Just a thought

Blogger is as slow as this tonight:

"Willie, there's a six-foot seven inch tall irate customer at the counter who wants to talk to you especially, about the letter you sent him."

"I'll be right down."

Yes, that slow.

Anyway, while I type this offline and wait for all the little virtual salmon to thin out in their swim up my Internet connection, a thought has occurred to me.

Do you remember your Irish education? Do you remember all the lessons in the Irish language that never sank in? Mornings of verbs and Irish conversation?

Okay then. Do you remember the teachers visiting each other in the classrooms, and speaking Irish to each other so that the kids wouldn't know what they were saying?

Any connection between non-comprehension and teacher attitide coming to mind?

Just thought I'd mention it in passing.

The staff of life

If milkmen avoided free-range cows, then it was no surprise that breadmen wouldn't set foot in the field at all, possibly for fear of an attack by die-hard cereals. So three times a week my parents placed our green, enamelled breadbin onto a nook on a stone wall half-way up the lane. Coming home after school at 3 o'clock, I'd pause beside it in the laneway, open its lid a crack and gaze in at the beautiful white turnover loaves that would be nestling inside, their newly baked smell wafting out deliciously. Occasionally I'd succumb to the sin of greed and take a large pinch of white bread out of the side and pop it into my mouth. Wonderful!

Then I struggled the breadbin with its far-too-small carrying handles up the lane, through the middle gate, across the field and into my mother's kitchen.

"I think," she said to me one day, "we'll we'll have to stop putting the breadbin down the lane."

"Why?" I asked.

She lowered her voice, conspiratorialy:

"A rat or something is getting into it and eating a hole in the bread."

Oh-oh. I'd been rumbled. Apart from anything else, my suddenly big red face was a dead giveaway. I had to confess. My mother took it well enough, but made sure I knew if I wanted any more bread it would have to be cut with a knife in the kitchen, and not pinched in the lane.

When the priest came round on Wednesday to the school to hear confessions, I went into him in the spare classroom and knelt down.

"Bless me father, for I have sinned. It's two weeks since my last confession. Here are my sins. I was cursing. I was telling lies. I pinched bread from the bin in the lane..."

"You did what, my son?"

"The lane, father."

"What about it?"

"We have our breadbin in the lane, and I took bread out of it."

There was a pause, as the priest considered our domestic arrangements.

"The breadbin is in the lane?"

"Yes, father."

The priest was probably vaguely aware that such things as breadbins existed. Likely in the Augustinian college where he stayed, an underling would appear in the evening with a serving of a thickly-sliced piece of buttered turnover that must have come from somewhere. But probably not a lane. Obviously, he'd have to follow this one up later.

When the rest of the class had filed in and received absolution one by one, he came in to speak with Miss Egan. They whispered away and he nodded towards me. She shook her head. Then they both shrugged. I suppose he was asking her if I lived in a hedge or something. Anything peculiar in the family? Does he ever say strange things in class? Health Board ever involved?

I was in a fancy home-interiors store a couple of weeks ago and I saw a new enamel breadbin for sale. It was almost the same size as our old one (long since lost in a house move, to my regret), but cream in colour rather than green. I'm still trying to decide if maybe a new, cream-coloured one might go well in the kitchen we're building. At the moment, our plastic-packaged supermarket breads are stuck on a shelf in a cupboard. I miss the opening up and peering into an enamel breadbin, the smell of bread, trapped inside, wafting out, and the sound the lid made when it was dropped back on.

Maybe I'll speak with Herself about it.

Ecker and other inconveniences

I'm dawg tired this evening, and there isn't a spud peeled or a cat napped in the house yet. Looking at the Blog a few minutes ago, I was thinking of it like homework after a long schoolday. Let's hope that feeling doesn't last!

