Every Kind of Craft

The other day I found myself telling an anecdote about my English teacher, who was a wonderful woman; and it occurred to me that, in general, the staff at my secondary school were a pretty interesting lot. They weren't all good teachers, and one or two of them really weren't good people either, but on balance I recall them with a good deal of affection. And the way I'm going to do it here is that if I am sure they're dead by now I'll give their full names, but if there is any doubt I'll use an initial instead.

My English teacher was a Mrs Hirst, and she must have been somewhere around 60 when I was there; I very much doubt she's now approaching 110, though I'd be delighted if she is. She was a real character who, I'm glad to say, did not at all practise what she preached. She complained that it shouldn't be necessary to make learning fun, because children should just learn because they had to... and then made her lessons more fun than anyone else's. She couldn't help it. She was immensely creative and had a tremendous sense of humour. She also had progressive myopia, which meant she had a pair of glasses like fish tanks and terrible handwriting, for which she frequently apologised. She'd tell us that she felt bad telling us to write neatly when her own writing was barely legible; "but," she would add, "I don't have to pass any exams." It was a fair point. Anyway, in the end - and this is the anecdote I was telling the other day - they took her driving licence away because her eyesight had grown so bad. She lived in Endmoor, which was some distance out of town, and so, nothing daunted, she simply got herself a pony and trap. The pony was called Wallace. She explained blithely, "I may not be able to see where I'm going, but Wallace can!"

Then there was my physics teacher, who was also lovely, and the first absent-minded professor type I ever got to know. His name was John Smith, and he had difficulty remembering his own middle name... which was Alban. You would really think that someone called John Smith with a very distinctive middle name would have no trouble at all remembering it, but he did! He was extremely good at, and enthusiastic about, his subject, and incredibly vague about everything else. He was also invariably cheerful, pleasant, and encouraging. Lovely man, and I was very sad when I heard that he had died quite young.

Another very sad early death was my Latin teacher, Mrs Metcalfe. I have no idea how she managed to teach us so much Latin, but she did; she seemed to spend at least half of every lesson telling us fascinating anecdotes involving sheep. She and her husband had a sheep farm out at Ingleton. She always looked completely immaculate, not a hair out of place, even when she'd been up in the small hours helping a ewe to give birth. She, too, was a very creative person, and clearly greatly enjoyed supplementing our textbooks by translating Christmas carols and other familiar songs into Latin for us. I still recall her version of Jingle Bells, which was about a chariot race (of course it was - the ancient Romans didn't have sleigh bells!):

Tinniunt, tinniunt,
usque phalerae;
quam libenter audiunt
in cursu aurigae!

Those three were definitely my favourites. I didn't do so well for maths teachers till the fourth form (when I got Miss L, who married another maths teacher and became Mrs C), but fortunately we had such good textbooks that I was able to teach myself from those, so it didn't matter. (The maths teacher I had for the first three years was nice, don't get me wrong. She just couldn't teach.) And then there was Mr W in the sixth form, who was a decent enough maths teacher but had the odd habit of taking a step backwards after wrapping up a proof, and he'd invariably collide with something. If it was the filing cabinet he usually apologised to it. The RE teacher, Mr M, deserves an honourable mention for being a bit eccentric and very sweet; he couldn't teach either, largely because he couldn't keep discipline, but as long as you sat at the front so that you weren't directly dealing with the troublemakers at the back, you'd be reasonably OK. He was a Quaker, and, unusually for a Quaker, he was as vague as heck, but I liked him.

And then there was history.

I absolutely loathed history at school. It was only shortly after I stopped doing it that I discovered it is a fascinating subject, and I'd simply been very badly taught. The first history teacher I had was nice but woefully boring. The second one was still woefully boring, but she was also a dragon. And the third was a Mr H, and he was an absolute disaster. He wasn't even that interested in his subject; what he really liked was playing rugby, so he'd usually turn up in class with at least one bit of himself in a plaster cast. I didn't like him, and it later turned out that he didn't like me either because, apparently, I made him feel "intellectually inferior" - a confession my mother managed to frighten out of him. Her response, I believe, was: "Well, you are intellectually inferior, you stupid man!" Which is not how I'd have handled it, but... she did have a point, I'm afraid. He wasn't that bright. In the end he ran off with one of the sixth form, leaving behind a wife and two children, so his moral compass wasn't working too well either. He was, I'm happy to say, very much an exception.

We shall not speak of the PE teacher. :-)

I firmly believe that you're never too old to learn new things. Some of these things are very useful; some of them aren't necessarily immediately useful, but they're nonetheless very satisfying; and some are just... plain weird. Today I'm going to share with you something I learned the other day that falls squarely into the middle of that last category.

I should explain that my Discord fibre crafts crowd is extremely multinational, with a strong preponderance of European, and in particular German/Austrian/Dutch. I continue to be amazed and humbled at how good their English is - it took me quite a while to twig that they weren't native speakers. Becoming fluent in a second language is never easy, but when that language is English it goes up by several further levels of difficulty because the spelling and pronunciation are so irregular; one of the fibre crafts crowd is also a member of my D&D group, and the other day she pronounced the word "pint" (D&D, being US in origin, uses imperial measures, which is why I generally have my calculator on hand while playing) to rhyme with "print". I'd honestly never thought about that one till she said it, but, yes, it made perfect sense; to my knowledge there is no other word in the entire English language which ends in a consonant plus "-int" and does not rhyme with "print".

