A Carol

…from John Masefield’s The Box of Delights. Presented here without comment – which perhaps is for a future post. – except that in Masefield the even lines are indented.

George took his lantern from the nail
And lit it at the fire-a;
He said, “The snow does so assail,
I’ll shut the cows in byre-a.”

Amid the snow, by byre door,
A man and woman lay-a
George pitied them, they were so poor,
And brought them to the hay-a.

At midnight, while the inn kept feasts,
And trump and whistle blew-a,
George heard a trouble in the beasts
And to the stable drew-a.

And there within the manger bars
A little child new born-a,
All bright below a cross of stars
And in his brow a thorn-a.

The oxen lowed to see their King,
The happy donkey brayed-a,
The cocks and hens on perch did sing,
And George knelt down and prayed-a.

And straight a knocking on the door,
And torches burning red-a,
The two great kings and Melchoir
With robes and wine and bread-a.

And all the night time rolled away
With angels dancing down-a;
Now praise we that dear Babe today
That bears the Cross and Crown-a.

Amid piles of books

The great Alcuin once praised a time (in his past) when he sat with a friend, quiet inter librorum copias – amid piles of books. I have had the privilege of doing the same, and if I didn’t get a PhD out of it, well, more fool me – but I did spend time with chant books, books of hours, office books, the I’m-sure-this-is-interesting-but-it’s-page-after-page-of-crabbed-writing-with-the-occasional-red-capital books… So I wasn’t a complete novice when Lizzie and I went to the British Library for

Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War

…even if my “own period” was six or more centuries later, the late C15th and early C16th MSS. The printing press; the rise and fall of Norman-French; complex harmony; Wycliffe; America… In coming to this eagerly awaited event exploring the piety and power of the kingdoms of what is now called England, I thought I knew what I was getting into – naive of me: this is so much richer than a timeline of MSS.

It is simplistic to say so, but six hundred years is a long time for any scholar, committed professional or amateur, and the thousand years between Cnut the King and us seems more than that by a huge stretch. These are works that never were designed to come together – they span five hundred years themselves – but together they make the most wondrous kaleidoscope of a culture – or of a string of shifting cultures. The BL has skillfully collected material that is not only of monumental importance but also illustrates very well what a different world the peoples of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms inhabited. The lady Wynflaed who left her nun’s veil in her will, as well as naming her slaves that were to be freed; the warning illustration in a bilingual psalter against deceit, showing Cupid firing arrows at a cuddling couple; the elegant copy of Alcuin’s letters; Aelfric’s Grammar… The exhibition is designed to lead the visitor roughly through the first peoples we might think of as “The Anglo-Saxons” (book after book is available on this shorthand; suffice it here to say that, while explaining the rise of Germanic kingship in Southern Britain, the curators steer mercifully away from Our Island Story) through to one of the final cases, The Domesday Book. And for similarities we have not only a growing and changing view of power and relationship with the rest of Europe (and Africa: it was lovely to hear the astonishment of two visitors reading about the African Abbot Hadrian of Canterbury), but the growth of ‘our’ language from the grey, tatty wonder that is Beowulf through to Bishop Wulstan’s poem in praise of…. well, himself. There is enough here to challenge and to enlighten what it is to be English – or even English-speaking – in the uncertain times we live in, partly because we are shown a story – uncertain, faltering, violent, pious – of the growth of English identity.

I’m thinking about the books, principally: they were what I wanted to see. I have mentioned my love of manuscripts before in the blog and although I love them, I know there are crowds of people with more enthusiasm and expertise: my passing note (twice, I think) of Christopher de Hamel’s wonderful Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts just points to who I have read and learned from. (And in such a list I can’t miss out Tolkien (the model for the Dwarves Chronicle in Moria is in this exhibition) or Lewis (and Pauline Baynes, who must, I think, have seen the Utrecht or Harley Psalter) or indeed M R James, whose works I used in paleography tutorials in the 80s.) His book, especially, and Daniel Wakelin’s Designing English book and exhibition were in my head as I looked forward to – and then looked round – the British Library exhibition.

Just sometimes hyperbole around amazement and treasure is justified. It wasn’t just the size of the great Codex Amiatinus that astonishes, but its story: how it got to Italy with Abbot Ceolfrith and why it never got to Rome; what happened to its equally massive sisters; what it shows in illustration and skill. It is open at a wonderful interpretation of a scholar (Ezra, the exilic historian) at the task of writing , a common enough image (not wishing to damn Lindisfarne’s spare and lovely images with faint praise!), but here with his library open, a book on the floor, his ink-mixing stuff to hand… It sums up to me so much of what I love about scholarship both as an activity and as an object of study. Ezra is inter librorum copias, and so I am here, not changing the world by restoring Jerusalem, or making a bid to be made Archbishop like Ceolfrith, but just a tourist into this world of manuscripts, inspired by their beauty and fragility, intrigued by their world(s), glimpsed, like a friend’s face in a crowd.

This is a majestic and vitally important exhibition. It is improbable that I will get to see many of these treasures in another, and it may be that conservation practices will mean they will never come together again. Once in a lifetime? Once in a thousand years.

