Flies

I know flies. I’ve camped with them.

I heard how they eat. A lot of them land

on things and put down their proboscis that

sits at the front of their heads. Some saliva

comes out and this starts to digest whatever

they’re sitting on. Then they suck the stuff

that they’ve started to digest back up their

proboscis. You can feel that saliva moment

just after they land on your skin, slightly moist,

slightly cool. Then there are the biting ones, that we

call horse flies. Their probosces are like daggers.

They jab that into your skin and suck the

blood up through the dagger. I thought I had

all this figured. The flies that do the saliva thing

are the ones we call house flies and the

bigger house fly type are blue bottles. And there are

some shiny green ones that love horse shit.

And the horse flies come in medium and large,

the medium ones are nippy and when they

land on you, you can hardly feel it, until they

stab you with the dagger. The large ones are

like flying caterpillars, fleshy and angry, and

a bite from them is like being attacked by a

fork-prong. Once I saw one by a swimming

pool waiting to get my shoulder. I grabbed a

flip-flop and threw it and it hit it, first time. End

of horse-fly. I’ve tried a hundred times since

and never got one. That’s it, I thought: house

flies and horse-flies. Then one day we were

sitting at a table and I felt something bite me

and I looked down and all I saw was a fly. But

that kind of fly doesn’t bite. A house fly. Then

there was another. These little house flies

were biting me. I got one and when it fell off,

there was a little drop of blood on my leg. I

picked it up and looked closely: its proboscis

didn’t have the little spongey saliva bit on the

end. It was pointed like a tiny needle. It was a

tiny horse fly disguised as a house fly. It didn’t

say it was a horse fly. It just turned up acting

like it was any old house fly but then did the

horse fly thing in my leg. Not just one of them.

There were hundreds of them. And under the table.

Always under the table.

Hornet

Every night at 10.19 a hornet arrives and

makes a great effort to get into the house.

It hunts for crevices but none seem to be

wide enough or deep enough and it withdraws,

and buzzes across another stretch till it finds

another potential hole to disappear into.

Sometimes it’s joined by one, two or even

three others and the air is full of their

deep droning. If I’ve left the door open

it will fly straight in and start hunting in the

kitchen. We shut the shutters at 10 o’clock

and that sorts it, though one time, our

daughter came into our bedroom at about

five in the morning and said that there was

a hornet in her room. She said that it had

flown above her head as she lay in bed,

flying from the skylight to the window. It must

have been there all night. The man next door

said that he was once stung by a hornet while

he was picking courgettes and his arm swelled

up like a balloon. The man who cuts grass and

hedges says he’s been stung by hornets and

it’s no big deal. I ask him what he puts on it

and he says nothing because it happens when

he’s out cutting grass and hedges. I told him

that he has to be careful not to annoy a hornet.

Hornets that are annoyed release a scent that

tells the other hornets to come straightaway 

and sting whatever it is that is annoying the one 

who’s released the scent. We scream when we see

them arrive at 10.19 and we hide. Or we ram

the doors and windows shut and peer at them

through the glass. The hornets see us and

come over to the glass and crawl in front of us

just a few millimetres from our noses. Once I

was sitting in the kitchen with the door open

behind me and the hornet flew in at 10.19 and

landed in my hair. It decided of its own accord

that there wasn’t a deep enough crevice there.

Another time I said that I would shut the shutters

to keep the hornets out but then just as I shut

the shutters I found that I had trapped myself

between the shutters and the outside doors

with the hornet. There wasn’t any room for me

to run away from it and it tried my hair. Once

again, my hair turned out to be not good

enough for it and it flew off into the night when

I got the shutters open. I imagined myself

opening my mouth and the hornet flying in

and deciding that at last it had found the crevice

it’s been looking for all summer, only for me

to close my mouth around it, finishing it off

with one crunch.

Glasses

I couldn’t find my glasses and went to bed

uneasy that I had left them in the cafe. It

seemed likely that I would spend at least

some of the next day, unable to read. In the

morning I discovered that I had left them out

on the table where I had sat reading the paper.

Several ants had climbed over them in the

night and when one hurried across the right

hand lens it caught the attention of the others

who thought it had suddenly grown and they

were surprised if not slightly scared. A fox

wandering past was just as surprised and

licked it off the glass but was then disappointed

that it turned out to be standard size.

The Pig-man

The tide of war retreated across the suburbs

leaving gas-masks in attics, a man with one leg

on the bench by the library, an air-raid shelter

in the park which one day, the kid with the

most nerve took us down and where we found

beds and broken bottles and imagined a life of

riley back in the days just before we were born.

After all we could go to the Empire restaurant

that had survived the war too, along with talk of

doodlebugs and uncles who disappeared in

places I couldn’t pronounce. The internet has

unearthed other leavings: piggeries. Sited, they

said on scrubland or in unused corners of parks

and I remembered how, amongst the nettles and

brambles, behind a fence made of old doors and

prams, in the air-raid shelter park, a red-faced man

in a dung-coloured coat, stood by a corrugated

sty, in the midst of stink. We called him the pig-man

and after our explorations in the dumps and streams

just as the lamplighter on his bike cycled round

pulling the lever with his pole and hook, so that

the gas mantles fizzed and lit, we hiked through

the nettles to get a look at the pig-man. We

cackled at him, as if he had no place in our park,

and this would rouse him to tell us to clear off out of it,

which made us cackle all the more till we hacked

our way out and left him with his pig, never

knowing that he had been part of what our

teachers called the war-effort.

