All kinds of things to read and enjoy

The Lakes

2010-09-18T03:34:00.000-07:00

The Lakes – sylvan tranquility masks high emotion
Robert L. Fielding
Set in England’s Lake District, with Lake Ullswater as a backdrop, The Lakes (375 mins) a video of ‘one of the landmarks of last year’s BBC output, created, written and produced by Jimmy McGovern, also responsible for Cracker with Robbie Coultrane, and Brookside, tackles many of Britain’s social problems - ‘Broken Britain’ with alcoholism, drug abuse, infidelity and moral meltdown in the spotlight.

The unfolding tale of murder, abuse and mayhem, family strife and debt, centres around Danny Kavanagh played by John Simm (Life on Mars – 24 hour party people - ) and the Quinlan family, as well as employees and owners of the local hotel, played by actors with faces familiar to fans of British TV’s ‘Corry’, ‘The Bill’, ‘Holby City’ and ‘Peak Practice’.

Moving from his native Liverpool to start anew, Kavanagh finds himself embroiled more in strife than sightseeing in what he imagined would be a peaceful part of England, where he could start over, stopping his own particular addiction - gambling.

McGovern’s exceptional ability and skill has given us all the ills of a Britain split apart by Hedonism and alienation gone mad, but in the magnificent final scenes, including the inside of a courtroom in which a rape trial is being conducted, McGovern, and his team (Joe Ainsworth, William Gaminara, and Julie Rutterford) and the domestic denoument in several households, we are led to the point of the thing, an expose and moral answer of, not just the main issues, but also, as if there weren’t enough for a modern audience to take in, the hypocrisy of certain high officials of the Church, and attitudes to rape and its victims.

If Britain is ‘broken’, and there is much evidence that it is, this film shows us the way forward through trust, reconciliation, and an increase in traditional family values. Be warned though, this fine production is NOT for the faint hearted!
Robert L. Fielding

The lens of the artist

2010-04-08T05:27:00.001-07:00

The focus of the artist’s lens: Austen, Hardy, Trollope and Dickens
Robert L. Fielding

Born in the same year as Wellington’s victory at Waterloo, Anthony Trollope lived a full life removed of the threat of invasion by the French. Hardy, on the other hand, knew those times and wrote about them; his novel ‘The Trumpet Major’ is full of the threat of imminent invasion by Napoleon’s Grande Armee. Austen, writing earlier than both, sharpened her focus to the drawing room’s of landowners and other gentry, bringing in the ‘outside world’ only rarely.

Hardy’s tragedies drew back from the inner confines of his protagonists, and included trends and changes of the days of which he wrote. Sergeant Troy enters the sylvan, bucolic tranquility of Bathsheba Everdene, struggling to run her farm, and brings worldliness and dash to her world of rustic simplicity.

With such innovations as the opening of the first public steam railway when he was yet a boy of ten, and later, in 1835, the mania created by steam, Trollope’s novels reflect, not entirely a sylvan setting in the cathedral close of Barchester, but an onrush of the modern to deluge his characters in the form of the dominance in all matters, public as well as private, of the fourth estate: the Press.

Tom Towers, top man at the Jupiter, represents both the independence of the Press, essentially a truly modern entity, and its ubiquitous presence, influence and commentary on every facet of life. Warden Harding’s peace of mind is disturbed, cataclysmically and forever, by a lawsuit against him and his inherited stipend.

Trollope, unlike Austen, and on a smaller scale than his contemporary, Charles Dickens, allowed the issues and trends of the day into his stories. And whereas Hardy let them intrude but little, preferring to use omnipotent forces to quell the beating hearts of his characters, Trollope showed his falling prey to the omnipotence of powers centred upon a country increasingly dominated by its capital, London.

Dickens embraced the life of London in a way that neither Hardy nor Trollope ever did. Trollope dealt with the power emanating from the capital at a more telescopic distance.

Dickens infused most of his novels with the influence of London, dealing with the malign forces that oppressed some of its inhabitants, chiefly the young and the very old, and the poor.

While the literature of these great novelists is not exactly looking at life through ‘the cracked looking glass of a servant’ as Irish art was once described, every writer purposely leaves out that which he or she does not wish to write about. Put the other way round, writers in any age only deal with those facets of life they know something about or wish to discover or delve into whilst writing. For Austen, it was the ways we can delude ourselves, for Hardy, how forces beyond our control often affect our lives, for Trollope, it was how institutions like the Church can be manipulated and themselves manipulate, for Dickens, it was the ways man can and does work against man.
Robert L. Fielding

2010-03-23T01:33:00.001-07:00

Alice: “Twas brillig!”
Robert L. Fielding
In Alice in Wonderland (108 mins), directed by Tim Burton, with an excellent screenplay by Linda Woolverton, based loosely on Lewis Carroll’s words, Alice Kingsley, Australian, Mia Wasikowska, plays the young woman who doesn’t quite fit into polite Victorian society. Shortly after the death of her father, she shuns a proposal of marriage and ‘escapes’ down a rabbit hole into the world inhabited by the creations of the mind of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson -Lewis Carroll.

In the topsy-turvy world she finds herself in, the bright-eyed Alice soon comes up against the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), the grotesquely white-faced Iracebeth of Crims and her minions, who have helped her to conquer Underworld by stealing the crown from her sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway).

The day will come when Alice has to fight the Jabberwock (with eyes aflame) on that day of days, the Frabjous Day. Meanwhile, labouring under a misunderstanding, Alice is pronounced to be ‘the wrong Alice’ – she has shrunk to a mere six inches in height, later to an improbable 20 feet tall.

She becomes the White Queen’s champion, eventually slaying the Jabberwock, the Red Queen’s dragon, that terrorises her subjects, keeping her on the throne.

Johnny Depp adds to his incredible versatility (Sweeney Todd, Chocolat, Public Enemy, Edward Scissorhands et al) playing the frenetic milliner, Tarrant Hightop, the Mad Hatter, complete with magical hat at the usual price of 10/6, and multiple personalities, one of which speaks Glaswegian based upon Rab C. Nesbitt, no less. He fights the Knave of Hearts, Ilosovic Stayne (Crispin Glover), to complete the Frab Day.

