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)

The Comfort of Pigeons.

I went for a run. It happens a lot with me - a way of managing my gluttony. Around about the half-way point of my usual 6 mile route, I encountered a woman in a flap. Her car was parked at the side of the road, engine running. Her car was a large silver 4 x 4 - the type that ensures her children's safety on the school run whilst imperilling the lives of their classmates. At the woman's feet laying a pigeon that she had just clipped with her big silver car.

'I couldn't avoid it', she said. 'It was just sitting in the middle of the road'.

As she talked, the pigeon turned circles on the pavement, beating the ground with its one good wing. There was a large puncture hole in its chest.

'Do you know where I can get a box from?' the woman asked me. 'If I could get a box, I could put it in my car and take it to the vet's', she said.

The vet's in my village is located less than a minute's drive away from where the pigeon lay.

I said, 'I don't have a box'. The woman seemed disappointed. 'But anyway,' I continued. 'The vet won't be able to do anything for it. It's a goner'.

My prognosis seemed to distress the woman a bit more. 'No,' she said, 'I think it will be all right if we can find a box'.

Fatefully, next to the pigeon there was a large, heavy stone that had once been part of a long-demolished wall.

I offered to drop the stone on the pigeon to put it out of its misery.

I have experience of euthanizing birds. Made redundant in his mid fifties, my father embarked on a  canary breeding business, carried out in the detached body of a Luton van 'parked' at the side of our house. He wasn't very good at it and most of his canaries developed serious neuroses. It's a thing with canaries apparently. My dad's flock started pecking off their own legs. Canary prosthetics or psychiatric services were hard to come by in 1970s Belfast what with all the shootings and bombings, so my Dad drowned the legless neurotic canaries in a white bucket, specially set apart for this job. In this avian euthanasia programme he recruited my brother and me. Obviously psychologically damaged by the Troubles, my brother and I were enthusiastic canary-drowners. One held the legless canary under the water until the musical bubbles stopped rising from its beak. So, when it comes to dispatching our feathery friends to their eternal home in the sky, I know what I am about.

'Hmm..' considered the woman. 'I wouldn't be comfortable with you dropping that stone on it,' she said.

I thought, 'It's not about your level of comfort'. But I didn't say it. I am a nice bloke.

By  this point the pigeon had now mastered the art of moving along the ground with one wing and had sculled itself into the hedge by the side of the road, its journey from the roadside marked with a sticky trail of blood.

'Oh', said the woman. 'It's better now.'

'No', I said. 'It's dragged itself into the hedge to die.'

Undaunted, the woman said, 'I'm still going to get it that box. It will provide it with shelter overnight and then, in a few days, it will get better and fly away.'

'Or die or be eaten by a fox,' I said.

The woman was beginning to tire of my pessimism and, perhaps, concerned that she had sought help from a psychopath

'I'll get that box', she said and got back into her big silver car. She thanked me and drove off. I noticed that hanging from her rear-view mirror she had a white cardboard dove. I recognised it as an air freshener given to customers of a local car wash staffed by asylum seekers from Afghanistan. It is rumoured that the staff are bonded slaves but as they charge £5 for a full wash and wax, no one cares. They charge more for a full valet but they're the cheapest around. Most cars in the village feature the same white dove, fragrantly bestowing its in-car serenity upon the stressed-out driver.

After the woman drove off, I went over to the heavy stone and picked it up. It was sufficiently heavy for the task. I walked over to the pigeon. But, by this time, it had secured itself deep under the hedge. There was not a clear drop from above onto its head.  I tried to hook the pigeon out from under the hedge with my foot to administer the coup de grace but I couldn't reach it. I placed the heavy stone back where I had found it and, crouching down by the hedge, I wished the pigeon a speedy death. Its eye was obscured by its inner eyelid but, otherwise, it looked calm.

Two days later, I ran past the spot where the pigeon had settled down to die. I looked under the hedge again but it wasn't there. A few yards further along, however, I noticed that someone had stuffed a large cardboard box into the hedge. Carefully, I pulled it out. It was very clean and empty.

