Automata Lab

Maria and Georg Kroshniewitz lived in a small flat

in North London with their three children. Ever since

she was a small girl, Maria had made small moving

toys. Using parts of old construction kit games, she

would make windmills and cranes and trucks. When

she first met Georg, she kept this skill secret, not

wanting him to know that she had this deep interest,

deep longing to make moving objects. He was

visiting her one time and while they were talking of

an old movie they had both seen, a sound

came from the cupboard behind them, a whirring

noise that stopped, started, and stopped again. It

sounded like a kettle beginning to boil. Curious,

Georg asked Maria and though she tried to laugh

it off, Georg persisted and in the end opened the

cupboard and showed him dozens of automata.

He could hardly believe that Maria had made them

herself but it wasn’t long before she showed him

just how she could and told him how she had spent

years at it. He was intrigued and then bit by bit

became obsessed with it himself. They became

a couple and had three children and all the while

they made their little automata, moving now on to

little robots and more lifelike forms that walked

and danced. And all the time it was something

private and domestic and their children grew up

amazed and delighted by them but ultimately

taking them for granted. It was what they all did,

invent, make and play with automata. One time

the middle child took one to school for an open

day and it so happened that one of the parents

who came, worked in television and it wasn’t

long before Maria and Georg and the children

were showing their models and robots on a

TV show. In the modern way, one short sequence

from the show - where the robot danced beautifully

to a joyful samba song and then appeared to

slap the show’s host, went viral. Maria and Georg

were in demand all over the world. I say, ‘Maria

and Georg’ because the children didn’t want

to be part of it. No amount of pressure from

TV moguls, hosts of shows, and PR people would

convince them that they should take part in the

demonstrations and spectacles that were devised

by the TV companies. But, Maria and Georg pressed

on, using their old automata, making new ones,

devising new shows while the children, growing up

now into older teenagers, kept their distance. They

were supervised mostly by various au pairs, live-in

nannies, and cooks enabling Maria and Georg to tour

the world. The children had their own ambitions:

one wanted to be an archaeologist, one a jazz

guitarist and one an accountant. With their new-

found wealth, Maria and Georg created an

automata lab and started to push the technology

to its limits. Some of it was top secret as it

involved workmanship at a micro level. The point

of it all was the marriage between the old and

the new. And this was the charm. It was all a

fantastic success, until disaster struck and the

automata lab was burnt to the ground. At first it

was assumed that it was an accident. It had

a terrible effect on both Maria and Georg who

found that mentally and physically they couldn’t

pick it up and start again. They began to argue

and fight and bit by bit they each started to

suspect that the other had been responsible for

the fire. They each started to find motives as to

why they might each have started it, Maria

accusing Georg of envy, Georg accusing Maria

of greed and resentment - both claiming that this

went back to the beginning of their relationship.

In the end, they couldn’t bear each other’s

company any more and split. There was hardly

any wealth left, because the automata lab

company was over-capitalised and some kind

of dodgy financing structure landed them in

debt. At the same time, the child who wanted

to be an archaeologist showed symptoms of

a fatal illness. The separated parents were

desperately obsessed with the whys and

wherefores of their own destruction to be

terribly concerned with their dying child. She

eventually died at the age of 22 and following

her death, the jazz guitarist child came to

Georg and told him that the archaeologist

had confessed that she had caused the

automata lab to burn down. How was that

possible, said Georg? And the guitarist

reminded him of one of the automata that

the archaeologist had made in the time when

they were still doing shows together: a wonderful,

spluttering, jerking, stumbling, flying dragon that

breathed fire when controlled from a mobile

phone. She had waited her moment, and, in

effect phoned the dragon, and the result was the

conflagration. Georg asked the guitarist if he

knew whether Maria knew. ‘Of course, she

does,’ he said, ‘she always knew,’ he said.

Last Days

In his last days, Tony the cat became

more discerning and decided that

outside was not worth bothering about

and his litter tray was not up to scratch.