The graphics in Tim Burton’s creation are amazing – Carroll would have been ‘wellpleezed’, and the voice-overs from the likes of Stephen Fry (The Cheshire Cat), Barbara Windsor (Mallymkun, the dormouse), Micheal Sheen (the white rabbit), Timothy Spall (Bayard Hamar, the bloodhound), and Paul Whitehouse from The Fast Show (the March Hare) are a joy to hear and recognize.

Real people on screen included the multi-talented but now sadly infrequently seen Lindsay Duncan (Oliver Twist, GBH), and Geraldine James (The Calendar Girls, Ghandi) and the favourite from British television, Frances de la Tour (Rising Damp’s Miss Jones) – all playing the usual suspects in Burton’s/Carroll’s masterpiece.

The question that remains to be answered, for me, is whether Carroll or Burton, or both, intended any allegorical meaning in the production. I took it as telling me to be true to my own spirit, and/or alternatively, what can happen when despots hold sway – I could be wrong on both counts. Only wikipedia readers will tell you that the White and Red Queens represented the Houses of York and Lancaster, to the rest of us, it was what Carroll intended – ‘literary nonsense’ – much beloved by children and teachers of discourse analysis – ‘curiouser and curiouser!’
Robert L. Fielding

2010-03-23T01:30:00.000-07:00

Titus
by
Robert L. Fielding
‘Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite them, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum – and vengeance is sweet until what goes around comes around – the essence of the messages Shakespeare may have intended in Titus Andronicus, his earliest tragedy. Titus (162 minutes) also depicts the brutality and the futility of our ‘need’ for revenge, and our abuse of power.

Sir Anthony Hopkins (Titus) is magnificently cruel, even sinister, while displaying sensitivity – the tragedy of a man doomed to follow a trait that leads him to his downfall (cf Hamlet, Coriolanus, KingLear, Macbeth etc).

His nemesis, Tamora (Jessica Lange) is the epitome of a vengeful, scheming, nasty piece of work, who seduces the corrupt Saturnine (Alan Cumming) to act in ways that are symptomatic of a Rome in its decline – with unutterable savagery and unspeakable decadence.

The film rather puzzlingly begins with a device straight out of a workshop for film directors/writers; a small boy stages a military debacle with his toys on a kitchen table, until a bomb explodes and he is taken (with us) into the world of agoras and temples in ancient Rome.

It has been suggested that the boy is a ‘stand-in’ for us – perhaps to involve us, perhaps to remove any alienation we might feel from the action, perhaps to place us centre stage. In all respects, the device failed – the boy was nearly always somewhere, which puzzled me, I must say.

The real action, when it begins, comes thick and fast, hot on the heals of Tamora’s plea for her son to be spared by Titus. No mercy was shown him and his death marked the first in a series of acts of brutal revenge, finishing, as Shakespearean tragedy usually does, with the deaths of most of the cast.

Violence begets more violence, and with malign dictators, violence knows no bounds. Saturnine, newly crowned Emperor of Rome starts as he means to carry on – with sadistic orgy and madness.

The appearance of what looked for all the world like staff cars from 1930s Germany, carrying the Emperor on his feet shouting at everyone gave the film a sort of universal appeal – this is how dictators in all ages behave.

Using cinematography/computer graphics to great effect, Luciano Tovoli, was able to bring the hatred of a soliloquy onto the silver screen. If they had had these techniques in Shakespeare’s day, this is how he would have done it!
Robert L. Fielding

Review of 'Dad's Army' by Graham McGann

2010-02-12T19:51:00.000-08:00

Dad’s Army: The Story of a Classic Television Show by Graham McCann

by
Robert L. Fielding
‘A hugely entertaining read’ Daily Telegraph - sums up this marvelous book about a hugely entertaining sit-com, with all our old favourites, now sadly mostly no longer with us.
Arthur Lowe as Captain Mainwaring; his nemesis, John Le Mesurier as Sergeant Wilson; the classical actor, John Laurie as Frazer; the perennial ‘old’ timer, Clive Dunn as everybody’s favourite Grandad, Corporal Jones; Arnold Ridley as the refined old gentleman, Godfrey; Ian Lavender as the “stupid boy”, Frank Pike; and James Beck as spiv, Taylor, with Bill Pertwee as the irascibly nasty, Warden Hodges – members of what seem like everybody’s extended family.

McCann begins this well written, painstakingly researched book, by giving us the facts about the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), later to be renamed, the Home Guard.

It is somewhat difficult, now that we are ‘all in Europe’, to imagine how it must have felt to be on the edge of imminent invasion in those dark days. Thomas Hardy hinted at an earlier threat from Napoleon’s Grande Armee in ‘The Trumpet Major’, but this much more deadly one must have felt like the end, particularly after the evacuations at Dunkirk.

What shows through in all the episodes of comic relief, tirelessly reviewed here by McCann, is Britain’s ‘bulldog spirit’ – a sort of Stoical self-belief, epitomized by Winston Churchill’s stance, and illustrated in a thousand different ways by people like Vera Lynn.

Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the writers, created a team and storylines that were both entirely believable and funny to generations of viewers; not just those who lived through it all.

With background information about Lowe, Le Mez, and all the rest, McCann has ‘fleshed out’ the characters who lived on the small screen every week for nine years and in over 80 episodes. Everybody who has ever laughed through even one is intimately connected to its main characters and the situations they found themselves in. We are all aware of the foibles of Captain Mainwaring, the rivalry underlined by class differences between him and his second in command, ‘uncle Sergeant’ Wilson, but it has taken this book to look further into the two well known and loved characters, magnificently portrayed by Lowe and Le Mesurier.

Really, reading this immensely enjoyable book was something like reading about members of my own family – so familiar, and yet with a life half over before I was born.

My father actually served in the Home Guard before his call-up to the Royal Navy – had served with chaps the same age as his father, even his grandfather, and had his tales to tell. All were retold and embellished with great aplomb and hilarity by this never to be forgotten team of actors who entered our lives as the real life ones had before them; to stand up for us and to make us proud to be British, and to portray for us, that peculiarly British trait - the ability to laugh at ourselves.
Robert L. Fielding

A great film - 'Gran Torino'

2009-03-24T03:48:00.000-07:00

Gran Torino
A movie with a message – to make you think about life and death, living and dying, ‘Gran Torino’ (116 minutes) does all that.