The Pacifist's Guide To The War on Cancer: A review

I hate cancer. It killed my dad and my mum. It is the reason why every couple of years I have to go off to hospital to be medically buggered by a man with a large hose pipe. I tell you this not to win your sympathy or your admiration, I tell you because, like millions and millions of people across the globe, my life has been affected by cancer.  Having cancer, or (in my case) being on a cancer-prevention screening programme, doesn't make me or anyone else special or virtuous. In fact, if you look at cancer statistics, it makes us quite normal.  The same point can be made about mental illness. Cancer and depression are so common that they are normal. They no longer hold any taboo.  My siblings and I compete over the number of polyps dug out of our lower bowels.  I have held forth at middle class dinner parties on the wonders of Rohypnol and the laxative power of Moviprep.  So, for good or evil, cancer, unlike our personal incomes, is not a topic that is off-limit.  Nor, in my opinion, does cancer bestow on those who suffer from it an aura of saintliness.  Byrony Kimmings, you are right on one point in your awful new show, 'cunts' do get cancer, as well as depression and every other known medical condition.  And I doubt whether it makes them any less 'cunty' or any more saintly.

This insight is the only redeeming moment in a very long and indulgent evening.  For me, the 'creatives' behind the all-singing, all-dancing cancer musical didn't really know what to say about cancer. Early on in the creative process they had spoken to cancer patients, but, like most ordinary punters who get cancer, their thoughts were not that insightful into the condition. Only the over-bearing mother stereotype expressed an opinion that added anything to the evening when she questioned whether Bryony Kimmings had a brain. Of course the director has a brain but, unfortunately, in my opinion, it wasn't fully engaged in the creation of this show.

The first Act is pure 1980s 'big issue' youth theatre, complete with simple-minded music, pointlessly energetic choreography and banal lyrics (excepting the reference to cunts).  Who knew that hospitals are places where you are required to wait around a lot and where medical staff speak in jargon?  Who would have guessed that social media is a platform for hypocrisy?  And who knew that tumours, if untreated, grow? (Many thanks to the designer for giving expression to this last point in giant inflatable tumours that invade the stage throughout the show).

If the first Act was bad (which it was), the second Act was truly appalling as we 'moved towards the real' in the words of Kimmings' voice over. (Yes, Kimmings appears in the show, right from the get go as a 'voice off'.)  This movement towards 'the real' began with the main character, spotlit on the stage for an absolute age, doing nothing while the sound of what I took to be a motorway pile-up played in the background.  And that, my friends, is what passes today for ground-breaking theatre these days. More deep insights followed.  Hospitals at night are eerie places apparently.  Mothers want to protect their children. Shocker!

Eventually and predictably, the show broke down, the music stopped (Thanks be to God!) and the actors began lip-synching to the actual words of the cancer patients whom they had been portraying. You see, we were moving towards the real in a very hippyish, therapeutic way.  The disembodied voice of Kimmings encouraged the actors to drop all artifice  and be real about their own encounters with cancer.  So, as one might expect, we got references to 'Grandad Bill' and 'Aunty Maureen'.  Then the audience were encouraged to join in. As before we had a random list of names.  I have little doubt that behind each name there lies a real personal tragedy.  But, in our post-Diana Princess of our Hearts world, there was, for me, a sense of my fellow audience members wallowing in this collective narcissistic grief. Personally, I wanted to puncture this 'grief-fest' by shouting out the name of my daughter's hamster who had lost her fight against cancer only days before. (Yes, people, hamsters get cancer too.) Even greater was the urge to proclaim loudly the death from their brush with cancer of the actors' careers, but I managed to restrain myself. Like all church services (good and bad) the evening ended with communal singing and we all congratulated ourselves on being 'real' and being survivors.  Standing ovations followed but it was hard to tell whether the audience were applauding the performers or themselves.

I have seen work by Complicite many times before and have been impressed by its inventiveness and originality.  Recently, I really liked Simon Mc Burney's one man show, 'The Encounter' and I spotted a couple of things from it that Kimmings had borrowed in her show.  I was therefore really disappointed by The Pacificist's Guide to the War on Cancer. A mash up of 80s 'big issue' youth theatre and a New Age church service, it offered me no new insights into cancer.  It simply wasn't dark enough, funny enough or clever enough.  But, here's the thing, the kids, generation Y, the safe-spacers, the snowflakes, all have taken to Twitter to say how much they truly loved it.  'Look how cool I am!  I went to see a musical about cancer! Get me!' It seems the 'expose' of social media, like all of the other messages in the show, went unnoticed. A truly irreverent, darkly comic show about cancer needs to be written.  Unfortunately, 'A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer' is nowhere near being it, despite what Twitter or Facebook might tell you.