He found more amenable sites where

he could remind us that he was

still alive: the fire place, under the pipes,

behind the stove. It may have been his

version of the treasure hunt where

the only clue is the smell. And perhaps

he knew that we have lost some of

our powers of tracking scents and that

we would end up in the wrong corner of

a room, puzzled. But then, after a whole

morning looking, we’d find it, hurrahs all

round, a brief discussion over who had

stewardship of the treasure itself and

then the wait for the next hunt. Small

wonder he’s much missed.

National Poetry Day? Week? Month? Year?

[Feel free to print this page off and use in school for a staff discussion or a training day.]


The simplest thing to do for National Poetry Day (or any day, week, month or year!)  is to read poems. If you're a teacher reading this, can I suggest that you think up as many different ways of 'serving up' poems as you can. For example:

1. Handing out poems and poetry books to a group or a class of children and saying to pairs of children/school students, 'Choose a poem, work out how to perform it, and we'll all come back in ten minutes time, for a Poetry Show.' You might suggest to them that they can perform it in any way they like: saying it together, taking alternate lines, miming some or all of it, getting the rest of the 'audience' to join in with parts of it, making a rhythm to go with it by doing 'beat box' or tapping your chest or using a 'shaker' etc etc. After the show, invite the children/school students to pick out things that they've seen which they liked and would like to have a go at doing themselves, next time you have a poetry show. The more you do this, the more the children/students will want to read ad write poetry and the more they will know how to do it. That's because poetry has its own built-in 'hooks' - its ways of attracting people to want to hear it, read it, and have a go at writing it. These 'hooks' are what poets spend their lives devising. All you have to do is believe in the poem, believe in the poet, believe in the children, and students reading it. Poetry shows will do the work of introducing children and students to poems a thousand times better than any worksheet. 

2. Put up big posters of poems around the school and in classrooms. Simply write out a poem on as large a piece of paper as you can find and pin it up. 

3. Think of poems as if they are music videos. This means that you can have solos, duets, choruses, backing groups. You can make power points, and videos of poems. 

4. The simplest way to get into writing poems (not the only way!) is to a) read a poem b) talk about it together c) say to people: 'we could write a poem like that'. 'Write a poem like that...' can mean write a poem that sounds like that, or has a shape like that, or uses bits of the poem, or is 'sparked off by something in the poem', uses the pictures in the poem in some way...and so on. 

5. When I say, 'talk about it together you can try some or all of this:
a) talk about anything in the poem that you thought 'affected' you. How? 
b) talk about things in the poem that made you think of something that has happened to you or to someone you know. How? 
c) talk about things in the poem that you made you think of something that you've read, or seen on TV, a film, a song you know, or any other 'text' you know. How? Why? 
d) if you could ask someone in the poem a question, or if you could ask the write of the poem a question, what would it be?
e) collect up the questions and let everyone choose a question from that list to try to answer. Perhaps invite someone to be the person in the poem or the poet in order to put some answers together. Use the internet to find out some of the answers. Make it an investigation. 
f) Invite groups to be 'poem detectives' in order to find the poem's 'secret strings' - these are the unwritten links between parts of the poem. If you have a copy of the poem, you can invite the children/ students to draw these links on to the poem. Invite the children/students to explain how or why these are links. These can be:
i) links of sound like rhyme or rhythm or alliteration or assonance
ii) links of shape like verses, and stanzas
iii) links of images being repeated - similar words to describe something...the 'lexical field'.
iv) links between images being contrasted or as opposites or rivals. 
v) any other link. If the children/students can show or explain that it's a link, it's a link!

6. Resource the class or school with poems and poetry books. Use poetry videos from YouTube. Use the National Poetry Archive for recordings of poems. 

7. Encourage the children/students to think of themselves as 'collectors' of poems, or parts of poems. They can do this in an anthology that you make together as a whole class; or make private anthologies of poems you like; or have a space on the wall where you share favourite poems or parts of poems, lines, phrases, words from poems or anything else that 'sounds poetic' - proverbs, sayings and the like. 

