London city centre

Spent yesterday meandering my way about the sights and sounds of the capital. London is absolutely huge. An unplanned sprawl of neighbourhoods, which are almost independent cities of their own, each with very peculiar identities.

On Saturday, after cancelling an impromptu visit to Paris, I ended up walking all the way down Regent's canal, from King's Cross to the Camden lock, and on till Little Venice, which is out by Maida Vale. You wouldn't believe how pastoral it feels. The sun was out, as well as the bellies and skinny white legs of a lot of tourists and passters-by, and it was like being in a small Italian town, or in Cambridge, even though trains were screaming in and out of King's Cross right next door.

London is full of gorgeous walks that nobody seems to tell you about. The city is so hectic and busy that people tend to get out of it to enjoy calmer countryside, when they want peace and quiet. Only it's right there at their doorstep; they just don't have the time to see it.




This part of the canal borders Little Venice, which is almost like a port for barges. It's a nook of tranquility in this mad, buzzing city. People seem to live much more peacefully than in the rest of London. And when you walk down here and see rusty old barges with 'for sale' notices, it can only make you fantasize about a different life right downtown.


I'm quite sure they're hellish to maintain, and I can hardly imagine how many insects you get in the summer. But still. There must be people who are nuts enough to live this way. Anyway.

This part of the canal is right next to the London Zoo. I can't imagine what the zoo itself is like, but from the canal it looks stunning. Especially since it's near the part of Camden where loads of people come walking from Camden, so you get every possible freak of nature around there. People hanging out consuming all sorts of entertaining items, with more piercings on their bodies than skin that isn't pierced.


See London is a bit like a giant anthill. Very impressive architecturally, makes you want to admire it, and observe it aesthetically, but before you know it your shoes are covered in odd things you didn't even know existed. And you love it, even though it itches and you'll need a shower when you get home. But boy will you have enjoyed the ride.



The graffiti down brick lane isn't that far off from Picadilly, where the canal ends. It's a pretty-boy pretentious part of town with lots of fashionable designer shops which find 'retro' clothes and sunglasses which they sell for an outrageous fortune. Sort of like something out of a Jennifer Saunders sketch, but taking itself far more seriously. There are DJ stores all around, which sell overpriced second hand records.

But it's fantastic.

When you're not stuck in the tube, that is...

Teachers' strike

I'm sitting in the almost empty staffroom of my West London school, finishing off some marking, as most of my colleagues are out on the streets protesting. Strange that. I never thought of myself as a strike breaker.

I simply didn't get my act together to join the teacher's union after moving back here a few months ago, and now they're swamped with requests for people to renew memberships, with the strike action starting. Seems like teachers are keen to be in a union when it gets them out of school.

Funnily enough, this is still a view held across the UK. Last night when we went for dinner to celebrate a colleague's birthday, someone started railing against strike action, and complaining that she had a 10 hour workday while others were out parading on a street for more pay. She wanted them to deduct their day's pay and remunerate her for her extra work, or so she quipped, at the top of her bellowing voice, across the restaurant. Playing right into the hands of Labour government's rhetoric, she saw striking as just another way to skive off a day of school. No political significance, nobody taking risks in order to improve conditions for everyone else, just plain laziness.

The fact of the matter is that this strike is not about getting more money. Essentially, the government is proposing a pay increase which is below the current inflation rate, and has done so for two years running already. So this effectively amounts to a fairly hefty pay cut, since prices rise, and our salaries don't match that rise. To quote Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers:

“The Retail Price Index, which features on Government websites as the figure used for pay bargaining, is currently running at a yearly average of 4.1%. The current pay offer of 2.45% is well below that and can be seen in no other way than as a pay cut.

“Year on year pay that fails to keep pace with inflation has real consequences for the profession and our schools. It saps morale and causes problems of recruitment, retention and teacher shortages, not to mention real financial difficulty for our members. It is time to call a halt.

“Real term pay cuts hit youngest teachers the hardest. Not only do they have to contend with high housing costs, fuel bills and escalating food prices, they also have to pay back student loans at a rate of 4.8%.

(www.teachers.org.uk)

So this is about a profession which is a benchmark for a lot of others, which is slowly having its salaries eroded. The knock-on effect of allowing this to happen is that doctors, academics, civil servants, and pretty much anybody whose job is related to the government is going to have a harder time keeping up a decent standard of living, if Labour gets away with cutting teachers' salaries. I don't argue that I should be earning the same as somebody working a tough, dog-eat-dog business job, who can be 'let go' because of a downturn in the market, nor even that my job has the same social significance as a General Practitioner. But when you know that a starting lawyer earns well over twice what I earn after 5 years on the job, or that a starting GP earns well over three times my salary, then something is out of joint.

