Run away from the inside of a book.

There's not a lot of call for books among our 15 year-olds in Wales, it seems. Almost half of them will tell you that they only read if they have to, and nearly two thirds never borrow library books to read for pleasure.

The source of these figures is the 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) report, which has just informed us that Wales is below all of the other countries in the UK as far as our teenagers' performance in reading is concerned.

 The response from the Welsh Assembly government has been predictable and hands, and necks, are being wrung.

The previous PISA report took place in 2006 and, although Wales did slightly better then, it certainly did not shine. So what has changed in four years that might lead us to expect that we ought to have improved? The answer, at least for the educational experience that our current sixteen year-olds will have received, is, "Not much yet."

Since 2006, the lion's share of Welsh government support and training has gone to the exciting, but still developing, Foundation Phase (the education of 3 - 7 year-olds), while in Key Stages 2 and 3 (8 to 14 year-olds) a fundamental re-structuring of the curriculum and its assessment is taking place with far fewer resources. The simple truth, anyway, is that it's too early yet for any of these developments to have had a positive impact on the education of pupils who may have been included in the 2009 PISA assessments.

And so, what about PISA 2012? The pupils who will take part are already 13 years old, still too old to have experienced substantially the changes that are being wrought around them in the education system in Wales, and so perhaps it isn't likely that we will see results that are tremendously different from those we've seen already. I suppose this is what is called an inconvenient truth.

 There is a more fundamental issue than mere curriculum-design to be addressed here, however. The love of reading, and its corresponding facility to understand and to engage with the written word, is not something that is simply the responsibility of schools to ignite. A learner's whole community, and especially parents and grandparents, must play their part.  

Through others, we become ourselves

said Lev Vygotsky .

We must look to ways in which we should support, and expect, every child's parents or carers to acknowledge that they are its first teachers, not the school. This is not an easy responsibility to bear, nor would it be popular with some.
And so it is more likely that what will take place is more adjustment to the curriculum, with an attendant "searchlight on literacy" .

But we have tried that before and, as Michael Rosen, erstwhile Children's Laureate, observed,

The government has allowed a situation to develop where the word "reading" has come to mean something narrow and functional, no more than evidence that a child can read. This is an abdication of what education is about.

Is there are an alternative?

Well, he also says

I have always thought that teachers can think. In the particular segment of education where I mostly work, with literature and language for primary age children, I’ve come to the conclusion that literature and reading have become so reduced, dissected, cross-examined, abridged, chopped-up and tested that the most subversive, exciting and political thing to do now is to rush about creating moments in schools where the children will know for certain that all that they’ll have to do with a book, a poem, a story or a play is enjoy it.  No questions, no tests, no learning outcomes. 

Mind it!

I'm just going outside ...

When the snow begins to fall in this part of the world otherwise normal and well-balanced individuals trip their switches and begin to operate in unusual and outlandish ways. Ours is a landscape where, not so very long ago, many of the hills were topped with the black drifts of coal waste-tips and on washing days, when clean white sheets were hung out to dry, they would, if the wind blew from those tips, turn into weird, dark canvases. The more artistically inclined voters among the populace would stand, then, and stare at them because the sooty bed-linen would become uncomfortably reminiscent of the works of Dore or Goya. Eventually the starers would move off, pensive and talking quietly amongst themselves, to add a kind of morose rive gauche quality to the general gloom of the valley. Perhaps it is this racial memory of creeping blackness that triggers brains around here to regard white flakes falling from a low grey sky as some kind of heavenly sign that an apocalypse is near.

The first flurries of snow began to fall around midday. By 2 p.m. the world is turned upside down.

In the supermarket all of the tills have lines that stretch back well into the aisles and every trolley in those lines is stocked with bread, potatoes, milk and, among the more far-sighted, a certain amount of alcohol.

There is a worrying buzz in the store, too. It is like the sound that you hear when you've opened a long-neglected garden-shed to find that a colony of assertive wasps has moved in during your absence. For the shoppers are uneasy; outside the snow is falling, and inside stocks are running low.

