John Bald/language and literacy

Sir Thomas Allen, Royal College of Music.

 

To the Royal College of Music, for a masterclass by opera star Sir Thomas Allen. Three hours of teaching, closely matched to the highly varied requirements of five young singers, moving from intense concentration to hilarity as appropriate, and enhanced by his own singing, technique and stagecraft, beginning when he entered to thunderous applause and looked around him as if startled. Eric Morcombe could not have done it better. Sir Tom goes for subtlety, sound and phrasing based on deep understanding of the text and how its meaning is brought out and enhanced by the music, creating a new work of art. He spoke of living with texts for long periods before performing them and went into the smallest detail of pronunciation, such as whether or not to pronounce a final consonant to maintain a line, as if playing it on a cello. A Soft Day, sung here by Sharon Carty, shows the goal and the difficulty, for example, near the end, in a tiny diminuendo of four repeated words, from a very soft start.

The Royal College has an exciting programme of concerts by international artists and students, at very reasonable prices. Well worth keeping in touch. 

Quiet PC - the best computer service in the industry.

Seven years ago, I bought a pc from Quiet PCs. It wasn't cheap, but it is silent, with a heat “sink” instead of a fan. Unlike most companies, they will help after warranty runs out, and have done so two or three times over the years. For a few months, l've been having incessant problems with crashes, and was thinking of changing the machine, reluctantly, as it is so efficient. Most companies would have sold me a new machine. Service manager Andy suggested I try changing a small battery, the existence of which I had never suspected. Problem solved. If you ever need a new computer, try Quiet PCs. They really do go the extra mile, even after seven years.

The Language of Kindness, Christie Watson; This is going to Hurt, Adam Kay; Under the wig, William Clegg; In Your Defence, Sarah Langford. Four professional memoirs reviewed.

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I recently wrote on Conservative Home that whoever removed bursaries from the training of nurses did not understand nursing. Anyone wishing to do so might begin with the first of these memoirs.

 

Christie Watson spent twenty years as a nurse, beginning in mental health and proceeding through almost all areas to become a specialist resuscitation nurse and mentor to others. Her book starts slowly, taking us through the years of teenage dreams, indecision and dead-end jobs to work as a volunteer with Scope. She found the work worthwhile, and, “although I had nothing, I was happy.” An experienced nurse suggested she take up nursing - “They give you a bursary and somewhere to live.”

 

Christie soon found herself dealing with the extremes of life and death, finding time to talk to an elderly lady with a heart murmur, being taken for ride by a mental patient pretending to be her nurse supervisor, washing the body of a child who has died and propping up her chin so that her appearance would not cause additional distress to her parents, surviving, thanks to her (by then) ex-husband surgeon, a catastrophic mistake when she cut a child’s breathing tube by mistake. Throughout the early years, the voice of experience from midwives and sisters is close by, building expertise and confidence. “You’ll be fine,” says Sister Anna, “I’m here.” Right on both counts. This book goes from the mundane to the searing in the blink of an eye, including a moving and brilliant chapter on Ms Watson’s application of her nursing skills to the task of adopting a child with learning difficulties, greatly aided by her daughter, who immediately accepts him as her brother. In our current context, one thing shines through – nursing and neoliberalism have nothing in common.

 

“This is Going to Hurt” is a doctor’s story with a sad ending – what may, or may not, have been a mistake under extreme pressure, in a very difficult case, led to Adam Kay’s giving up. His career was mostly spent in obstetrics, carrying out as many as 16 caesarian sections in a night. Eventually, the bad times – as he puts it, “recorded in HD” - won out over the many lives he saved, and he left, finding a new career as a comedy writer. A gruelling story, including much medical information, and financial facts of life for junior doctors in the NHS, delivered with a light touch. Well worth reading.

William Clegg QC’s “Under the Wig” describes a journey to the top end of the criminal bar, beginning in 1972 with his “interview” for pupillage – dinner at the home of a friend of his father’s ended with “Ok, you’re in, when do you want to start?” - and concluding, anti-climactically, with a successful defence in the phone hacking trial. Like many such memoirs, it has a good deal of explanation of basic legal procedures, but Mr Clegg’s choice of cases, and his clients, are interesting, and he is frank about the ways in which he sets about a case, constructing arguments, whittling away at the basis of the opposition’s evidence, talking to juries and appeal judges, and indeed how to become a QC. The cases include several well-known murders, including that of the much-loved tv presenter Jill Dando, and fraud, which he manages to make interesting. Mr Clegg’s chambers no longer undertake legal aid cases, a departure from the cab rank principle that is justified by the derisory level of fees in relation to the work required. The situation is, incidentally, now so bad that the only way in which many barristers can earn more than their train fare is the amount they’re paid for reading the case papers, the number of which can run into thousands.

