Game Beautiful

In the beginning...

Futbol. Footie. The Beautiful Game. The poetry of grown men kicking a bladder around a field, even an exotic South American one, leaves me yawning, tepidly. A few weeks ago, a friend squeaked excitedly that she was going to the World Cup which no doubt cost her fiancé a great deal of money. She apparently has tickets for two matches, the protagonists in both being unknown and dependent on elimination from earlier rounds, so she has to decide on the spot what colour she's going to wear. In the last week of school - international schools are so much fun - students emblazoned their faces with flags of their home countries and some staff were unsporting enough to send them to the washroom to clean up, on the grounds, presumably, that Germany's chances that afternoon were less important than vulgar fractions. Some say that football is a matter of life and death. The diehards would respond with "Oh, no. It's much more serious than that." The historical record is, however beyond dispute. In 1314, complaints by London merchants led Edward ll to issue a proclamation banning football in London because, "...there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise which God forbid; yea, we command and forbid, on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future. Local towns banned it on the grounds that whole villages inflated a pig's bladder and kicked it and each other up and down the main street until people dropped from exhaustion or were trampled to death by their neighbours, which I have to say, does sound remarkably unsportsmanlike. In the early 1600's we read "With the 'fotebale'...[there] hath beene greate disorder in our towne of Manchester we are told, and glasse windowes broken yearlye and spoyled by a companie of lewd and disordered persons.  Hate to tell you, sport, but, there still is. Shakespeare had little time for it, either.  This from King Lear : "... you base football player" (1 iv).

Must get one, must get one...

James the First's "Book of Sports", on the other hand, encouraged people to play after church on the Sabbath, presumably in a spirit of love, tolerance and forgiveness and also because he hated the Puritans who liked their Sabbaths gloomy.

There are worse things, of course. I read the other day that American football is like prostitution where people ruin their bodies for the entertainment of complete strangers and savage violence is interspersed by committee meetings, surely the two worst attributes of American society. Still, this time around, the USA soccer team - why must they still call it that - made it to the last sixteen, only losing to plucky little Belgium. Shame, really.

"Our Father"

Postscript: as I was writing this last night the host nation were being unmercifully thrashed in an historic 7-1 defeat by the iron men of Germany who barrelled through a flimsy Brazilian defence like a Panzerfaust. The hosts' ramshackle performance means that careers will be ruined, bucketsful of tears shed and humble pie will be on the menu for months. Oh, well. It's only a game, as Mr Cholmondely-Walker was fond of saying. Pass the shag, gentlemen.

Momentary Me

I've been having a few randomly retrospective thoughts about some of my classes - something which I suppose all ex-teachers do, especially if they're in their educational dotage like me and prone to wandering off in mental flights of fancy into the undergrowth of the past. Small schools are better than large ones. Small classes are better than large ones, because in both cases, you get to know the student body very well, even those that you don't come across in class, and also because, by default, the student body gets to know you as well. Not the cardboard cutout , the squeaking posturer, the Nazi of discipline, but the momentary you, the you that  has been released to be human rather than the ironclad disciplinary machine, grinding the quadratics till the pips squeak and to hell with mixed metaphors, the laggers, slackers and irremediably stupid. Which tends to cause one to teeter towards "favouritism". Like "racism", "sexism" , "elitism" or any of the other "isms" in which the PC thought police love to entrap us, having a favourite means that you're BAD. 

What total eyewash.

I have a favourite shirt, pair of shoes, cologne, even day of the week, but because my favourite is animate, it is no longer appropriate to admit to having it. All my students fell, I suppose, into three categories: favourite, not favourite and "meh". Categorisation of these students was entirely subjective, as changeable as British weather and often spectacularly random. Admitting to such behaviour in school is like mooning in front of a crowd of Grade 10's - not really recommended. I'd confess in private if I had to, but I'd rather be caught stealing the office manager's stash of Nespresso capsules than be accused of treating students differently depending on their current 'favourite' status. That sort of thing would make me the kind of shoddy, attention seeking pseud that people complain to their therapist about. Even having a non-favourite has a certain masochistic charm about it. Oh, yes. You know who you are.

Aviator moment

My Grade 9's decided to smart up for Graduation, some in full evening dress. It was decided that we'd have an 'aviator moment' - they always were quite an enterprising group.  I hoped that they were happy that it was the end of the semester and not that we were parting company. They gave me more trouble than some and more joy than most. Farewells were genuine and heartfelt. I am going to miss all of them.

Green to Blue

Awaiting the blue

As many of you know, we have a swimming pool. Arriving after a long absence and removing the covers revealed, instead of irridescent clear blue waters, a bilious pond in a remarkably unpleasant shade of bright green, opaque and oily. This was clearly not good. We consulted the oracle, the fountain of all wisdom, namely the Internet. There was much discussion about cause, effect and solution, some being contradictory. After silently and alternately cursing and praying, I reminded myself that I was a scientist. I'm supposed to be good at this sort of thing, but I have to confess, I was not aware that ownership and maintenance of a swimming pool required an advanced degree in inorganic chemistry. As a child, I learned to swim at the local "baths" - probably so called because the cleansing effect of the bleach was more valuable to public health than the swimming lessons. The water was so inoculated against infection by massive doses of sodium hypochlorite that one's skin wrinkled in a heartbeat and placing one's face underwater risked complete and permanent exfilation of the vitreous humour. In other words, step one, bleach. We had some, but not enough. A twenty-kilometre drive to the pool shop revealed a staggering array of chemical treatments, all sold in ten litre tubs. School chemistry involves careful measurement in milligrams and millilitres, with clean spatulae and spotless glassware. All that seemed to be required here was a medium sized shovel. There was an entire section devoted, optimistically, to something called PH. I assumed this was the agricultural version of the logarithm to base 10 of the hydrogen ion concentration, or pH, which I gathered was of some significance. I bought a pH tester, with a colour chart resembling nothing I had ever seen before; the pH values it tested were between 6.8 and 8.2, with an optimum of 7.2 to 7.6. The colour was off the scale. I calculated the requisite dose of pH (-) to increase the acidity. After a heavy storm, I repeated the test, to find that it was now off the scale in the other direction. Well, you get the idea. Opening another huge tub of alkali, I somewhat despondently added some. Flocculation is a process whereby colloids come out of suspension to form flakes. In other words the murky water contained microparticles that were too fine to pass through the filter unless I bought another tub of overpriced stuff labelled "clarifying agent", which, the blurb told me helpfully, would restore my pool water to a beautifully crystal clear condition. After, it said at the end, I had thoroughly swept the bottom of the pool, which I can't see, with a brush.

France lost to Germany and I am now going to sit in a corner with a book and twitch a bit, if that's OK with everyone.