Marking Time

You may remember that I wrote about Markolepsy fairly recently; a term that I coined to describe a condition suffered by English teachers. In a nutshell, marking is extremely soporific, so we fall asleep mid-essay, which results in us marking essays with blotted ink and droplets of sleep-induced saliva rather than ticks, “sp” and “punc”.

I’ve spent a few hours marking this weekend in various states of consciousness. In between bouts of marking and sleeping, I’ve thought of another argument against those people who say that teachers aren’t allowed to complain about teaching because of all the holidays they get.

I get this all the time, you see. Whenever I tell anyone that I'm a teacher, the first thing they comment on is the holidays, usually with an expression of poorly disguised jealous hatred on their face.

Now, I agree that teachers of subjects like Maths should get less holiday time. After all, each question in their subject has only one correct answer and they don’t have to do any reading when they mark. I agree that teachers of PE don’t deserve their long holidays. Their subject has no answers at all and no writing whatsoever. Standing around in a field all day shouting, "Point that elbow!" or "Run, boy, run!" is hardly work, is it? I also think that Geography teachers should have their holidays reduced because all they have to mark is how effectively maps of Brazil have been coloured in.

English teachers stand alone (which either sounds like the title of Morrissey’s next single or a Labour party slogan) because we have to read so much stuff. This means we do more work than teachers of other subjects. It’s obvious, isn’t it?

There’s more to it than that, though. It’s not just reading. I enjoy reading, after all. But can you imagine reading 30 pretty much identical essays in a row? Correcting the same errors? Making sure that the comment at the end of each piece of work is different in case they compare them, even though they don’t pay any attention to them anyway, because if they did I wouldn’t be correcting the same errors in every piece of work?

English teachers are actually working on negative time. To put it another way, it feels like it takes longer than it actually takes to do marking. The gears of the universe creak and strain when I pick up the red pen. The machinery of time starts to work in reverse as I tick and underline. It doesn't start immediately, either, because I always start off fresh. If it takes three minutes to mark the first two-page essay in the pile, then I’m probably down to two and a half minutes by the fifth as I get into a rhythm. However, once I get past this, I become so horrendously bored that each two and a half minutes feels like twice as long as it actually is. Once I get to the tenth essay (assuming I’m still awake), even though I’ve only been marking for 27 and a half minutes, it feels like 40. The trend continues exponentially.

The experience of marking reminds me of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which a priest describes eternity as being like a seagull flying for decades to a beach where it picks up a solitary grain of sand and carries it back, which also takes it decades. Eternity ends when the beach is empty of sand.

This also describes the experience of reading Joyce, too.

So, English teachers actually lose, and are owed, time. Particularly when on a marking marathon like the one I’ve been on this weekend. According to my calculations, I’ve been marking for 36 out of the last 24 hours this weekend. And in my seven year “career” so far, I should now be enjoying my second retirement.

NB No calculations were actually calculated.

Here's a photo of the pile this weekend. As you can see, it's almost the size of a CD:

Bear With Me

I went to a pub quiz with a difference last night. Ella and I were in a team together in a pub we’d never been to before. It was kind of glitzy and the quizmaster really played up the razzmatazz. At the same time, there was a bit of a small-town atmosphere too.

It reminded me of some of the roadhouses we visited in Australia – a thriving community in the middle of nowhere. We felt like outsiders, but as long as we didn’t do anything stupid, we were sure we’d be ok.

The first round was karaoke, bizarrely, so Ella got up and sung “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”. The first couple of notes were a bit pitchy for me, but then she brought it home and it was, to be honest, the bomb.

The second round was even stranger than the first. It was my turn this time. It was one of those “Who am I?” type rounds in which I had to identify a celebrity.

I was expecting a photograph of the celebrity, but what I got instead was a dwarf. A real, live dwarf. He kind of wandered about in front of the teams for a bit and I had to go into the middle and tell him who I thought he was dressed up as.

He had bleached blond hair, but other than that he didn’t really look like anyone. I felt that I was going to struggle.

I was informed that I had three guesses.

Initially, I guessed that he was Patrick Swayze. This was a waste of a guess, really, as Patrick Swayze is not exactly renowned for having bleached blond hair.

Nor is he much of a celebrity anymore, unless you count a small part in Donnie Darko and lots of big parts in Hallmark movies.

He gave me a bit of a clue next by pulling up his jumper and revealing a Newcastle United football shirt. I think I must have been panicked into my next guess, because it was David James, who has never played for Newcastle. He has, however, bleached his hair blond.

