Running Adventures in Yorkshire (Episode 1)

For those who have been asking (and the majority of you who haven’t)I notched up another win at the Throttle-in-Mossdale Run in the Park on Saturday. This time I beat 5 adults (two of whom were octogenarians) and 4 kids who were admittedly distracted by the addition to the race of an 'obstacle option'. One of them had to be cut out of the agility ladder at the end by a passing volunteer fire officer. Though welcoming on the whole, the village runners haven't taken too kindly to being beaten by a barefoot incomer and, during the cool-down on the newly-installed outdoor gym, there were dark mutterings by the sit-up benches. It would seem that in a fortnight's time at the Annual Village Fun Run, I am to face my nemesis in the shape of a 12 year old, known locally as ‘The Whippet’, so called as he is rumoured to possess the speed of a whippet, the height of a whippet (stood up on its hind legs) and the stamina of a...whippet. (So hopefully, he might struggle over 3k). Incidentally, it might interest readers to know that in Yorkshire, a whippet is a standard measure of speed, length, weight and time. Hence in God’s own county, national speed limit signs show the silhouettes of two whippets rather than the familiar black diagonal line. Yorkshire people talk of their children as having grown ‘as tall as three whippets’ and Yorkshire weight-watchers are happy to announce that this week they’ve lost ‘a whippet and a half’ from around their waist.

My show-down against ‘The Whippet’ promises to be like the climactic final scene in the classic western, High Noon, except the race starts at 11, there won't be any guns involved (though there is an archery display afterwards) and, at 54, I'm older than Gary Cooper was in the film and, even to my eyes, he looks well past his best and totally incapable of defeating the younger, more accomplished Miller gang. “They’re making me run,” says Cooper’s character in the film, “and I’ve never run from anyone before.” In contrast, people have never made me run and, in fact, quite a number of people, including close family members, would be very happy if I stopped. Furthermore, having grown up in Belfast during what is euphemistically referred to as ‘The Troubles’, I became very adept at running away from all those who wished me harm due to my involuntary religious convictions and how I pronounced the letter ‘H’. (Differences over the latter and the ‘substance’ of the Eucharist after consecration combine to form the source of the conflict in Northern Ireland.) Even beyond the contested confines of Northern Ireland, running away has been a tactic that has served me well over the years when disaster, humiliation or a promotion seemed headed my way. I shall, therefore, not follow Gary Cooper’s advice and, in two weeks time, will hopefully look over my shoulder to see The Whippet and his youthful posse struggling to catch me as I turn for home just after the newly-refurbished children’s play area. 

Jesus Died for Me

Hanging on a tree
Jesus died for me
So I could be free
To live eternally.

Sweet Jesus, if you don't mind
I care not for your kind
Who would damn most of mankind
To a Hell whose depths defy the human mind.

Gentle Jesus, I no longer wish to number
amongst them that are saved
But shall  remain  with the depraved
And live out my days in sinful slumber.

Having dinner with sinners
Breaking bread with the broken
Making friends with the condemned
And forging bonds with the forsaken.

Like you did.

You cursed the elect
Those pains in the neck
And affronted the powerful, the great and the good
You rejected the in-crowd, the up-themselves, the oh so-proud
And for that, yes just for that,
They hung you on a cross of wood.

Hanging on a tree
Jesus died for me
So that I could learn be
A revolutionary.

Teachers Know Nothing

Socrates was declared the wisest man in Athens (a city famed for its wise men) because he knew that he knew nothing. If not at number one, Socrates must rank in the top three greatest teachers of all time, alongside Jesus and Buddha, and therefore all teachers ought to learn something from him. And where better to start following in the front prints of the barefoot master than by confessing that we too know nothing.

Granted, we know the stuff we have to teach. In fact if we don’t know that stuff, we don’t deserve to be called teachers. Instead, if lacking somewhat in subject knowledge, we may call ourselves ‘facilitators’ but ‘teachers’ we are not. So, as teachers, we have to know what we teach. But, we must confess that we don’t really know how we transfer the stuff we know into the minds and life patterns of those we teach. It is a mystery.

