8.8.88

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

'Now, who can tell me today's date?'  I remember the teacher standing in front of the class; a female teacher, so perhaps it was Miss Pinkney or Mrs Sutcliffe - but not Miss Grogden or Mrs Day.  I am at the back of the class to the right, next to Angela - but this may have been the following year.  I half remember sitting next to my best friend, Neil Campion, at some stage, which must have been around this time, towards the end of my infant schooldays.  Perhaps he sat in front of me.  I suppose I should be amazed at how easily I lost touch with him.  I never saw him again, though I do remember being told how his brother - who had a withered left arm with a rather disturbing hook-like device he clipped over it - was killed a couple of years later when he rode his motorbike into an unlit skip late at night.  Apparently his girlfriend riding pillion was also killed, but none of this touched me in the slightest.

'And what is special about today's date?'  Our double desk - whoever it was that shared with me - consisted of a top with a kind of rectangular cavity underneath.  In it we would keep all our text and exercise books, along with pencils and rubbers and set squares and the like.  I remember that I arranged mine in two neat ziggurat forms, one in each corner.

'And when will be the next time that that happens?'  Outside, in the sunlight, lay the grass playing area bounded by a high wire netting fence.  At the far end this gave on to the forbidden sports fields of the secondary modern school next door.  I never knew anything about this place, except that it was where most of those at my primary school ended up.  It never occurred to me to wonder whether I too would go there.  Not that I assumed I would automatically go to a grammar school, because I would not have recognised the concept; it was more that I spent my childhood in a strange kind of volitional and experiential haze.

'Yes, Glyn?'  But I did know what the date was, what was special about it, and when it would happen again.  The answer seemed obvious, and that I should know it, natural.  Like my desk, like the sunshine that poured in through the high windows, like the steady progress through the junior school towards the 11+ exam and beyond, everything in my world seemed perfectly ordered and perfectly right.  My schooldays were hardly the happiest of my life, but they were totally stress-free, insouciant, and frictionless.  I scarcely felt them pass at all.  Time flew by in standing still.

Thus it is that I have few memories from that time, just the odd, flickering image from each year.  But the question that opened that June morning has remained with me ever since.  Eleven years, one month and one day after hearing it, I wrote on my 1977 desktop diary for 7 July: '(remember 6.6.66?)'.  And I did.

And I do today.  The anniversaries are moments of punctuation which come round with a quirky regularity, as if governed by sunspot activity.  Like strange, temporal vortices, they exert a complex force.  All my life, I know, they will give me pause for thought: thought for what was on these dates in the past; and thought for what might be in the future.

(1988)

Download CC0-licensed text file

Contents

The plane truth

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

Air travel has become a symbol of late twentieth century life, of the triumph of technology, and of the latter's democratisation.  We therefore have a vested interest in acquiescing in its romantic mythologies.  We affect to believe that in entering this smooth and gleaming skybound vessel we somehow partake of the pioneering spirit of the Wright brothers, Spitfire pilots and astronauts.  Unfortunately, the airlines know better.

They know that they are dealing with a ridiculous situation: hundreds of people trapped in a flimsy metal hull, surrounded by thousands of gallons of explosive air fuel.  They know that, like overcrowded rats, passengers would probably go mad and run amok if they were fully cognisant of their condition and of its unnaturalness.  They know that their main business is to take our minds off imminent destruction by unremitting distraction.

To do this, airlines employ as their model the principal paradigm of control and deceit: childhood.  Adults habitually adopt artful ploys to keep children quiet, to keep them obedient, to keep them happy.  To make mass air travel possible, the operating companies have engaged in a thoroughgoing campaign of passenger infantilisation, reducing all the jetsetting executives and package tour holidaymakers to a group of boys and girls out on an educational day-trip's jaunt.