Walt Kowalski (Eastwood), a retired car worker/Korean War veteran has just buried his wife, and sees the indifference of his family and the shallowness of her eulogy. Arriving home in a run- down quarter of Detroit, and still sore, he’s met by the folks next door, a Vietnam family.

Walt doesn’t take kindly to foreigners, kids – anybody, pretty much, but he acts to protect them from a gang of young thugs, even though it’s really just his own peace he’s looking out for. The family lavishes unwanted gifts of food and flowers on him – still he doesn’t like them.

Showing how immigrant kids can go wrong, the film has rival gangs doing the dozens and mouthing off before trying to get the young Thao (Bee Vang) on side, forcing him to steal or vandalize the Gran Torino in Walt’s garage.

Walt thwarts the attempt, and sounds off at the boy. Later, when the boy is assigned to do chores for a week as atonement, the old man teaches him about life – about how men talk to men, and how things work generally.

He’s invited into the house to eat with the family and is sort of adopted by Thao’s sister, Ahney Her (Sue Lor). The gangs get rougher and rougher on the two kids until hard man Walt roughs it up and the gang retaliate – shooting at the family home, beating up Thao and raping his sister.

Here you might have expected Walt/Clint to wade in with guns blazing, but instead he locks the boy in the garage and goes off to confront the gang alone. Surrounded by the silence of frightened neighbors, producer and director Eastwood makes the film end on an entirely unexpected and ultimately more meaningful note.

Eastwood’s performance as a vet that has lived with the horror of killing since the 50s and finds redemption and (for the padre at any rate) salvation is masterful and totally convincing.

Notable too are all the main characters – villains, grandmother, barber, and all. This film works primarily because it rings true, not because it uses graphics to great effect or goes the whole nine yards with action. It is precisely its lack of shoot-outs and car chases that makes it more of a drama, less of a spectacle.

I came out thinking about what I had learned about living and dying, about some of the roots of our social ills, which is always better than coming out deafened and partly blinded by cinematography.
Robert L. Fielding

Dad's Army - 40 years young this week

2008-08-04T11:48:00.000-07:00

Still as popular as it soon became in 1968, everybody's favourite sit-com, 'Dad's Army' is 40 years old this week and still going strong, even though most of the senior citizens of its wonderful cast have passed away to that Home Guard platoon in the sky.

Its popularity has hardly lessened with avid fans eagerly watching repeated episodes on the box or buying up the DVDs and videos of the show.

Showing what the British people were made of back in the dark years of the 2nd World War is what 'Dad's Army' did best. At Warmington-on-sea, on the south coast of England, the threat from Hitler would have been at its greatest to those left on our mainland.

Younger, fitter men were elsewhere - fighting in Europe, leaving older and younger men and women to defend our treasure - Britain. These men and women did it all with a smile on their lips - the appeal of Dad's Army is made more so because it rings true, and because, of course, it is hilarious.

Robert L. Fielding

Review of a classic film - 'Birdman of Alcatraz'

2008-05-13T10:28:00.000-07:00

Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)
(TCM) Burt Lancaster, Karl Malden, Telly Savalas

The re-showing on TCM of what is now almost a classic film showed Lancaster at his best – playing a man capable of extreme violence, changed by an abiding interest.

The true story of Robert Stroud, interned in Levenworth penitentiary, where he conducted tests and experiments on canaries to discover remedies for the ills that afflict them, began with a dangerous man indicted for murder.

Finding a fledgling sparrow in the exercise yard one day, Stroud nurses it back to health, teaches it a few tricks – hopping onto his finger and flying, and his interest in all things avian begins.

Called ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’ by Hollywood, Stroud actually conducted most of his research at Levenworth, although he was transferred to the infamous island later.

Supported by his mother and then by a benefactor, Stella Johnson, whom he later married, Stroud became the leading authority on avian illnesses and their treatment, writing in the journals of the day on his findings.

Karl Malden (Harvey Shoemaker) played Stroud’s Nemesis governor, later to become a more understanding governor of the prison in which Stroud spent some of his early years, while a young Telly Savalas played Stroud’s cellmate as he nursed the birds to health, or to their death, until he started to cure them.

Science sometimes progresses accidentally, as Lister found with his discovery of penicillin. Stroud merely hit on remedies at first, but then became more systematic as his knowledge increased. The interest sustained him through his 50 odd years in prison.-
Robert L. Fielding

The 8th Al Ain Classical Musical Festival

2008-03-15T01:47:00.000-07:00

With ten concerts - ten great performances resulting in ten standing ovations – the 8th Al Ain Classical Music Festival, under the patronage of H.H. Sheikh Abdulah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Minister of Foreign Affairs was a huge success.

The programme of impressive and ambitious concerts began on March 6 with Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’, sung in Arabic, and ended with arias from Verdi and Puccini in Abu Dhabi.

Four guest orchestras, including our own UAE Philharmonic Orchestra, accompanied 12 soloists in arias from well known operas including Tosca, The Barber of Seville and Madame Butterfly, and several symphonies and overtures, including Mozart 41, Beethoven’s Fifth, and Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’, narrated in Arabic by Adel Bakri.

The venues were the impressively splendid Municipality Theatre, and the atmospheric Al Jahili Fort, and the Auditorium in the Emirates Palace Hotel in the nation’s capital. Concertgoers at all three were greeted by representatives of our hosts, and the evening air was beautiful as were the settings.

For those with a more involved interest in classical music, several workshops were given in Abu Dhabi.

Admission was mostly free and all the concerts were well attended, making it very likely that we can look forward to the 9th Festival next Spring.
Robert L. Fielding

English Concert Tour of the UAE

2008-02-16T01:26:00.000-08:00

Al Ain, 31st January 2008

Sheikh Khalifa Auditorium, in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Tawam Medical Campus was packed on Thursday night – the English Concert were in town, ending their tour of the country.

In his welcoming opening remarks, HE Sheikh Mohammed Khalaf al-Mazroui, the Director General of Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, said he hoped the English Concert had saved the best until last – they duly obliged with an excellent evening’s music.