Such a confession of ignorance was easy for Socrates to make. From what we know, he never received payment for being a teacher, his classroom was the public square and his ‘students’ were more like random victims of his stroll-by interrogations about the meaning of life. As paid pedagogues, it would be far more difficult for us to declare our state of ignorance. We have B.Eds, PGCEs, M.Eds and EdDs that supposedly prove the opposite. We have a professional status that sets us apart from the rest of world who don’t know how to do what we do. Parents and governments entrust us with the education of the nation’s children and youth. And, we get paid well above the average wage for doing what we do. But, let’s all ‘fess up’, in the deepest depths of our pedagogic souls, we really know nothing about how we do what we do.

But in order to keep our jobs, pay our mortgages and feed our own children, we pretend that we really know what we’re doing by hiding behind our qualifications and dazzling record of exam results. Well, that’s what we used to do, until the government and their agents, who also need to admit that they know nothing, began jackbooting their way into our ‘secret garden’. We were called to give an account of ourselves, to show our working out in order to justify why we did what we did and why it was ‘effective’. But, of course, we didn’t know. So, we looked to experts, gurus, charlatans and snake oil salesmen who sold us the lie that the mystery of teaching could be reduced to a method or a set of skills. The government had its own list of deceivers and, for several decades now, the living has been easy for educational consultants, growing rich and fat on public money in that gap between the professional ignorance that dared not speak its name and non-professional expectation. The roll call of charlatans is far too long to reproduce in full here but let’s remember some of the mega stars of the consultant constellation - ‘Take a very quick bow, Mr. Alistair Smith with your Accelerated Learning’, ‘Stand up, pair up, and divide up your takings, Messers Kagan and Kagan’, ‘Spare us your blushes, Mr. Daniel Goleman over your non-existent Emotional Intelligence’, ‘Keep building that spending power, Mr. Claxton’, ‘Sound out phonetically the word ‘cash’, Ms. Miskin’...and the credits just keep on rolling.

We have to put a stop to this pretence. If we, who are teaching, day in and day out, don’t really know what we’re doing, is it likely that someone who actually doesn’t teach at all, can offer us anything worthwhile? No, despite the sales pitches and ‘independent’ research findings of the Educharlatans, there is no golden ticket, no sure fire recipe to becoming a good teacher. You need to know the stuff that you are going to teach, inside out and back to front, there is no doubt about that. But figuring out how you transmit what’s in your head and your heart into the heads and hearts of those you teach is the work of a life time. Others can help you step around common pitfalls and you can stand back and admire a Master teacher at work, but don’t expect her to tell you how she does it because she doesn’t know or, rather, she cannot articulately give expression to the wisdom she has accumulated over decades into a handy ‘How To...Guide.’ And, if anyone tells you that he can and wants to charge you for such a guide or a conference or a workshop or a university course, then that person is a charlatan. Avoid!

In his day, William Goldman was considered the greatest screenwriter in Hollywood. His screenwriting credits include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man and The Princess Bride. In 1983, Goldman published ‘Adventures in the Screenwriting Trade,’ which many aspiring screenwriters, myself amongst them, hoped would lift the lid on the talent of the Master and enable us to write a classic Hollywood movie. However, our aspirations were dashed in the opening line - three words that become a mantra throughout the book and, for Goldman, are the distillation of the wisdom gained in working at the highest level in Hollywood for years. That opening line, a sparse, fundamental sentence of subject-verb-object is: ‘Nobody knows anything’. Teachers, rather than pretending that we know what we’re doing, let’s confess our ignorance and even more importantly let’s expose the ignorance of all those self-deluded non-teaching Educharlatans and Senior Managers who, desperate for fame, wealth or power, pretend that they do know.

Dear Mr Butterworth

Dear Mr Butterworth,

I went to see your latest play, ‘The Ferryman’ at the weekend. Due to the array of five star reviews it has garnered, I was really looking forward to seeing it. But, alas, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. In fact, to be totally honest with you, I despised it. Therefore, I am writing to you in the hope of unburdening myself of the contempt that I feel for your play. But, before your reciprocal contempt for this letter is expressed in the shredding of it, l offer you the promise of a solution that will redeem your play from being what it currently is: an episode of Mrs Brown’s Boys transposed to 1980s Armagh.

