Education Archives • My Dog Errol

360 • Joy to the world

25th December 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

The truth can no longer be ducked:
This planet’s NOT totally fucked
‘Cos its prime pest, its blight,
Its blind parasite
Is programmed to auto-destruct.

I have to admit I wrote my Christmas Message yesterday — not on the morning of publication as is my wont – and road-tested it on a sandwich board, front and back, walking among last-minute panic-buyers in our Regional Shopping Mall. ‘Why are you wearing a mask?’ a child challenged me. ‘I don’t want to catch the plague,’ said I. ‘Your board says it’s going to disappear of its own accord,’ countered an angry mother. Only then did I realise that ‘pest’, ‘blight’ and so on could perhaps refer to the Covid virus, as well as to the human race. Twice the Christmas Message, then! The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

322 • The Spurning

17th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your ward, Abigail,
Did not gain a place here at Yale;
The Provost reviled
The ‘preposterous child’
While his staff found her ‘stupid’ and ‘stale’.

Well, I didn’t gain a place at Yale either, and I urge Abigail, and other rejects like her, to wear the disdain of ivory-tower eggheads as a badge of freshness and distinction. Either that, or to sweet-talk their guardian into endowing some hifalutin’ think-tank there, with free education for his dunderheaded protégée a specified condition of contract.

269 • Normal

25th September 2020 RL Comments 3 Comments

Please note that your stepson, Francisco,
Is banned from this evening’s Class Disco.
When everyone queues
To kiss Mrs Hughes
A normal-sized child will get his go.

Modern-day teachers show commendable dedication, generosity and imagination in devising bonding exercises, early in the academic year, that will incline their young charges to warm to the grade school experience. This tersely-worded bulletin, however, gives the receiving family insufficient sense of their unfortunate stepchild’s infraction. Is he too large, or too small, to join his new class buddies in Inappropriate Touching with their tutor?

260 • Whipsnade

16th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your child, Mary-Lou,
Is banned from our trip to the zoo.
The keepers advise
That a girl of her size
Might get killed by a rogue cockatoo.

Please note, rather, that a truly enlightened society would ban all children from visiting all zoos, the better to hasten their abolition. Since vested interests will surely strive to keep them in business we must – however ruefully – concede that the extinguishing of a few toddlers, by vengeful Psittaciformes bursting forth from internment, might prove a useful catalyst in turning the tide of public opinion against such egregious institutions.

247 • Julie noted

3rd September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

What a jolt, to be jilted by Julie,
An upstart, a pipsqueak, a schoolie!
I am not ‘old and weird
With dead gnats in my beard’
And my pants do not reek of patchouli.

So it’s back to school for the young, and back to the drawing board for others (their elders and betters, by most accounts). You don’t see Daniel Craig getting rejected by Léa Seydoux, do you? Or if you do – I don’t think I’ve seen that film – she surely doesn’t insult him in such vague and unimaginative terms.

223 • Apecraft (2)

10th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My brother had trained his bonobo
To play a few tunes on the oboe.
I bought my baboon
A good contra-bassoon
Yet that night she eloped with a hobo.

I have been reprimanded (hounded, even) about a ‘misanthropic tone’ that supposedly suffuses this poetical blog. ‘Has mankind accomplished nothing you would consider celebrating?’ writes one disenchanted correspondent. Well, it has: the admirable Great Ape Project has urged that chimps, bonobos and other such anthropoids should be accorded the same basic rights as human beings (exactly which human beings remains open to question). And no less a territory than The Balearic Islands extended personhood rights to the Great Apes as long ago as 2007 (one of that tribe holds temporary sway in my home country). But – cf bulletin #222 here at My Dog Errol – such envelope-stretching can come at a terrible price.

197 • Where are they now?

15th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

We’ve not seen a great deal of Piers;
He hasn’t come this way for years.
The reason he states
Is the size of the weights
That he’s tied to the hairs in his ears.

We’ve not seen a great deal of Layla.
She’s given her heart to a sailor.
She’s renting her spine
To a colleague of mine,
And the rest still remains with her gaoler.

We’ve not seen a great deal of Chalkie
Since he walked, on his hands, to Milwaukee
Where he teaches guitar
At The Conservatoire,
So he claims. But I guess that’s a porky.