The concert began with the work of an ‘adopted Englishman’, George Frederick Handel – his Concerto Grosso in A op.6 no.11, which, the copious programme notes informed us, was actually the last of a set of 12 to be written by a then ailing Handel.

J.S. Bach’s Cantata ‘Weichet nur, betrubte schatten’ – the ‘Wedding Cantata’ came next and was delightfully suggestive of a special occasion in Springtime. The Soprano, Lucy Crowe gave us a hint of her great range.

In the time honoured tradition of concerts in London, New York or Berlin, the conductor, Harry Bickert, treated the audience to an amusing anecdote; this one from Handel’s life. During the hectic rehearsal of one of his difficult operas, Handel, infuriated by the antics of his petulant prima donna, the Italian singer, Cuzzoni, actually threatened to throw her out of one of the upper windows of his Brook Street home.

Harry Bickert got things underway after the brief interval, with three arias for Cleopatra from the opera, ‘Giulio Cesare in Egitto’. It was in this fine music that we were truly entertained by Lucy Crowe’s amazing vocal range, poise and verbal dexterity, I know not what to call it.

Finishing with Geminiani’s Concerto in D Minor ‘La Folio’, before leaving to great applause from a very appreciative audience in which only a very few took pictures on their mobile phones in mid-concert, Harry Bickert gesticulated to his players that an encore was appropriate.

The treat was a great one; Handel’s ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’ – epitomizing his vast output, composed at his famous home of 36 years, 25 Brook Street, where he lived until his death in 1759, and which now houses The Handel Museum.

The evening was courtesy of HH Sheikh Tahnoun bin Mohammed Al Nahyan, the Ruler’s Representative in the Eastern District of the Abu Dhabi Emirate, and the British Embassy, represented on this lovely evening by Edward Oakden, the British Ambassador to the UAE.

Sweeney Todd – the Demon Barber of Fleet Street

2008-02-16T01:23:00.000-08:00

(116 minutes) – directed by Tim Burton

Instead of financiers in the city of London turning the handle of an ‘immense pecuniary mangle’, as Dickens once described the goings on there, Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) and his pale-faced accomplice, Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) turn the handle of a far more gruesome contraption in this odd musical version of the cautionary tale of the legendary 19th century serial killer.

Set in a London Dickens would have been at home in, full of rats, some two-legged ones, and all sorts and grades of filth, Benjamin Barker, later using the alias of Todd, returns from years of exile, fitted up for a crime he didn’t commit, and vows to avenge the great wrong done to him by Judge Turpin (Alan Wickman).

In his absence, wife and daughter left in dire penury, are taken in by Turpin, and later, the Judge decides the time has come to wed the daughter, now his ward, Johanna (Jane Wisener).

Meanwhile, Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), a sailor who alighted with Todd, falls for the Lady of Shallot-like Joanna and treats the audience to one of the best songs in the whole production whilst trying to extricate her from an asylum.

The rest, as they say, is history; Sweeney develops what almost amounts to a production line of ingredients for pies devoured by customers of a newly prospering pie shop. Throats are slit, blood squirts a yard as a line of horrified men meet a grizzly end in Todd’s barber’s chair.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but you should see it, for the acting, the singing, the appallingly dark sets, the great performances and the music.

Two things I may never do ever again after seeing this film: eat a meat pie, or be shaved by a barber who uses a cut-throat razor.
Robert L. Fielding

Dubai metamorphoses

2007-11-05T06:32:00.000-08:00

Next time you have a minute to spare, sit down and count everything around you – impossible – probably! Let’s limit it to the fixtures and fittings – everything that comes with the flat: floor tiles, skirting boards, doors, window frames, panes of glass, light switches – it’s going to be a big list. Right, now multiply that number by 100,000 – that’s the stuff on its way along Emirates Road to Dubai Marina and the building sites around Dubai.

Bumper to bumper lorries, rivers of steel, slow moving some of the time, stationary most of the time, or just winding around the roundabouts on the way.

Now add to that, the thousands and thousands of people traveling by car and bus and you have an idea what is happening in Dubai. – the rapid building of what amounts to another city, no less. Hundreds and hundreds of tower blocks – steel and glass constructions that are springing up almost daily.

If you don’t go down that way much, you’ll be amazed next time you do, and the next after that, on for a year or two, probably for the next ten or twenty.

Step back, if you have the time, the parking space and the inclination of your neck to look at the virtual forest – except this is no computer model, no virtual reality, but the reality of what Dubai is – the mushrooming of an ultra modern, state of the art metropolis.

Next come the inhabitants, tourists, homeowners, prospective homeowners and their attendant agents, financiers. The guys putting the place up are already there – you can see them like so many ants moving up and down the walls, along the floors and driving the machinery preparing ground for new sites.

I don’t know the statistics, but just taking a look at it, I would say they are of the astronomical sort – something approaching the billions of dollars poured in to get it all moving skyward.

Burj Dubai towers over all, its progress upwards slowing as it nears that magic number that makes it the tallest building on the planet – until the next one – in Dubai!

Catering for the families that will people this verticality are the massive malls: Dubai Mall, the Mall of the Emirates, Mall of Arabia – the mind reels with it all.

Let’s not dwell on cars – enough of them already, but how many thousands more are bound to arrive, and where will they all fit in?

The authorities have thought of that; the Metro snakes alongside Sheikh Zayed Road, a serpent of concrete and steel. The trains – unmanned ones, are arriving early next year. Speaking personally, I can’t wait until they begin to flash up to Ibn Battuta Mall. What sort of futuristic sound will they make – will it be heard above the noise from all those cars?

The future is now in Dubai, and elsewhere – the Guggenheim and Louvre in Abu Dhabi, Dubailand – pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and it will soon be right here, on our doorsteps.
Robert L. Fielding

Why we live together: our need to hear noise

2007-10-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

Next time you go camping up in the mountains or in the desert, listen to the silence. Listen to what it’s like to be alone in the world.

After the routine noise of your working days, it probably sounds beautiful; you can hear your pulse, your breathing, regular and even; silence is indeed golden, but what if that was all there was – silence!

It’s difficult to imagine what that would be like, isn’t it – we live in a world full of noise – the obvious noise made by traffic and people generally – the noises we try to get away from but usually can’t – and the sometimes desired noise that we call music. Noise is ubiquitous –it’s all around us, all of the day and most of the night too.

