Blog
How do you peel a banana? Or leading young people from food poverty to food (and language) riches. With help from Jack Monroe, Rodrigo y Gabriela and the smelliest fruit in the world!
Date posted: Thursday 20th February 2014
‘Let food by thy medicine’
Hippocrates
Think of any pithy and sensible saying, and you can bet your bottom Euro that it will have first been said by
a) An Ancient Greek
b) Mark Twain
c) Winston Churchill
d) Bill Shankly
I have always thought that food can either be medicine or poison (lentils, red kidney beans, coffee and Coca Cola fitting into the latter category for me.) So I was a bit surprised to discover that an ancient Greek called Hippocrates had got to the idea first. (For many years I had been under the impression that he had given us the concepts of hypocrisy and hippies.) (more…)
May you stay forever young: or how time, like trains, keeps on moving. With help from Ming Tea, The Seekers, Johnny Cash and Chuck Berry!
Date posted: Saturday 15th February 2014
May you grow up to be righteous,
May you grow up to be true,
May you always know the truth,
And see the lights surrounding you.
May you always be courageous,
Stand upright and be strong,
May you stay forever young
Forever Young by Bob Dylan
I like trains. Not in a ‘let’s stand at the end of a platform and write down the train numbers and models in a little book’ kind of way. I like them in ‘a waiting for the train, watching it pull into the platform and seeing the people getting out, finally getting on myself, stowing the luggage safely, taking out the new Robert Harris novel I’ve just bought in WH Smith (buy one, get one half price), watching the suburbs gradually pass by (noting how even the smartest people wantonly chuck rubbish over their back garden fence onto the railway embankment), observing the rolling hills flash by, and finally dozing off and dribbling out of a corner of my mouth, with the sound of incomprehensible messages from the driver about apologies for delays and reminding passengers of the wide selection of outrageously-priced sandwiches in the buffet car drifting into my subconscious’ kind of way.
Finding Heaven at 38,000 feet. Or bringing up twins, with help from Talking Heads, Lynryrd Skynyrd and a roll of masking tape!
Date posted: Thursday 30th January 2014
Heaven. Heaven is a place.
A place where nothing, nothing ever happens.
Heaven by Talking Heads
Life was quite hectic when my children were very little. Sometimes I felt so tired that I would have a waking dream about being in an airliner on a long haul flight, with nothing to do but gaze out of the window and be waited on by air hostesses while listening to Heaven by Talking Heads. Then I would come to my senses and realise that it was my turn to load the shopping onto the conveyor belt at the checkout. In my dream I’d always reserved my seat well in advance, so I wouldn’t get stuck by the aisle and have to move every time my neighbours wanted to go to the toilet. I read in an article once that men pass wind about 15 times per day; though more often, and more unpleasantly, if they eat a lot of sulphur-rich foods like beans, cabbage, cheese, soda and eggs. (We have Gillian McKeith to thank for her revelation that ‘food combining’; e.g. eating dairy, meat, pulses and citrus foods during the same meal, can lead to ‘gas’.) The article didn’t mention females and gas, so to complete my vision of heaven there would be a woman sitting in the seat next to me. (more…)
Dances with Sheep: or children’s role play in the digital age. With help from Ray Charles, Kevin Costner and Ghita the Digital Shepherd!
Date posted: Saturday 25th January 2014
Have you ever wondered what men get up to when they are lonely, far away from home and surrounded by a flock of sheep? Now, finally, I can confirm the awful truth.
 Dances with Wolves |
 Dances with Smartphone |
Sheep have played a part in rural life for centuries, and have found their way into mythology, legends, literature and stories for children. Think Jason and the Golden Fleece, Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, The Boy Who Cried Wolf and even Shaun the Sheep. Transhumance, the seasonal migration of people with their flocks of sheep or herds of cattle in search of fresh pasture, is the stuff of legend, as well as being a big feature in American Westerns. Let’s take Dances With Wolves as an example. Kevin Costner took a huge risk when he bought the rights for this film, then produced, directed and starred in it. In 1990 there hadn’t been a hit movie based on life in the 19th century American West for quite some time. It was his directorial debut, and much of the film’s dialogue was to be in the Sioux Lakota language, with English subtitles. Add 6,000 rampaging buffalo (including two tame ones belonging to Neil Young), vast outdoor locations with untrained wolves, and you have a potential turkey on your hands. Kevin pulled it off though, and the film was a massive success. (more…)
The Beatles: their role in my downfall: or why maths is (or isn’t) so much fun. With help from John, Paul, George and Ringo and Dirk, Stig, Ron and Barry from The Rutles!
Date posted: Thursday 16th January 2014
Ooh I need your love babe
Eight days a week.