A little suite of patterns or exemplars for those who need to craft excuses explaining why they no longer visit people they were friends with in High School (it’s too, too bourgeois, after all, to persist in blaming the Covid crisis for our insularity and self-absorption).

196 • Miss Walker recollected

14th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Senior teacher, Miss Walker –
So winsome, but such a fast talker!
In one very quick chat
(In a bush, near her flat)
I grasped just the single word, ‘stalker’.

Miss Walker and Ms Carter roomed in the same apartment complex as I recall, two pretty cute babes. Walker called me out, but I turned the tables and reported her for misconduct. It takes two to tango, I claimed at the time. I wasn’t that popular when the Principal dismissed her. Not being her only teen admirer, I didn’t feel that guilty. Go figure.

194 • Ms Carter, recollected

12th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Senior teacher, Ms Carter?
That course was a total non-starter.
I blame her huge eyes,
Her marble-white thighs
And her stylishly-streaming stigmata.

Yes, Paulina Carter, never to be forgotten, however hard I try. It was my first glimpse of such oozing wounds, and her whispered explanation (‘Call me a victim soul’) seemed somehow unsettling. Many of my classmates learned to focus on their studies: I only had eyes for Paulina.

192 • Ms Ewing recollected

10th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Senior teacher, Ms Ewing
(Whom most of the parents were suing)
Would cram us with Stilton
While yodelling Milton
God knows what she thought she was doing.

This was a couple years on, again, from my previous educational memo. The idea of snacking on British food in the BritLit class sounds kinda cool on paper. But it was implemented in this unruly, worrying manner: maybe gas from that nauseous cheese had gotten the better of her.

189 • Dr Campbell recollected

7th July 2020 RL Comments 12 Comments

Our Deputy Dean, Dr Campbell
Told us ‘God’s out to get those who gamble’.
Yet she died, in a bet,
Playing Russian Roulette
Which the School needed skill to unscramble.

This somewhat garish episode from childhood taught us more about adult hypocrisy than we could have learnt from any number of bookish fables or homilies. The school Governors reacted to a popular employee’s death by proclaiming a string of revisionist accusations … how she had ‘lied to the Board who appointed her’ … how her college degree had been ‘incorrectly specified’ … how dates of her previous employment ‘contained inaccuracies’. In short, parents could not blame the school for appointing such a dissolute daredevil to be their children’s moral guardian, because ‘Donna Campbell was not the person she purported to be.’ Well, which of us is? Even as a child I was mesmerised by the Establishment’s feeble catalogue of squirming, pedantic and ineffectual exculpations. Hats off, say I, to a memorable teacher, whose gift for non-verbal demonstration imparted such significant life-lessons.

187 • Ms Clayton recollected

5th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Junior teacher, Ms Clayton,
Disparaged the books of Len Deighton:
‘Too dismal, too bloody!
Instead let us study
My Odes to the Glory of Satan.’

‘Clayface’, as she was always known, had little idea what teenage boys enjoy reading – nor, indeed, what Bible-belt parents consider appropriate. I think she was from The Bronx, or Brooklyn. At that age, I imagined they were the same place.

185 • Ms Phipps recollected

3rd July 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Our Junior teacher, Ms Phipps,
Wore outfits with thousands of zips:
To combat the moth
She would use only cloth
Bought in very thin Möbius strips.

What better way for a teacher of Math to introduce perplexing concepts in Topology, you might say. But we were older now, and teenage hormones made it impossible not to dwell on the imagined contortions, in her boudoir, as she dressed. Or undressed. A Möbius stripper. I blush to think of it, even now.

184 • Man Friday’s Tale

2nd July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The day I met Robinson Crusoe
He was halfway through ‘Émile’ by Rousseau,
An excellent book;
If you’ve not had a look
Then I strongly suggest you should do so.

Academics talk about ‘metachronic hyperagonism’ when an imaginary character is caught reading about another imaginary character, in fiction published a full generation after her or his own supposed lifetime (luckily we are not obliged to listen). I leave it to others to imagine in turn what Rousseau’s Émile was reading. Anyway, today is apparently the death-anniversary of Daniel Defoe. On publication, his pioneering ‘Robinsonade’ claimed to have been authored by its imaginary protagonist, which may also be metachronic hyperagonism (ie ‘self-referential bullshit’). Especially since Crusoe was really Kreutznaer in any case.