The white sliced-bread is already gone and some elements, strangers to the vocabulary, are being driven to make hopeful, but ultimately uninformed, choices between pain rustique, coppia ferrarese and bauernbrot. Others, only previously familiar with smooth plastic-wrapped loaves,  stare helplessly at the knobbly, naked splendour of stacked sourdoughs, or pick in a distracted way at the organic bloomers' golden crusts. Among the vegetables, too, circumstance forces hands. With the potatoes running low, shoppers scrabble for the last tubers remaining.  A small and determined group of toothless, grey-haired women forms up into a phalanx and drives forward through a wall of surprised shoppers to snatch bags of Maris Piper and King Edwards; then, hot with victory, the wiry testudo heads off to hunt out the small remaining reserves of teabags and Hobnobs.

I decide that I am not equal to the ordeal of entering the lists for the single pack of cat-food that was to be my only purchase, for trolleys are stacked six-deep, and, tempers frayed, normal people threaten to become zombies. The buzz in the aisles is a guttural growl at the tills.  A young woman deftly slips her basket on a belt, just in front of a family already unpacking their load of shopping. "Don't mind, do you, love!" she brays loudly, in the direction of the mother.

Deciding that I am not suitably armed for this battle, I guiltily put the cat-food down amongst some aubergines in a display and slink out of the store.

There are big snowflakes falling on the car park. Two drivers  threaten one another over a single parking-space, and a crawling line of cars stretches towards the petrol station where, no doubt, the pumps will soon be empty. I start my own car quietly and, with great caution, ease it away from the store and out onto the dual carriageway.

The traffic is reduced to a single line in the white gloom as we feel our way down the valley, headlights and wipers working overtime ... except for a young lady in the sporty little Fiesta, who flies by in the outside lane at 70 mph, car-horn defiantly blaring  'La Cucaracha'. Perhaps she's a zombie already.

What's in a name?

A couple of weeks ago, to escape from the early darkness that descends upon our little village at this time of year, we went for a walk through the woodland behind our house, and up onto the track that leads to the broad, flat, sunny whaleback of the Garth.
As you climb the path, both a geography and a history lesson unfold before your eyes.

The valley floors are overcrowded; roads, railways, the old canals thread and interwine south to north and they are lapped by untidy waves of houses and trading estates. This is a legacy of the century before last, when coal and iron were mined and extracted from the valleys, and settlements grew up around the works and the collieries to house and supply the immigrant workers. For the populations in those valley towns were, and are, cosmopolitan; in the valley where I grew up, family names included Hartshorn, Courtney, Greening, Walbeoff, Szymanski, and Minoli, as well as Evans, Gronw and Morgan. Before the nineteenth century, the deep-cut, damp, valleys were hardly populated at all.

The dissected plateaux rolling high above are a different story. This is farmland and moorland, and here, settlements, though fewer and smaller than down below, have a pedigree. There are farms, typically they are old farms, whose byres were old even before the acts of union. Blood-lines are older up here; there are Vaughans and Lewises, Pritchards and Prices. Coughlins, Joneses and Contis, if they have found their way up to the sunlight at all, have done so only recently, and by way of the high-altitude council estates that were the successors to the earlier TB hospitals (situated alike,  to clear the diseased lungs of the poorer working folk) or the newer dormitory villages and terracotta-roofed houses that sprang up in the affluent years of the beginning of the present century.

Up on the Garth, then, it should have been no surprise to see the local hunt, the Pentyrch, gathered on the sky-line with its horses and hounds. Behind them, beyond the farms of the Vale of Glamorgan, and across the Severn Channel, was Exmoor, and in front, to the North, the high moorland of the Brecon Beacons. Atop their impressive horses, and dressed in jackets of black or brown velvet, the riders and followers are probably a more substantial link to the long-view of the history of this landscape than the damp, patchwork citizenry in the stone streets below. Even they are not immune from infiltration, though, because, as we passed, their whipper-in, after sounding the horn, and shouting: "Get down Dancer!" at one over-eager dog, called to us, "Oi, you 'aven' seen three dogs down by there 'ave you? We carn' find 'em."