 

Sarah Langford is a barrister whose work has a surprising amount in common with that of Christie Watson. While most of William Clegg’s clients are accused of headline crimes, hers are repeat petty offenders, parents trying to make a life for themselves and their children, gay men facing disgrace, if not conviction, for indecency in public toilets, wives suffering because of loyalty to their criminal husbands, all in all a catalogue of human misery to which she brings hard work, competence and, where she can, kindness. Sometimes she succeeds, sometimes the judge gets it right against her judgement and the wishes of her clients, sometimes she has to walk away, having fought one losing fight too many on behalf of a client who has no intention of giving up burglary and to whom she is is, in effect, one of the tools of his trade. Sarah Langford is not on the gravy train of the legal profession – on my one venture into the High Court as an expert, the QC earned £23,500 for prep and his first day in court, with £2500 refreshers, and his less impressive junior £11,000 plus £1500 per day – and indeed, like many nurses, is barely earning a living, despite her distintion in her law conversion course. Her book pays us the complement of giving full explanations of legal procedures in notes at the end, rather than incorporating simpler ones in the text. I couldn’t put it down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Crystal: Just a Phrase I'm Going Through.

I've always found David Crystal's work illuminating, and have just caught up with his autobiography, published in 2009. I was pleased to see the short shrift he gave to Chomsky and the principle of his Language Assessment Remediation and Screening Procedure, which is to consider the person in front of you and what their needs are. The acronym LARSP is another matter - I still have trouble remembering what it means.

However, a case he cites, of moving a child from a two-word construction - man jump ; see car; red ball - to three, is an interesting demonstration of the relative importance of different parts of speech. Each of these fragments contains a noun, and two out of three a verb. I infer that noun and verb are the main building blocks of language, and other parts subordinate to them. I call them "companion words", adding to the sense of noun (adjective) and verb (adverb), saving time (pronouns) or holding things together (articles/determiners and conjunctions, which I call links). The approach is very similar to what Chomsky called "teaching transformational grammar", an activity he condemned. However, Chomsky is not a teacher, and is wrong once again.
There is a similar insight into the issue of time and tense with verbs. For European linguists, the terms are synonymous. English-speaking linguists reserve the term tense for a change in the form of the verb, and Professor Crystal has used the term "aspect" for other ways of indicating time, such as "He goes to university next week. He is off to university next week. etc." However, in this book he notes the influence of what linguists call "adverbials" - why not just adverbs, with the understanding that they can comprise more than one word - in providing the signpost of time. He may well have made the same point elsewhere and I've missed it, but this time it came across very clearly.

We indicate time in English either by a change in verb form, or by context, usually an adverb. "Once upon a time," indicates that something has already happened, and cannot be followed by a present or future verb, any more than "Tomorrow" can be followed by a past one. I call a compound verb, such as I will go a change in form. Ich werde in die Schule gehen is in the future tense in German, just as I will go to school is in English. The term time zone is, as I've argued elsewhere, more useful for teaching purposes than tense, a word that means nothing to anyone who does not have a working knowledge of French etymology.

David Crystal's book reflects much of the history of modern linguistics, with generous and well-merited account of the work of Randolph Quirk, and of modern family and academic life. There are ups and downs, and a shining example of courage, when he left Reading University without a redundancy package to move to the life of an independent scholar in Wales, with a radio studio built into his house. His invaluable Cambridge Encyclopaedias, respectively of Language and English, rescued his finances, and he became an editor of general encyclopaedias, using the experience of classification this provided as a basis for later work in search engine design. His latest (or so I thought...) books on spelling, grammar and punctuation , published after the autobiography, are to me the most valuable, and provide, with Harry Evans' Essential English, an excellent basis for understanding how our current language has developed and works.

Professor Crystal dislikes linguistic purists, and yet, like all others who do so, writes in immaculate standard English throughout. Language changes slowly, and there is no discernable difference between his grammar and that of Dickens and Lewis Carroll. Food for thought throughout, and recommended.

Learning objective - any objections?

Michael Rosen's Alice parody in today's Guardian scores a good few hits, but I really loved this one

“That’s the learning objective,” the Gibberwock said.

“Is that because they object to learning?” said Alice.

I'll never understand the simplistic mindset of people who imposed this nonsense on teachers, and made children copy it out. Ignorant nonsense, and many of them got knighthoods out of it. The mechanistic approaches of New Labour were the worst offenders. I'm lucky I never had to use the expression, as I fear I'd have got the sack for my reaction to it.

Vox Cantab at Holy Trinity, Hildersham. Grace, elegance and deadpan humour.

Congratulations to Vox Cantab on a wonderfully subtle, varied and enjoyable concert at Holy Trinity Church, Hildersham, on Saturday afternoon. The Cambridge choral scholars who make up this small choir now follow a wide range of professions, but continue to sing to an international standard,  for charity, for the pleasure and joy they bring to their listeners, and for their own satisfaction in doing what they know they can do, just about as well as it can be done.  

