The Most Famous Cliffs in All of England

This weekend I decided to take Frenchie on a Great British Adventure.  Luring him with the promises of some 'really impressive bitches', I piled him into a hire car with a thermos of tea and some Lindt chocolate for the journey and whizzed out of London - poop poop! - to the East Sussex Heritage Coast.

The actual motivation behind the weekend was to celebrate the temporary return of the lovely Karin Jose, visiting Brighton on a sojourn from her normally steamy Philippines but I thought, why not enjoy some of what this lovely country has to offer whilst we're at it?  Coincidentally, I have also been reading 'James and the Giant Peach' with my year 7s at school and if you know this delightful book, you may remember that at one point, the enormous peach rolls down a very steep hill leaving destruction and a flooding chocolate factory in its path, as well as two squished villain aunts, before leaping to freedom over the side of a very tall, very white cliff into the ocean, where it bobs around before getting chomped on by sharks.  This is where we are up to in the story and we are all having a rompingly good time with it so far, in true Roald Dahl fashion.

Imagine my lightbulb moment, therefore, when I realised that my lesson on writing a post card from inside the peach coincided exactly with my very own holiday to a white-cliff'd coastline!  When I tell them, year 7 will literally think I planned it this way because I have no life other than to serve their educational needs, but really, I am still uber cool and have my own life, and this was just chance good luck!

So, where were we.  Oh yes, zooming down an A road with Frenchie peering suspiciously at the sky wondering why it was so blue in England in January when actually he had heard from very reliable sources that the sky remains a constant middle-grey tone for 97.4% of the year (his sources are very precise, but apparently not accurate).  There was a moment of struggle when the little put-put car wasn't sure if it was going to make it up one of the South Downs, but when we topped the 'up' and began our ascent, I obviously broke into jubilant strands of 'Jerusalem' at this very green and pleasant view:

At this point, after asking for an exact definition of 'pleasant' (lovely, agreeable, nice) Frenchie McFrencherson decided to scoff quietly and ask me if 'green and pleasant' was really something to become patriotic about, whereupon I assured him that, yes, it was.  That's what it is to be British, sometimes, I insisted, and what better way to be than green and pleasant.  If more people were green and pleasant then we would have less need for swords of burning gold and arrows of desire and more time for pleasant pastures and mills and lambs of God and stuff.

When we finally arrived and drove the car into a National Trust bollard (oops), we were greeted with a whole array of bearded, dog owning, wooly jumper wearing Roald Dahl characters in the NT Cafe and a car that was surely straight out of one of his short stories.  I'm thinking 'The Hitchhiker' - thoughts?

Very quickly, as we huffed and puffed up pne of the Downs' 'ups', Frenchie quickly decided that the British landscape is not actually flat, but rolling, as I have told him many times, and in fact there was 'a certain magnificence' about the coast and the light, and that we must go and see the film 'Turner' at once.  Now I'm quite okay with 'green and pleasant', but I'm not going to refuse a 'magnificence' when it's offered.

Very pleasant, I think you'll agree!

We continued the weekend in the marshland around The Seven Sisters park, reminiscent of another Roald Dahl short story - a sad one about two bullies and a swan - and as we drank tea in quaint villages, squelched through the mud by the river and stuffed ourselves full of roast dinner in a traditional pub overlooking the estuary, Frenchie could even be overheard mumbling that the walk had been 'beautiful' and the village of Alfriston 'quite pretty'.

Obviously, I did not show my delight at his conversion to walks in the British winter countryside, but obviously, I've had to transfer my smug excitement to a blog entry to save myself from exploding with Jerusalem Joy.  And did the HOly lamb of GOD in ENGland's PLEASent PAStures SOMETHING?!  Yes.  I think He did.

I came home to discover that 'James and the Giant Peach' is probably actually set in Dover, and Beachy Head is not 'The Most Famous Cliff in All of England', but I'm not convinced my students will question this, and I, for one, am not interested in being the bearer of factual information.  There's no place for that in my classroom: only interpretation, opinion and your own special angle on life.  Or rather, my own special angle on life.