Don't step on my blue serge suit!

Gwyn Thomas was a writer, raconteur, wit and schoolmaster and, while he once had a cult-following in the United States, his work has never become popular in Britain, outside Wales. Perhaps it is because, while drawing on universal themes, his context is a parochial one; he confines his plots almost entirely to the South Welsh industrial valleys in the early and middle years of the last century. Even within Wales his audience did not extend to the Welsh-speaking heartland, or to most of the more rarified pundits of Welsh literature. This was because he was an example of that strangest of all birds, a Welsh author writing in English about the condition of living in Wales. Today, undeservedly, his work is almost forgotten, whether in Wales or the world.

It was a pleasant shock, then, when in Cardiff recently, to discover a flyer for a new drama, based on  a collection of Gwyn Thomas' short stories "The Dark Philosophers", to be staged in a theatre in Newport. I bought tickets and on Friday last we  set off for that city to see a performance.

View from Cymmer Hill

Newport is an interesting phenomenon. It juggles the awkward facts that it is, geographically, closer to Chepstow than to Cymmer, historically, nearer to Monmouth than Glamorgan and, realistically, it is a bit of a cat in a kipper-box. An interesting place to choose, then, to stage a performance of a play based upon the work of a writer who said himself , "as soon as I get to Chepstow I feel very frightened."

The Riverfront (Glan yr afon)  Arts Centre houses the theatre, and we arrived early enough to buy some supper for ourselves. The menu was international; chicken fajitas and spaghetti bolognese clamoured for our attention beside brie-filled baguettes and "mouth-watering" panini.  Adding to this heady cosmopolitan ambience were the many spruced-up and well turned-out socialites, bon-viveurs and theatre-crowd types who, like so many gazelles or show-birds, disposed themselves around the foyer in elegant knots or careless agglomerations of chatter and self-assuredness.

We decided upon spicy (is there another kind?) chick-pea curry and yellow rice and moved to a bistro-style table in the foyer to await its delivery. Gwyn Thomas described his writing as "Chekhov with chips", and so perhaps this multi-cultural start to the evening was some sort of a portent.

Hardly had we begun to eat when a young woman, a little flustered and distracted, and talking urgently into her mobile phone, asked if she might join us at our little table. There were two empty seats, and so, of course, we agreed. As happens on these social occasions, we fell to talking and we discovered that she was the partner of the playwright and was, at this very moment, talking him in from the railway station to the theatre. Our little group of three was soon joined by a fourth (still not the playwright), a theatre director. He exhibited a healthy, and self-confessed, "south-west glow" and had travelled over from Bristol to see the play, for he and the playwright were colleagues.

Soon, we were all, severally of course, tucking into a serving of spicy chick-pea curry, and listening carefully for updates on the playwright's progress through Newport. The man himself arrived at length. He was a sunny-looking young fellow, quite ruddy, with a satchel and a green combat jacket, and he was clearly anxious for the play to get started. He thanked us for welcoming his partner to our table and was interested that I knew Gwyn Thomas' own play, "The Keep". He asked if I'd ever met Gwyn Thomas. I said that I hadn't, and he looked disappointed, but his partner smiled and ventured that she was sure I'd enjoy the play immensely. With a cheery, "Break a leg" we left his little party to find our seats in the auditorium.

The set was very effective. A dark space, the stage was occupied by a towering hill of old-fashioned wooden wardrobes, desks and chests of drawers. These became, at different times in the play, terraces of valleys-houses, hillsides, coffins and portals, and, too, they symbolised quite beautifully the domestic setting of Gwyn Thomas' work and the skeletons in closets that he often hangs out to air.

The play began ....

... and we left our seats furtively at the end, trying very hard to avoid meeting again with the playwright and his party, for it would probably have been embarrassing had we done so.