A whole load of other unions are following the NUT's lead and announcing strike action over pay issues, which is a first in recent years in this country. I can only breathe a sigh of relief that people are mustering up the courage. It's harder than it seems to face a group of kids and tell them you're choosing not to teach them...

The attitudes towards striking are very rife in my current school. Arguments break out between teachers who see striking as troublemaking, and those who are so involved in this that they won't accept they are also being manipulated by a union.

One way or another, it's great to see these debates coming out in a country where, as I mentioned in my previous post, people are willing to put up with the most ludicrous inequalities or dysfunctions in government, and see protest as being childish or confrontational (as though these struggles can be resolved without confrontation...). Teachers have had pretty much any authority over their curriculum taken away in the past decade, and have had little or no say in the way that schools have been run over the past 20 years. I can't think of any other profession which has seen so much change with so little consultation as British teachers have, and for once that they stand up and are counted in this struggle to stop their basic salaries from being chewed away inconspicuously, they are railed against and branded...

It's about time I put my money where my mouth is, and sorted out that NUT membership so I can proudly get the hell out of this staff room if another strike day is set...!

St George? Who's that?

Just spent my last weekend in freedom before going back to the grind at school tomorrow. It was a phenomenal week of doing as little as possible, travelling to Toulouse to spend time with my niece, getting back here and eating and sleeping a lot. And last but not least, renewing some really valuable friendships.

Meanwhile, this weekend, London hosted the St George's day celebrations, which were quite something. As I was waiting for the train to get downtown yesterday, I realised that the tiny little town I'm living in - a suburb of Twickenham - had its own St Geroge's Day parade. Far from the gaggle of bewildered kids I was expecting, it was quite a spectacle. Everybody, from the local drug volunteers in a double decker bus, to the line dancing group hot on the heels of the enormous military orchestra, was out under the dark, soupy April sky, braving the likelihood of rain.

I'm pretty flabbergasted to see how much is going on in this suburban sprawl of a place which I thought completely barren of everything except 99p shops and Tesco's. I suppose people don't advertise what they do here in the same way they do in downtown London, because they tend to stick around here for Longer, and don't need as much attention for what they do. I really should get involved in something, and find out for myself what Whitton is actually like.

Something I really enjoy about living in the UK is how small, grassroots-type stuff works. People have this unending ability to create small groups to address a local problem, or keep a social group going. As compared to France where people complain about the government not doing enough to improve their lives, but hardly ever actually set up any viable alternatives of their own, the British are far more proactive and resilient. Then again, they let their government get away with gross incompetence or negligence a lot of the time. The transport, the health system, overcharging everyone for everything and doing little to pay it back... When stuck in the Tube for the millionth time, with a 45 minute delay, and everybody patiently sighing and saying "Mustn't grumble!" the Frenchman in me often thinks "Yes you should grumble! Why are you so damn resilient??!"

Anyway, I got into town and moseyed about the city centre, looking for something interesting to do. As I got to the British Museum, I heard Indian music playing. I went into the main hall - which is a spectacle of gigantism in itself - and witnessed this unbelievable music and dance show. This snippet doesn't really capture how colourful and graceful the six dancers were. It culminated in a Tarantella-like frenzy of drumming as the dancers spun wildly out of control. The audience - mostly composed of tourists visiting the museum - were completely wowed, as I was myself. That was probably the first time in history that the British Museum was anticlimactic. What an unbelievable place.

It just strikes me each time how absolutely enormous the British Empire project was. My friend Chris has helped bring this to the forefront of my thoughts by bringing me all sorts of documents on Sudanese politics in the 19th century to translate. But while moseying around the Islamic and South Asian sections of the British Museum, I couldn't but think what a massively organised enterprise of pillage the Empire was. They actually organised raids, or 'razzia' as they called them, to break down local resistance to their government, where they would steal the odd woman here, shoot the odd herd of cattle there... And of course, get hold of any interesting-looking booty on the way. So the grandeur of this museum is always mitigated by the knowledge of how it was acquired, in my case.

I can't help but enjoy the simplicity of British attitudes. The way they can be uncomplicated about organising themselves to get things done and address problems. Of course, that simplicity can sometimes translate into oversimplifications when it comes to understanding foreigners, as many of the idiotic TV programmes on immigration display. But then there's also a sort of instinctive acceptance that outsiders like myself can disagree with the non-essentials. That I can look at the St. George's Day parade with amused detachment, without being anti-British. And of course, the most interesting Britons, those who like Chris display the mixture of humility, self-mockery and genuine cultural interest, are the most critical of their own Empirical history. And long may it continue, despite the rants of Boris Johnson, or Tony Blair's Americanism.

The China Saga

After seeing all the protests in London the other day, and everyone sporting Tibet flags, it was tempting to be involved in some way. It's hard to stay out of this one.

