remove myself from conversations about her by saying:

“Oh, Celine Dion? My cat really, really doesn’t like her” – it seems the only way I can avoid being rude about her voice. The third person is really useful sometimes.

By preparations, I mean the roads were sealed off and large projectors were placed around the centre. The parade at night is nice to see but has too many people to make it in any way enjoyable.

When I was a kid, Halloween was one night in the year when we dressed up, carved turnips and painted pictures of witches. It didn’t extend to weeks of celebrations with horror movies about psychotic killers, there wasn’t a Halloween brand and any sense of fun associated with it was Disney style and harmless like the movie Hocus Pocus. There were always objections to it though particularly from Churches which still had a lot of influence in the 70s and 80s but most of us saw it as harmless fun. It didn’t extend beyond putting a sheet over your head and shouting “booo”. I think its popularity was because it was a shared experience and time honoured. My father carving the turnip, my mother making cookies and my grandparents buying sweets. These days the kids just go to the supermarket and stuff their faces full of whatever they can buy.

In more recent years as Religion seems to have dwindled, Halloween has become not only a brand but a much bigger celebration than Christmas. Houses with decorated windows, lights, pumpkins, scarecrows without heads and covered in blood which make them look putrid.

A group of kids turned up at my place last night looking for sweets and shouting “trick or treat”. The phrase “trick or treat” is a new phenomenon which we borrowed from America but it does represent what kids do on that night. They visit neighbours and ask for sweets. We don’t actually respond by choosing an option like “trick” we just give them sweets and then they leave.  In my case I use my video doorbell, see the costumes and just ignore them. Maybe I am a hard hearted Skype English Teacher but I prefer to be on Skype talking to people about how frightening learning English can be rather than talking to kids about how frightening they look.

A lot of people don’t like Halloween because of its darker connotations. I do know that 31^st October has always been associated with the dead and it is a night when the dead and the living supposedly can meet each other. It is kind of like the Day of the Dead in Mexico but we don’t leave gifts on graves for the dead, in fact we don’t even think of them. British people are not sentimental in that way, at least not on Halloween and we are far too mean to leave alcohol for dead people on their graves.

 The original idea back in the 17^th century is that if we dress up as ghosts, no one will know who is alive and who is dead,  offering some kind of protection on the night. Here in the UK we also have a number of people who are pagan or wiccan. Halloween for them is a religious observance akin to Christmas  and they are also becoming fashionable.  Halloween has long been associated with magic and as a child I do remember seeing things like dead chickens on graves and more recently farmers keeping their horses locked up on the night for fear that someone will cut off their tails, there has been a few police reports about that and on local media.  So it is clear that in the countryside there are people around practicing some kind of magic on that night but nobody knows who they are or why.

I did feel a little bit disturbed when I was in the supermarket and the assistant was dressed as an old hag. As her face was hidden, I couldn’t see who she was or her facial expressions and that made me a bit uncomfortable. But it’s no worse I suppose than dressing up as Santa Claus or people wearing covid masks.

My feelings towards Halloween are rather ambivalent, I don’t like the costumes but I suppose there’s no real harm.  

I had a discussion with my neighbour about this:

“Are you all set for Halloween?” He muttered wryly.

“What do you mean all set?” I asked, trying to disarm his vain attempt at humour,

“I mean do you have the sweets ready?” was his next attempt at small talk.

“Um, no…… I don’t.. I don’t really…..” but by that point he had walked off, reminding me again that this was only small talk and I shouldn’t be thinking about answering well.

Strangely he had the same conversation with me at Christmas time, its just their way of making conversation about nothing but when they don’t get the answers they want the conversation simply dies. It does make me wonder though what makes other people excited and how they lead their lives. I had a pang of sadness that  I might be  missing out on something, spending most of my days online. I mean there could be elephants dressed as witches living next door all the year round and I likely wouldn’t notice.

The clocks change by one hour around the same time as Halloween, I use the American proverb to remind me which way they change:

Spring Forward ( In Spring they go forward).

Fall Back (In Autumn they go back, Autum is the British word for Fall).

Once a big deal, now that’s automated as well. I wonder if people in the future will even realise these things take place?

Subject: Cancel Culture: Pigeon Racing

Audio: On usual social media platforms.

Cancel Culture: Pigeon Racing

In the 1970s before the Internet came, pigeon racing was all the rage. It was fairly common to see both young and old men owning pigeon lofts. These were like large garden sheds specifically custom-built to house racing pigeons. The culture of pigeon racing always piqued my curiosity because both my Father and Grandfather had their own lofts at the bottom of their gardens and were fee paying members of their local pigeon racing club. Even the Queen was in on the act, she had her own pigeon loft and was racing her own pigeons until her death. Sadly the new King withdrew his patronage from pigeon associations and charities shortly after he was crowned.  People who breed and race pigeons are sometimes known as pigeon fanciers.