Quite how an ensemble can so thoroughly misinterpret and, therefore, misrepresent the genius of a writer is breathtaking. On this stage, Simeon is no longer a complex, brooding, enigma but a straightforward incestuous ram; Oscar is still vile, but the dark corners in the lives of those he squashes have been swept clean, and their own sinister cobwebs quietly disposed of. The result is that the pathos and wry humour of life's "big, sad, beautiful joke", bitter and sweet as the darkest chocolate, are overcome by sweet and sticky bathos and slapstick, and life is no longer funny.

A Commedia dell'Arte character, masked,  stalks the set throughout. As the action progresses, he walks among the characters, sometimes listening, sometimes teasing, sometimes telling them what they must say. That this Arleccino is intended to be the writer himself is undeniable, for he wears the unmistakable signature trilby hat and suit, but his purpose, other than to provide the glue that sticks the pastiche together, is unclear. He provides the suitably monstrous puppet-Oscar with its voice and takes part in an unnecessarily supercilious re-enactment of one of Gwyn Thomas' frequent television appearances. Maybe a theatrical metaphor is being dangled here. If so, we are, alas, either too short-sighted to see it, or too dull to understand it; perhaps both.

And, finally, what of  Walter, Ben and Arthur, the Dark Philosophers themselves? Perhaps they were too busy on this cold night, arguing over strong tea in the back room of Idomeneo's cafe, to make the complicated journey from Porth to Newport. Oh, but wasn't there a fourth among them? Ah yes, I remember, so there was ... and perhaps he was at Idomeneo's too, for though we searched, we could not find him at the Riverfront.

The sun also rises.

There are very many places whose names describe the beautiful or fortunate aspects of their location. Honeycombe Leaze, Otter Ferry and Combe Florey make you want to throw everything in and set off to share the sheer joy that their inhabitants must feel in saying, quite simply, "Oh yes, I live in Honeycombe Leaze," or, "Visiting Combe Florey? No, I live here." Other places hint of drama or dismay; Battle, Bleak Hey Nook and Lower Slaughter would be worth a drink bought for a local in any of their, undoubtedly atmospheric, hostelries in return for a story or two.

We live in a place whose name is just as descriptive and evocative of its location, but whose first fathers must have been of a much more modest and practical frame of mind than the worthy founders of Chew Magna or Rickinghall Superior. Gwaelod y Garth is what its name describes, the Bottom of the Hill, and being at the bottom, and facing east, we are accustomed to the dusky shadow that creeps down upon our little houses once the sun has passed over the top of the mountain.
In the summer, this personal sun-screen can be very welcome. We're often to be seen sitting outside our doors drinking cocoa in the cool shade while the unfortunate elements on the other side of the valley are still sweating and toiling in evening sunlight. We save pounds and pounds through this, not being forced to buy parasols, for example, or any of the more exotic garden furniture such as gazebos. Barbecues, too, are an unnecessary expense that we are fortunate to be spared. In winter time, however, if truth be told, the sun's early disappearance is something of a trial. For, what with the naturally damp disposition of the climate hereabouts, and the lush and over-exuberant ambitions of some of the lower flora, we are forced to wage a continual war against creeping green. By November - January at the latest - some of the older and more sedentary inhabitants of the village begin to take on a distinctly mossy appearance, and those of us who are of a comptemplative nature and who stop often, therefore, to peruse or to cogitate as we go about our daily business, are careful to rub our heads and to pat our shoulders often, lest the invisible yet ubiquitous fern-spores that fill the darkling air should gain a foot-hold.
We are all very used to this, of course, and newer elements in the village, like ourselves, soon pick up the necessary habits to keep the cryptogams at bay, and we quickly learn to move about regularly and, from time to time, to seek out those places roundabout where the sunlight lingers a little longer and where, as a result, the visitor will find small, sociable groups of us villagers, gathered together like those sea-lions one sees sometimes on the better kind of natural history programmes.
Very occasionally, I have been told, a villager will succumb to the advancing green-ness and, seeing the attraction of becoming fully vegetised, will seek out a dark and shady spot and sit down there as autumn approaches to mossify. By all accounts it is a gentle and painless process and, apart from the irritations of woodlice and millipedes, uncomplicated. Some voters, in days gone by, so one of the local wags tells me, took it into their heads to visit the National Botanic of Wales in this state, and are now, even to this day, feted in the temperate green-house there and make a tidy income for themselves through occasional walk-on parts, as exotic alien lfe-forms, in programmes such as Doctor Who and Pobol y Cwm.

