What animals make the best/worst pets?
No animal in and of itself makes a good pet or a bad pet. It’s down to how you treat them. If you are affectionate they will be affectionate, if you are withdrawn they will be withdrawn, if you are aggressive they will be aggressive. Our cat Albus is treated with love, affection and as a fully fledged member of the family. He responds in kind. When people say that cats are indifferent, what they are really saying is that they are indifferent to the cat. When the animal in your household feels like a true part of that household, they will treat you as family and the house as their safe place. Whatever pet you have, be it cat, dog, fish, snake or tarantula, it will be the best pet if you treat it with love and care and it will be the worst pet if you don’t. If you are not going to make your pets absolutely central to your life then don’t get any because you don’t deserve them and they deserve a house and family that will open their hearts freely. A pet is not an accessory or an optional extra, it is a living, breathing, feeling creature that must have a nurturing and loving house. I think everyone who wants a pet should be inspected first and asked questions about the relationship they intend to have with their fellow animal – remember that humans are animals too, not some unique divinely inspired creation – and if they don’t answer those questions satisfactorily they should not be allowed to have a pet.
What job would you do for free?
After 35 years of being paid for teaching, I suppose it was inevitable that when I had time to volunteer, my chosen field would be very similar. Currently I have two volunteer positions that I have gone through the application process for and they are both related to the skills I have developed and honed over three decades at the chalk face! I will be starting with a school in the summer term as a reading helper. It is arranged through a charity called Coram Beanstalk who train you in preparation for volunteering in a local school. I will be working one to one with the same students every week for a minimum of a year. The first thing we were told at our first training session was that we were not there to teach the children to read. We are there to give them confidence and encouragement to make reading a positive part of their lives. Yes, there will be the use of teaching ideas and strategies that I have used so many times before, but there are no exams at the end of the year so I can concentrate on the children learning through enjoyment.
The other volunteer position I have taken up is with a website called Write the World. It runs competitions for 13 to 19 year olds across all styles of writing. My job at the moment is to shortlist pieces of writing that then go through to expert judges. The first piece of shortlisting I did was to assess screenwriting. Well, that was a steep learning curve I can tell you. I had never written or read anything in that format before, but I know what is good across a number of different writing disciplines so after a while I was able to look at whether the story being told was one that drew me in and then to look at the specific elements of screenwriting to see how they met the rules of the format. In a few months I hope to move onto reviewing which is a form of the feedback that I enjoyed so much as a teacher when I saw it come to fruition. Now, with this site there are prizes but the focus is on improving writing so once again I can concentrate on developing the students rather than preparing them for exams.
So, teaching turns out to be a job I would do for free! Would I have done it for free in the previous 35 years? You must be joking!!
What Olympic sports do you enjoy watching the most?
At the recent Olympics in Italy, those of us without TNT Sports were given the opportunity to watch events that have been hidden behind a paywall. I used to have access to Eurosport in the UK as part of my TV package. The range of events they covered was a real treat. I became a die hard fan of Alpine Skiing and got to know a lot about the competitors and the sports themselves. My wife became a massive fan of the Professional Cycling especially the Tour de France and the Veulta. All that came to an end last year when Discovery Channel took over and priced us out of the market as it became a straight choice between that and Sky Sports. Of course, this happened in the past, pretty much when Sky started to outbid the BBC and ITV for everything they could. My children are completely disinterested in cricket because they had never seen it on the TV in their childhood. As the subscription model dominated every sport, the few sports that terrestrial TV has kept now take place in a vacuum. Occasionally you see live football, live cricket, live snooker and other sports, but you never get the narrative that you must have to truly enjoy the sport.
We have accepted this situation in countries across the world. It has been forced upon us by the greed of sports bodies and TV companies and it has been bought into in both senses of the word. As a result, the skiiers, the curlers and the tobogganers will disappear behind a paywall for the next four years. Whatever you enjoyed in the Olympics it’s time to accept that it’s another four years before you see it again and, unless you have a long memory, you will have to relearn it in 2030. This is our modern world, where pretty much every element is monetised and if you don’t have enough money you are locked out.
How would you improve your community?
Those of you who have read all five of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books may recognise the concept of an SEP field. It was one of many genius ideas from Douglas Adams and proposed that if a person was faced with something that they couldn’t do anything about, that they would not even be able to see it as it was Somebody Else’s Problem! I feel like that about my local community. It’s not something that I have ever thought was relevant to me, wherever I have lived, and so I am not really engaged in thinking how to improve it. The SEP field is so strong that I don’t see anything in my local community apart from the fact that it isn’t violent or lawless, at least not at the moment. The people in my local community are no doubt very nice on the whole, but my own community is my house not anything outside. I support local businesses and deliver a local independently produced magazine with my wife, so I am not anti my community, but I don’t have any interest in thinking about how to improve it. Improvement is down to other people and I am more than happy to leave them to it as long as the community doesn’t affect me.
How have you adapted to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic?
This question is based on a false premise in my opinion and everything from here on is based upon that. It is based on the UK experience so will not be applicable across the globe. You are very welcome to disagree. Based on the above let’s go. What is the evidence of any changes that remain?
Working from home is just about hanging on despite the bosses and the rich owners desperately trying to find a way to stop it. At my last firm the self important higher management kept telling us working from home was a privilege not a right and could be withdrawn at any point. So in the end it became the basis of a threat where it survives at all and consigned to history in other firms.
Next we have the short lived feeling that we were all in it together and that we were responsible for each other. That stayed in place during lockdown amongst the public and in the Royal Family but the politicians, especially our Prime Minister ignored the rules and partied. It has fast tracked the cynicism of people with all areas of public life and the cynicism is probably all that is left, because we no longer see or care about our neighbours for the most part.
Finally, the idea that our environment matters reared it’s head during Covid. We learnt to value our walks in green spaces and those two half hour walks were the highlight of the day for many. With fewer cars around the air was clearer. The animals we seldom saw before became more numerous and the birds we saw had peaceful breeding seasons. We valued those glimpses of nature. Now, huge swathes of people vote for promises of pollution and an ever decreasing green belt as well as more and more oil instead of renewable energy.
Yesterday we saw a rocket being launched into space by a country who want to colonise the moon and exploit it for its mineral deposits. This wasn’t an event of wonder and hope for me, merely a display of power by the very rich who want to ensure that they get richer.
I have seen no lasting positive impact from Covid. It has simply shown up human nature in all its nastiness.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 