As if things weren’t strange enough, with one guess left, I found myself sitting beside Ella again, with the dwarf standing next to me. It suddenly occurred to me that the dwarf looked a bit like Magnus Mills, one of my favourite novelists. Magnus Mills doesn’t have bleached blond hair, but I was beginning to think that maybe the hair was a red herring, even though it was the only effort he'd made to look different to how I imagined he usually looked. I told Ella that I thought he was Magnus Mills and the dwarf thought he overheard me. He whispered, as if trying to help me to get the answer right, that yes, he was Magnus Seamills. He wandered back into the middle of the pub for me to take my third guess. No one had seemed to notice this cheating going on.

Now, I’d never heard of Magnus Seamills but it was obvious to me that the dwarf was trying to help and that he'd misheard me. I got up excitedly, danced back over to him, and said in a loud voice, “It’s Magnus Seamills!” at which point, somehow, I managed to trip up the dwarf. Our feet - mine extremely long and his extremely short - managed to get tangled up and down he went.

All of a sudden, things turned a bit nasty. The dwarf couldn’t get up. He evidently had something seriously wrong with his leg and he started shouting, either in pain or in anger, I couldn’t tell which. As an outsider in this pub, I felt that Ella and I could now be in considerable danger because the locals would be outraged that I had tripped up their weekly celebrity-impersonating dwarf.

It was at this point that I woke up and realised that it had all been a dream. Even for a dream it's fairly unusual, but it's also very normal in its own way.

Does anyone fancy having a go at an interpretation?

Guess What This Is

It's probably quite easy, actually.

Funny Story

Inundated with visitors at the moment. First of all, Merle and Si were here briefly and now my parents have arrived.

Merle and Si are on their way around the world and had four days or so in Singapore. They were superb guests: no trouble at all. They even popped in on Ella at college, where they were complimented on how young they look by someone on Ella's course. I wasn't there myself, but apparently, this colleague of Ella's really laboured the point that Merle and Si did, in fact, look extremely young. Merle and Si were flattered, of course, even though this person didn't know how old they were.

It was only after a few minutes of her asking Merle and Si questions about me that they realised: she thought Merle and Si were my parents.

Merle is, in fact, a year or so younger than me.

Slightly less flattering.

I can only imagine the painful shuffling and cringing smiles that followed the moment of realisation. I kind of wish I'd been there, but I'm also kind of glad I wasn't.

Merle and Si:



Mum and Dad:

The Fear In Bali 3

Some people crave fear, or at least the adrenaline which accompanies it. I hate it. I loathe the increased heartbeat, the sweaty palms and the internal lurch.

These are some of the other things I was scared of in Bali, to varying degrees.

Dogs. The streets were full of them. They barked at us. Ella didn’t care. I crossed the road where sometimes there was another barking dog waiting for me, in which case I walked in the middle of the road.

Dogs are ok if I know them. Dogs are ok in countries which don’t have rabies. Bali has rabies, so every unknown barking dog was potentially rabid. Ergo, none of these dogs were ok. Logic, init?

Motorbikes. We hired a motorbike by mistake. Our simple enquiry of “how much will it cost to rent a motorbike?” ended up with us having one for a day and a half. Ella drove. I spent the first 10 minutes saying “I don’t like it,” over and over again until she pulled over and told me, quite patiently, that I wasn’t helping her concentration much. I managed another 10 minutes before asking meekly that we take it back to the hotel and go for a walk. I don’t know what the problem was. I used to ride motorbikes once every Summer on the Isle of Wight when I was a kid.

Snorkelling. I’ve not done much of this, but I loved it. Saw some amazing fish. But every time something brushed my foot, my immediate thought was “shark!” Even though there are no sharks in Balinese waters.

Losing things/having things stolen. I must be a frustrating person to travel with because I’m always very nervous about this. I’ve heard some nightmare stories about having stuff nicked like this one and like Andy F who had his entire backpack nicked from a beach in Thailand.

What are you supposed to do with your stuff if there’s two of you, on a beach, and you both want to go in the sea? My problem is that I can’t leave valuables in the hotel, because all the hotels tell you not to. That means that I take them with me, which means I can’t leave my bag anywhere either. Should I leave my valuables in a hotel room? What do other people do? Why does no one else seem to have anything with them on a beach when I have two cameras, a wallet, my glasses, a bottle of water, two books and a notebook and pen?

Why are holidays so stressful?

Chickens. According to one of my taxi drivers, every man keeps chickens in Bali in order to rear them up for cockfighting. Or in order to eat them. The bird flu infected chickens were as ubiquitous as the rabid dogs. In my head, at least.