First though, I need to do the unburdening. I am a family man. I grew up in a large family in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. I work with families as a job. In my experience, there is no family as disgustingly happy as the Carneys in the first half of your play. I get it that happy families are hard to write, hence why soap writers exclusively serve up a diet of dysfunctional families, but the Carneys make the Waltons look like the Manson family. When Oisin breaks the kite, the younger children seem a bit sad and confused. In reality, there would have been tantrums and tears. I believe you yourself have children, so why did you depict the Carney children as so unrealistically angelic? Was it because they were Irish and therefore somehow different from or better than children anywhere else in the world? I thought what you were playing at was setting up this family idyll in the first half of the play in order to expose it as a sham in the second half but I was wrong. The Carneys are just all very very lovely and very very Irish. They drink, they dance, they swear, they sing, they make Classical references, they talk about fairies and banshees and they count their years in harvests. They are, in fact, a British suburbanite’s representation of the folk across the water.

And now we come to the second half and the entrance of the Baddies. (Boo! Hiss!) Contrasting with the lovely, lovely Irish family, you presented us with three members of the IRA. They have had to travel a long way to interact with the Carneys because obviously there were no members of the IRA residing in South Armagh at the time. This distance between the Carneys and the IRA is highly significant because it suggests to the audience that each party inhabits its own separate world. But that is misleading because, as I’m sure you know, Mr Butterworth, IRA members and lovely lovely Irish families were not different entities; they were, most often, one and the same.

After a busy afternoon’s sniping, the South Armagh Sniper probably returned home to his loving wife and children. He probably read a bedtime story to the kids. It might have been about fairies and banshees but I doubt it. After which, he probably kissed them good night and then went to do a night shift in a factory, although there weren’t too many of them in Armagh in the 1980s. The same was true for the Loyalist paramilitaries. After a pleasant evening spent torturing a Catholic in the back room of a pub, in front of an invited audience of lovely lovely friends and neighbours, the Shankill Butchers returned home to their lovely lovely wives and mothers who, the following day, discussed the best detergent for getting Fenian blood out of a denim jacket. This was the reality, Mr Butterworth, and I’m sure you know it. (The British Army certainly knew it when they introduced the policy of Internment but you can’t lock up an entire community without drawing the opprobrium of the entire world. ) So why did you present IRA members as operating outside society when they were embedded within it? As an Englishman, did you feel that this might disturb the cherished post-colonial guilt of your middle class British audiences towards all things Irish?

Or, did you not wish to offend members of the Diaspora and their ‘Oh So Irish’ British-born kids who you knew would flock to a play about the Auld Country, in which Irish families are lovely and Irish terrorists are The Other? I would genuinely like to know.

So onto my proposed solution for redeeming your play. You will be pleased to learn that you can keep most of the first half, except for the opening scene which was totally superfluous anyhow. So lovely lovely Oirish family, tiddly dee tiddly dum, potty-mouthed kids (not funny, by the way, even if audiences laugh) etc. etc. The second half is, however, where the changes will have to be made because, in the rewritten version, we come to realize that Quinn Carney, the lovely, lovely Quinn Carney, farmer and family man, is implicated in the execution and disappearance of his own brother. For the last decade, his whole life has been a lie. I’ll leave you, the greatest playwright of his generation, to work out the denouement. You might want to incorporate Tom Kettle into this somehow. In the play at the moment, he’s just a cypher – an inversion of the Irish fool or Lenny Small with an estuary accent. Perhaps he could be the only one who knows the truth about Quinn. Perhaps he is really a British Army deserter. Whatever. He needs a real back story, (currently he doesn’t have one) and that could involve Quinn’s deceit. (Incidentally, we had Social Services in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, so the primitives wouldn’t have been able to adopt a lost child with an English accent without some sort of legal process.)

I know the play in its current form is transferring to Broadway, where I know the Yanks will love it because it will present them with a nostalgic view of Ireland that avoids the implication that they’re related to terrorists but, is that what you want? Your play is a huge hit but so is Mrs Brown’s Boys and Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl. Like your play (in its current form), neither of these masterpieces tells the audience anything about Ireland or the Irish. So, Mr. Butterworth, here’s your chance to transform your play from something popular into something important. You have a couple of months before it transfers to Broadway. I saw an interview that you gave to the BBC in which you said you were a last minute sort of guy. So two months should be more than enough time to re-write the second half and to dispense with that awful, clunky second interval while you’re at it. Good luck with it.

Do not let me and my fellow Irish men and women down. Tell the truth about us.

Regards

Mark Hamill (Yes, it is my real name)