I was looking back over my blog and found this from August 2006 and it made me smile so I thought I would re-publish it. At the time aspirational lists were spreading like wildfire across the blogosphere (sic)and this was my attempt to debunk those a little.
I wonder what your own lists would look like?

I've noticed a lot of people have posted about the number of things that they want to achieve before they die.

Well I am not very good at those sort of things so instead I am going to make a list of things I intend to avoid doing before I die. Personally, I think this list will be easier to keep.

44 things to avoid before I die.

1. Seeing a production of RiverDance.
2. Buying an Electric Light Orchestra CD.
3. Saying "My vision for this Department is ..."
4. Take up golf.
5. Wear a real ale tshirt.
6. Laugh heartily at a bad joke in order to ingratiate myself with someone powerful.
7. Take up smoking.
8. Do a detox diet.
9. Buy a 'nice' little second home in France.
10. Say "I value your input" in a meeting.
11. Run a Marathon dressed as a penguin.
12. Actually running any sort of Marathon.
13. Being the 'life and soul' of a party.
14. Grow a beard.
15. Go bald (Fingers heavily crossed here)
16. Plant Leylandi trees.
17. Buy a 'nice' little sports car.
18. Buy a 4 by 4.
19. Have a 'Year in Provence'
20. Read a self help book.
21. Read the 'Celestine Prophecies'
22. Take up Amateur Dramatics.
23. Appear opposite Viggo Mortenson (The Bastard!) in a production of the Tempest.
24. Become a 'Man's Man'
25. Nibble delicately at dried fruit for breakfast.
26. Wear a Tshirt with the logo 'Extraordinary People' on it.
27. Listen to SuperTramp.
28. Nod sagely when people talk about 'The Wisdom of the East'
29. Become a Buddhist.
30. Find Vic Reeves funny.
31. Find Jonny Vegas funny.
32. Appear on 'Reality TV'
33. Say at a meeting " I think the contribution of ..... has moved the debate on."
34. Sing 'My Way'
35. Think John Lennon's 'Imagine' is really kind of profound.
36. Become celibate.
37. Wear slippers.
38. Say "You know I think Osama Bin Laden has a point."
39. Colour code my bathroom.
40. Think De Bono's hats is also kind of profound.
41. Tolerate bullying.
42. Buy any sort of dog accept a sheepdog.
43. Throw out Suzi's knickers and gymslip.
44. Let Suzi die before I do.

Wow I did it, just in time as there'e someone at the door. Oh My God its Michael Flatley!

Maybe I did let 44 happen but then that is another posting.

Memento Mori - 'Remember you will die'

'I died for Beauty, But was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for Truth was lain
In an adjoining room,

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For Beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, the two are one;
We brethren are," He said.

And so, as kinsman met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

Emily Dickinson 1830 - 86

I've been looking through a book of Simon Marsden's photographs (http://www.simonmarsden.co.uk/) for inspiration recently particularly Memento Mori which I got for Christmas and on reading the preface realised that I did not need reminding that I would die but was aware of it every day and that I had spent a lot of my life being both fascinated and terrified by the prospect. And I remembered how as a kid we would rehearse death when we played 'War' and that there seemed something dramatic and noble about it then but unlike the reality we would be spring back to life on the count of ten.
Do kids still play 'War'? So many hours of my childhood was spent re enacting what we had seen in 'The Dam Busters', '633 Squadren' and 'Dunkirk'. I guess to many today such films would be seen as propagating a myth of stoic, decent Brits and their allies and evil Nazis but a myth with more honesty and truth than the relatavism of today where all are victims and good and bad are reactionary constructs and all societies equal but with some, namely ours and America, less equal than others.

Anyway, I digress!

I've decided to illustrate this topic with one of my own pictures rather than one by Simon Marsden, I took this about twenty years ago in a beautiful Victorian cemetary in Leicester one Winter's afternoon. Perhaps its just that my Mum indoctrinated me but I find places like that unbearably poignant all of that life lived and now gone never to brought back, they felt the sun on their back as do I now and one day the sun will rise and the swallows dart across the warm Summer earth as it is in my garden now but I will not be there to see and feel it. Another life gone, soon to be forgotten.

So I have been here for over six months now and am beginning to explore and feel some attachment to where I live. A good sign is that I am wanting to go out wih my camera but am not still so struck enough to wake at 4.00 am to capture what is before me.

But it is not home, although it is both beautiful and different and I know that I can never feel what I felt for the woods, moorland and streams of Cardinham.
Is that me just being bloody minded and difficult or is it possible to love a place so deeply that all we feel for anywhere new is an echo of what we once had?

Will be New Labour's Michael Portillo?

And will they carry themselves with as much dignity?