Other than that, I’m quite a confident, comfortable traveller.

Seriously, though, what do you do with your money when you want to go in the sea and you’re not in Australia (where it’s waterproof)?

The Fear In Bali 2

After five days in Bali, Ella had to get back to Singers for college, so I was left on my own to explore.

Actually, this was my first ever experience of “travelling” on my own (the more I creep into my thirties, the more I feel I should be calling it “holidaying”). I like the melancholy atmosphere that solitude creates and the way that one can just meander purposelessly from one thing to another, without speaking to another soul for hours.

I also like the way that solitude makes you a different person to the one you are when you’re with company. As well as spending a lot of time on my own doing things like reading, I was also doing things I wouldn’t usually do, like singing “Hello” by Lionel Richie with Balinese waiters in a restaurant in which I was the only customer. They got the phrasing of the song wrong, actually. You see, they didn’t leave the long, plaintive pause after the first “Hello!” in the chorus. Rather, they pressed straight on to “Is it me you’re looking for?” only pausing for one beat instead of the correct three and a half beats. Although this incorrectness made me feel a bit uncomfortable, I let it pass and joined in.

I was clearly letting go.

Solitude can also make your mind play tricks with you. What you gain in the various pleasures of solitude, you lose in not having the reassurance of other people.

I took a few long walks in Bali, mainly to marvel at the beautiful undulating paddy fields which cascade downhill. One such walk led me up a steep hill that sliced through two rivers. All the way down to the banks of the rivers, coconut trees, elephant grass and rice fields abounded.

As I turned a corner at the crest of the hill, a man wearing only a loincloth leapt out from amongst the elephant grass. Even more unnerving than the loincloth was the machete he was brandishing. “Come with me,” he commanded. He seemed rather excited, jumping from foot to foot. “You come with me,” he repeated.

My first thought was that he was going to take me into the bushes and slit my throat or chop my limbs off or something. Worse still, he had one of those eyes that is all white. Rather than feeling sympathy for him because of this, my mind obviously reminded me of films like The Others and The Dark in which characters with eyes like this are scary. I go a bit simplistic when I have a fright.

I felt I was looking at two choices: go into the bushes with him and be chopped to pieces by the machete, or carry on walking/running and be caught up with and chopped to pieces by the machete.

Nervously, I followed him into the bushes. I was relieved to see three coconuts on the flattened grass.
“I saw you!” he shouted at me manically. “I saw you taking photos! I was over there!” he pointed to the other side of the river. “I was over there, up a tree and I came to you! You must want drink!”
“How much?” I asked, having recovered somewhat.
“What your name?” he asked. I told him my name and he told me his and we shook hands.
“You must want drink! Thirsty walking!” he repeated.
“How much?” I asked again. At this, he expertly sliced a gash in the coconut by bringing the machete down from a great height twice. The flesh penetrated, the liquid within spilling onto the ground, he discarded the sliver of shell. He held the coconut out towards me, the fluid rocking from side to side.
“You need drink!” he informed me.
“How much?” I asked again.
“What your name?” he asked again. We went through the exchanging names and shaking hands ritual again. I realised at this point that he had selective understanding of English and that now he had opened the coconut I was going to have to drink it. And pay for it.

It was very refreshing.

While I was half drinking the coconut and half spilling it down my t-shirt, he said something about needing money for coffee. He got the discarded piece of coconut shell and wrote 20,000 on the ground with it by pressing it hard against the dust. That’s about one pound and 30 pence. “Very expensive,” I said. “10,000.”

Once again his selective understanding of English came in. He just ignored me. I carried on drinking. He carried on standing there with his machete, muttering about needing coffee, while I took the occasional sip of coconut juice, which I hadn’t needed.

After this stand-off had carried on for a while, he pointed at the 20,000 he’d written in the dust again and I had one last stab at bartering with him. No response again. A glazed expression came over his eye. I realised I was going to have to pay the full amount. After all, I considered, there’s no way I’m arguing with a man brandishing a machete. I started counting the money and giving it to him.

“Only 19,000. 1000 short,” he informed me. I gave him the last thousand, muttering something about it being very expensive. “Now you walk with coconut,” he told me.

Dismissed, I continued with my walk, with the coconut, wondering how I’d managed to get sprung like this. In company, it’s much easier to walk away from a purchase you don’t want. Strength in numbers and all that. However, I was also feeling slightly pleased with myself for managing to escape from the situation with all limbs still intact.

The Fear In Bali 1

Went to some beautiful temples, including one which is also a monkey sanctuary. As well as being tame, these monkeys could also be aggressive, apparently, and according to the publicity info, we should avoid being scratched or bitten at all costs.