We all sleep through the constant, dull sound of our air-conditioning, through the noise of the cars still going by at three in the morning sometimes, and the noise from those asleep in the same room.

But what would our lives be like without noise – ask the deaf! Noise tells us that we are not alone, and although there’s usually too much of it for our liking, if there was none we would feel lonely.

Jean-Paul Sartre said that hell is other people, but in a world where few people existed, other people that could be trusted would have made life bearable. In a world of dog-eat-dog, of lawlessness, being surrounded by people you knew and liked was probably vital.

To choose to live as a hermit (from the Greek ἔρημος erēmos, signifying "desert", "uninhabited", hence "desert-dweller"; adjective: "eremitic") - a person who lives to some greater or lesser degree in seclusion and/or isolation from society, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermit) would be an odd choice in a world of danger, and only the strong or the insane would contemplate it.

Living in communities arose, it has been said, more from the need to cooperate to manage common land than out of the need for defence. Nevertheless, people would most certainly have felt safer with others close by, and the history of our planet and its people is the history of the community – of the rise of walled cities, of treaties between communities, and of conflicts between them.

‘Eidgenossenschaft’ – German for confederation, the term literally translates means "oath fellowship"; a confederacy of equal partners, which can be individuals or groups such as states, formed by a pact sealed by a solemn oath, and is quite different from the hierarchies that grew out of feudalism - pacts between unequal partners.

Both were most probably concerted attempts to fend off interlopers as well as live off the land. Now that both mean less than they used to, why do we want to live together – in cities that have outgrown their usefulness to us – cities in which living is harder than it has ever been? The answer is because the alternative is probably too dreadful to contemplate – living alone, with all that silence!
Robert L. Fielding

Here are 76 good reasons to cut down on your sugar intake

2007-08-27T08:52:00.000-07:00

76 Ways Sugar Can Ruin Your Health

http://www.mercola.com/article/sugar/dangers_of_sugar.htm

Contributed by Nancy Appleton, Ph.DAuthor of the book Lick The Sugar Habit
In addition to throwing off the body's homeostasis, excess sugar may result in a number of other significant consequences. The following is a listing of some of sugar's metabolic consequences from a variety of medical journals and other scientific publications.

Sugar can suppress your immune system and impair your defenses against infectious disease.1,2
Sugar upsets the mineral relationships in your body: causes chromium and copper deficiencies and interferes with absorption of calcium and magnesium. 3,4,5,6

Sugar can cause can cause a rapid rise of adrenaline, hyperactivity, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and crankiness in children.7,8

Sugar can produce a significant rise in total cholesterol, triglycerides and bad cholesterol and a decrease in good cholesterol.9,10,11,12

Sugar causes a loss of tissue elasticity and function.13

Sugar feeds cancer cells and has been connected with the development of cancer of the breast, ovaries, prostate, rectum, pancreas, biliary tract, lung, gallbladder and stomach.14,15,16,17,18,19,20

Sugar can increase fasting levels of glucose and can cause reactive hypoglycemia.21,22

Sugar can weaken eyesight.23

Sugar can cause many problems with the gastrointestinal tract including: an acidic digestive tract, indigestion, malabsorption in patients with functional bowel disease, increased risk of Crohn's disease, and ulcerative colitis.24,25,26,27,28

Sugar can cause premature aging.29

Sugar can lead to alcoholism.30

Sugar can cause your saliva to become acidic, tooth decay, and periodontal disease.31,32,33

Sugar contributes to obesity.34

Sugar can cause autoimmune diseases such as: arthritis, asthma, multiple sclerosis.35,36,37

Sugar greatly assists the uncontrolled growth of Candida Albicans (yeast infections)38

Sugar can cause gallstones.39

Sugar can cause appendicitis.40

Sugar can cause hemorrhoids.41

Sugar can cause varicose veins.42

Sugar can elevate glucose and insulin responses in oral contraceptive users.43

Sugar can contribute to osteoporosis.44

Sugar can cause a decrease in your insulin sensitivity thereby causing an abnormally high insulin levels and eventually diabetes.45,46,47

Sugar can lower your Vitamin E levels.48

Sugar can increase your systolic blood pressure.49

Sugar can cause drowsiness and decreased activity in children.50

High sugar intake increases advanced glycation end products (AGEs)(Sugar molecules attaching to and thereby damaging proteins in the body).51

Sugar can interfere with your absorption of protein.52

Sugar causes food allergies.53

Sugar can cause toxemia during pregnancy.54

Sugar can contribute to eczema in children.55

Sugar can cause atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease.56,57

Sugar can impair the structure of your DNA.58

Sugar can change the structure of protein and cause a permanent alteration of the way the proteins act in your body.59,60

Sugar can make your skin age by changing the structure of collagen.61

Sugar can cause cataracts and nearsightedness.62,63

Sugar can cause emphysema.64

High sugar intake can impair the physiological homeostasis of many systems in your body.65

Sugar lowers the ability of enzymes to function.66

Sugar intake is higher in people with Parkinson's disease.67

Sugar can increase the size of your liver by making your liver cells divide and it can increase the amount of liver fat.68,69

Sugar can increase kidney size and produce pathological changes in the kidney such as the formation of kidney stones.70,71

Sugar can damage your pancreas.72

Sugar can increase your body's fluid retention.73

Sugar is enemy #1 of your bowel movement.74

Sugar can compromise the lining of your capillaries.75

Sugar can make your tendons more brittle.76

Sugar can cause headaches, including migraines.77

Sugar can reduce the learning capacity, adversely affect school children's grades and cause learning disorders.78,79

Sugar can cause an increase in delta, alpha, and theta brain waves which can alter your mind's ability to think clearly.80

Sugar can cause depression.81

Sugar can increase your risk of gout.82

Sugar can increase your risk of Alzheimer's disease.83

Sugar can cause hormonal imbalances such as: increasing estrogen in men, exacerbating PMS, and decreasing growth hormone.84,85,86,87

Sugar can lead to dizziness.88

Diets high in sugar will increase free radicals and oxidative stress.89

High sucrose diets of subjects with peripheral vascular disease significantly increases platelet adhesion.90

