New Year's Eve

Night, and the blue moon full; half the world in the new year and half of us still in the old. Snow tumbling softly through the street light outside, settling in a coarse white patina. Candles, food and wine, a company of friends gathering here from nearabouts bringing music and sweets.

A year ago we were newly returned, sitting amongst boxes and rediscovered books.

Christmas Eve 2009

Snow pix

The white frosting continues today; another six inches of snow fell at tea time and the place looks more Narnian by the hour.

Unsettling

Still chill

Snow continues to fall; snow on snow.

The practical upshot of this is that the first fall of snow settles and packs down, like the flour in the bottom of the sack, under its own weight or trodden down by small boys/Christmas revellers/car scrapers. It melts very slightly in the degree or so of warmth afforded by the midday sun and at night this millimetre of water freezes to a near frictionless surface of ice.

New snow overlays this miracle of physics with an impossibly beautiful covering of crisp yet powdery sugar frosting like a white sahara. "Treacherous" doesn't come near to describing this combination of awesome beauty and lethal potential. Broken bones and smashed cars abound, as do snowmen.

Simon and I spent the afternoon building ours and he's proof that those hours of reading Calvin and Hobbes were not wasted. He is a jolly, seasonal but strangely disturbing presence in the garden with his mushroom dark glasses and sharp sticks hair. A triumph.

Chill

Today Simon and I were walking back from town across the bridge when a breath of freezing air descended. The sky turned that colour of grey that heralds snow, and it began to sleet. All this happened in the space of 30 seconds, like it does on those weather maps. Shoulders hunched we hurried on, and half-way up the long hill to the house we stopped and looked as a wall of snowflakes swept down the street and turned all to a whiteout.

There's now several inches of snow lying like sugar on every surface; cars turned to soft white mounds, trees drooping with heaped powder and slender icicles. I watched two squirrels bounding through the deep snow on the lawn across to the bird table, ascend opposite sides of it and chomp into the seed I'd laid there. A moment later one of them went flying off the platform and landed in the snow, kicked superbly by the other. A tussle ensued with first one then the other being booted from the food shelf. A victor emerged and the other went off to tackle the squirrel-proof peanut holder.

It's now nearly midnight and minus 10 outside, according to the car's temperature reading. Could be a white Christmas at this rate.

More flooding photos

The River Tweed in spate.

You can click on any of these photos to get a full-size view.

Scroll down for more.

Peebles floods

Peebles caught the edge of the recent flooding. These were taken on the day the river broke its banks.

All is pervaded with the smell of turpentine

The news wires are alive this week with a shocking story of deceit, misinformation and deliberate falsification of data in the ongoing debate about climate change.

In an interesting coincidence with the upcoming summit in Copenhagen some e-mails between scientists at the University of East Anglia have been 'leaked' and a press story generated around their contents. The e-mails selected out for publication centre around a cover-page graph of mean temperatures derived from data from tree surveys. The depiction of the data from the period 1960 onwards was apparently adjusted to account for an anomaly wherein the mean temperature appears to fall from that year onwards. The fall in temperature didn't actually happen according to other temperature data and is a statistical anomaly related to how the tree data was collected. The adjustment produced a graph depicting a continuing rise, reflecting the actual temperature data more accurately and removing the need for an explanatory paragraph on the front cover.

Climate scientists should know better than to make adjustments to such a politically sensitive set of data, however mediocre its content, well intentioned their actions or passionate their zeal. The subsequent stories about conspiracies and hidden agendas have been predictable.

A series of triumphal press releases by sceptical scientists - most of them not climate scientists - and the Saudi Arabian government, have rewritten the substance of this correspondence as a conspiracy rivalling the Moon landing, Kennedy and Diana all rolled into one. A redrawn graph has become, through careful selection of e-mails from an eleven-year correspondence, a deftly planned and audaciously executed defrauding of the public by climate scientists; a re-framing of a completely natural process of global warming and cooling into a man-made phenomenon.

Shock jocks and newspapers of a particular hue have exulted. Lurid headlines have gushed like light sweet crude and the hills are alive with the sound of baying hounds. Few of the stories I've read have made any mention of the actual contents of the e-mail messages, concentrating instead on gripping headline statements about deceit, conspiracy, fraud, manipulation, secrets and lies. Misinformation abounds. The facts are far less interesting.