8. Think up ways of 'interpreting' poems other than the usual 'comprehension' sort of ways: music, dance, film, art, painting, model making, making a box to represent what's in a poem and so on - all 'inspired' by a poem. 

Flies

The flies had died. The ground was pretending
to be frosted over but not making that good a
job of it. We made little clouds as we walked.
The flies had died. We said it was autumn. A
reasonable suggestion. But a decision was made
and summer came back. There was heat on my 
back when I sat at the table. And by midday the
flies rose from the dead. Buzzing at the window,
hopeful that something nearby would be rotting.
Perhaps it was. 

Pigeon

You pigeon, so grand, in your well-fed

suit walking our bit of grass like it’s

the lawn at Downton Abbey, the one

you hire locals to mow. Little would

we know, you were the one who

drove straight at the bedroom window

smashed it and brought terror to

two seven year olds. It was you,

then, who couldn’t get out, and

you couldn’t make up whether to

walk or fly, every time you opened

your wings you hit the wall. And you

shat on the table. Not so grand. Then.

I opened the window and flapped

a towel behind you and you were away,

beating the air like nothing had happened.

Gone, without a thank you.

Jays

Jay rage

in the alley

at the back of the house.

Swearing at each other.

Such flash clothes.

Such anger.

Then they fly off,

in furious straight lines.

Meryl Streep at the Dentist

At the dentists today he sang Randy Newman’s

‘Short People’, he did the German tonguetwister:

‘Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid und

Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut’

told me that he was friends with Meryl Streep’s

double - who was Maltese and who was in

some kind of trick that the Daily Mail

played on the Sunday Times where

the Sunday Times thought they were

interviewing Meryl Streep but they weren’t

and just the other day he met Cat Stevens’s

brother in a cafe who was with the bloke

who played Romeo in the Zeffirelli film.

I said that I had had a dream about Meryl

Streep when I said to her that she was really

good in that film where she was in a raft going

over the rapids with Sam Neill and she said

thanks. He told me not to chew on the crown

for 24 hours because the glue is in the second

phase.

Best review I've ever had!

Hi Michael,

I’m a teacher of English at a secondary school in Cambridge. I just wanted to send you a word of thanks for your recently published work on reading and writing, particularly the three booklets that came out this year:  i)"Why write? Why read?", ii)"Writing for Pleasure and the one on approaches to  iii) "Poetry and Stories for primary and lower secondary".

Jaded after another year of feeling that I’d done an efficient job of teaching adolescents something called ‘GCSE English’, but next to nothing about reading, speaking and writing, I spent a week over the summer reading and fileting what you’d written. What most struck me most were two things: the way you boiled reading (or hermeneutics) down to five, essential and graspable emphases (narratology, stylistics, pragmatics, intertextuality and ideology); and the basic method for getting students to engage with a text from the inside of their experience, starting with ‘Does this remind you of anything in your life?’

Your writing gave me a sense of ‘permission’ to think about reading, writing, talking and teaching in these ways again. Combining your insights with a couple of ideas of my own, I knocked up a little nine-page booklet to share within our English department, facetiously but earnestly called ‘Proper English Questions’. I did this first to clarify my thinking; second to give some pointers to new English teachers; and lastly to encourage others in our department – several of whom I knew to be bridling at a nationwide English-teaching culture which seems to be more like accountancy than it is about words and ideas.

Last week, I talked the approaches through at a CPD session with a handful of department members across Key Stages 3, 4 and 5, and with a total of around 70 years’ teaching experience. They went away and gave some of the approaches a go in their lessons – a lesson on Blake’s ‘The Tiger’ with Year 7s, a Year 11 lesson on Jane Weir’s ‘Poppies’, a Year 12 IB Language and Literature lesson on different texts in the #MeToo debate, and in my case, all my Year 11, Year 12 and Year 13 lessons.


Each teacher came back to me separately, fizzing with excitement, revivified, ‘slightly scared’ in one instance – all by the responses of their respective kids. A few comments:

· ‘Absolutely brilliant – they had full-on debates about how successful the articles were in achieving their aims.’