Tara for now.  The next blog should be coming to you from a very cold, but very romantic Salem, MA, US of A!

Frosty

Now, listen, Vietnam. I am not one to put others down. I don't like to brag at the detriment of a person or a country's feelings or self esteem. You've got all the right rain in all the right places and you are da bomb at steamy humidity and hot, hot sun. Your undergrowth is lush and jungly and let's not even start on your deltas and swamp land. Mwa!  Magnifique!  It is the best not to need an alarm because you'll be woken up at 5:45am (just in time for work) even on weekends by the natural sunshine pouring in through your windows and oh, the sense of freedom to commute amongst hordes of beeping mopeds and families lodged together on bikes or even those quiet mornings when you can zip down the highway at 60kph because no one else is up yet. Yes, yes, Vietnam: you got dat covered. 

But let's just do some cultural sharing for a sec. Vietnam, I introduce to you the Frosty Morning Walk to School (no a sweat included):

The kids at school say to me (best saaaf London accent please), "Miss why are you so cheerful in da mornin'?" And I say (in Joanna Lumley tones) "Because of the beauty, darlings!  Because of the beauty! And also coffee."

So, soz, Vietnam. It's mean to create a competition with something you can only achieve in your northernmost mountainous regions, namely temperatures below 20 degrees but on this occasion, I'm afraid the UK wins 

Wimblingdon

Gosh, the posts are coming thick and fast all of a sudden, are they not?

Here, just in case you have always lived in tropical climes and consider the following 'exotic','foreign' and 'different' or have lived in tropical climes too long and have an urge to feel a wrenching longing for the British countryside, are some pictures of the rather lovely Wimbledon Common that Frenchie and I have adopted as our back yard:

And here are some miracle Jesus birds walking on water.  That's just how we grow them in Wimbledon: miraculously. 

 

Mmm. Ice, mud, long winter grass, puddles and low-lying cloud. Don't get much more exotic than that!

I'm Dreaming of a French Christmas

So. Hello again. Here is a cultural-come-teacher post all about the importance of literacy. Don't worry: there are some photos and amusing bits and a lengthy exposition about Christmas. 

So.  Some time ago I married a rather lovely French expat man who recently agreed to continue his international adventure on the other side of the world in jolly old England, taking on once again cultures and customs not his own in the spirit of global exploration.  He is wonderfully good at assimilating and is practicing with pleasure the very British art of complaining about the weather, listening to Radio 4 and delighting in London's green spaces and Sunday morning walks. He still hasn't proclaimed his allegiance to dear Queenie, isn't yet convinced that the NHS really is free, and prefers a coffee to an Earl Grey but at least he's ordered his My Waitrose card to get said coffee for free from one of our most loved national treasures.

Such daily adherence to my culture comes with the agreement that major holidays be spent bathing in his culture in the busom of his family in the south of France, nestled in foie gras, champagne, nespresso machines and babies. Lots and lots of petit filou-type francophone adorable babies. It's hard, I know, but these are the sacrifices one makes for one's husband. 

Now, despite many travel adventures over the last ten years (so old) or so, this was my first Christmas spent away from Chez Shep where, obviously, we do Christmas The Shep Way or, as some people have come to think of it: The Right Way. Other ways of doing Christmas are of course The Wrong Way, The Hoi An Way and the French Way.

The French Way, like an unreasearched visit to Australia, is strangely similar but by no means in any way the same as The Shep Way, thus I spent this festive season floating through a blue and white striped, onion-garlanded twilight zone of Christmas playing 'spot the difference', 'spot the equivalent' and 'don't get upset that they don't understand that it's not done this way'.  Whilst practicing the tolerance and open-mindedness typical of my long-and-proud-history-of-colonisation mother nation, I observed and recorded some rather curious and peculiar rituals performed by these dark and swarthy peoples across the Channel or the 'Manche' as they like to incorrectly call it:

1. They put shoes under the tree for Père Noel to fill, but no sign of a stocking. Similar, but weird. 

Poor petit filou inherited niece #1, the only one capable of speech, and the only French family member speaking a similar standard of French as moi was very upset when she saw my enormous boots on the left because, even though she is only three, she is intelligent enough to note that I have abnormally large feet, even for an adult, and thus would be receiving an inordinate number of presents that far outnumbered the volume capable of fitting in her own tiny booties. Too bad, petit enfant: Père Nöel favours the outsized and galumphing. 