Director Louisa Denby had chosen a programme based on the theme of journeys. The first half was serious, beginning with the story of Christ’s journey through life and death, and ending with a moving reading by Charlotte Denby of the moment, in Anne Holme’s I am David, where the sheepdog deliberately sacrifices its life to save that of David,  and Brother James’ Air on the 23^rd psalm. The second was occasionally winsome, more often a splendid example of deadpan humour, Andrew Watts doing particularly well with Three Men in a Boat and Mr Micawber’s departure for Australia in David Copperfield. The finale, Over the Rainbow, was a triumph of humour hidden behind a straight face. All of the pieces gave full scope to individual talent, blended to perfection by Louisa Denby.

The concert was part of a busy weekend, with evensong at Barton and performances tomorrow at the Old Royal Naval Chapel, Greenwich, and St Stephen’s, Rochester Row. The choir performs frequently at Fitzwilliam and other venues around Cambridge. Highly recommended.

The Disappearance of Emile Zola. Michael Rosen.

Michael Rosen’s interest in French, and in Emile Zola, came as a surprise, though not quite such a surprise as that of his late father, Professor Harold Rosen, who would pore over his homework in his eighties much as I did myself as a teenager. By the time I started to read French at university, Zola was considered so last century that a friendly lecturer (with a doctorate in seventeenth century drama) asked me why the hell I was bothering to read him. My reply that it was a good book seemed inadequate, but I still think this is the main reason for reading and studying literature. Zola was, and is, an important writer, and Michael Rosen’s book reminds us of one of the reasons for this.

“J’accuse,” is one of the most quoted lines in French history. It was the headline of Zola’s verbal onslaught on the establishment that fabricated evidence against Captain Alfred Dreyfus for allegedly leaking to the Germans details of the recoil mechanism of France’s 75mm quick-firing field gun, which was to play a crucial role in World War I. The false accusation was followed by a cover-up, and then by persecution of those who sought to expose the cover-up, including Zola himself, who was convicted of libel for telling the truth. Unlike Oscar Wilde, he had the sense to choose exile rather than imprisonment, and this book tells the story of his exile.

I learned a lot from it. I had not known that Zola’s first publisher in English, Henry Vizetelly, had been fined, and then imprisoned – like Wilde, with hard labour – on charges of publishing obscenity brought by the “National Vigilance Association.”  I found it mildly surprising that Zola himself was allowed to live in hotels in London and Upper Norwood, and later to take leases on houses, with virtually no security arrangements. Opponents of Dreyfus and Zola were determined to maintain the former’s conviction even after it had been proved that he was innocent and a Major Esterhazy, who admitted forging the evidence, was guilty. Dreyfus was Jewish, and, as one of his enemies put it, all Jews were traitors. This, even more than the outrageous injustice to Dreyfus, was Zola’s driving force – the full power of the French state was being used to enforce lies and suppress the truth.

There is much social history alongside the drama. Zola cannot abide British food. The idea of putting water on a steak offends his soul. He is a pushy parent, urging and bribing his children to be top of the class, and telling his son that if he is lazy and tells lies, he will turn into a monkey and be put in the zoo. Zola is a keen photographer, with his own darkrooms, and pedals around with a plate camera on his bicycle. His double life, with children by his mistress while enjoying the support of his wife, are described in extracts from letters, as is their reconciliation – Zola’s wife has a picture of his mistress placed in his coffin. The enmity behind the story is never far away, though, and a confession that an anti-Dreyfus fanatic had murdered Zola by blocking the flue of his stove, so causing carbon monoxide poisoning, is consistent with the evidence. The account of the aftermath reveals a personal connection – Michael Rosen’s great-uncle, Oscar, was on the same “Convoi 61”, to Auschwitz, as Dreyfus’ granddaughter, Madeleine Dreyfus Levy.

First-class scholarship, and a light touch on a dark story. Recommended.

Patrick Hemmerlé, Grand Prix, avec félicitations du jury, Paris. With Adrienne Kelly Jackson, Little St Mary's Church, Cambridge,

The Cambridge music community has been trying hard not to keep it a secret, but Patrick Hemmerlé's position as one of the premier pianists in Europe - and perhaps the premier in this area of the repertoire - is beginning to be understood. Patrick's triumph at this year's Concours Festival de Répertoire Pianistique Moderne in Paris, with the congratulations of the jury, is leading to new invitations to perform each time he plays, as well as, on this occasion, to a new CD contract.