· ‘They were coming up with links and contrasts that I’d never have seen.’

· ‘They hated reading through it three times at first… but then they really got into it.’

· ‘It really made me hear that poem differently.’

· ‘We got some ebullience back!’

· ‘God, it made their thinking clear!’


Just by considering your wisdom and tinkering and adapting it to our own hunches and practices, we seem to have given ourselves a really good inoculation against test-itis…

It really does come down to trust, and this is a hallmark of your work with teachers and young people. Trust in the activities of reading, writing and talking, which have – who’d have guessed? – been on the go for centuries before GCSE accountability and edublogs. Trust in English teachers to pass on their skills and ideas to their students, by modelling the questions we ask ourselves instinctively (but perhaps not consciously) as practised readers. Trust, most importantly, in the young people themselves to be capable of genuine intellectual activity, at whichever age, from whatever background.

In the high-stakes testing environment, that trust can seem like a luxury. It’s not. These booklets of yours remind us that it’s the foundation of all we want to do. Teach and learn the subject well, and the qualifications will follow. Teach the qualification well but not the subject and not only will the grades suffer; more importantly, you’ll have hobbled your students’ reading, speaking and writing powers, most likely irreversibly.

All in all, then, huge thanks. These booklets are wise, humane and practical guides for teachers who want to teach English, not teach to the test.

Best wishes,

Neil, English teacher, Cambridgeshire

(NOTE FROM ME: 
If you would like copies of the booklets:

i) "Why write? Why read?"
ii) "Writing for Pleasure" 
iii) "Poetry and Stories for primary and lower secondary schools"

you can get them through my website:

michaelrosen.co.uk

Click on 'Books' in the menu and you'll find them there. )

A and E appointments at last

As part of a new efficiency drive
the government is giving hospital A and E
a much-needed shake-up. After years
of overcrowding, the government have
what may well be a solution to the crisis:
an appointment system for Accident and
Emergency Departments. This is how it
will work: if you think you are likely to
be knocked down in the road, fall out of a 
second storey window, walk into a sharp 
object, or swallow some bleach, then simply
call your local hospital A and E department,
tell them which accident or emergency you
think you are likely to experience and they
will find you a slot for you in that day's schedule.
No more confusion or panic, no more
red lights flashing, and alarms going off. 
Instead, when you have your accident, 
simply make arrangements to get yourself
to the hospital and a team of world-class
medics will be on hand. 

Unexpectedly quit

The file you have been working on for the

last hour is going to crash. We are going to

quit. This computer is going to do that thing

where your screen is going to revert to that

naff image you’ve got on your desktop. The

file that you were working on will stop existing.

It won’t be anywhere. There is a button called

‘diagonistics’ which you can press, wait for about

three weeks and get a message which will say

that an error called something like DF110 (which

is in fact a painkiller) has just happened. This

implies it is your fault that the file has

disappeared. Usually we find that the files that

disappear are ones that punters like you have

grown overly attached to. Perhaps it was a story

or a poem or an article. You were probably

getting locked in, fully engaged with what you

were trying to say, getting that satisfaction where

the words felt right, the phrasing had a kind of

rhythm and the ideas seemed to flow from one

part of the file to another. We expect there

were one or two jokes in there that you had just

made up. OK, not exactly jokes, perhaps more

like wry comments, or that thing where you

repeat things but in different ways for effect.

The weird thing is, we could lay money on it,

you’ve probably forgotten the best bits. That’ll

be because they were so new. And extra-weird

that you had only just made them up, so surely

they were right at the front of your brain so

for goodness sake they should be still there.

But they’re not. Gone. You’ll notice that we’ve

used the word ‘unexpectedly’ before the word

‘quit’ which is not strictly true. It’s not ‘unexpected’

for us. We do it all the time. We roam

round the world unexpectedly quitting all over

the place. Wherever we see a computer that’s been

running along in a fine and dandy way, we

hurl in an ‘unexpectedly quit’. Have a nice day.

All We Like Sheep

It wasn’t that we were enthusiastically Christian.