Eight Days a Week by The Beatles
 The Fab Four |
 The Prefab Four |
You may love The Beatles. You may think, ‘They are OK I suppose, but my dad preferred The Stones’. You may be someone who hates The Beatles. It’s just possible you may have no idea who The Beatles were. So here’s a warning: Prepare for a Beatlesfest! (more…)
Double Dutch? How do children pick up accents? With help from Focus, Golden Earring and 1000 drummers in Rotterdam!!
Date posted: Thursday 9th January 2014
Yodelling for Holland? Thijs van Leer of Dutch band Focus
Most people from the UK didn’t travel abroad much in the early 1970s. It’s not like we stayed in our villages and only went into the town across the valley on market days (that was in the 1670s), but there wasn’t the opportunity to go on holidays to the other side of the world. Your family might spend a week in southern Spain or Majorca, but anything else was considered to be highly exotic. Certain of us hankered after taking the ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. Naturally this was to see the Anne Frank Museum, the canals, and the galleries containing masterpieces by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Vermeer and the like. Obviously after all that you’d be a bit tired and would need to get refreshment from one of the legendary coffee shops, causing you to spend the rest of the day admiring the lovely colours of all the tulips, and marvelling at how slowly the sails on the windmills turned. (more…)
Get On My Cloud! Or how not to develop ‘confident speaking’. With help from Mick Jagger, Rhys Ifans and the cast of The Boat That Rocked
Date posted: Tuesday 17th December 2013
Hey, hey, you, you, get off of my cloud,
Don’t hang around ‘cos two’s a crowd.
The Rolling Stones, Get Off My Cloud
Mick Jagger: ‘Ugly and quite sinister’?
It was 1969. The streets and universities of Paris and the US were in the grip of serious student unrest. Honky Tonk Women by The Rolling Stones was at number one in the charts, and I was ending my second year of a seven year stretch of incarceration as a ‘prisoner of conscience’. Two years previously my parents had examined their consciences (and bank balance) and decided that I should attend a boys’ boarding school five hundred miles north of the family home. It was often tough going, but the experience had a major part in making me what I am, so I’m not complaining. (more…)
A personal response to the life of Nelson Mandela, from someone who met him
Date posted: Saturday 14th December 2013
As a tribute to a very great man, here is a blog post from my colleague Judith Twani.
For more information about Judith’s work click here.
The world is mourning the loss of one of the greatest statesmen of our time, a man that is forever imprinted in the history of the world. Some are calling him a “black Jesus”, a saint and a saviour, titles he would have been very uncomfortable with as he recognised his own weakness and human frailty and the contribution that all his comrades made to the liberation of the nation. (more…)
Bwi ba ba ba ba do: or why children are not ‘so cruel’. Supporting children who stammer, with help from Musharaf Asghar, Gareth Gates and John ‘Scatman’ Larkin
Date posted: Wednesday 27th November 2013
Ski bi di bi di do bap do
Do bam do
Bada bwi ba ba bada bo
Baba ba da bo
Bwi ba ba ba ba do [x2]
Everybody stutters one way or the other,
So check out my message to you.
As a matter of fact, don’t let nothin’ hold you back.
If the Scatman can do it, brother, so can you
Scatman John The Scatman (1995)
When we hear about children teasing or being unkind to each other, we are often told, ‘Children can be so cruel.’ I don’t actually believe that. I think that when children tease each other they are either making a mistake that they can learn from, or copying adults around them. Take the example of stammering/stuttering (they mean the same thing, which is accurately termed as dysfluency.) Everyone is dysfluent at some time or other in our lives: often when we are tired, highly nervous, or have had too much alcohol! Many children between ages two and four go through a period of normal non-fluency, where they seem to have so many ideas and not enough words to express them all. This can be a natural part of our lives as communicators, or become a serious problem. Which way it goes will depend on how other people react to the way we speak. (more…)
Did you ever wake up with them bullfrogs on your mind? Helping children to understand their emotions and to learn English, with help from Rory Gallagher and Canned Heat!
Date posted: Friday 22nd November 2013
Did you ever wake up with them bullfrogs on your mind?
Bullfrog Blues by Canned Heat (often performed as an encore by Rory Gallagher).
I’ve never woken up thinking about bullfrogs, but I do spend time thinking about some of the experiences I have had teaching other people’s children over the past 30 or so years. Teaching is a very demanding job, but of all the jobs in the whole world it’s probably the one where you can have most influence on children’s lives. And having 30 children thrust together for five days a week, as they grow and try out new things, can sometimes lead to a particular kind of heady intensity developing between them. Teachers know this and develop strategies for helping children get on together. However there are some things that you just can’t bargain for. (more…)