Thus far there's been little speculation about the agenda of these evil climate scientists who have apparently been hoodwinking us all these years. What's in it for them ? Who's paying them ? There's not much money in windmills, and research grants hardly justify such a massive collusion and lengthy creative accounting effort.

Watergate taught us to follow the money, but the trail emanating from the global warming conspiracy theory doesn't seem to go anywhere. What about the trail leading from the sceptical camp ? Well, the charge on Copenhagen is being lead by the Saudi Arabian government. Ah....

Full Circle

It's a year since our return across the world. Today I drove home in Autumnal twilight from visiting friends near Leicester, up England's eastern routes and across the A69 following Hadrian's Wall, past Lockerbie and into Peeblesshire through the rain-drenched hills over the Devil's Beeftub at Moffat.

The landscape in this late season is softened by weeks of steady rain; muted, grainy sepia and rust. In the dark outside my study window the owl is calling.

Edumacation vicissitudes

We've been lucky with schools. Both our children started out in a small local Catholic primary school in Scotland where the emphasis was on community, learning in small classes, thinking about other people. The school doubles as an integrated specialist centre for physically and intellectually disabled students so our two learned alongside kids in wheelchairs, with Downs syndrome, with big hills to climb.

From there to New Zealand, to a large and culturally diverse primary school with a challenging diet of intellectual rigour, competitive sports, performing arts, active learning, public speaking and celebrating each other's achievements with a blizzard of certificates, awards and prizes for success in almost anything. It mirrored my own experience of education in New Zealand, again in a period of curricular emphasis on creativity, diversity of experience, integration of disciplines.

Back in Scotland the new curriculum, introduced while we were away and echoing the New Zealand model, is slowly finding its feet and promises to widen and deepen the experience of children in primary and secondary schools. While I am increasingly suspicious of the value of factory-style education in rigid peer-groupings, I can't deny that we've been lucky thus far.

Returning to visit New Zealand after only a year I was sad to find that in the primary education sector some lunatics have once again taken over the asylum. The diverse curriculum introduced in 2001, which attracted international interest for its innovation and depth, has been shelved in favour of a narrow-band approach focussed on "numeracy" and "literacy".

Election-winning slogans like "students leave school unable to read and write" and "New Zealand low in international numeracy tables" are guaranteed to drive such reforms, despite their meaninglessness. The averages used for league tables are distorted by a sizeable group of the culturally disenfranchised. The headlines about illiterate new employees fail to take account of education's delayed effect.

Young people with questionable numeracy and literacy skills now in the New Zealand workforce were at primary school in the late 1980s and 90s, a period when the same policy of narrow focus on literacy and numeracy was being strictly implemented. They are proof of its failure, not cause for reform.

Indeed international studies over decades, and the experience of western nations in the past 30 years shows that a narrow focus on numeracy and literacy in primary schools produces the opposite of its intended outcome. Why ? Because there's no point in being able to write a good sentence if you have nothing to write about. Because being able to manipulate numbers is pointless if you don't know what the results mean.

Good writers need interesting experiences to write about, without which there are no good books to read. Imaginative number manipulation needs imagination (d'oh!) and an experience of the empirical world to which to apply it.

Relevant childhood education is about breadth of experience, physical adventure, imagination, honing skills, reading and writing great stories and from real experiences, discovering knowledge, playing with possibilities and making sense of the world using as many different measures as possible: mathematical, artistic, literary, scientific, cultural, spiritual, theatrical, sporting, and in as many different forms as possible.

In a good education a child finds passions, which carry them through life in work, relationships, explorations, and they discover creativity which enables them to adapt to life's vicissitudes, take risks and sharp turns, accept and capitalise on its unfairness.

Without this tide at the start of our ventures, our whole life can lie in shallows. New Zealand schools' new narrow focus will produce yet another generation of kiwi students with narrow focus and a limited sense of context; beige fodder for industry.

It is a discarded opportunity and I'm sad about it.

Glimpsing Asia

In retrospect watching Blade Runner a few days before visiting Hong Kong was probably unwise, given the immersion with which I watch movies. I only had 24 hours there, half of which I slept through, and so only ten more than I spent on the film, but it was enough to get a glimpse.

An inadvertent speciality of mine when travelling is making my way through the rush hours of major cities using public transport. It looked simple on the map. I hadn't allowed for the millions of other people.