Oldtales

Reading Peter Dickinson’s The Kin is intriguing. I am not yet finished, but want to take a bit of time to think about stories of origin and how he creates and presents them in between the narrative chapters, the things he calls the Oldtales. Origin stories are interesting in Dickinson because they illuminate the actual tale of the children of the Moonhawk Kin, and their relationship to the places through which their Kin travel.

However, preparing a blog on them I thought I would go back to source books that in turn illuminate “our” own origins (the “our” is in doubt, of course, because of the ways in which increasingly we view our origins: Chris Stringer and Adam Rutherford, for example, give us lively accounts of a trail of humanity that does not include Adam and Eve). I went back to Mircea Eliade to read of the ‘African High Gods,’ of Ngai, of Ndjambi Karunga, and to read the beautiful Hymn to Shamash from Mesopotamia and prayers of a !Kung hunter – and I thought of the stories in Genesis that explain Mamre and Moriah, Beersheba and Bethel. The connections to Peter Dickinson (whose books tell us he was, as a long-term project, often to be found exploring myth and religion in his writings) are really interesting, but didn’t illuminate what I was looking for. How does these stories resonate with the reader? Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces brings me, tantalisingly, to the Bacchae and thence to Thursbitch (“O Bonny Bull”), but again and again I find myself looking at the first stories in Genesis.

They are worth a read in an attempt to see quite what they have to say about earlier views of where we come from, but as Robert Alter in his Art of Biblical Narrative suggests, we need

…some detailed awareness of the grid of conventions upon which, and against which, the individual work operates… am elaborate set of tacit agreements between artist and audience about the ordering of the art work…

and he warns that when we look at biblical narrative

we have lost most of the keys to the conventions out of which it was shaped.

This gives Dickinson a free hand in creating the stories that illuminate the main narrative, of course, and the creation of the Good Places, the multiplication of the sons of An and Ammu – so that these “folk tales” are all distinct, sort of working with the main narrative, sometimes not (yet) – but the opposite is true when we look at our own old tales. We are encouraged, I think, to see them as part of a single book, The Bible, when it might be better to see the biblical texts as a collection – and Genesis itself to be a collection within the collection. All of a sudden I am back in my Old Testament tutorials as an undergraduate, reading Gerhard von Rad.

Von Rad proposes a number of narrative sources, “woven together more or less skillfully by a redactor.” This, in part, explains the two creation stories at the start of the Genesis collection “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” and then “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens” which leads to the next story beginning “Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.” The gods (in the plural form Elohim: we are already into controversy here, but remember that “God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” not to mention the “sons of God” in chapter 6) make choices about the world: reading these stories out of their stained-glass attitudes we have a different sort of world, closer to the movements of Dickinson’s Black Antelope, where the text of Genesis is “de-Biblified,” taken as origin-text rather than sacred story.

Except, maybe, all origin-tales, to sound “right” to us, have an element of sacred story about them? I think I have a lot more to think about.

Codicil:

The amazing Neil Philip, on Twitter, has helpfully informed me and Mat:

The Genesis Rabba, a Jewish commentary of c.400 CE, says that while G-d created Adam in his own image, this likeness to G-d only lasted until Enosh, son of Adam’s 3rd son Seth, after which humanity degraded and acquired faces like apes. Also says humans had tails like animals.

Loads and loads more to think about then!

How Dead Are the Dead?

In the great story of Funnybones we are confronted with an unheimlich narrative. Three characters go for a walk, play on the swings and go home – but there’s a problem: they are dead. Or are they? They are skeletons, certainly, but they have emotions, thought, language, relationships and in any case we are told explicitly that

On a dark dark hill there are was a dark dark town…
and in the dark dark house there was a dark dark staircase
and down the dark dark staircase there was a dark dark cellar
and in the dark dark cellar …
some skeletons lived.

The nub of my argument when I talked in the Brookes Hallowe’en Seminar was that depiction of “real death” is sometimes avoided or underplayed, although this is changing. The comic misunderstanding of the skeleton in the park requires however at least some knowledge of what a skeleton is. It comes back to the time (maybe 1993) I read Funnybones in nursery, with animal X-rays darkening the windows, and as I finished (“…some skeletons lived….THEY STILL DO”) the X-rays with perfect timing slid from their places and we all jumped. Death as comic – but also as unnerving.

In Funnybones the dead are hardly that unnerving. A big skeleton, a little skeleton and a dog skeleton are identifiable as a strange sort of being: nocturnal, with a clear mission to frighten people, but not dead, really, and if undead then hardly George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. But they have accidents, experience disappointment, and are warm towards one another. In the disjuncture the reader sees not only the scarily unfamiliar, but also the very famliar, a family unit out with the dog. Their silliness reminds me always of the “gurning to camera” of the third skeleton in the C14th De Lisle Psalter, Arundel MS 83, f. 127v, blogged about (with a great illustration of the grinning skeletons) by the British Library here. But while in “The Three Living and the Three Dead,” the skeletons meet the living princes to “admonish them to consider the transience of life,” in Funnybones we are with Gilbert and Sullivan finding that “we spectres are a jollier crew than you, perhaps, suppose.”

To understand what is going on here, we can refer to Gillian Rose’s visual methodology:

What is being shown? What are the components of the image? How are they arranged?
Is this a contradictory image?
What knowledges are being deployed?