I can't help sympathising with the Tibetan cause, even though I think the Chinese are right to say that Westerners butt in without really understanding the situation too well. I mean, we take no real interest in Chinese politics except to show pictures of their military propaganda and then to criticise their foreign policy without having much knowledge of how it works or why. Admittedly it's a bit hard to understand it when they don't allow foreign journalists. But it's important to acknowledge, most of us criticise the policies without any clear idea of what's going on.

Two things are clear to me. Firstly, that you can't dissociate sport and politics in this whole Olympic affair, the way people like Steve Redgrave call for. The Olympic Games are political one way or another, however much sportspeople would like to live in a fancy schmancy world where they're furthering the cause of sport without playing to anybody's agenda. The protests are countering another political agenda which is China promoting itself through the Games, they're not "politicising" it, as many would have it. Let's lose the rosy glasses if we're going to be realistic athletes.

The second thing is that whatever way you look at it, the Tibetans are drawing attention to the sores in Chinese government policy, which somebody needs to do. Whether this is territorial in-fighting or - what seems blindingly obvious - a superpower determined to crush a legitimate people's right to self-determination, the Chinese have no right to keep everybody out of their "internal politics" if they want media attention for how wonderfully developed their society is. You can't have your media cake and eat your Tibetans.

Not that I'm an expert on any of this, but it certainly brings it home when you've got friends on either board, or when somebody comes up to you in the street asking how much the Dalai Lama is paying you to take his side. Literally, a host of Chinese students were convinced down to the hilt that the only reason these protests were taking place - and that idiot Westerners were getting involved - was financial gain. They simply couldn't accept it was on moral grounds.

I for one will make a point of boycotting as many Chinese products as I can at this time, if for nothing else to make the separation between the government and its people, which is all to easy to conflate in this situation. After all, I wouldn't like to be amalgamated with Gordon Brown's appearance on American Idol just because I happen to live in the UK...

Back In

This morning I woke up to the clattering of the roadwork going on outside my sister Michelle's house. The sun was blazing, but because the shutters were all fastened, I had slept in till 11:30. A disturbing notion for one who is usually sweating down the road to the melody of Jimi Hendrix music on a morning run, at 5:00am on school mornings. So I got up and went for a run to purge my laziness.

Since I came to visit Michelle here in Toulouse, I've been able to stand back a little from the madness of the last few months. Landing back in London, getting back in touch with friends and family I've missed, and fighting my way to some sort of normality in a tough work environment. Being in the airport and reading Bertrand Russell's lectures on why he's not a Christian gave me solace in my pagan condition. And spending time around my neice Zoe is just great. She keeps patting me on the chest and reminding me that I'm her Tonton (uncle), and that she's Zoe. Obviously she's picked up on the clueless, confused look on my face and wants to set things straight for me.

I've littered the place with books I've brought on my own initiative, and one series requested by Zoe herself. It's called In the Night Garden. A rather disturbing airheaded bimbo called Upsy-Daisy prances about a hill littered with multicoloured balls of something or other, and is invariably joined by an alien creature with a head in the shape of a monkey-nut, known to his viewers as Iggle-Piggle. There is no discenable plot to any of this. They give each other kisses and eventually engage in some form of dance resembling a bunch of drunken babies trying to perform Cats, the Musical but forgetting the steps.

I feel so old reading this stuff and lamenting some sort of narrative. The poststructuralist senselessness of it disturbs me. Maybe it's a good thing that kids are brought up on this stuff now. It might do a better job of preparing them for the insanity of education and the world of facebook and myspace which awaits them, than Enid Blighton's pathetic trash.

Bertrand Russell is helping me remember why I reject Christianity now. A brilliant article in this collection, called Nice People, is a hilariously scathing reminder of the vagaries of Christian thinking, and how its rampant righteousness pervades Western thinking. He is clearly biased against the faith, but seems to know enough about it to be genuine and lucid. I definitely reccommend it to anybody in need of a good, clear analysis of religion, without delving into overcomplicated theological rants.

Meanwhile, the prospect of moving further into the centre of London looms now. Got to get a flat somewhere downtown so I can be nearer to my new school, and generally within reach of the rest of the human race rather than at the total mercy of London's fashionable Hounslow.

I am more and more comfortable in the knowledge that my senseless chaos of a life, hanging by a thread of momentary reflection between episodes of Scrubs on Sky television, is actually good fun. Accepting like Russell does that we don't need to live in fear by clinging onto religious belief, is actually quite comforting. And if all else fails, there's the knowledge that...

Sheep go to hell

News

Just a quick news flash to say that I took a job in a French school right downtown. Yes, a French Lycee in London's glamourous South Kensington (quite a contrast from London's glamourous Hounslow).

Better rush off and do the marking I didn't do yesterday as I was so wired about taking the new job. Who knows what it'll actually be like, but it helps the old ego to be offered a job like that while working for such a mental school where people won't even give you the time of day!

More to come soon...