182 • Ms Hewitt recollected

30th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Primary teacher, Ms Hewitt:
In theory she knew how to do it,
But as often as not
When she felt on the spot
She just made it all up. And we knew it.

Teachers should take care not to underestimate pupils’ insight and cunning. Admit it, if you’re flustered: it’s a good deal more endearing – and educative – than any amount of nervously-extemporised drivel.

180 • Ms Purvis recollected

28th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Primary teacher, Ms Purvis,
Enlivened a boring church service
By lighting a fuse
That ran under the pews,
And made some of the parents quite nervous.

Ms Purvis was another amiable maverick on our school staff, and this had been one of her more famous Founder’s Day pranks. Of course we urged her to repeat the escapade, but I guess she’d gotten a major rap before, so it had to remain a story.

179 • Blight on Blight

27th June 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I have only two problems with ‘Noddy’,
The plots and the writing (both shoddy).
If only Ms Blyton
Had worked with the light on
(Or simply been flung in a wadi).

These lines paraphrase my earliest memory of literary criticism. Ms Nicholls’s passion was commendable, her logic less so. A wadi-flinging before 1922, when Blyton published her first title, might have seemed arbitrary and over-harsh. Yet once she’d made it into print, the damage was irreversible – the smug racism, compulsive sexism and wooden stereotyping were out there, a viral formula spreading relentlessly from mind to mind to mind, yea, even unto the third and fourth generation.

178 • Ms Nicholls recollected

26th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

When our Primary teacher, Ms Nicholls
Equipped us with scythes and with sickles
We skipped down the street
Swiping folk off their feet.
She did get us into such pickles!

In a lesson about the Grim Reaper, when I was probably about 7 years old, our teacher brought in her academical robe and some gardening tools, and we took turns to dress up as Death. I owe that school a lot, and return to it often in dreaming. Ms Nicholls seems to have moved on, however.

170 • Deep Fake (5)

18th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The day I joined Phi Beta Kappa
I was kicked down the stairs by Frank Zappa;
I think it was him
Though he’d been to the gym
And was looking uncommonly dapper.

Here our unfortunate narrator is subjected to a cruel assault, on a day that should have been notable for quite different reasons. The wounded ego is naturally keen to recast the humiliation as an encounter with a musical idol, yet the fantasy it supplies casts the object of his veneration in an unsavoury – and wholly improbable – light.

161 • Dickens

9th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The day I read Great Expectations
My train had got stuck between stations:
Since time was so tight
I omitted, outright,
All the plot and the long conversations.

When they can find us nothing to look forward to, the British media likes to keep us doped with pointless anniversaries. ‘Today we celebrate the death of Charles Dickens,’ offered BBC Radio 4 a moment ago, and hordes doubtless cheered this maladroit proclamation. As our bulletin suggests, during the 150 years since Dickens’s passing the UK has learnt to scoff at entertainment that requires any imaginative participation.

156 • (Postscript)

4th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My knowledge is sparser than sparse
So this twenty-page scrawl is a farce.
Oh please, dear examiner
Credit my stamina!
Surely you want me to pass?

As the pollen-count exacerbates the common misery, one is reminded how hay-fever was the go-to excuse for a feeble performance in school and college examinations around this time of year (a personal footnote for the marker, extolling quantity over quality, was a second-string gambit, offered in reckless hope).

152 • Sapient cephalopod

31st May 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

The octopus looked in my eye
As he clung to my shivering thigh.
‘Man is scarcely unique,
Just a hideous freak,’
He observed. I could make no reply.

Alarmingly the octopus sets out to debunk Descartes‘s teaching, that ‘animals are mere machines, but man stands alone’, but its intentions are contradicted by the scenario itself. For one thing, the man is not ‘standing alone’. For another, only a unique species could fantasise such a damning put-down from a ‘mere machine’ – and then be too stupid to come up with an appropriate riposte.

141 • Meet the team (8)

20th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Your trainer’s Monsignor Arturo,
The curse of the Currency Bureau.
His fraudulent dealing
Has gone through the ceiling
And trebled the price of the Euro.

Reformed drug-users make the best addiction counsellors, just as burglars, having served time in jail, often prosper as security consultants. We might surmise from his title that Arturo, above, is a former inmate of the Vatican, and perhaps feel heartened that his skills – if such they be – have latterly found favour in a commercial milieu.

130 • Attaboy!