This has come up before (it’s a shame that the new blog hasn’t preserved the images) and formed the backbone of the talk I gave a couple of years ago on the visual methodology of death. It is also pertinent in the run up to Hallowe’en: again something I have discussed before. What is being shown is a family out for a walk – or three animate skeletons on a (rather unsuccessful) scaring spree. In the same way there are complexities in the folk tale of the Teeny Tiny Woman who is compelled to give back the bone she finds in a graveyard. The sheeted figures who look on in horror as she pillages a bone for her supper (what on earth is that about?) require their bone back. They are not, initially, menacing: they are being menaced by a cute little old lady. The comedy lies in the contradictory imagery, with the knowledges being deployed being rather complex.

The Teeny Tiny Woman, Funnybones; these will do for now. They draw on the flwing sheets of M R James and the earlier shrouded corpses. But of course children do know skeletons – museums have them; dinosaur fossils have them; we (and this is a bit of a shock: see this brief observation) have them. And in Funnybones we are invited to see with T S Eliot’s Webster “the skull beneath the skin.”

There are other ways children see death, of course. Children’s Literature does well to represent a number of aspects:

In The Scar we deal, heartbreakingly, with real death – but the dead mother is unseen: her absence is the key act in the story.Dad said “She’s gone for ever.”I knew she hadn’t gone, she was dead and I would never see her again.’This story is not alone in looking, not at death, but at bereavement, just as the heart breaking Sad Book depicts the death of Michael Rosen’s son Eddie as a blank page, a gap in the history, loss. He is drawn very much alive – and then not seen. A kinder view than the medieval skeletons? Or more shocking?
In Badger’s Parting Gifts, on a different tack we are invited to see the actual moment of Badger’s dying, going down into a long dark tunnel with no fear or pain. Yet even here the dead Badger is not depicted.
In Death Duck and the Tulip (when I’ve talked about this the most divisive book choice), Duck recognises Death and they are friends – of a sort. Death here is close kin to the medieval Death the Reaper, or the three dead mentioned above, and maybe there is a message here of living life to the full and accepting our mortality that is not far from Arundel MS 83…

A conclusion to all this? No, there isn’t one. Writing about death finds a number of ways to lighten the message – comedy; the sidestepping of the dead body (not always: Sydney Smith does so well (gently but clearly) in Footpath Flowers); using animals instead of humans – but increasingly these are not hard and fast conventions, and I predict we will see more imaginative ways to deal with letting in the dark and the dead into children’s literature.

Ahlberg A, Ahlberg J (2010) Funnybones (re-issue ed). London: Puffin

De Paola T (1985) Teeny Tiny. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Doonan, J (1993) Looking at Pictures in Picture Books. Stroud: Thimble

Erlbruch, W (2008) Duck, Death and the Tulip. Wellington: Gecko

Lawson, J and Smith S (2015) Footpath Flowers. London: Walker Books

Moundlic, C (2009) The Scar. London: Walker

Rose, G (2007) Visual Methodologies (2nd ed). London: Sage

Rosen, M (2004) The Sad Book. London: Walker Books

Varley S (1985) Badger’s Parting Gifts. London: Picture Lions

Up the Mountain

Marianne Dubuc’s Up the Mountain is worth considering when anyone says that a picture book is simple. It does not have the visual fireworks of Gaiman and McKean’s Wolves in the Walls or the political complexity of Foreman’s A Child’s Garden but the straightforward story (outlined below) has a lot to offer.

I find it is sometimes challenging when reading educators’ social media about “Where would you have this book?” and ” What use could you make of this book?” to stop and think of a book as an object in itself: the visual aspects, the pace and language of the narrative… That’s not to deny teachers for a moment a very exciting way to explore and widen their own understanding of “children’s books” – but just that sometimes a book calls me to step away from the pedagogy. Up the Mountain does that for me. Yes, it fits with projects on Outdoors, it could be used to discuss age, and friendship, and exploring, maps and maths, wildlife, ability…

But that’s why it is a really enticing book. “Very old” Mrs Badger, on her Sunday walk up the mountain meets the little cat Leo who overcomes his reticence and joins her in the walk – that Sunday and “for many a Sunday after that,” until Mrs Badger no longer has the strength and it is up to Leo to rediscover the mountain. It is a plain enough narrative, with an easy pace and lovely drawings, and as Leo makes the “splendid” mountain his own, it has a poignant and subtle message about growing up and passing on the things you have experienced and grown to love – as Leo does at the end of the book. This is a story my 5yo granddaughter will love, but the unspoken affection, the relationships between character and landscape, the exploration of tradition and enthusiasm mean I can return to this over and again for my own pleasure.

So how do we step back from being pedagogues to being simple readers? Easy enough for me in semi-retirement, maybe, easier still with research partners to spur me on, but the following are just some rough-and-ready thoughts.