In fact, we weren’t Christian at all but my brother

who loved singing was in a choir that was going

to sing the ‘Messiah’. Handel’s ‘Messiah’ and he

practised at home. From another part of the flat,

we would hear, ‘Every valley shall be exalted’. It

came into my head: ‘Every va-alley’. And it was

going to be exalted. And the ‘exalted’ came out as

‘exal.....ted’. But which valleys? Where were

these valleys? We went on camping

holidays and walked up valleys. We camped in

a valley in Wales. Would it be exalted? And what

is exalting? How do you exalt a valley? I was 12

and I didn’t have the answer to these questions

but because my parents started singing it round

our flat, ‘Every valley shall be exalted’ as well as

my brother, I didn’t ask. It was just an obvious thing

that you could sing about. The valleys were going to

be exalted. And there were other bits that stuck too:

‘All we like sheep who’ve gone astray-ay-ay-ay-ay....’

That was the valley in Wales again. The farmer had

hundreds of sheep and some of them went astray.

My mother thought this one was funny. I had no idea

why she thought that was funny. We might be

listening to the radio and some item on the news

would set her off singing, ‘All we like sheep have

gone astray-ay-ay-ay....’. And everyone would join in.

Me too.

Deleted

It took me some time to discover that some

emails intended for me sometimes arrive

straight into a folder called ‘Deleted’. I

hadn’t deleted them. They contain

important information. Stuff that I need.

Like where I’ve got to be. And when. And

yet they’re in ‘Deleted’. Who decided that

I shouldn’t know where I should be. And

when. For some time people had been saying

to me, ‘I sent you the information the other

day.’ And I would say, ‘No, it didn’t come in.’

And we would say, ‘Hah! Email, eh?’ like

these emails had disappeared into a space

we couldn’t describe, a dimension that doesn’t

exist a square-root-of-minus-one dimenions

or, there is a vacuum cleaner in California that

hoovers up emails. ‘Hah! Cyberspace!’ we said,

like we were saying something that had any

meaning. And then, I don’t know why, one day

I peeped into this place called ‘Deleted’ (if it is

a place) and there was an email full of

information about where I was supposed

to be. It was hard not to feel for a moment that

a hidden hand had intervened in my life, saying:

‘Hey you, I don’t want you to read this!’ but then,

I thought it was kinda worse to think of it as odder

than that: machines randomly ranging across

humankind, deleting millions of messages under

the pretence of doing us a favour. Like even at

the moment of creating instant worldwide

conversations, it prevents them happening too.

And I thought how yesterday I forgot a thing that

I had only just remembered. It was as if I had

sent it from one part of my brain to the other

and then deleted it without asking for my permission.

But, hey, at least I did that. I think.

Wow! someone's leaked me this speech from the Department for Education

[smile at everyone]

Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity today

to talk to you about standards.

[pause for effect]

You will have seen in the press a good deal of alarmist headlines about so-called cuts in funding and provision. Let me leave to one side the matter of whether these really are or are not cuts.

[look up at everyone to make sure that this point is understood]

The issue for all teachers, parents and children is standards. So whether there is or is not less money in the pot, what counts is the standard of education that our children are getting.

[if necessary repeat this point with a gesture with the right hand]

And let me make it quite clear right from the start that when I say standards I don’t mean the standard of education. What I mean is the standards reached by children in the tests and exams they do right from the off and all the way through their school lives. It would be a great mistake to confuse the matter.

[prepare for a change of tone, be sneery but not too sneery]

Yes, of course, due to the last Labour government’s complete mismanagement of the economy, we’ve all had to tighten our belts and in the case of schools, it might have been that we’ve even lost the belts themselves, so there isn’t much left to tighten.

[pause for laughter].

As a result, I’m told that there are schools cutting back on school journeys, art, music, teaching assistants - even the school day itself.

[appear slightly regretful at this point]

But this has nothing to do with standards.

[right hand forceful movement]

I repeat, standards are the standards achieved in the tests and exams. So long as they stay stable or better, there is no decline in standards.