Leaving my luggage with the surly operators of Hong Kong airport's Left Luggage facility I trailed my little wheeled cabin bag to the airport express train and thence to the high-pressure circulatory system that is the Hong Kong MTR, or subway system. It was New York all over again; millions of purposeful commuters pouring in arterial streams through a labyrinth of tunnels, platforms and trains. Most of the signage was in Chinese with English subtitles except the ticket machines and some of the overview maps, which were just in Chinese.

I bumbled along, having slept only fitfully in 36 hours, tight-lipped lest the words "does anybody here speak English ?" slip out, finding my way somehow to North Point from which my hotel was - to quote the website - an easy five minute walk. Riding up innumerable escalators I came to a choice of six different street exits, none of which suggested my hotel's address. No matter; it would surely be obvious.

An hour later, in a back-lane street market selling live fish, very recently deceased chickens, interesting dried herbs, long-dead and dessicated cephalopods and packets of steaming rice wrapped in large green leaves I asked a woman street vendor about the road I sought. A shrug and a vague wave down an even narrower alley. I was now in Ankh-Morpork and wishing my luggage had legs. Each little street spilled on to another little market, or occasionally back to one of the thundering main roads clogged with buses, trams, taxis, people, bikes, cars and hand-carts, the floors of skyscraper canyons overhung with electric tram lines, bamboo scaffolding, clothes on drying racks hanging from apartment windows, giant neon advertising signs, and thousands of air-conditioning units. I wasn't in Kansas any more and all the signs were in Chinese.

Wandering in ever-widening circles from the MTR station I had several adventures and did eventually stumble upon the hotel, a fine modern luxurious hotel - thanks to my travel agents for recommending it. There probably is a way to get there from the MTR in five minutes but I - I took the road less travelled by, and that made all the difference.

A shower, a sleep and a change of clothes before setting out again into the city streets.

Nuance

Nuance

With the cathedrals thundering
at him, history proving
him the two-faced god, there were
the few who waited on him
in the small hours, undaunted
by the absence of an echo
to their Amens. Physics’ suggestion
is they were not wrong. Reality
is composed of waves and particles
coming at us as the Janus-faced
chooses. We must not despair.
The invisible is yet susceptible
of being inferred. To pray, perhaps, is
to have a part in an infinitesimal deflection.

R. S. Thomas

Five days to Twelfth Night

I spent the week directing a production of Twelfth Night for a team of homeschooling families in South Auckland. The kids acted and the parents were the production team. A fine week working with fine people, and a superb two nights of performances; sharp, bright, pacy and alternately hilarious and poignant. The cast, many of whom also took part in my drama workshops a few weeks ago, was aged between 5 and 15 but would put the paces on actors twice or thrice their ages.

It was an ambitious project and today I've emerged blinking into the sunshine not quite believing that it's only been six days since we started. The joy of such projects, and the reason for their irresistible gravitational hold on me, is the alchemy of talents and skills they generate. I love directing that traffic, having faith in people's ability to surprise, and even the game of dodging the reflected glory that can so easily make directors think more of themselves than is healthy.

Example: a casual conversation with one of the mums a couple of weeks ago about scenery. I described a three-sided rotatable flat and we sketched something together on paper that might just work. The next day she produced technical drawings from her husband, a few days later he'd made two of them in the garage. We got them to the theatre this week and puzzled over what to paint on them. Another dad, a graphic artist, drew six architectural sketches of Italian streetscapes and gardens. Four mums, two overhead projectors and a can of paint later we had the ideal elements of a stage set that would endure wind and weather throughout the play.

Meanwhile another dad created Shakespeare's father's coat of arms on a banner which decorated an otherwise forlorn corner of the stage, several mums generated exhaustive lists of props, costumes, scene changes, prompts, exits and entrances. Consequently the backstage management rivalled air traffic control over Heathrow. One of the fathers even made REAL SWORDS (we didn't tell OSH) and so on it went. A community of families selflessly blending its skills and talents to produce a golden production which I'm proud to have been part of.

These children and young adult performers have had a rich immersive experience of theatre which will stay with them; an infinitesimal deflection R S Thomas talks about. Who remembers maths lessons with fondness, or at all ? But most of us remember childhood performances on stage, and the impact they had. My interest in, and respect for the homeschooling phenomenon grows as I see the opportunities for rethinking the fundamental priorities we bring to educating our successors.