High sugar consumption of pregnant adolescents can lead to substantial decrease in gestation duration and is associated with a twofold increased risk for delivering a small-for-gestational-age (SGA) infant.91,92

Sugar is an addictive substance.93

Sugar can be intoxicating, similar to alcohol.94

Sugar given to premature babies can affect the amount of carbon dioxide they produce.95

Decrease in sugar intake can increase emotional stability.96

Your body changes sugar into 2 to 5 times more fat in the bloodstream than it does starch.97

The rapid absorption of sugar promotes excessive food intake in obese subjects.98

Sugar can worsen the symptoms of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).99

Sugar adversely affects urinary electrolyte composition.100

Sugar can slow down the ability of your adrenal glands to function.101

Sugar has the potential of inducing abnormal metabolic processes in a normal healthy individual and to promote chronic degenerative diseases.102
I.V.s (intravenous feedings) of sugar water can cut off oxygen to your brain.103

Sugar increases your risk of polio.104

High sugar intake can cause epileptic seizures.105

Sugar causes high blood pressure in obese people.106

In intensive care units: Limiting sugar saves lives.107

Sugar may induce cell death.108

In juvenile rehabilitation camps, when children were put on a low sugar diet, there was a 44 percent drop in antisocial behavior.109

Sugar dehydrates newborns.110

Sugar can cause gum disease.111

http://www.mercola.com/article/sugar/dangers_of_sugar.htm

Global warming trivia

2007-07-14T07:11:00.000-07:00

Global warming – apportioning blame – the old way

I doubt if there is one person alive that is not aware that global warming is here to stay – unless we change our ways – even if we do change, it isn’t going anywhere – the planet is warming up, with all that means – rising sea levels, drought and death – ours if we don’t act fast.

Is it necessary, though, to debate the size of the carbon footprint of a bottle of water – I mean haven’t we more urgent things to stop, or at least think about. Every day, millions of cars carry a single driver down a route passed by some form of public transport. Now, I’m no scientist, but I’m wiling to bet that the CF left by those drivers in their endless queues at countless lights and white lines is a whole lot bigger and more significant than that left by a crateful of bottles of spring water.

Pretty soon the finger pointing will start, if it hasn’t already. Like smokers, drinkers of bottled water will become a social pariah, occupying the space vacated by wearers of real fur. We’ll start getting pots of paint flung over us, or worse, bottles of water. It has got to stop before it gets hold.

The ‘looneys’ will begin a sort of environmental MacCarthyism – we’ll get asked if we drink bottled water when being interviewed for a job teaching, working in a bank, or anything in the public eye.

This is not as crackpot a suggested scenario as it might at first seem: if our chief reaction to GM is to apportion blame rather than be constructive and supportive, we’ll lose our focus, and it will spiral even further out of control. Giving people guilt complexes isn’t going to work. We belong together on Earth, and we must beat this thing together, or it will destroy us together.
Robert L. Fielding

What shall we treasure of hers?

2007-05-16T06:55:00.000-07:00

Remembering someone no longer with us, gone to a distant shore to be with those closest to her, what can we treasure as being something that was particular to her, as a child saves a seashell and takes it home, the better to be reminded of that shore and those sunny days, holding it up to her ear to hear the mysterious roar of the ocean from somewhere within.

What shall we treasure of her that we can hold up and remind ourselves of those sunny days when she was in our midst? For we have no shell, no recording of her to brighten our day when it darkens.

But do we not have that memory of her smiling face, gained merely by closing our eyes and recalling. She is not here, but whenever I want to see her warmth, I close my eyes and there she is, like a sea shell in a child’s hand, bringing back in an instant those days lit up by Lori’s presence.
Robert Fielding

Notes on a scandal - Cate and Judi star

2007-03-02T22:26:00.000-08:00

Two wrongs most definitely do not make a right, but they do in this tense dramatisation of events in the lives of two schoolteachers and their families, from the novel by the English writer, Zoe Heller.

Committing a massive transgression, Sheba (Cate Blanchett) is discovered in flagrante delicto by Barbara Covett (Judi Dench). Ms Covett seems to offer the desperate Sheba a much needed shoulder to cry on, but she has an ulterior motive.

Revered and respected by colleagues at the school, Covett takes Sheba by the arm - literally - and begins to lead her away from the frightening impasse the 37-year old finds herself in.

Sheba's family are totally unaware of the situation which is escalating and threatening to ruin everything. Barbara seems as good as her word, but then matters worsen until the distraught and furious parents of the juvenile rush into the lives of all in a scene so well choriographed and executed, it felt like being there.

The husband (Bill Nighy) is understandably furious and kicks Sheba out. Covett comes to the rescue with the offer of a refuge until things settle.

Moving in with Barbara is Sheba's worst move since the one that started it all. She soon learns, from Covett's ransacked notes, of the older woman's designs on her. Sheba confronts her and eventually flies back home, not before a 10-month stretch in prison.

This is an intense film with superb performances from Blanchett and Dench, and also the wonderful Bill Nighy, totally believable as a doting father and a partner feeling dropped on.

Suspend your judgment on Sheba if you can - Blanchett and the screenplay conspire openly to help you. Dench's character receives no such aid.

A cautionary tale, 'Notes on a scandal' (92 mins) was nominated for Oscars recently. It should have been awarded them.

Robert L. Fielding http://www.rlfielding.com/

'VOICES'

2007-02-25T05:55:00.000-08:00

‘Voices’
The Al Ain Theatre Society
Al Multaqa, UAEU 23/24 Feb. 2007

Going some way to comment on the saying, ‘My son is my son till he takes him a wife, but my daughter’s my daughter for the rest of her life’, ‘Voices’, a series of seven monologues by the Al Ain Theatre Society players hugely entertained and made serious comment too. We were taken from fishwife, to exercise freak, through tales of how brides were prepared in a more gracious age, to the angst of mothers letting go, and the fears of turning into them in later life. The human condition was given an unusual treatment from an alien, and a mother mourned her dead child – a panoply of the mother-daughter relationship done in entirely different ways.

The evening began with a mother nagging her daughter, first as a young girl, then as a young woman, and lastly as a spinsterish older woman. The daughter reacting to the same nagging at different stages of her life – tries to leave, but ends up staying to look after her ailing Ma. Caroline White-Goettsche was hilarious in the oldest phase, totally exasperated by Ma.