Now this is not about my divorce, because of course if it is claimed in a legal document that I am unreasonable then of course I must be, as legal documents are both serious and truthful and would never include the slightest stench of lies or falsity. They are, of course, as serious and binding as let us say for example, wedding vows and should be treated in exactly the same fashion as "In sickness and in Health" should be.

No, this post is about Don McCullin's autobiography which is entitled 'Unreasonable Behaviour' and bears no relation to my current, and no doubt, entirely deserved predicament.
If you don't know, Don McCullin is a photographer most famous for his pictures of war but also of the poor and destitute of this country as well as more recently, beautiful landscapes of Somerset and India.

In his autobiography he describes how sldiers prepare themselves when they know they are going to do something appalling like shoot their prisoners.

I had learned an awful new fact about war and killing - that people build themselves up for an atrocity. They suppress their humanity by humiliating, torturing,tormenting their victims first. And the victims wait to be killed.

He also describes how the soldiers build each other up in order to do this. By gaining their cronies support they help to justify themselves in what they are about to do and by doing this no longer have to worry about whether what they are doing is right or wrong. By the time they are ready to carry out their atrocity they are convinced that their victims actually deserve their fate.

I wonder how well this applies to lesser, but still awful acts?

If you would like to read the book, and I do recommend it, then you can get it on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Unreasonable-Behaviour-Autobiography-Don-McCullin/dp/0099437767/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209711228&sr=8-2

Sometimes it is hard to remember...

I have just returned from Whipsiderry Beach. I took my camera but missed the sun as it fell behind a bank of cloud on the horizon as I descended the steep steps that lead down to the beach. I couldn't really get my eye in for photography until near the end as the dispersed glow of the sinking sun began to fade and left the island there silhouetted with the damp slate of the rockpools just reflecting enough light for some detail in them to be recorded against the gathering night time sky.
At one time I used to visit this beach often. It was near a school that I briefly taught in and I would escape there at lunchtime, returning late to lessons with my socks soaked through from paddling through the pools and my trousers covered in sand. Sounds romantic doesn't it? The fey teacher with his head in the clouds and his heart in the great outdoors. Sadly, it wasn't as this fey teacher was crippled with anxiety and no roaming alone on a Winter strand could cure that.
Now that I no longer suffer so badly from anxiety it is hard to remember how it felt and continued to feel until quite recently. It is also hard to convey the sheer terror of it, it is not like nerves. People become transformed before your eyes into diabolic creatures whose only wish is to expose you and destroy you. Each word that leaves your mouth in a conversation has to be be forced out by a sheer effort of will. In all social situations you are planning ahead, finding ways to protect yourself from and remove yourself from the awful gaze and attention of others. Friendship is impossible because just talking to another human being is a nightmare to be escaped from.

And sometimes I forget how brave I was to carry on when most people would have given up.

I must admit to struggling with poetry and resent the idea that somehow it is superior to prose. I also struggle with the idea that there is something morally superior if it is opaque and needs to be worked hard at in order for its meanings to become clear. Why shouldn't beauty and profundity be clear and accessible?

However, having said that the Guardian this week has been publishing little booklets of work by great poets (Note the lack of inverted commas there - greatness really isn't some elitist clique but is utterly genuine) and I was particularly struck by Ted Hughes and Siegfried Sassoon.
And best of all, for me, was the last section of Hughes' poem 'Pike'

"A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had Outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastry that planted them -

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightful I dared not cast
But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head,
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods
frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night's darkness has freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching"

I think Ted Hughes expresses there what I try to express but with considerably less talent in my photographs. That sense of a dark and powerful but not necessarily beautiful natural world. One that makes more sense perhaps when viewed through pagan eyes and when I take photographs I put aside my rationality and athiesm. Perhaps I should stop here as I cannot convey what the poem does which is of course the point of it.

No this doesn't relate to OFSTED, they have gone and I had very little contact with them though they did see me with my most difficult class who lived up to expectations and were in fact difficult.
Perhaps the school can now return to some form of normality and not, for at least two years, be trying to second guess what our masters consider to be 'good educational practice. Hey, maybe we can try and do the right thing for all those that are within our care, that would, after all, be quite radical.
Good and bad, right and wrong, I'm sorry to be so terribly old fashioned but I still believe trying to do the right thing is after all what we should strive for. In my opinion more 'good practice' would stick in education if we took a moral and ethical attitude rather than being swayed to cheat in our attempt to reach absurd, artificial targets.

Anyway, the main point of this blog is to ask you whether you have been judged and found wanting and how that made you feel. And what if you had been judged unfairly and that you could not succeed however hard you tried, that the judgement against you was simply a consequence of their own past. How would you feel towards those that judged you 'weak'? Would you be angry and resentful? Perhaps consider that there was some truth in it? Is it possible to be magnanimous in these circumstances?
No answers from me just endless questions, the questions that come to whisper in your ear as you lie awake in the middle of the night.