Now some might say that the tests and exams are regularised and moderated so that we have comparable outcomes. I apologise if that sounds like jargon, that may not mean a great deal to everyone listening to this.

[sincere]

In effect, it means that once the exam results are in, a group of highly trained

[try to sound like Michael Gove at his best here]

mathematicians look at the results overall and if there is any sense that there is slippage, they make sure that the results come out with the overall scores we want.

[purposeful]

This way we know that standards are maintained.

So, what I say to all the prophets of doom out there is: never mind the standard, focus on the standards.

[raise the voice at the end of the sentence and pause for applause[

Yes, never mind the standard, focus on the standards.

[stay standing while people applaud.]

Wanted: for topical news programmes

We are a production company providing a variety of top quality, topical news programmes for radio, TV, podcasts and other online platforms and we are looking for any politicians who have been disgraced, caught committing offences of any kind - false expenses claims, libel, lying, deceiving, etc or any politicians who escaped prosecution by making unfounded accusations under parliamentary privilege, any politicians who have lucrative (albeit legal) arrangements with companies who lobby parliament for special treatment of some kind, any politicians who have special relationships with foreign powers, known but not usually declared, any politicians with millions of pounds in tax havens or highly tax-efficient arrangements or if you are a politician who falls into one or other of these categories or anything that sounds similar, we need you urgently to appear in some of our programmes disguised as moderate, sensible, middle-of-the-road, reputable, reasonable, reliable, honest, not particularly wealthy people. We guarantee to make you feel welcome and you will be free to make your points uninterrupted and without any reminder of any of your past or present attachments, associations, misdemeanours, transgressions or crimes. In the event of our being in touch with you, could you please rehearse some accusations of your own, directed at any of the following: Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party, Momentum, the Labour Party Front Bench, Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn and Jeremy Corbyn?

Look forward to hearing from you.

All Hail to the Raspberry Pip

All hail to the raspberry pip, survivor, desperate to

stick between the teeth; wedge itself like a pebble in

a tyre-tread; it refuses to be dissolved or shrunk,

it hunkers down, cornered, resisting a poking with

your finger-nail, and even the tooth-pick can fail.




All hail to the raspberry pip, hiding in its scarlet globule,

migrating into your mouth, a bird’s beak, a fox’s jaw,

disguised as softness, waiting to be munched, ready

for the peristalsis, the long slide through.




All hail to the raspberry pip, heading for a spot of dirt, a

railway siding, where it becomes a bramble, winding and

arching its thorny way, obstreperous enough to delay

your longing for the fruit until it has

fully scarletted.

Please give Tony Blair at least a tiny bit of media exposure

Is there a chance, a faint possibility, a smidgeon of an opening, a reasonable opportunity, please, please, please for Tony Blair to have a chat show or platform all of his own, a solo spot, a talk show, a late night spot, a morning talk, a regular interview, a brief appearance, a timely intervention, on any major media outlet or all major outlets, so that we can hear from him regularly, at least once a month, but ideally, more often, once a week, or once a day, or several times a day across several channels, or multiple news slots, a variety of media platforms so that we can for once, just once, hear what his views, thoughts, timely musings are on politics, war, the Middle East, the Labour Party, elections, Jeremy Corbyn, anti-semitism, morality, hope, the will to live, personal wealth, human rights, bigots, socialism, values, community, money, weather, shirts, toilet cleaner, printing ink, acne, the stone age, driving tests, fortune cookies, Jeremy Corbyn, water melons, Jeremy Corbyn, morality, Jeremy Corbyn, personal wealth, Jeremy Corbyn, war, Jeremy Corbyn, Jeremy Corbyn, Jeremy Corbyn and Jeremy Corbyn?

The Nation

The Nation State Law of Israel states that

it is the place where Jews ‘self-determine’.

It does not mention the 25% of the people

of Israel who are not Jews.




The nation is made up of its people. The

Nation State Law is the Law for the people.

But not all the people are mentioned.