For study until 21 July 2024

Subject: My Mate Karim

Audio: On usual social media platforms.

Sometimes I forget how diverse British culture is because I just go with the flow. I don’t really have any hard and fast views of what a British man is supposed to look or act like.

So when my mate Karim appeared one night back in 2006 telling me his mother finally found someone for him to marry, it didn’t come as any great shock. We came from different backgrounds but we simply didn’t care. We were very good friends.

He started by telling me how he was a little bit nervous about his forthcoming marriage. He had agreed that his parents would find a bride and that the wedding  would take place in the town where his grandparents had immigrated to the UK from, back in the 1960s.  

“We are like chalk and cheese” he said referring to himself and his future wife. Then  he told me his great idea:

 “Why don’t we fly to Pakistan together and you can get married too?” he suggested.

I could see he had a look of desperation in his eyes. He didn’t want to face this alone.

“Thanks” I replied…

 “but  that’s not really workable for me”.   and nervously laughed at what I hoped was a joke.

I had seen that look before, I always thought of it as the kind of look a deer gets before it gets struck by a car in the middle of the night.

 “It really is game over” he continued.

 Karim was just as British as I am and culturally he pushed himself to enjoy everything he could, a sportsman, popular with the ladies and one of these guys who always had a friend, cousin or uncle who was ready to offer any kind of “deal” that you might be after.

I’ve had enough British Born Pakistani friends in my life to know that there was no way out of this for him and he had been preparing for this moment for some months. He considered himself lucky that he knew the girl, it was one of his cousins. Although I could never really figure out how they were related, they were cousins but 5 times removed and he barely knew her.

I considered Karim to be very fortunate because he walked between two worlds, which left his mind open in a way few people reach. By day he was very much living up to his parent’s high expectations of Islamic South East Asian living and by night he was the disco king, with a childlike determination to achieve everything Western living could offer until 1am most weekends. He was able to merge the two ways of life without going insane and without the usual crutches young white men rely on, drugs and alcohol. Mixing with Karim introduced me to a lot of places and people where alcohol was not at the forefront of people’s minds. 

I had almost the same conversation with my Chinese friend, although he came to Britain in the 1990s to study and eventually stayed. There was a moment when his parents simply advised “it was time to marry” and he went scurrying off to China. He also maintained that look of fear which he tried to hide behind a kind of masculine persona.

Karim had certain qualities that I never found in my own peer group, loyalty, friendship, brotherliness and in many ways he was more of a Brother to me than my own brother was. I often wished I was half the man he was, yet he faced discrimination, judgement, intense expectations from his kin and from the society that we live in. The difference between his life and mine was that he came from a community, a network of people who loved and supported him yet he wanted to be independent. Like most British people I was taught not to expect help from people and to make the best of what I can achieve alone.  I had independence but was seeking community.

I was invited to his British wedding celebration, he arrived on a white horse dressed in Indian Clothes with photographers, surrounded by his family and I was reminded again how different culturally we are. His wedding had 300 people, in contrast, at my wedding there were 4, me, my other half and two witnesses and even one of them I didn’t know personally.  My parents had long since passed away and there was no one else in the family I keep in touch with. In his words “Arranged Marriage isn’t that bad – you just fight for six months then you learn to live with each other”.

Karim moved to the Emirates, I moved to Spain and we kind of found what we wanted – some sense of knowing more about who we are. To be British was to be a Global Citizen in the 1990s, but by today’s standards I’m not sure that’s the message the next generation are receiving. With Borders closing, Brexit, crimes rising and attitudes changing, Karim says he was right to move to raise his family in a place where he knows they will be in a diverse atmosphere. After all, diversity is the one true thing we all have in common.

As extreme political views ebb closer to the front in Politics the gap between those of us who want a diverse mixed culture and those of us who don’t is widening. There’s obviously  people who feel that being British means something else – maybe Karim, my Chinese friend and many others never got that Email.

(Never got that Email in this case simply means “were not aware”)

Affirmations

Monday – My English keeps getting better.

Do you truly believe that statement? If not, why not.

Tuesday – My efforts are paying off.

What are you doing differently from when you first started studying English? How long did it take before you saw results. Why was there a delay?

Wednesday – Others are amazed at how quickly I learn.

Being honest…. how long did it take you to get to this point? Why was that?

Thursday – I love learning English.

Did you hesitate when you read this? Why do you think you don’t love it?

Friday – English is becoming more natural daily

What progress are you measuring?