Reading widely helps: if you stick to the ones you know, you are missing out. Not just because this book or that is perfect for this child or that, but because your own enjoyment is endangered, rendered threadbare. On social media recently, a new teacher asked about the book for this next term. My response was to suggest she read a book she will enjoy reading, and the best way to find those is to read widely. The commmuity of people reading and discussing “children’s books” (or fantasy or whatever) is rich, wide and very charitable. Look at Sarah or Dimitra for starters…

Re-visiting half-forgotten or set aside books or series: have you “done” the lovely Owl Babies a lot? What about On the Way Home? Or if you set aside something (a besetting sin of mine) ask yourself why, and whether it’s worth returning to it. Finish the Stone Book Quartet. I bet there’s a Moomin story sitting unexplored – or what about Jansson’s adult books??? There’s a whole different thread…

Treating the books destined for the classroom just as you would your holiday reading: You don’t intend to put Margaret Atwood’s Hagseed in the classroom but how did you read it? Did you take its psychological messages about bereavement and revenge to heart, or did you read it as a comic exploration of a Shakespeare play? Did you read and re-read, or did you race through it? Did you share it with a friend or a partner? Or a book group? Or on Goodreads? What did you “get out of reading it”? I read seasonally: Moomins in the autumn, maybe, and Lucy Boston’s Children of Green Knowe in December… How do you read? What do you enjoy? Why do I like Up the Mountain so much? Is it that poignant subtext of Mrs Badger saying goodbye to her beloved Sunday walks? The gentle loyalty of Leo? A bit of self-reflection might let you think differently about the children’s books not as a resource but as a source of wonder and enjoyment.

Reading about authors – reading other people’s critiques of authors’ discussions and interviews (I have to link to Mat Tobin here, but check out Simon and Martin and others, too), author biographies, books by the author outside their usual genre. No, for some people that’s not the way they want to go, but for some those lavish books of Maurice Sendak’s artworks or the simple self-revelation of Alan Ahlberg’s The Bucket are just the thing to get you looking at the books children read in a different light.

And then finally. Once you have enjoyed the illustrations, seen the way prose and picture work together (or in opposition), enjoyed that way that little cat peers out at Mrs Badger and how the bunny later echoes the incident, finally figured out the relationship between Sally Gardner’s wolves and John Masefield’s – then start looking at the classroom, and again, Mat has the resources … Too late to do this for this summer, I know, but this is, after all, simply a reflection as the weather cools. Time for the Moomins for me, then… More mountains and small beasts.

Not Brookes Branded?

This is a brief (ish) reflection on the joys and trials of being a Principal Lecturer and Programme Lead as I come to the end of my service in the role. Trigger Warning: contains opera lyrics, I’m afraid.

Starting from First Principles, from Values, and while for me this is Oxford Brookes, the lovely and infuriating and supportive and dismissive organisation that has been my work home since I moved from being a Headteacher in 2002, I don’t think I am alone in education in any phase or sector in the joys or the frustrations I’ve met with. As an aside, I’ve only just seen this piece in the local press: my comments on leaving Bartlemas bear a striking resemblance to what I am about to say here! This link, in any case, takes us to the Brooks strategy and vision of the University: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/strategy/strategy-2020/ and I’ll pick out some important ideas.

…committed to leading the intellectual, social and economic development of the communities it serves…
We will continue to enhance the value – and the perception of value – of our social as well as educational mission…
Oxford Brookes University will provide an exceptional, student-centred experience which is based on both internationally significant research and pedagogic best practice. We will build on a tradition of distinction in academic, professional and social engagement to enhance our reputation as a university which educates confident citizens characterised by their generosity of spirit.

This is fine stuff, but perhaps I would amend it to warn against the rise of what Paul Gilbert referred to recently as “non-compassionate processes.” There has to be room – as Helena Mitchell and I are pointing out in a forthcoming chapter – for compassion and self-reflection as a way of cutting through what one writer calls the ‘semantic mess’ of educational values.

It would be easy to cite some of the less compassionate processes, and the UK is not alone in seeing managerial/administrative creep introduce these to the cost of staff and (very possibly) student experience. Say this to many public-sector (or quasi-public-sector) workers and a car parking debate will not be far behind. I will not dwell on the negatives, in case it looks like I am giving up the role out of pique, which is emphatically not the case. Instead I want to think about three phrases from my quotation above. Let me put the first two together as parts of the same idea:

Leading the intellectual, social and economic development of the communities it serves…our social as well as educational mission.

The Programme Lead is really responsible for a rather odd set of tasks that make up a bigger picture – not so much a mosaic as an anthill of duties of various sizes: performance development review; watching over quality returns of all sorts; chairing meetings, sitting in others; teaching and supervising; that knock in the door or the call that says “can you just…”; selling the programmes from first enquiry to beyond graduation… It is sometimes hard to see how the little tasks fit with the grand schemes, especially the aspirational stuff about leading social development and student-centredness. Gregory the Great (d 604) complained of the tensions and the perils of the distracted (Pope or Programme Lead) have not lessened, as the Barber of Seville noted:

Tutto mi chiedono, tutti mi vogliono,
tutti mi chiedono, tutti mi vogliono,
Qua la parruca, presto la barba, presto il biglietto, ehi!

Figaro… Figaro… Figaro… Figaro...Figaro…

Where does coffee fit? The chat on the bus? The head round the door to “just check…”? How do I find time to further the grand purpose when I have these minutes to review? Or how does tine management becomes so lacking in compassion? Or how might I discern an ethical aspect to these procedural tasks?