Continuing the theme, Marion King gave a convincing Joyce Grenfell-like monologue alternating between chastising and praising her precocious daughter’s talent, only to end by admonishing her – going from doting mother to scolding schoolmistress in a few short, very funny minutes.

Ann Sandin (pictured above), who also directed everything, played an alien on Earth, questioning why she was made the way she was, exploring from an unusual angle, finding out some truths.

Zahida Chebchoub waxed lyrical, mixing prose with song to draw a picture from a more elegant age. Singing and dancing, Zahida described a side of life that has passed.

Karen Harle-Cowan absorbed a quietened audience with an altogether darker piece about a woman mourning the past and a happier time. This more serious treatment of the theme served to bring an element of almost tragedy to the lighter rest of the evening.

Deah Gulley gave a hilarious account of a woman obsessed with activity, going through real routines straight from the gym while relating her hectic life, in between the breathing hard and the sweating freely. I felt she was the antithesis set against the others.

Monica Fantauzi(pictured above) bade a daughter farewell, remembering her own life at that age, in a poignant vignette of loss and loneliness, tinged with relief that the girl would inevitably return with the black blouse she had taken from her.

Encompassing all our fears, Joud Jabri-Picket regretted the passing of time as she looked in the mirror, realizing that she was becoming her mother – kneeless and with Bingo wings on her arms.

All told, mothers are given a rough ride at the hands of daughters, but as daughters invariably become mothers, perhaps all is well.

The great evening’s entertainment put on in aid of ‘Women for Women International, and contributing in excess of USD 2000 to it, drew a good audience which included a party of schoolgirls. They surely learned something about their lives from our talented friends and colleagues.
Robert L. Fielding

http://www.rlfielding.com/

Saving the planet – saving fuel – our duty

2007-02-12T06:47:00.000-08:00

Global climate change is here – lower temperatures than normal in UAE, higher ones in UK, flooding in Indonesia, 8 feet of snow in New York State.

The reports point to us – humanity – as the culprits – either we change or the climate goes on changing until… that is too awful to think about right now, isn’t it? But we should think about it, before it’s too late.

Each one of us can do something, however small it seems – it will go a long way if we all do something.

So, what can we do here in the Emirates – land of cheap fuel and streets full of cars?

Well, we can start switching lights and appliances off when we aren’t using them. Now I hear someone saying, “Hey, the UAE produces cheap electricity, why should I bother?”

The answer is that it may be cheap to you, but it is not cheap to the planet – its cost is high – to Earth – to climate change and pollution generally.

What else can we do – switching off a couple of lights doesn’t seem much. Start by looking around you on your way to work – how many cars do you see with only one person? Answer – most cars.

So, how does that help? Sharing cars to get to work helps – true, sometimes it’s just not feasible – “I want my car in the afternoons.” “I like to drive.” “Why should I put myself out for other people?”

Those are some of the things you’ll hear people say when car sharing is mentioned.

Let’s answer them one by one:-

“I want my car in the afternoons Sure you do, but if you plan, you can have your car on the afternoon it’s your turn to use your car. Plan your week better. Do it for Earth.

“I like to drive.” Sure you do, but there are some things more important than what you want.

“Why should I put myself out for other people?” You’re not doing. Plan your week better. Relax on the way to work two or three times a week – that sounds good, doesn’t it?

And what will you get in return – queues halved overnight – almost – and lower carbon emissions to go some way to reducing the damage being done to our climate and our environment – that’s what!
Robert L. Fielding

The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy’s other dark places

2007-01-20T21:51:00.000-08:00

Doing what he does best, Ellroy combines reality with his fiction in large, violent doses on the screen; this adaptation of his bestseller successfully recreates L.A just after WW2. Two fighters – Fire and Ice (Hartnett and Eckhart) fight it out in the ring and then become partners in fighting crime. The Black Dahlia ( 121 minutes) goes over one of the most notorious unsolved murders in America; the grizzly killing of Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner).

As a film, it works as well as Ellroy’s novel – the language is too authentic for European ears, or for Americans under the age of 50, and the plot is intricate and difficult to follow. It’s a great film for all that and doesn’t pander to the blatant tastes of populist cinema – no car chases or shoot outs that rely on computer graphics for effect. Just a well told tale illustrating the ills of America, California, L.A., and Hollywood in particular.

The film centres around Hollywood wannabes and the riff-raff that come between them and fame – the graft, well known names – Mack Sennett is named in connection with what we now call scams in the building of Hollywood.

And there was Fiona Shaw as the crazed wife of the Scottish millionaire building magnate. Fiona Shaw as Ramona Linscott, the person who did murder Short – Ramona the insane, the crazed, mad with jealousy, who coolly puts a silver pistol in her mouth and pulls the trigger. Shaw gave as convincing, and as frightening a portrayal of a psychopath as it has ever been my misfortune to see on the silver screen. She was the stuff nightmares are made of.

Hillary Swank was equally convincing as the manipulative, murderous, pathetic daughter, Madeleine, clinging to Bucky (Hartnett) as the horrors unfolded.

And there was the audience, who, mostly not having read Ellroy’s book, or else having tried to read it and put it down as a genre they couldn’t hack, left the theatre in a sort of limbo – feeling they had watched something memorable, but not being able to recall just why it was so.
Robert L. Fielding

Danny Deckchair – “d’yuh see it, mate?”

2007-01-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

Proving more is not better, Rhys Ifans – the Welsh git in Notting Hill- stars in this Australian TV film that works - Deck Chair Danny directed by Jeff Balsmeyer. This is not a genre I usually get on with – the American equivalent where everything is perfect where there is no peeling paintwork on the screen door – no rusting barbie in the yard - no ordinary people next door, Australian TV films seem to do it better somehow.

I think it’s because they leave the semiotics – the non-verbal language of the sign - to the viewer. American film producers try too hard to get it right and in getting it too right, get it all wrong. I don’t want to see immaculately coiffured, already belipsticked people just getting out of bed – not a tussled hair out of place. I want more of how it is first thing in a morning – an unconscious smear of toothpaste on the top lip – that kind of thing.