This concert at Little St Mary's Parish Church, Cambridge ("smaller, but higher...") was a demonstration of the status of Cambridge as a world centre of excellence. Patrick played Prokofiev's Visions Fugitives, and Villa Lobos' Rudepoeme, the centrepiece of his competition success, with power, subtlety, pace and elegance.

His virtuosity requires full concentration from the listener, and his left hand, surprisingly for an artist whose hands are relatively small, produces breathtaking, sustained power and hits like an earthquake. I've listened to many of the most celebrated pianists in the world, live or on disk, and have never heard such sudden, dramatic impact from the bass in any style of music. No Bosendorfer either - the instrument at this concert was a small Yamaha grand.  Patrick's introductions are witty, and to the point. The Villa Lobos piece was intended as a portrait of Rubenstein - as which, said Patrick, it was a failure. It was, though, very accurate as a portrayal of Villa Lobos.

Adrienne Kelly Jackson joined Patrick for performances of Prokofiev's second sonata for flute and piano, and Jolivet's Chant de Linos, derived from the Greek myth of the unfortunate music teacher who was killed by his pupil Heracles for criticising his playing. Perfect timing, complementary virtuosity and a slightly breathy tone that lent colour and humanity to music that does not rely on melody for effect, even if Linos himself is credited with having invented it.

World-class artistry in a small church, reflected by the glorious, gleaming silver candlesticks on the altar.

 

Interlude. Rob McNicholas, head professional at Saffron Walden Golf Club.

 

 

Nearly every Scot has an interest in golf, but in England it can be hard to get a game, particularly if you're not born into a club. So, I'm grateful to the senior section at Saffron Walden for taking on a beginner, and to Rob for getting me from "all hell and no idea" to playing the occasional good shot among the bad ones. 

Here is Rob's Teaching Philosophy

Clarity of explanation

I strive to ensure that my students are completely clear as to what we are trying to achieve within a lesson. My explanations, expectations and demonstrations are straightforward. I find video technology a helpful tool to reinforce ideas whilst avoiding over-complication. Ensuring that those I teach have a complete understanding of the coaching they receive is a priority to me. This approach allows my students to comprehend how a particular technical change makes a specific difference to their game, with self-sufficiency an ultimate goal.

Even within the context of a complex teaching programme, I believe a key to success is to keep the messages short and simple. This process ensures that students can confidently work towards a goal, even in time away from a structured lesson.

 

Personalised lessons

I am well aware that no two golfers are the same. Their different experiences, ability and physiology obviously influence the approach and focus that I take within a lesson. As such, I differentiate my explanations, drills etc. as appropriate. However, my aim is always to increase the potential for a student. I believe that golfers of all abilities and confidence levels can show an improvement within a lesson.

 

Enjoyment

Even if my lessons present challenges, or force golfers to work outside of their comfort zones, I endeavour to make them enjoyable experiences. A relaxed and friendly style initially puts people at ease at the start of a lesson. Good-natured competition is also an element of many of my junior lessons that I find helps maintain focus and increases enjoyment. In addition, consistently ensuring every student is aware of the progress they have made is an essential factor for full enjoyment; showing them how much they have achieved is highly motivational

 

I heartily recommend Rob's work and that of the club, both to adults who've always wanted to play, and to parents looking to give their children a chance to learn the game. Some of the drives we see hit by juniors are world class.

 

The cost?  Trial membership gives two months unlimited play plus an hour lesson with Rob. The club has two other professionals, Aaron Howard and Sarah Smith, and the pro shop has a good selection of second-hand clubs, with the key advantage of free professional advice on what will suit you. The annual membership is just over £1000, which is comparable to the cost of following a football team, and better exercise. The entry fee is £1000, or £850 if you take the trial membership first, with an option to pay over five years at a slightly higher rate - the trial membership fee is deducted in both cases. The entry fee becomes part of a separate account to pay for improvements to the course and facilities, and is carefully invested for the benefit of members, who own the club. Play three times a week, as I do with the senior section, and value for money is excellent. 

 

Saffron Walden Golf Club  

 

Course overview on Youtube.  It really is as beautiful as it looks here.

 

Rob McNicholas on getting out of bunkers. It works!

 

Interlude. The game of golf and a present from a pupil.

Ben Hogan did for golf what Joe Davis did for snooker - almost all current professionals have incorporated his techniques into their game. I have taken up golf after neglecting exercise for far too long, and have become a member of Saffron Walden Golf Club. The professional, Rob McNicholas, has been very patient in teaching me to play, as have my fellow seniors, but my round on Wednesday was as bad as the Australian cricket team's performance on Thursday.  A pupil whom I've been helping with Spanish reciprocated my gift of some books with these cup cakes. The ball, you will notice, is in the bunker on both occasions. At least when that happens, you know where it is. A miracle occurred last week. I hit a ball into the rough. It had a blue spot on it when it went in, and when it came out, it had three red spots instead...