Uno alla volta,
per carita!

A university which educates confident citizens characterised by their generosity of spirit.

It’s interesting to see the parallels between this statement from Oxford Brookes and Geoff Taggart whose vision for the Early Years is that “Compassionate pedagogy seeks to nurture children who are vocal, capable citizens as well as secure, well-adjusted people.” In the same way, at Brookes we educate [sc “people to be”] confident citizens in the midst of what some have described as a Mental Health epidemic. Is an academic a Canute, failing to hold back the tide? I would argue not, despite growing calls for better engagement from academic staff with the mental health of students, although I do think Paul Gilbert’s warning about processes that are “non-compassionate” is worth remembering: to redress the balance in what are potentially non-compassionate situations we need “intentionality and commitment:” vague notions are not enough. What struck me most, in a personally significant, moving (and manic) few days in May, was the Compassionate Mind conference in which leaders in all sorts of sectors were united in a plea to return to first principles, to re-examine practices and attitudes that were toxic: overworking; rising levels of stress-related illness; the extra hour’s emails when you get home… Generosity of spirit can feel a bit like a drive to work harder and harder, from a position in which the individual is the slacker. If our first principles include generosity, we must consider emotional and physical wellbeing as key to that, and leaders (including Programme Leads) have to see that generosity includes gentleness, and role-modelling concern. If “what will survive of us is love” (a line I cited earlier but with added poignancy as I start to pack up) then it starts now or more likely should’ve started years ago, before the packing boxes, or crisply worded email or the exasperated comment, or receiving these and storing them away (yes, Nick, that means you – and yes, St Benedict thought this all over in Ch 4 of the Rule centuries ago…) or even the setting up of the shiny new system for this or that: its chrome plating does not guarantee its ethical worth. Gosh, that was a long sentence! I think very often- and this year or two in particular- I have seen (like I have never seen before) where love and compassion are, and where they are not, in my own work life. Partly, where they are not are in the internal and external drivers that make me feel bad when I cannot deliver. Where they are, are among the trees on my lovely campus, green places, the student whose need or query I can meet, the quiet (or not-so-quiet) time with friends, the mind-stretching afternoon thinking through research. Wild Spaces, Wild Magic has to have a mention here – and brings me to my leaving.

While this song does go through my head from time, this

Notte e giorno faticar
per chi nulla sa gradir;
piova e vento sopportar,
mangiar male e mal dormir!
Voglio far il gentiluomo,
e non voglio più servir…

is not really me… A gentleman – even of leisure- doesn’t seem to suit me, although the old designation of Gentleman Scholar would be fine. I think I am sorted enough in my going that I will not be an Independent Scholar, at least, a phrase that reminds me of the Abbot in Brian Moore’s Catholics, adrift and alone, prelatus nullius, nobody’s prelate. As Julie Fisher has said “Independent Learning is not Abandoned Learning” – and I hope my plans for reserach and writing are the same. Not to see Thursbitch again would be painful.

But since I’ve launched into one other language, and while the clouds lower over this blog, here is the gloomy Chorus from the end of Anouilh’s Antigone:

Et ceux qui vivent encore vont commencer tout doucement à les oublier et à confondre leurs noms.
Cest fini.

Finished. This is the greatest fear, I guess, of humanity, and it does, in some way, strike me as I write this: the fear of being asked “Who are you?” when one expected to be recognised. Will I continue to contribute or merely haunt? The revenant in stories usually has some name, whether (in my family) their vision is now reckoned as beatific (it’s his feast day as I write this section and I will confess I have always wanted the hat he wears) or something less rewarding. The notion is that these spirit-presences at least are not forgotten…

Let’s not end there. Let’s search for another, livelier, image. More from Don Giovanni?

Finch’han dal vino
calda la testa,
una gran festa
fa preparar.

Or is that too out-of-context, too frenetic? There is no “great feast” but maybe there are friends and people without whose love and support my world would be a greyer place… and maybe a beer or two. I’m back from the greyer thoughts of leaving to the much richer remembering how lovely these last few years have been, genuinely connecting with people whose love and friendship sustain me. To move away from grand opera to Gershwin:

They can’t take that way from me.

I’ll end by reflecting on the title of the blog. I started from core beliefs and values, and nothing has exemplified how easy it is to lose that vision of “enhancing the value – and the perception of value – of our social as well as educational mission” than the criticism that a student-initiated project on Mental Health was “not Brookes Branded” and “untidy.” I won’t rant, but since this has been so much about music, here is a piece of beautiful, lively, moving – and tidy – music. A bit of Bach never comes amiss. And here is something else – also moving, well-thought-out, heartfelt, beautiful, but much less tidy: Vaughan Williams in a piece I’d like to think of as the soundtrack to walking to Thursbitch. Is tidiness per se part of the University mission (I don’t just mean Oxford Brookes)? Does corporate image drown out how we relate to the individuals? Does single spacing in a Programme Handbook serve to advance or inhibit student satisfaction?