'Homework Exercises' (or 'Ecker' as we elegantly called them) are what Irish school teachers like to heap upon the miserable in their charges. Not only do we suffer a 9.00am to 3.00pm school day until around age 13, we also get to do homework in all the subjects towards the following day's lessons. Personally, I suspect the idea was an excuse to get us home before dark. I can tell you that the bogie man and banshee did more to scoot me across the fields than ever the fear of a teacher's cane did when I was younger!

I thank whoever is listening each morning as I pass the forlorn faces in school uniforms that I no longer have to go to school. No matter how stressful a day I'm having, there's no snide Irish teacher to confound me with verbs, or a Maths teacher to roar at me over multiplication any more. And no Ecker.

Cats to feed and spuds to peel and cook, though. That's my Ecker these days. Onwards and upwards.

Don't get ahead of yourself: Crayoned Ohs and Dick and Jane come first, bold boy

I started writing at home when I was about three years of age, I think. The alphabet, written on the wall, was my first "work". This wee piece of precociousness (and unending pestering of my mother) meant that I started school at the age of four, where all thoughts of writing were stolidy discouraged by boxes of crayons and many, many scribbled "ohs". If one was going to write, one was going to write properly.

We wrote on big pieces of white paper, copying the images and characters written on the blackboard by the teacher and trying not to get caught for being bold. "Boldness" is the Irish equivalent of "naughtiness". "Don't be bold" an Irish mother will tell her children.

At school, we also learned songs about "The Bold Fenian Men", which was a little confusing, as these were Nationalist heroes. So maybe it was also good to be bold!

Our desks had brass-covered inkwells, mostly without either inkpot or ink, which was disappointing. It meant that we were kept out of the way of grown-up writing. Books with Dick and Jane were the limits of our literary world, and we toiled furiously to See Spot, See Spot Run, See Spot run with Dick and Jane. One, two three.

I'd almost forgotten about that one. Learning, (one) as we did, (one) about how to read aloud in public, (one) the teacher would get one child to read while another counted pauses out loud for each piece of punctuation. (One, two, three). A comma counted one, (one) while a full-stop counted three. (One, two, three). When we encountered our first semi-colon it counted as a two.

Did you ever hear the radio sketch with the guy making a funny noise for each punctuation mark? Somehow it still sounded hilarious to me, even after our own classroom purgatory of one, one twos, and one-two-threes. If anyone remembers who did it, please let me know. A quick Google search hasn't turned it up.

In time we got to write "Compositions", kept for the school inspector in special copybooks on shelves beneath the blackboard. The teacher cheated a bit here, because she made us write the composition on What I Did on my Holidays in one copy that she could correct and make good, then got us to laboriously transcibe the sanitised version into the "good work" books that the inspectors saw. Performance indicators hadn't been invented, but I think Ms. Egan had a handle on the theory years before their time. Woe betide the kid ("Good man, Woebe!" as Scottish comedian, Billy Connolly, would say) who blotted his good-work composition book. We were still in the days of canings and they were generously applied for all sorts of misdemeanours as well as breaches of the ever-growing body of rules.

No matter how many canes we broke, or disappeared, there were any number of trees outside that made for replacement sticks. The teachers would sit until they could take no further slight, then pick on someone to go outside and find a stick. Maybe the expectation of the victim while he waited for the makeshift cane to appear was a deliberate part of the punishment, or maybe, as I suspect, the teachers were just too ignorant of what they were doing to us all for that sophistication of the torture to occur to them. In any case, it was a system open to corruption. I remember getting the biggest stick I could find one day because I didn't like the kid being punished. It was as thick as a broom handle, and even the teacher thought I'd gone mad! "Sure that would kill him!" he shouted. "Go and get another!" In the meantime, the punishee was waving his fists furiously at me from behind the teacher's back. I'd be hearing from him again at lunchtime or after school.

Do they make kids stand to attention for 40 minutes at a time these days? I was wondering this today as I waited for a bus and my back was twingeing at me. We were made stand around the sitting teacher (probably to act as human draft excluders, if nothing else) for about that length of time while lessons went on on Irish language, or Mathematics, or English. I'm fairly sure my aches and pains started around then.