Rather confusingly, we were asked to buy bananas to give to these monkeys that we were supposed to be avoiding. The logic was that by throwing bananas at them we could keep them away from us.

I also read that not having bananas for the monkeys makes them aggressive. Feed me or else is their maxim, it seemed.

We bought some bananas.

Being scared of things that are likely to bite me, I wanted to get through the sanctuary as quickly as possible. Every time a monkey approached, I’d throw a banana at it, which it would peel and eat. By the time it had finished, I had scarpered.

One monkey approached me from the front, blocking my path. I had two bananas left, but resourcefully threw one to my left for it to go and get while I kept walking, hoping to leave it in my wake. However, it grabbed the banana, unpeeled it and started eating it whilst chasing me at the same time. There was no way I was going to run and I also knew I couldn’t out-walk a monkey. It caught up with me and started tugging at the bottom of my shorts. This made Ella laugh uproariously. When I asked her what was so funny afterwards, she said it was because I looked so scared.

I threw my last banana at it. From then on, all the monkeys left me alone because I didn’t have any bananas left.

I saw nothing of the temple because I was too busy looking out for monkeys.


This photo is blurred because I was already scarpering.

Bali's Picturesqueness

Bali has the most picturesque scenery of anywhere I’ve ever been to. If you’re standing in Bali and you spin around in a circle with your eyes closed and a camera in your hand until someone says “stop” and take a photo at that instant, chances are you’ll end up with a quality photo.

Here are some photos I took using the method above.

All quite colourful, eh? 

Away Again

It's Easter holiday time, so I'm off to Bali this afternoon for about 10 days. It's about an hour from here, but I've never been before. No idea what I'm going to do once I get there. Sorting out itineraries and places to stay are what plane journeys are for.

See you in a couple of weeks with some photos, probably.

I Say, I Say, I Say

I went to watch some stand-up comedy last night. According to interviews I’ve read, it appears that comedians become annoyed when members of the public come up to them when they’re at the supermarket or wherever and tell them jokes or say to them, “I reckon I could be a stand-up comedian”. I suppose it’s like being a doctor and having people always trying to put your arm in a sling when you’re trying to tie your shoelaces or something.

After the performance, one comic (Shappi Khorsandi – funny!) came and sat at our table. I promised myself that I wouldn’t tell her that I reckon I could be a stand-up comedian. Straight after promising myself this I realised how conceited I was being even beginning to imagine that I might be able to actually do stand-up. I concluded that I didn’t really think I could do it. Although I went on to think that if you’re a professional comic, you’ve got all day every day to sit around thinking of funny things to say. How hard can that be?

Despite these contradictory thoughts raging about my brain, I was still determined not to say to Shappi that I thought I could do stand-up if I ended up talking to her.

By the time all that had gone through my head, it was time for Ella and me to go home. While I’d been in my own little space, imagining what I wouldn’t say to someone I’d never spoken to before, Ella had been chatting away with Shappi and her friend, having a laugh and exchanging phone numbers.

Just as I was about to leave, I found myself saying goodbye to lots of people who I'd been sat with all night but hadn't spoken to. One was Shappi and she asked me what I did and I told her I was a teacher. She said, “I reckon I could be a teacher.”

Not really.

But she did say “I’ve got a lot of friends who are teachers, and I reckon that teaching is the job that’s most similar to stand-up comedy.”

After spending so much time thinking about what I wouldn’t say to her, now that I was talking to her, I realised my time would have been better spent thinking about what I would say to her.

I managed to ask her whether teaching and stand-up comedy were so similar because of all the hecklers, which is almost a joke, if you think about it. She said that actually it was to do with having to think on your feet and having to get all the people in the room to like you (an interesting teaching strategy – must try it some time).

Anyway, now that she’d said that my job was similar to hers, how could I resist? “I promised myself I’d never say this to a stand-up comedian,” I began, “But I reckon I could be a stand-up comedian…”

We were interrupted at this point by the other comic who started an in-depth conversation with her. As Ella and I were about to leave anyway, I realised that I wouldn’t get the chance to tell her a joke.

I also wondered what sort of impression I’d made on her from our brief encounter. I wonder whether anyone has ever used the phrase “I promised myself I’d never say this to a stand-up comedian” before. What kind of person goes around making such promises to themselves?

I kind of hovered for a bit, hoping to be able to explain myself, but that would have made me seem even more stupid, so I waved and departed.

If you wanted to prove to a stand-up comedian that you were capable of doing her job, what joke would you tell her?