We might argue that tidiness allows for things and people to know where their best chance of flexibility lies, and that untidiness makes for reaction-led work, chasing around stables locking the doors. I think this has been my problem for some time, and I also think that reactionism is maybe where UK Higher Ed finds itself at the moment on student and staff mental health, but as we contemplate shaving down resources, focussing on core business, we must go back to the core ideals of “exceptional, student-centred experience.” And I have come to realise that student-centredness has to include the open ear, the compassionate stop in the cafeteria, the smile… and it starts with the people who work in Higher Education, just as it does in Early Years: it comes down to genuine interest in Nursery and Reception and it comes down to it in seminars and classes at Oxford Brookes, too. Buzz-phrases to finish with then: I stand up for relational pedagogy and compassionate pedagogy wherever I may find them, hand-in-hand as they must be, and will continue to do so.

Codicil

Hard not to be mawkish today as I set down my burden, and I will confess more than a lump in my throat when I think of what I have done as an educator since I was that clumsy Reception teacher in 1988 – but really, what will survive of us is love, even if it is only a butterfly in a bigger turning world. So a final remark in this phase of the blog: individuals all have their songs on my YouTube Playlist, but this will do for everyone for now. No more time to stay and dream.

Or do QA paperwork.

O Sweet Woods

…the delight of solitarinesse? I am not sure this is always the case. Dowland’s song is lovely, and does all those Elizabethan/Jacobean things about how countryside allows escape – from court, from love, from mess. The re-read of this play (I’ve sprinkled some allusions throughout this post) has given me much to think about tonight. However, just as the Duke in As You Like It retreats to the Forest of Arden not alone but with his company, the social aspect of the pictures below cannot be denied. Hey nonny no.

Maria Popova’s Brainpickings Blog is a mine of beautiful sources for all sorts of things. Here, she excerpts some of the writings of Hermann Hesse on trees, which sparked some thoughts on Twitter and in me. What makes a place special? Is it simply memory? Here I want to post some pictures and some brief explanations with really no thought but to explore some of the sites that have meant something to me over the past two or so years. So this is really just a resource for further reflection, taking account of space, memory and relationship. They aren’t in chronological order, or really in order of importance, except that the last is the most recent.

I’ll start at Wittenham Clumps, where I learned the value of Forest School back in 2000. This is a later picture, of course, with two grandchildren making dens. I’ll come back to Forest School, that almost incidental thing that was therapy for me after Theo died and then went on the inform my educational world view. Making dens in the Wittenham Woods, watching physical skills and inventiveness and imagination come together is still a great joy.

But the next has to be the first dawn looking to Ludchurch from Gradbach. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer. Wild Spaces Wild Magic defines so much of my work-thinking over the past two years: that it has such personal significance is down to the “geological pantocrator,” the pareidolic Green Knight (here in the initial project outline), and to the quiet glory of this dawn – and (back to the humans) to the team. It was mat who showed me that face, and if I have lost my heart to the project it is in part because of that experience, and then this glorious autumn morning, and also to the variety of gifts of the team – Debbie, Jane, Roger, Mat:They make me think and feel and create (and fail and pick myself up) but it is this half an hour at dawn in a solitary wooded valley that was a moment of transcendence with

…tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.

***

To create a methodological framework for this, I suppose I am looking for a visual approach to autoethnographic study – but in reality, I am not there yet. Where I am, or where I was the other week at any rate, was seeing woods not as a place of solitary contemplation as in my previous post, but as a place of meeting. A place of shelter, companionship, release, exploration: Who Will Go Walk? Here then, to end, is a series of photos: Nettlebed, a place of glory in bluebell time, where in Rob Macfarlane’s words “Each step in taken in an ocean” and where in autumn Maggie and I have walked the red-gold of beech leaves. I could wish this were the site of Cooper’s fantasy sequence, so powerful it is, so amazing the visits I make with Maggie.

And then there’s Wychwood, the “strange caper” where I broke my finger trying to keep up with Jon. The memory stays, brings a smile. The finger is still wonky. Maybe the woods, like Arden, like a monastery, like life’s different contexts, are places we are accompanied by our follies? Maybe I needed to learn I am more “Full of wise saws, and modern instances,” a bit like this blog, than a nimble Orlando under a greenwood tree.

I cannot omit the 2016 autumn trip with Mat on the first, splendid visit to Alderley Edge. Here he is photographing away in the woods on our weekend in Garner Country. I’m not sure we found anything of real insight at Alderley that tentative first morning – but it does deserve another trip, maybe on its own. The Edge was maybe eclipsed for me by the later activities of the weekend, notable, of course, the meeting with the Green Knight, whose photos are all over this blog, and in whose magic wood on our last trip I felt both lost and found.

Nearly there. Three more shots: my local nature reserve, the Lye Valley where the ways the woods open out into fen are like a curtain drawing back… again the grandchildren, or two of them: watching them teaches me more than reading about outdoor learning. ..

…and the domestic woods at Harcourt where much of my Outdoor Learning practical work takes place… and yes, I did smoor that little fire. What started as what I think of (unkindly) as my hobby module has become a major part of my understanding of my role.

And finally to say nothing much but to bring the blog post to a finish, here are Chris and Jon and me. Woods and friendship again. Solitary they can be, as in the previous blog I cited – but they are also places of meeting. Another form of therapy?