How children speak. Do they?

There are a lot of misleading statements doing the rounds in connection with children's spoken language. First of all, we need to remember that no one speaks in what the Secretary of State for Education calls 'full sentences'. When we speak, we hesitate, interrupt ourselves (or each other), we speak over each other, we don't 'recapitulate' what the other person says and reply with short phrases or single words, we do 'ellipses' - that is we leave out a good deal because we understand each other from context, gesture, tone of voice, we use a lot of pronouns (it, she, he, we, I, etc and the words that go with the pronouns my, hers, his etc), we 'fade' (that is we don't finish a whole thought because it's clear from context or we change our mind half way) and so on.


Second, we should have a solid base line on any statements made by anyone talking about what children's language can or can't do. We should ask every time, 'what transcripts of children's speech are you using, that you base these judgements on?' and 'under what conditions did you make these recordings?' - follow-ups: 'were adults asking questions?' or 'were the children on their own?' 'Were they discussing or planning something together? were they engaged in imaginative or dramatic play?'

It is easy to think, as an adult, that we know how children speak based entirely on our own interactions with children and yet if you look closely and analyse how children speak when they are on their own, without adults present, discussing something that they need or want to discuss, and/or engaged in imaginative play, you see a very different picture. (We do this on our MA in Children's Literature at Goldsmiths, when we do the term we call 'Children's Literature in Action. We compare children's responses to books when they are being asked questions by a researcher/teacher, and when we leave children to discuss a book, sometimes with 'trigger' questions on a bit of paper, or sometimes 'freely'.)

Please if you hear anyone (including me!) make any statements about how children speak, please ask the questions above.

In my experience, very, very few people do base their judgements on this kind of work. Least of all secretaries of state for education.

'Neither Brussels or the City - for the many not the few'.

I'm going to come over all marxist on this one. Surely, their division represents the crisis that they can't solve. Both at a UK level and a world level, (see Trump) there is deep anxiety from those who believe 100% in the 'market' . They have pulled all the levers which should have guaranteed them success in being able to 'win' - that is secure profitability, their own power and a minimum of disorder. They've got their 0% interest rates and their quantitative easing, their state stakes in the banks, their tax havens but it's not enough. The competition between chunks of capital is getting fiercer, there is the same old same old desperate need to keep wages down, desperate need to substitute machines for labour (but that costs trillions of investment) and no matter how hard you exploit workers, you still need to sell stuff to them, and if their wages are low, they can't buy the stuff. You can force the poorly paid into borrowing money (credit cards, wonga etc) but there comes a point when that causes a credit crisis: someone somewhere says they want some dosh and a bank somewhere says they haven't got the dosh (Northern Rock, last time). 

Let's remember, none of this is caused by migrants or left social democrats. This is a crisis entirely born from a system that is locked into competition for markets. So, these fervid rows between squadrons of extremely unpleasant individuals are rows between people who deep down know that they can't control this system of running the making and distribution of the things we need. They are just coming up with fantasies on how to stay in power while the next phase veers from crisis to crisis. It is terrible for millions of people in awful insecure, low paid jobs and/or in insecure, lousy housing, or if they are disabled, or for millions trying to migrate their way out of poverty and despair. We should be alarmed when members of the ruling class start pleading with us to take sides with them against the 'elite': one section of the elite calling for us to oppose the elite.

It's clear that 'social democracy' - represented in the UK mostly by the Labour Party, is in a very precarious position. The press and TV are constantly demanding that the Labour Party state their position on all this. In effect, demanding that the Labour Party ally itself with one or other of the elites demanding allegiance to this or that 'solution' to the crisis. In the past, those running the Labour party would have had no problem with this. They were and still are totally committed to the European 'solution' for managing this crisis - sorry, *trying* to manage this crisis. In brief, all that provides is a bit of cover in the battles between the great chunks of capital - US, China, EU. But ultimately this is of course about capital's problem, not ordinary people's problems. It's not about making and distributing things for the benefit of all. It's about how can American, Chinese or EU capital best survive. 

Meanwhile, the Brexit solution thinks that the UK can imitate Steve Bannon's 'solution' which he calls 'economic nationalism'. But the UK doesn't have the clout of the US to bully anyone into accepting UK goods and services, so the image of the 'great global trading nation' (May) is surely fantasy. It looks as if Corbyn is trying to do something very difficult but necessary: not take responsibility for the crisis, the mess, or the phony choice being acted out in the cabinet. It looks as if he is saying that those in power will bring the house of cards down on themselves. And ultimately, why should we take sides in a dispute that doesn't solve the problems of working people? It's an incredibly hard position to maintain because the press can only cope with binaries. And yet the posing of binaries is what keeps drawing working people into making a choice between which of two systems will be better at holding down wages and cutting state provision!

If Corbyn had more support from the centre (Westminster) his slogan ought to be (says I) 'Neither Brussels or the City - for the many not the few.'

Rees-Mogg, the 'metropolitan establishment' and his own 'establishment'

When Jacob Rees-Mogg signalled that there is something bad called the 'metropolitan establishment', we can ask, which part of himself is not part of this metropolitan establishment? He is using Trump-Bannon and Hitlerian tactics, attacking an 'elite' in order to strengthen a national elite, his own one.

Which bit of the following is not 'metropolitan establishment'? 

"Rees-Mogg was born into a wealthy family in Hammersmith, London...he worked in the City of London for Lloyd George Management until 2007, then co-founded a hedge fund management business, Somerset Capital Management LLP."

(from Wiki)