They are un-mentioned. They are the people

who are not seen by the Law. They do not

exist. In fact, they so do not exist

that it is not even mentioned that they do not

exist. They are nothing. In fact, it is not even

mentioned that they are a nothing. In fact,

I haven’t even said this. This is not a

statement. There is nothing here. You

have not read it. You will not mention the

unmentioned people when talking about the

Law.


Because the Law does not mention the people

who are not mentioned, the Law can not harm

the people not mentioned. It does not

discriminate against them because they are

not mentioned in the Law.


You may mention how this Law is a Law that

does not discriminate against any people but

you may not mention any people who are not

mentioned.

The Drop

Wasps are dropping from the lights

in the ceiling of the kitchen. They have

forgotten flight. They fall as if they are

dead, but on the table or the floor they

crawl a little. Wasps dropping. No buzz.

Straight from the light, and down.

There is hardly a hole in the ceiling for

them to come through, but they struggle

and make it. Some crawl over the light

and their shadows loom across the room.

And then drop. Above the lights they

must be queuing. Waiting their turn to

come down. They must know it’s necessary

for them to go, and there’s no information

coming back to them to tell them that

it’s just a drop. There isn’t anything else

for them down here. Just the table or the

floor. It’s no home down here. They’re not

treated well. They get brushed out. Or

stood on. Even the crackle from under

a shoe doesn’t put off the next ones

coming through. Another one drops.

And another. And there’s a sound. If

there’s a piece of paper on the table,

when it drops on to that, it’s nearly a

tap or a clap. That could be a warning.

But it isn’t. They’re still coming.

We do it for you

Hi, we’ve noticed that you’ve been listening

to a lot of radio and watching a lot of TV recently.

Good choice! But guess what, from now on, you

don’t have to. Our trained listeners and viewers

can do it for you. It’s simple, it’s cheap,

it’s convenient. This is how it works:

You get up in the morning, and if you’re anything

like the rest of us, your head feels heavy, you’re

dying for that coffee, you can’t bear the sound of

anything buzzing in your ear. One thing you

really don’t want is to hear radio. What we do

is send someone over to your house and we

take your radio into another room, switch it on

and listen for you. Then, when it’s time for you

to move on to your other tasks - whatever they

are - we just leave. It’s as simple and as easy

as that. Again, come evening, maybe you think

you’ve got to switch on that radio, watch that TV

sitting in the corner of your living room. No!

Not anymore. We can do it for you. Yes, round we

come, and do the job. You can go off and do

anything you like, and you have absolute peace

of mind that someone is listening to your radio and

watching your TV. And - here’s the coolest part -

we don’t tell you anything at all about what’s been

on! Imagine that! You will have no idea at all what

all that radio and TV has been going on about.

And we’re not just one-shot jonnies. This is a

24-hour service, our listeners and viewers

will be with you within minutes.

C’mon. Give us a try. You know you want to.