Secrets of the Sea

“We live in one envelope with a multitude of voices…”

In a marvellous blog post on a marvellous book, Mat Tobin explores the role of the sea as it affects the psychological landscape of the book Town is By the Sea. It raises a challenge for me about how I understand and select what I mean by “landscape.” Of course the very syllables of landscape tell us about the shaping of the “dry land” and mirrors the foundation text of the opening of Genesis “And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas” (1:10). Who shapes the sea? Genesis and Job give the Judeao-Christian response. Job, full of glimpses of nature and acute turns of phrase, is of course worth a look, but is clear who shapes the sea:

He bindeth up the waters in his thick clouds; and the cloud is not rent under them.
He holdeth back the face of his throne, and spreadeth his cloud upon it.
He hath compassed the waters with bounds, until the day and night come to an end.
The pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at his reproof.
He divideth the sea with his power, and by his understanding he smiteth through the proud… (Job 26)

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof;
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb?
When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddlingband for it,
And brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors,
And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed? (Job 38)

We are left in no doubt about the beauty and terror of the sea, and the descendants of these passages are Melville’s Ishmael in Moby Dick and R S Thomas in the religious meditation Sea Watching

You must wear your eyes out
as others their knees…

In contrast, Richard Greene sets his own journey from his native Newfoundland resolutely as a people study. In “Islands in Memory,” in Crossing the Straits, he does talk (as I think Schwartz and Smith do, at one level) of

Grey stones and poverty
engendering a discontent
that is hospitable, quaint
in the tourist’s eye…
ledgers of seasonal obligation,
tricks of credit,
lies over what a fish was worth,
but more so
the sea that stood outside
all resentment…

but in the eponymous poem, Greene centres on the people, the solid, repeating practices of crossing by ferry from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia

and Newfoundlanders crossing
the Straits see water enough in warmer times
to forego the prospect now, but this moment
of pent chances, between home and home,
is not mine alone, and for most who travel
there is some tear in memory between
the longed for and the given, what they left
and what they are. Nova Scotia looms…

The sea is a highway to a new place, just as in Town is By the Sea it offers beauty and rest, a wider horizon of light – but it is an ambiguous offering, since the town also offers (?or maybe demands) stability…

Mat also mentions the

desire for change and new opportunities. Small, tight communities have a way of holding on to you and not letting go. Their comforting sense of familiarity, of friends and their families, homes and play spaces or shops, sea fronts and country lanes beguile you in believing you cannot live without them.

A multitude of voices – a multitude of views, The visuals of the sea are fascinating in Town is By the Sea (Simon Smith has a subtly animated version here in his own review), where the sea is often “all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen” as Montgomery says in Anne of Green Gables. The play of light in Town is By the Sea immediately makes me think of this model, as it were, of light and beauty, although Martin Galway does wisely point out that there is a lot to be said about line and colour in this book – as Thomas puts it “Light’s peculiar grace/In cold splendour” (Song at the Year’s Turning). In Town is By the Sea the wide sweep of light is in opposition to the claustrophobic mine under the sea…

But there is still more to think about when we look at sea and seaside. Here, in what is proudly announced as Allan Ahlberg’s 137th book, a mum takes the children and the dog shopping, and – a bit like Bear Hunt – they encounter a seaside with buildings – Fife or Dorset, Cellardyke or Lyme… It is not all that different from the Nova Scotia mining town in Town is By the Sea in that we seem to need to define sea by where it isn’t… With the poet of Job, we are depicting sea as boundaried and measured by human experience.

The structure and conventions William Grill employs in Shackleton’s Journey mean he is able to be bolder, so that the ship is almost there just for scale in one picture

From William Grill’s “Shackleton’s Journey”

and not there at all in the other.

This is a different sea again: almost as inhospitable as it can be.

Iain Sinclair, who begins this post, deserves a fuller quotation here, from his Edge of the Orison:

He (John Clare) had to learn the difficult thing, in different places we are different people. We live in one envelope with a multitude of voices, lulling us by regular habits, of rising, labouring, eating, taking pleasure and exercise: other selves, in suspension, slumber but remain wakeful.

Picturebook artists are as aware of this as Sinclair, I think, and share the insights too of Philip Hoare whose work on sea and culture in The Sea Inside could be seen as running alongside Peter Fiennes’ Oak and Ash and Thorn, dealing with marine rather than arboreal culture(s) we encounter and shape. Hoare gets is right when he says that the coastal terrain

may be managed by man [sic], but it has been edited by the wind.

Edited by wind and wave and light and bird and… all of these editorial hands, or debating voices, whichever metaphor we choose. The woods in Fiennes’ book likewise are cleared, colonised, full of missed histories and unknowable opportunities; his scale is time, where Hoare’s is spatial. Hoare is right when he challenges his reader

Take out your atlas and look at it.

You can’t. Just as no two-dimensional map of the world represents the true proportions of its continental masses, so no chart represents the reality of its greatest ocean.

Maybe this is a place for fiction. Town is by the Sea gives us a beautiful but threatening presence, and the threat – and something of the scale – is in William Grill. There is an attempt to domesticate in much of the seaside of children’s literature, but all of these give different faces to a goddess with many personas. Maybe we are better off in the richness of poetry and fiction and picture, back in the pagan mysteries of Susan Cooper’s Greenwitch instead? Or maybe we admire and classify but cannot fully comprehend this vast presence in the world we crawl about on?