Trouble is my business

We inched into the city along a choked highway where cars moved slower than the dead-cert I'd bet on the day before.
From the passenger seat, the woman looked across at me. She was short, neat and quick, like a tap to the back of the head.
"Park down there," she snapped, pointing to a closed-off road by the riverside.
"I can't do that, it's a one way road," I replied. "We'll have to drive round."
"You better not be stalling, Mo."
Her small, wrinkled hand reached inside her bag. I sneaked a peek out of the corner of my eye as we waited at the lights. I was right, the bag was loaded. If she tickled me with that one I'd have a lump on my noggin the size of a politician's expense-account.
"Listen," I said. "I know these streets. Believe me, some of them you wouldn't want to walk down, even with your granny."
She didn't buy it, though, "Funny, wise guy. But this is one old lady who can take care of herself. Now find a parking slot before I introduce you to the sharp end of my walking-pole."
The Market is a covered district where all kinds of people buy all kinds of merchandise. It isn't a pretty place, a bit fishy if you ask me, and a lot of faggots, too, but she knew who she wanted.
"Where's the Stick-man?" she asked quietly, looking right at a guy selling hot rolls.
"For why?" he growled, and I could tell by looking at her that he'd soon wish he hadn't.
The little lady looked up at him and smiled, slowly, " I want, to buy, a stick. Do you sell, sticks?"
He'd tried to brush her off, but she had him pat.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean no harm, lady," the sap blurted out. "He's over there, on a stall behind ... the Book-man."
Her precise, "Thankyou" hit him like a glass of ice-water and left him shivering over his little pastries.
He looked at me.
"You with her?"
I nodded.
"Jeez," he said.
"What kind you want darlin'," the stick-man asked. " I got canes, poles, swaggers, wood, metal, plastic, plain, fancy ... "
"I want folding," she said.
He looked her up and down; it didn't take long.
"You sure, doll?" he said. "Folding sticks ain't cheap."
"My last one was. The guy I bought it from was glad to sell it to me ... without VAT."
I watched the words hang in the air between them, like spiders on silk.
"Try this one."
He reached across and pulled down a small package from the side-wall. He flipped it open, snapped his wrist and, with three sharp well-oiled clicks, a full-length stick was in his hand.
It was quicker than any stick-up I'd ever seen, but the she wasn't impressed.
"It looks heavy," she said.
"Lady, this is the latest, lightest, four-section fold-up on the market. Anything else is just tubing."
He caught her eye.
"Listen, rube, I can see you're no tenderfoot. OK. I'll throw in a tooled leather wrist-loop."
She looked a little interested. He leered. She pulled his lead.
"I want it sawn-off."
The Stick-man paled and eyed the passing crowds nervously. He swallowed like a big scared frog and gulped out,
"Jeez, lady, don't tell the world, you'll get my licence revoked. Sawn-off? You know what that means?"
"Yeah, you might make a sale," she shot back, quicker than a hen off a nest.
"OK, OK, sawn-off it is, but keep it down."
"Deal. I'll pay cash," she said. "Don't trust electronic card machines. They never work anyhow."
I followed her as she trotted out of the market. It was raining and the pavements were wet and we had a long walk in front of us.
"Danged if he hasn't cut it too long," she said,
I winced in anticipation, but she smiled.
"Hey, never mind, Mo. I think you've earned a cup of coffee. I'll buy."
I nodded my head. I knew it was not the time to say a word.

No country for old (wo)men

Time for an entry to the blog, after another very long pause.

