The other ten percent

My growing unease and dissociation with our house-building project shifted over the past couple of weeks when I accepted that I actually need to be hands-on in the building process. The cost of using a builder to build what we want is way beyond our funds. Although I currently possess very few of the skills needed to build a house, I have friends who do, I have time and I have a willingness to learn. I've also realised that it's a great project through which I can gain confidence in an area where I lack it; a giant to be slain.

What I've learned in theatre is that a creditable outcome can emerge from the 90% commitment that most of us can find for most projects and undertakings. It's the other ten percent that can make it extraordinary. But the other ten percent is the retention, the reserve, the backup, the plan B, the what if. I'm very good at what if, and anyway isn't that the cultural norm ? Going the extra ten percent - if you can find it - moves into total commitment, an outpouring, an adventure; uncool, somewhat fanatical, steady on there, don't go over the top, everything in moderation, healthy degree of scepticism.

Thinking about building a house - or at least being an active part of a house-build project - takes me way outside my comfort zone map and into a place where the ocean might tip off the edge of the world, but is also wildly exciting. It's an opportunity to go over ninety.

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.

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.

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.

Bad Apple

My smugness since acquiring a Mac has been almost unbearable.
"It just works" etc.

And it does. Years of driving around in a Windows PC jalopy with my head regularly under the bonnet fixing, updating, scanning, debugging, reinstalling and rebooting made the experience of the Mac like stepping on to the bridge of the Enterprise.

Unfortunately I ran into the Romulans this week (keep up..) with Apple's latest software update killing off my printer drivers. This just as I finished my publicity leaflet for my two drama schools in the summer holiday. There's a way round it (I won't bore you) but it's annoying and switches me straight back to that computercidal red mist that was a regular feature of my week. If anyone has some photon torpedoes for this problem do let me know.

Info about the drama schools is at www.centrestagedrama.com

Coraline

Took Simon and a friend to see Coraline 3D on Saturday; a great adaptation of a gothic book by Neil Gaiman. 3D technology is used intelligently to bring stop-motion style animation to life and sensibly avoiding cheap frights. The story unfolds slowly, building the expectation and shifting into Hitchcock-like suggestions that all is not as it seems.

Was it worth the hour and a half drive into Edinburgh with 35 minute traffic jam at Leith on a nearly empty tank ? Hmm.

A Gift From Siberia

It's three months on and we're in our tenth month of Winter. Today the snow arrived from the Steppes, bringing London to a standstill and dropping a light fall on us here. The heavy stuff arrives tomorrow apparently.

Here are pics from this afternoon's brief foray into the Arctic temperatures. Photo sessions last only as long as feeling remains in my fingers, the controls being impossible to operate with gloves.

It had to be today that I had a job interview in Edinburgh, of course, opening the curtains this morning to this, and the stern warnings on the radio to avoid all unnecessary travel. It was necessary, needless to say, and they thanked me for making the trip, though it's unclear whether this will be enough to secure me the post.

Three months on we are settled in our new home, welcomed warmly by friends, neighbours and even strangers who have heard our story. A fine return, and the opportunity to make a new place for ourselves.

The job ? Wait 'n' see if I get it first.

Weird People sit at the back

The subway, and New York generally, seems to be a good place to spot weird people. Training the kids not to stare at them is harder. Unfortunately they don't just sit at the back of the bus like they do everywhere else.

Entering the Twilight Zone

Rod Serling could have created some gripping moments with the GPS, had it been invented in 1960. This thing usually conveys us safely from one set of coordinates to another, naming all the streets and points of interest and apparently having a special satellite up there just watching out for us. We trust her (yes, her), smile forgivingly at her sometimes strange pronounciations, share her sense of effortless accomplishment when we reach our destination. Then just occasionally she does a HAL; directing us to keep left, then springing a right-turn, introducing a full-reverse arrow thing on to the map screen, giving a different instruction to what's clearly marked on the display, our little blue car icon careering off the chosen pathway into a dark tangle of unknown streets. We switch to old methods, scrabbling with maps, reading road signs that are OUTSIDE the car, turning aside from The Route.

There's a silence then she says "Recalculating", but what she really means is "What are you doing Dave ?" It's touch and go. We've even switched her off a couple of times recently. The errors are getting more frequent, and more bizarre. Should I worry ?