The facts defy that paltry layer of land which we call home.

This is just a blog post, and can’t approach the work of Hoare and Fiennes, but the danger is that the openness of the sea (like the Great Wood where the unwary can get lost) is that the “multitude of voices” means “There is no such place as home” as Hoare reminds us in his bleak final pages.

Who Will Go Walk in the Woods?

I’m reading three books connected with trees and well-being at once at the moment: at Mat’s suggestion, Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock; Max Adams’ The Wisdom of Trees and partly at Jon’s prompting Paul Gilbert’s Overcoming Depression. In the first, the Antiqua Silva asserts itself over a troubled house; in the second, there is appreciation of beauty, of effect, of the impact of the tree in Western culture; in the third I am exhorted to find/create an image of a safe space. Might I imagine a wood, full of green light? Woodland as therapeutic space: this blog returns to it again.

It appears that dasotherapy (or thasotherapy?) is not the neologism I’d thought: it occurs in a spa in Belarus. That’s not quite the use I’d hoped for, though, either. as I think about the Trees and Wellbeing conference that (almost) served as punctuation to an emotional rollercoaster of a fortnight – or month, or two months…

So when today I had some news I needed to turn over I’m my head, I went for a walk. A bit of time in the quiet green. Dasotherapy. Still not sure of the word.

I am immensely lucky I have the beautiful grounds of Harcourt campus as part of my work place. A muntjac was browsing, two magpies fighting or mating – bickering, whatever – in the canopy of weedy ash and sycamore.
It is not the canopy of Chiltern beechwood but in its way is beautiful. It may not be grand, but it is full of life and growth. I think of Roger Deakin’s accounts of walnuts in Ortok and ash in Suffolk; of Richard Mabey’s Unofficial Countryside and the marginalia of landscapes; and then of his Nature Cure. Mabey speculates here at his lyrical best, describing his fens (but in truth praising any ecosystem):

…there is a general movement towards the development of woodland…but against this there is a corresponding, intrinsic drive towards variety, flexibility, subtle forms of symbiosis and partnership.

I feel like here I almost catch up with him. There seem to me to be all sorts of reactions to woods- places of awe, of menace, of folklore or inspiration to “high” culture, or an impetus to preserve, or to admire the invasive… but today in this scrubby green sanctuary, the volatility of woodland strikes me: young woodland, with trees competing for sunlight. Today I don’t need the ancient menace of Mythago to tell me how movable a wood is, or Ward’s Ancient Oak in Max Adams to tell me how we grow old, how life is unstable and mutable. We operate on different timescales, but we too are seedlings, race for the light, and overreach ourselves and fade. Talis vita hominum- today, not to do with sparrows.

Birdsong in the Morning

A mindful time in meditation might mean all sorts. Frequently for me it means trying to look over the shoulder of worries and needs to a quieter place. Consider the wonderful line in the poem by RS Thomas, The Moor, linked here: What God there was made himself felt. I’m really not very good at it. It’s as if I know the words but can’t fit them to the tune. I know what it means for the “breath to be held like a cap in the hand,” or to “look with kind attention at my distractions” but can’t ever really get it right. There may not be a “right” to “get,” of course…

So it was with some surprise that an early morning in the run-up to Pentecost found me in the garden trying to be mindful, trying not to try, trying not to notice I wasn’t trying… It was, as the poet Rick Greene writes, “earlier than history by an hour.”

And the blackbird flew across the garden, with that wonderful liquid chortle….and a wren hopped about after the chickens’ mealworms, scolding , needle, pin, “sharp-song, briar-song, thorn-song” as Rob Macfarlane puts it. And then the littler of the two squirrels came across the shed roof and I watched it run along the fence, heading for Jo next door’s bird table. They came, and they went, and I watched them come and go… and I wondered (and wondered so much I thought I’d blog it) if this is what Martin Laird is getting at in his books. Here he is in Into the Silent Land.

The thinking mind that “whirls about” is constantly concerned with thoughts, concepts and images, and we obviously need this dimension of mind to meet the demands of the day, to think, to reflect on and enjoy life. But the thinking mind has a professional hazard. If it is not engaged in its primary task of reason, given half a chance it fizzes and boils with obsessive thoughts and feelings. There are, however, deeper demands, deeper encounters of life, love and God, and there is far more to being alive than riding breathlessly around in the emotional roller coaster of obsessive thinking…This profound ignorance of our innermost depths presents a singularly convincing case. This is the human condition and we have all eaten of its fruit. But this is a lie. It is a lie spun largely out of inner noise and mental clutter.

Maybe my chasing thoughts is just like chasing the squirrel (not something I do) or following the wren as it picks about on the lawn. I let them go: the cool, dark of the garden is the thing, not the scurrying busy animals. Maybe this is another thing we learn from being outside: that there are aspects of our mental states that are mirrored by what we see around us. Maybe, at a deeper level (or a more convoluted metaphor), I need to see myself as a place where thoughts scurry about, when what I came to do was enjoy the peace and the dim calm of the morning.