It is very inconvenient when you lose a bespoke walking-stick. Even if losing things is something that you are very good at. And so, when I heard that my wife's mother (call her Dorothy) had lost hers, and being a dutiful son-in-law, I offered to take her to buy a replacement. She had, after all, gone to the trouble of finding out that her local supplier of such things no longer stocked "her brand", but that a similar establishment in a different, though nearby, part of the city, did.
I duly picked up Dorothy on the appointed morning, and drove her to Canton. Don't be alarmed, it was not a long journey, for that is merely the name of the suburb where the stick-purveyor was to be found. Thinking about it for a moment, though, and with the undoubted benefit of hind-sight, the whole coming experience was to resemble being press-ganged or Shanghaied.
I parked the car in the spacious and usefully sign-posted "Customer's car park" a little nervously. There was another car already standing in a space and, if its driver was, in fact, a customer, then, morally at least, I would be double-parked.
There was a back entrance to the shop from the car park. It was a small, battered metal door with one of those fish-eye peepholes that you encounter in a certain sort of hotel. There was a bell-push. A sign told us to "Push for assistance". I pushed. I am an aficionado of the kind of film where pushing a bell like that triggers a long period in which one hears, ever more clearly, a limping tread and a dragging foot that herald the approach of a hooded and hump-backed Igor. And so I stepped well back. Dorothy, who does not watch films, has no such prejudices, and so she held her ground close to the door. This was a little unfortunate because it opened outwards and so, for a moment, she disappeared from view and I was left to face the denizen of the shop alone. Hooded and hunch-backed only metaphorically, it was a female, and she eyed me, an apparently healthy middle-aged man, with suspicion. I hastily reached my wife's mother out from behind the door and stood behind her, beaming as conciliatory a smile as I could muster, and pushed her forward.
"She wants a stick." I said.
"Indeed." the female snorted. "This way."
And she melted into the darkness of the shop.
It smelled a little damp inside, and the carpeted floor felt unaccountably "sticky" as we walked along a short corridor into the showroom. Here, in a large, low-ceilinged chamber, all manner of "living-aids" were ranged about, displayed on walls and shelves and on the dubious floor itself.
Some I recognised: wheelchairs, powered and otherwise; walking-frames; commodes; and bathroom aids. Others were strange to me, and I kept close to Dorothy for fear of them. On one shelf, soft bundles, faintly phosphorescent, and reminiscent of fungoid growths, bore the inscription "Foam Ring Cushions". Nearby, "Luxury Stocking Aids" cunningly twisted into a chthonic tower, of unfamiliar and nauseous geometry, cast an eldritch shadow in the wan light of the shop's fluorescent fittings.
The sticks, such as they were, cowered in a corner, far from the light, and the denizen, smiling at the prospect of a conquest, waved her hand expansively,
"Many sticks. Choose."
My wife's mother, as I've said, is not party to the protocols of the horror and mystery genres and, unaffected by that which she could not, therefore, perceive, dealt the "assistant" a blow that was as effective as a crucifix in a crypt,
"Which are the cheapest ones?" she asked.
There followed an extended cosmic battle between the forces of light and reason and the armies of chaos. I merely watched, trembling, as the "Igor" fawned over the qualities of the most expensively crafted sticks on the stand.
"Look," she said, "how they fold. See, see the pretty flowers on the stock."
"Too heavy," Dorothy snapped back.
"Feel the handle, it is orthopaedic."
With a delight that was not quite healthy, the denizen stroked a horrid, weirdly carved lump atop one of the sticks.
"I want a simple handle," my wife's mother countered, "and, besides, they're all too tall."
The denizen winced, and cast a sideways glance towards the till.
"Can you cut them to size? The man who sold me my last one could."
The Igor ket out a strangled,
"N-no."
Defeat.
The denizen betrayed it in every gesture. One shoulder raised higher than the other, an eye twitching, she acknowledged the greater skill of her adversary and led us to the door regretfully.
As we approached it, I heard a malicious giggle and then,
"I know a man who sells sticks. In the market, in the CENTRE of the town. He might help."
Snatching meagre comfort from abject defeat, the female leered in my direction and, as she heard Drothy ask, rhetorically, "Will you be able to park near the market?", she smiled and closed the door upon us.