The process begins with boarding.  You are trooped on to the aircraft by class and number like a bunch of unruly schoolkids, shepherded by men and women dressed in uniforms and acting the bossy monitor; you are told to sit down in neatly-ordered rows - all of which face the front - and are then strapped into your chair to stop you fidgeting.  Before the plane can leave, you must pay attention to the day's lesson: the voice of the unseen teacher on the intercom explains the usual incomprehensible things about lifejackets and oxygen masks - serious, adult matters that seem boring and irrelevant like so much education; meanwhile, snooty prefects mime woodenly by rote.  Just as at school, nobody really listens.

Shortly after take-off, you are brought a drink - drugged, usually, to make you complaisant - and then, a meal.  It appears instantaneously, hot and from nowhere: it is a well-known fact that the food of childhood never needs preparation.  The packaging in particular seems calculated to appeal to young minds: lots of fascinating wrappings to remove, your own personal cutlery, condiments, bread and butter - and, of course, an individual towelette to wipe your fingers and face with afterwards.  At least the stewardess does not try to do this for you, as your mother often did.

Thus all of your time on the plane is spent like a baby: in eating, sleeping, or being amused - or in going to the toilet.  One of the mysteries of air travel is how hundreds of passengers with little to look at or think about manage to ignore what exactly is going on in those small square cubicles placed so centrally and visibly.  When people rush for the toilets as soon as a meal has ended, and those embarrassingly obvious queues start to snake down the aisles, everyone acts as they would in the presence of a child on a potty, who becomes invisible.  The romance of air travel, indeed.

(1989)

Download CC0-licensed text file

Contents

The weekly essay

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

When I was a schoolboy, I used to dread Monday afternoons.  It was the day we wrote our English essay.  The classes you hate are often those taken by some mentally defective bully whose only pathetic pleasure is to terrorise hapless children.  In this case it must have been from some deep antipathy to the form, or else a sense of personal inadequacy with words; it certainly had nothing to do with Mr Thurlow.

Normally grown-ups tower over you at school; Sammy Thurlow appeared small even to us in our short trousers.  He looked like a tiny Amazonian Indian dressed in a characterless grey demob suit.  And there would be no need to shrink his head: it was already brown and shrivelled, as if chain-smoking had cured him from the inside out.

On the Friday before the essay, Mr Thurlow would turn to us, his rheumy  eyes avoiding our gazes as ever, and between near-fatal coughing fits give us our theme for the following Monday.  We wondered where he got them from: 'it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive'; 'ambition'; 'the pen is mightier than the sword.'  They could have been framed in Sammy's native Amazonian dialect for all the relevance they had to this twelve-year old.

I did not understand essays then.  Drawn more naturally to mathematics, I could only approach essays as problems in search of a solution.  But answers were hard to come by: was the pen mightier than the sword, or not?  The best I could hope for were a series of alternatives, each paragraph nullifying the next with its "on the one hand" or "on the other."  I was deeply envious of fellow schoolmates who were able to take the title as the starting point for some huge fantasia, a pell-mell rush of ideas and images which never seemed to bother themselves with a final destination.  I was also convinced that in some sense they were cheating.

I could have lived with the rigours of my dialectical approach had it been easy to apply.  But it was not.  Every Monday I was faced with the same blank piece of paper, as if all my previous essays had been in vain.  I was oppressed by the sense of distance to be covered, as if the sheet of paper were all uphill.  The essay's form seemed to be a Procrustean bed which stretched my limited ideas and poor creativity to breaking point.

I realise now that it was meant to.  An essay that was easy to write would have been a waste of time.  As I vaguely but correctly sensed, writing is a journey, and often through harsh terrain.  Its destination is not an answer, but a coming together and accommodation of your current ideas.  Which was why I found essay-writing so hard: I had no ideas.

Nor did writing really help me to discover any.  Ideas come only from experience, be it your own or other people's.  As the first ideas begin to germinate within you, the essay becomes not so much simpler as richer.  The act of writing is a crystallisation of ideas; like a crystal, it is formed by creating links, and by establishing a larger order.  That order, however, is only one of many.  As its name suggests, an essay is an attempt, an instance of ambition and of travelling hopefully.

(1987)

Download CC0-licensed text file

Contents