9th May 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

‘Well of course, he’s a National Icon.
Have you sat through his series on lichen?’
David Attenborough’s voice
Makes the whole world rejoice
(Or despair, when he’s not turned the mike on).

Yesterday the great man turned 94. He’s one of the few homegrown celebs the British media haven’t yet found a way of undermining. No doubt their lenses are trained on him night and day, hoping to snap inappropriate touching with a Venus flytrap, or lewd banter with a limpet. #MeNeither

121 • The Ouse

30th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As the cops drag a corpse from the Ouse:
‘Look Sarge, it’s all covered in clues!’
‘Wrong. The arm says “Suzanne”,
But it’s clearly a man.’
‘Right! We can’t trust a bloke with tattoos.’

This little cameo might suggest that The Boys in Blue — for all their open-mindedness, emotional intelligence and forensic acumen — haven’t quite got their heads around Gender Fluidity yet.

119 • Rhône

28th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Hats off to my patient Aunt Joan
Who taught me to play the trombone,
Or rather, she tried,
Dropping hints from the side
While I bobbed up and down in the Rhône.

No amount of patience on an instructor’s part will produce measurable progress in a pupil unless the overall circumstances are conducive to pedagogy. The informal teaching scenario here, and the diffident mode of inculcation, would garner scant praise from those who are paid to criticize professionals at work.

116 • Potus alert (4)

25th April 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

With tough healthcare questions to settle,
‘The Donald’ shows fans his true mettle:
We’ll defeat this disease,
His great wisdom decrees,
If we all begin mainlining Dettol™.

A memorable coronavirus intervention from the well-known TV entertainer. But he’s done himself a disfavor by recanting, and claiming his diagnosis was ‘sarcastic’. Intelligent people might stop taking him seriously.

113 • Beard of Avon

22nd April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A scholar writes: ‘Is it not weird
How Shakespeare’s portrayed with a beard?
The Sweet Bard of Avon
Was always clean-shaven.
At least, that is how he appeared.’

The reasoning of this ‘scholar’ does not reward protracted scrutiny. It pleases self-styled experts to wreathe their heroes in mystique, such as the belief that Shakespeare was born and died on 23 April, for which no firm evidence can be found.

112 • Isis

21st April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

At Oxford I’d very few vices
And strove to avoid any crisis
Unlike AJP Taylor,
The soi-disant ‘sailor’,
Who scuppered my punt on the Isis.

While we’ll never know whether Taylor sank this vessel deliberately, we can be quite certain that, even in the golden days of the Twentieth Century, any man of letters attracted gossip and rumour. Today, it would be threats of hanging or violation at the very least.

101 • Belfast Agreement

10th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A bell rings the hour in Belfast
To signal the end of the past:
Let the future begin!
Let us all abjure sin!
Let us wonder how long this will last … .

This incisive Anglo-Irish bulletin (posted as the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement actually falls on another Good Friday) reminds us that our lifetime is linear. Why, then, spend it eddying in circles?

095 • Yangtze Kiang

4th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As I drift down the Yangtze Kiang
I shall scream about Sturm, and then Drang.
If the onlooking horde
Fails to cheer, or applaud
They shall hear a yet harsher harangue.

Anyone remember the days when a troubled youth could devote a sophomore vacation to exhibitionistic acts of existential self-exorcism? The Chinese ‘hordes’ didn’t listen for long, it has to be admitted.

081 • Tiber

21st March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A mermaid emerged from the Tiber
To force me to feast on raw fibre;
Since I, like Rasputin,
Gorge only on gluten
Her fad did not gain a subscriber.

Our Roman week must surely end here. Food fads are one thing, food fascism another. A bearded charlatan may be outwardly less appetising than a Diving Belle, but at least the controversial Russian kept his dietary irregularities to himself.

041 • The Critics

10th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Q
Why is Handel’s long masterpiece, Saul,
Much like Pink Floyd’s immortal The Wall?
A
If you left out the stuff
That’s just twaddle and guff
You’d have hours of Nothing At All.

Our toxic culture lionises any sniping columnist whose primary skill is the facile disparagement of genius.

025 • Round the world

25th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

You still think the planet is flat?
Let’s climb up this tree for a chat.
From here, you’ll observe,
One can see round the curve …
Now how do you feel about that?

In this telling cameo, the impudence of empiricism confronts the implacable majesty of received wisdom.