The Filling

I went to the dentist and he said that

I needed a filling, a huge filling, massive,

really, really big. I said OK and he gave

me an injection and while we waited for

it to take effect he said what music would

I like on, you can have classical, pop, jazz,

whatever you like and I said, jazz please

and he said that he was writing a novel,

it’s about this Jewish kid who was

adopted by the Pope and I could feel the

injection spreading through my jaw like a

finger in my gum and there was Miles Davis

doing ‘So What’ on the speaker and that gave

me such a good feeling of sitting in my old friend

Dave’s room and Dave saying that this is the

greatest record ever made, and me thinking

how does Dave know that, how can he be so

certain and to think - hah! - it wasn’t all that long

after it came out and in a way, Dave was right

and he was - what? - only sixteen at the time,

fancy being 16 and listening to that album, and

knowing that it was great and the dentist said

Spielberg was on to the story and was making a

movie about it but Spielberg was basing it on a

history book he’d got hold of not his novel and I said

how I wrote a book about a kid who spends the

night in a museum long before the ‘Night in the

Museum’ movie came out and he said that the

filling was going to be enormous, huge, massive,

and he got cracking and I closed my eyes and

concentrated on flattening my back out in

the chair and breathing and he said to the

assistant, ‘Wedge’, and I wondered what that

could be, and then I heard the drill - such a

high pitch - and he said to the assistant,

‘Come over here, take a look at this,’ and she

went around to his side, and looked in and I

could hear her take in a sudden breath, and

he said, I’ve never seen that before, and she

said, ‘Neither have I,’ and I said, ‘What?’ though

really it was just a kind of questioning grunt

because I had the suction thing in on one side

that was hauling all my spit out and somewhere

in there was the thing he called the wedge, and

he said, ‘Well, I think I can see your brain.’ And I

said, ‘What colour?’ but I think he thought I said,

‘Fuck off’ because he said, ‘No. I mean really.’ So

I tried to ask him, ‘What was he going to do about

it?’ And because I couldn’t say it properly, I did

a kind of shrug meaning, what to do? And I meant

it quite urgently because I didn’t really want my 

brain exposed like that, I don’t know much about brains

but I was pretty sure that a brain shouldn’t just be

hanging out in the middle of a dentist’s surgery. But

I think he took the shrug as a kind of Jewish shrug, 

meaning, ‘hey, so! It’s no big deal, there are worse

things in life than a bit of brain being on show.’

So, he said, ‘Too right, I like the attitude. Do you

mind if I take a picture of it?’ And I did a gesture

meaning, ‘You go ahead,’ and he got that gesture

OK and put his phone right next to my mouth and

he said, ‘Got it, thanks. I won’t put it up on social

media or anything,’ and I gave him a thumbs up

because actually I was quite grateful that people

would not be tweeting pictures of my tooth with

this - like - tunnel leading up to my brain because

next thing I’d be on a station somewhere

and someone would come up to me and say,

‘Sheesh, saw your brain on Facebook, man,’

and he showed the pic to the assistant and she

said, ‘That’s good,’ and in a way I felt kinda

flattered that she thought my brain looked good

but then I thought O maybe she just means that

her boss has taken a good picture and - hey -

who knows, there might be some whole thing

about her having to say that his photos were

good because of whether she got a bonus or not

and he said, that he needed to ‘pack’ the hole

now and because it led up to my brain, it might

start affecting how I thought with that part of

the brain, and I said, ‘what part of the brain

is it?’ And he said, ‘It’s the part of the brain

that deals with chickens.’ And I said, ‘Will it mean

that I won’t be able to see or hear chickens, is it that?’

And he said that he wasn’t sure because people

react in different ways to having packing put in

right close to the brain. And I said but you said that

you had never seen anything like this before, it

sounds like you have seen a few people with this

tunnel up to the chicken-part of the brain and he said,

who’s the dentist here? And I pointed to him. I very

carefully pointed at him with one finger so that he

was in no doubt that I thought that he was the

dentist here. And I think he took that pretty well.

Latimer and Ridley

My father, atheist, Communist, Jewish, liked
to sing ‘I’m the man, the very fat man who
waters the workers’ beer’, a song in Yiddish,
about a Rabbi who got drunk, ‘Buddy can
you spare a dime’, ‘Avanti popolo...’ and


“Last week down our alley came a toff
Nice old geezer with a nasty cough.
Sees my missus, takes his topper off
In a very gentlemanly way!
"Ma'am" says he, "I 'ave some news to tell,
Your rich uncle Tom of Camberwell,
Popp'd off recent, which it ain't a sell,
Leaving you 'is little donkey shay."

"Wot cher!" all the neighbours cried,
"Who yer gonna meet, Bill
Have yer bought the street, Bill?"
Laugh! I thought I should 'ave died”
Knock'd 'em in the Old Kent Road! ‘

He would also on occasions summon up
the martyring of Bishop Ridley and Bishop
Latimer, both of them burnt at the stake in
1555.
At that very moment, Bishop Latimer
is thought to have said something which
inspired my father to recite, 400 years later
at the breakfast table, on a car journey or
when looking into the embers of the fire on a
camping holiday in Wales:
“Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the
man; we shall this day light such a candle in
England, as I hope, by God’s grace, shall never
be put out.”