So, it’s October 31 and I am marking two months since I finished full time year round teaching. Time to reflect on what I have achieved, learnt and thought.
So, what have the last two months been like in terms of ticking off achievements or landmarks? Quite low key if I am being honest. I have ticked off the ambition of visiting the Stone Circle at Stonehenge and that was an amazing experience. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I hadn’t stepped back from full time teaching. The blog is making a slightly bigger impact now that I am posting every day. The project to analyse Christmas magazines is going nicely and I should have some really interesting articles for December. Job wise I have signed up for work as a TV and Film extra, but unfortunately have not been able to take the two jobs offered due to them being the other side of London with such an early start that I couldn’t get there using public transport. I have registered availability for Action Challenge to help set up their charity challenges. I have also started the process of training to help young people develop their reading skills.
What have I learnt? First of all, how much 30 years of teaching has taken out of me! For the first couple of weeks I felt like I had way more energy, and I could feel myself relaxing day by day. However, with that relaxation and that unwinding process has come bouts of irritating infections, increasing rather than decreasing tiredness in the mornings and a lack of energy to enable me to push through it. My old joke about work used to be that it was only tension holding me together! Well, there appears to be a certain amount of truth to that. I compared notes with a former colleague who underwent the same process a year or so before me and he confirmed that he found that first few months exactly the same. He started off with a burst of energy and then ‘hit the wall’ in running parlance. I think that what has happened is that I, and most other people in this situation, feel the necessity to immediately replace work with something else that is productive. It seems to be a case of running before you can walk. I have accepted the fact that my family history projects are going to be postponed until early 2026.
What have my thoughts been about these first two months? I have a certain amount of discomfort, not to say mild guilt, about being a non contributor to the household in terms of earning. This is something I can’t yet get my head round. I think that if I am to make more sense of my new normal I need to try to find my inner Swiftie and shake it off! I feel like I have fairly successfully been able to do much more around the house and basically act like the house husband I was 20 years ago when Janet was working and I was looking after the children. However, I perhaps need to be able to accept that there will be days when I don’t do as much, and that is OK.
So, there you have it. I am a work in progress and I need to accept that. I never expected to be the finished article within two months of taking a new job, so it was unrealistic to expect to be the finished article within two months of completely changing my way of life. I need to recalibrate my goals and I need to be more accepting of slower progress. Things will improve, I just need to be patient.
See you in two months time when 2025 will be on its final day and I will be four months into my new life. Wish me luck!
What historical event fascinates you the most?
It won’t surprise many regular readers of my blog that the historical event that fascinates me has something to do with Christmas! However, the real fascination lies in its immediate effects and its long term repercussions.
The Christmas Truce took place in various places along the trenches of World War I between December 24 and 26 of 1914, the first Christmas of the war. It was a real event, but one which has had a layer of mythology placed over the top. It was likely that makeshift football games were played at certain points but they were probably nothing more than the type of playground games that had few rules and no real competitive elements. One thing is certain though. The soldiers did meet, they did sing carols, they did share food, drink and conversation and they did all this in honour of the birth of Jesus. Letters home from both sides attest to this. I have written a full post about this in the past so if you want the full story then take a read here. What I will finish with today are a few reflections on what the Christmas Truce meant and could have caused.
The first thing to say is that, apart from a few individuals with a natural bloodlust, very few troops go into battle wanting to kill. However, soldiers are taught to see the enemy as faceless entities who are simply a homogeneous mass of evil. The Christmas Truce blew this apart as the troops on both sides realised that they were fighting men exactly like themselves. Some of the Germans actually lived over in the UK before the war and knew the places familiar to the British troops. Once the human face of the enemy was revealed it caused a real conundrum. How could you fight people who you had made a personal connection with? The answer was that you couldn’t. In certain areas of the trenches the opposing sides warned each other of incoming fire or deliberately fired their guns over the tops of the trenches not in them.
The politicians and generals were extremely perturbed by the Christmas Truce and did their best to cover it up. They wanted the war to continue for their own purposes and they were quite happy to sacrifice not only ordinary working people but even many of their own contemporaries at public schools, sent to the front lines as junior officers. Their answer to the problem was to move entire battalions who had been infected by the goodwill of the Christmas Truce out of the trenches to be replaced by other troops with no personal connections to the other side. This, and their insistence on the ‘lie’ of the Truce, ended up ensuring that the war continued for nearly four more years at the loss of 8.4 million more lives.
The truth is that the humanity on show that Christmas was inconvenient for the war machines of both sides. When we remember those who died in 12 days time we must not forget that they were people like us who had family, friends, dreams and ambitions. They were brave but only because they were given no other choice by people who didn’t have to be brave.