2. Having fairy lights on the Christmas tree just isn't a thing. Everyone looked at me politely when I described it. That was all. I have no picture of the naked tree because what would be the point?

3. All dessert is frozen and in winter landscape form. 

Wow!  The French are so proud of their natural contours that they immortalise them in cream and chocolate. And then they devour and conquer. Gosh. 

4. In France, on Christmas Day, you don't eat until you want to be sick but pass out over a game of Scrabble still cradling a warming glass of Baileys, the only one you will drink all year before waking up with tiles worthy of a triple word score stuck to your face. It's just not good manners, apparently. There was also a sad absence of potatoes. 

5. On the 27th December, in France, one sits outside on the terrace in sunglasses without protective clothing to ward off pneumonia. I kid you not. I got a tan on my face. 

One of my more profound and serious reflections from this holiday period though only came to me when I counted the number of entirely bizarre and uncontextualised statements I made in the presence of my family-in-law that read more like Berlin speakeasy passwords circa 1934 rather than the conversation starters they were intended to be. Allow me to offer a few examples and please remember that nobody listening had any idea what on earth I was talking about:

"The cat arrives on Friday."

"Where is your sesame?"

"It is not far for her to reach, the floor."

...?  Entirely unfathomable.  The majority of my functioning conversation was with my three year old petit filou niece in law who, when crouching down in the middle of the town square and squealing 'pee pee!', was communicating on approximately the same level as me. Having said that, she is quite articulate and berated me a number of time for reading her stories wrong. Mais non, Emma!  C'est un lionceau!

Lion cub, apparently. Who knew?

Anyway, a week after the grammatically incorrect festival that was Christmas at the in laws, I returned to work for the first time in six months in an 'up and coming' Greater London school.  In my first week back I met lots of lovely students and was reminded of the crippling impact of poor literacy and after my beautiful francophone Christmas, dear me, am I beginning to empathise however, poor literacy is not about speaking English or another language well, so in fact, I'm lying, I can't empathise at all - I am super duper literate in English, I just appear to be some form of weird dream manifestation in French, floating around saying random things that are tediously linked to a conversation you vaguely remember having three days ago. Cat? What sesame cat?

Literacy is about communicating and making sense of the world in which you live through some tool of communication be it writing, speaking, sign language, listening, reading - whatever.  And in communicating your experience, you create and develop your experience.  Imagine if my only experience of the world was sitting mutely at a dinner table with nine other people, unable to ever take part, smiling politely before growing bored and distracted, offering to clear plates because at least that is a way of having purpose but really sitting there feeling worthless because I can't understand, or I can understand but can't contribute and making a meaningful verbal connection with me is so much effort that nobody bothers. This is the worst scenario of my francophone experience but for some children, a lesser version of this is every day in the classroom and if it's every day in the classroom, the likelihood is that they are then opting out of experiences that require a literacy that they do not possess: watching the news, reading a book, writing coursework, filling in important forms, accessing higher education, engaging with politics, expressing complex emotions, visiting museums and galleries, reading about other cultures...

Low literacy really is rubbish. Boo. 

So that's about it, really. But if that's all a bit depressing, here's some positive ideas:

1. If you have a child, read with them. 

2. If your partner speaks a different language to them, read in both languages!

3. If you teach kids with low literacy, get into Accelerated Reader. 

4. If you teach in London, ask me about all the great training that Teach First does!

5. Watch this video: Ed Sheeran reminds us that there are lots of ways to communicate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXvzzTICvJs

That is all.