But that's an aside. The weird fact I learned the other day is that there is a disproportionate tendency among male tourists in Amsterdam to drown in the canals.

And, of course, the moment I saw that, I had all sorts of questions. Why male? Why tourists? Why specifically Amsterdam? (I'm well aware that other places, especially in that region, have canals; it was one of the many things I enjoyed about my visit to Den Haag several years ago.)

So it was explained to me; and it goes like this.

Male tourist, probably young but not necessarily, gets plastered in Amsterdam. He may or may not also get off his head on drugs; the important factor here is he's very drunk. There are public loos but he's too far out of it to recognise one when he sees one, so, when he is inevitably taken short, he goes to widdle in the nearest canal. Now - and this is something I didn't know - if you are extremely drunk, widdling can drastically lower your blood pressure; I don't know exactly how that works, but it is a known thing.

So our tipsy widdler then faints and falls into the canal, where, if there's nobody around to spot him and haul him out (which there probably won't be if it's the middle of the night), the poor bloke promptly drowns. And I am here to say: please. Don't do this.

First of all, if you are male, and you are the sort of person who likes to get totally off his head when on holiday, please consider a destination other than Amsterdam. Secondly, if you absolutely must go to Amsterdam, ensure that you have someone with you at all times who is not off their head; before getting off your head, take a little tour of the area so you know exactly where all the loos are; and, if all else fails, for the love of whichever deity owns your allegiance don't widdle in the canals. It's not simply a matter of public nuisance, though for that reason alone I'd encourage not widdling in the canals wherever you are and whatever state you're in at the time. It's just a really bloomin' undignified way to die.

Public service announcement ends here. Carry on, folks!

When I was at primary school, I had to learn the descant recorder, because in those days that was what you did. I was very happy to do so; I liked music, the idea of making my own had always appealed, and my mother wouldn't teach me to play the piano. There was, however, just one problem. I had to practise.

It wasn't that I had a problem with that. I was perfectly willing to do as much practice as necessary. No - the problem was that me practising the recorder was annoying; and it was made perfectly clear that it was annoying, despite the fact that my parents would occasionally remind me to do it. And since my entire life mission as a child was to minimise the inevitable annoyance I caused my parents simply by dint of my existence, that made things very difficult. I needed to practise, I wanted to practise, but... "haven't you practised enough now? And in any case you're not getting any better."

Actually, that wasn't quite true. I did improve at playing the recorder, but not nearly as much or as fast as I really should have done, which was further "evidence" for my parents' ingrained belief that I was totally unmusical and so it was a waste of time trying to teach me any kind of instrument. Looking back, it's now very obvious why I didn't improve as I ought to have done. The first reason was that I was getting zero encouragement (well, in fact, "zero" is putting it kindly; what I actually got was active discouragement), and the second was that I wasn't practising in the most efficient way for me. I'd pick up the recorder every few days and then practise till even I got tired of it, so that I got all the vague disapproval out of the way at once.

That might work very well for some people, but it turns out I am not one of them. It's taken me till very recently to find the best way for me to practise things, basically because there is no one magic routine that works for everyone, so to find the best way for you, you need to stumble across it; and in my case it's doing it every single day (barring major illness and other emergencies, of course). It doesn't need to be for very long. It's the "every day" bit that really matters.

This is another thing for which I have to thank the SCA. I've already mentioned the scribal challenge which is going on at the moment; the idea is that you're supposed to do scribal work of some sort on 100 days of this year, not necessarily consecutive. I was, at the time, about to start work on a very complex scroll, and I thought "if I don't do this every day I'm going to lose my momentum"; so I did 100 consecutive days... and then carried on, because there was no reason not to. After I finished the scroll, I started doing some intensive illumination practice, with the specific aim of a) being able to draw Celtic birds confidently and b) following on from that, being able to incorporate them into any piece of knotwork. It took me about three weeks of short daily practice to get there, and during that time I drew a whole lot of odd-looking birds. I was forced to break my streak on Sunday because I was too ill to draw, but other than that I have done some kind of scribal work every day this year, and it's been incredibly helpful.

So, when I got Robin the Recorder, rather than practising the way I did when I was a child, I decided I was going to go for short daily sessions. I do 10-15 minutes a day, sometimes a little more if I'm working on a new piece; and I haven't had him very long, but I'm already seeing a big improvement which is not totally down to the fact that lo these many years ago I played the descant. I'm playing Handel now. Granted, very easy Handel - we're not talking about one of those arias with the scary melismas which are pretty much impossible to sing unless you're someone like d'Artagnan (whose rendering of the aria Hateful man! from Alexander Balus is jaw-dropping in every respect). But, nonetheless. Handel. If you'd told me when I bought Robin that I'd be playing Handel less than a month later, I wouldn't have believed you.

We're heading into a heatwave at the moment. I shall continue my daily practice. I'm pretty sure it will get unpleasantly hot, but not too hot to Handel...