Below is the link to my earlier post with a reflection on the event I put together at my local football club. It’s a great read.
What’s something you believe everyone should know.
The one thing that everyone should know is that there is no such thing as good taste and bad taste in terms of music, TV, Films or Books. Taste is personal. We often can’t explain how or why a particular form of entertainment appeals to us, we just know it does. If someone else likes a particular artist or a particular writer that you can’t abide, they don’t have ‘bad taste’ and if they like the same artist or writer that you do, they don’t have ‘good taste’.
It really is the height of arrogance for a person to accuse someone of having ‘no taste’ because they are saying they are a better human being than that other person.
There is a lot of popular entertainment that I don’t like, but I know that it exists because it brings pleasure to people. Who are we to say that it should not exist? If we don’t like it, we don’t have to engage with it. Turn off the TV or radio, don’t continue watching that film, don’t continue reading that book.
I love telling people about what I enjoy but if they don’t enjoy it, then they have different taste not ‘bad taste’ or ‘no taste’. One thing I know from my personal interest in Popular Culture is that those in positions of power have tried to dictate what people should watch across the centuries in order to separate them from the lower classes. It’s frustrating in the extreme to see their job being done for them by the arrogant arbiters of taste that now dominate online discourse. Live and let live. If you don’t like something move on and don’t use it to show an imagined superiority!
Generated with AI from my prompt
What does it mean to be a kid at heart?
To be a kid at heart, as I most definitely am, isn’t to look at everything with a kind of naive trust. It isn’t to bury yourself in childhood and never emerge. It isn’t to find the goodness in everything. It is the ability to retain the capacity for wonder.
When I watch a programme or a film that I remember from my childhood I am that child again. For however long I am watching I am immersing myself in the thoughts and feelings of many years ago. When I finally met Julie Dawn Cole earlier this year, I was that starry eyed boy who had a picture of her on my bedroom wall. I went back around 50 years to when I first saw her and when I had my picture taken with her I was as nervous as if my ten or eleven year old self was the one getting the opportunity to stand next to my childhood crush. I think that’s a large part of what being a kid at heart is all about.
However, there is another element that makes up that personality type. When I watched something with my children as they were growing up I had the ability to put myself in their shoes by reacting to their programmes or films in a very similar way to them. I would really enjoy programmes that I would like to have seen as a boy not as an adult. I would react to the characters and stories in the same way as I reacted to my favourite characters and stories in my childhood.
Christmas is the time that brings out my inner child like no other. For the month of December, I will play the music, the films and the series that fill me with that wonder, and I am always finding films that appeal to my inner child. For example, A Boy called Christmas really enchanted me last year and I immediately bought the Dvd for this year. My children loved The Snowman and Miracle on 34th Street as do I. I have a whole collection of Christmas Carol adaptations but the one I love most is the Richard Williams cartoon version that I first saw as a 7 year old. I will always believe that Christmas is a magical time of year, and although the way that I experience that magic has changed, my feelings haven’t. I still wake up early on Christmas Day with real excitement in my heart and I know that will never change.
Retain the Wonder!
You have three magic genie wishes, what are you asking for?
If I had three wishes I wouldn’t seek to fast track myself and those I care about. So, a lottery win is off the table, however useful it might seem. If you know one thing from the stories about wishes it is that they come with catches. Think about the Monkey’s Paw or King Midas! So, I would be looking at making the conditions absolutely right for the best possible outcome within the scope of the situation.
My first wish would be health and happiness for those I care about. If those two are present in your life everything else is a detail. Without health you have to work much harder to benefit from your opportunities. Of course it’s possible to be ill, for example with a long term condition like M. E. and still do amazing things, as Jessica Taylor Bearman has done, but the toll it takes mentally and physically is immense. Without happiness, as many of us know, you will not get the most out of your life. Again, you can do great things but if you aren’t happy it means so much less.
My second wish would be for those in power, be they Kings, Presidents, MPs, Business Leaders or even Board level, High or Middle Managers, to stop being in it for their prestige, power and financial reward only. So few of those in charge care about the people who they represent or control. I have said before, and I will say again, that we have never had worse people in charge at all levels of our lives than we have at the moment. If we work for the very rare person with power who actually cares about us we really notice the difference. It’s not about performative behaviour but about truly wanting the best for those you are responsible for.
My third wish would be for the environment to recover enough to allow us to reset the balance of the planet. Only people with an agenda or those who blindly follow them deny climate change is a reality, but sadly they include many of the politicians with the power to change the situation. We need to have the chance to reverse the worst of the damage, a chance that has now almost certainly passed us by. Again, notice that I don’t ask for a Deus ex Machina but for the opportunity to make things better ourselves.
So, make those wishes, but make them with wisdom.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 