Peebles, Southland

Thongor and the Boulders of Doom

Last weekend we drove north from Dunedin, stopping at a fine secondhand shop called The Oddity where I picked up all but two of the Thongor series of chronicles - you know the ones - for a few dollars. The titles tell all:
The Wizard of Lemuria (Thongor the Barbarian faces the vengeance of the Dragon Kings)
Thongor In The City Of Magicians
Thongor At The End Of Time (joyfully, not the last of the series !)
and Thongor Fights The Pirates of Tarakus
Several coffees and junk shops later we meandered through Oamaru.

Somewhere up that coast we stopped to view the Moeraki Boulders, an extraordinary collection of spherical rocks each about the height of a man and lying in the surf on a narrow sandy beach. Other tourists wandered, as we did, in a bemused way along the tight strip as waves broke over these dinosaur egg alien pod gallstones, as if luggage had been washed up from an unseen tragedy. I took photos, sat on one and wondered, as I often do, how to respond to them. Thongor would have known what to do.

In Oamaru two motels diverged on a wide street and we took the one less travelled by. It was, you may say, satisfactory.

Thereafter we headed upstream along the Waitaki river, stopping at Peebles.

That's right. Peebles.

there and back again

Just back from a weekend road trip with Brother Martyn taking in some of the beautiful Otago hinterland. We've been half-way to Mt Cook and over a mountain pass through snow and stunning landscapes where Lord of the Rings was filmed.

Photos when I've got them off the camera, I promise. Meanwhile I've caught a cold and enjoyed a day coughing my way around the steep Dunedin streets.

Ukulele albatross

Dunedin city faces, across its long harbour, a peninsula that doubles back and lies parallel to the shoreline. A drive out on this tongue of land ends at a high point where thousands of albatrosses arrive every year to mate, nest and raise their young.

At this Spring equniox, or at least near the first full moon after it, the birds are arriving and pairing so the colony is off limits to the public. I braved the threatening cold today and drove out there to watch the sea pounding the cliffs and see thousands of gulls also gathering and nesting along the edges of the land.

People also nest here in colonies of baches; small shed-like holiday houses that doubtless teem with families in the summer months, though they are closed and shuttered in the last of the wintry season.

I didn't see an albatross, and I contented myself with photographing swirling water and wheeling gulls. On the way back I stopped to look at the little boathouses that sit out from the shore on clusters of sturdy wooden posts. Some are plain and some painted gaudy colours or decorated with bright murals.

Tonight Marty took me to see the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra at Dunedin's last remaining grand theatre. An unlikely treat; dry humoured and still blinking somewhat in the light of their success, they gave a grand evening's entertainment. They look like a collection of Open University lecturers and students clothed entirely from charity shops. The double-bass player, who suggested that his instrument was in fact a ukulele and that he was just very small, looked like a Tim Burton animation, and I'm sure that was Neil from the Young Ones sitting third from the left. Peculiarly New Zealand, with hints of the Conchords and undoubted musical genius.

This weekend is the mid-point of my current sojourn. It's also the full moon, and snow is forecast. I'm the furthest away from Scotland that I've ever been, and now I begin my return journey.

Entrances and exits

Every exit being an entrance somewhere else, I've now turned my attention to this week's trip to Dunedin. A hauntingly familiar city when I visited for the first time last year, I'm looking forward to spending more time there.

Last Friday I shared some fruits of the past two weeks' work at an exhibition of drama skits and sketches by the 30 children and young people who have taken part. I enjoyed seeing the subtle changes they've undergone, the emergence of new confidence and the excitement of performing for their parents and friends.

The Spring progresses, but through mood swings of torrential downpour and dazzling brightness, an adolescent season of promise.

I'm enjoying tamarilloes, Vogel's bread, seeing Tuis in the bottle brush trees, strong sunlight, the sea.

I'm not enjoying the Auckland motorway.

Young promise

The blossom is in full flower here in Auckland. The first dusting of green on the deciduous trees is lime-green, changing by the day, and tonight the new moon lay in the old moon's arms. I started my second week of drama workshops with a younger group; a day spent shifting my expectations away from those set by last week's deep teenagers.