If the tussling is done by the hairdresser, you can tell it’s designer tussled – that’s how American TV films feel – this was different.

A crazy plot – an unlikely flying deck chair (actually it wasn’t a deckchair at all, but a tatty garden variety) that flies once enough balloons are attached, and Danny leaves his regular life and gets a whole new one two blocks over.

I like to be given the chance to suspend my disbelief willingly – rather than having it taken from me – that’s the American way. The Australian way lets you in to construct part of the meaning – it’s a more socializing event altogether.

The characters help too, you don’t have anything done for you – it’s there; men with brewer’s goiters, mutton trying to look like lamb, cross sections of communities – paparazzi photogs, local losers, manhunters, and Rhys doing what he does best – mistaking mayonnaise for yoghurt – or was that Notting Hill. See, British producers can do it too.

Rhys flying over the Melbourne suburbs was so obviously computer generated that it was fun – it wasn’t overgood.
“It’s obvious, let’s make it look ******** obvious,” you can almost hear the producer bellowing through his cheap loud hailer.

The malevolent, jealous cop never really succeeds, like jealous cops everywhere, I suppose – the sub plot doesn’t take over at any point – a bit unlike reality, but you can’t show everything that could happen. That’s why I enjoyed it.
Robert L. Fielding

Forrest Gump revisited

2007-01-02T00:48:00.000-08:00

When Forrest Gump first hit our screens a colleague of mine wrote in the local press how the film was a sort of feel good film for Americans. He said that in a world in which the ability of the US to influence outcomes was diminishing, Gump gave people hope – that big things could be achieved if you wanted them enough, or had luck on your side – it could still happen for Americans.

I watched Gump on TV last night, and came to see it in a different light; instead of seeing it through the eyes of my friend, I thought it sent out an entirely different message – one still giving hope and encouragement, but in a realistic way.

Gump begins life with all sorts of handicaps, the most obvious one provided by the irons on his legs – his legs aren’t as straight as they should be. His IQ is low, making it necessary for his doting mother to have to do things she might not otherwise do. Gump gets into school despite his low intelligence.

He is persecuted for his 9appearance, his irons, and his low intelligence, but as his life progresses it becomes clear that he is gifted in ways that are not usual – this is a film, don’t forget, and film producers tailor scripts and scenarios to sell the films they make. Forrest Gump lands on his feet in whatever situation he finds himself.

He teaches Elvis how to rock n’ roll, gives Lennon the idea for one of his greatest songs, witnesses Watergate without being aware of it, and even moons to President Johnson. He also makes hay when every shrimp boat but his gets destroyed in a storm, and gets into Fortune 500 in the process.

Gump makes it without even knowing – almost without trying, but he doesn’t know it, or at least doesn’t allow it to affect him – one could say he is too thick to know what he has done. It is up to Lieutenant Dan to reinvest the money they make from shrimps into a ‘fruit company’ – Apple, no less.

Is the film telling us that the American dream is alive and well, or is it telling us that money doesn’t make a difference to our lives – or something entirely different. As I watched the final scenes, it seemed to me that it was saying, ‘It aint over till the fat lady sings!’

Robert L. Fielding

Daniel Craig – the new James Bond: Casino Royale

2006-12-04T20:34:00.000-08:00

In this remake of ‘Casino Royale’ (145 mins) Brocolli has given us almost a complete make over of the whole 007 genre. No big, lavish sets, no ‘wham-bam’ stuff from the great lover, just a more vulnerable, thoughtful agent than those before.

No savoir faire – well not much, as per Connery, the iconic Bond up until now, no eye-brow raising flippancy a la Roger Moore, the longest serving Bond, and no classic good looks from the ever immaculate head of Pierce Brosnan, but a more human Bond. Sure, he can still punch his weight with the hardest thugs on the movie planet, and he still appeals to token, sultry femme fatales, but a lot has changed.

For a start, a lot of the hallmarks of 007 are being threatened: the shaken, not stirred cocktail gets the ‘Hey, I’ll have a Babycham’ treatment as everybody round the card table orders one.

Later, after a particularly heavy mauling, Bond’s reply to the question, “Shaken or stirred?” is “Do I look like I care!” finally burying the old cocktail cliché forever.

Craig falls in love for real, has a meaningful dialogue with M (Judi Dench) and his badge is under threat from MI5. Broccolli gives us more, by leaving out more: no inane schoolmaster talk from Q, the gismo expert, few gismos, no Moneypenny waiting faithfully at her desk while James propels his headwear nonchalantly at the hat-stand, and no memorable villains.

No equivalent of Oddjob, or Jaws, and no Goldfinger, Bloefeld, Rosa Kleb, Dr. No – no super-villains to help us cheer our hero on to the inevitable end – no total destruction of the megalomaniac’s plans, no ending up on a remote island with the girl.

It’s not just that the Bond movie has another Bond – ‘Casino Royale’ was a noticeably lower budget production – no grand sets, no Nail Island scenes, no Monaco casinos, but instead, Montenegro, a chase through a building site that reminded me more of Tarzan and Harold Lloyd than 007.

Don’t get me wrong – the fights were as good as ever, the chases - through the cranes and superstructures of half built hotels, were heart stopping, lightning fast and spectacular, but they were not full of what we have come to expect – cars that turn into boats, volcano craters that hide rockets, underground cities full of monorails. But I liked it the better for that.

We saw the real Bond, superfit – tough as old boots - sometimes caring - but vulnerable too (he almost died) without being too smooth or verbose – he even had to win the Aston Martin in a card game, for goodness sake.

Some things don’t change – the baddies were current baddies – not cold Soviets, megalomaniacs with wild dreams, low life drug barons - thugs from pre 9/11 days - but blokes we could readily dislike – money launderers with connections to international terrorism.

Ian Fleming might be turning in his grave again, but at least they are not using him as a fan anymore.

Robert L. Fielding

World Trade Center - a review of a great film

2006-11-26T03:00:00.000-08:00

World Trade Center (125 mins), Oliver Stone’s film of the events in New York on 11th of September, 2001 is a fitting memorial to everyone who lost their life that day. It would seem to fit into the disaster movie genre, filled previously by Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure and the more recent Pearl Harbour. The truth is that it is as unlike those films as it could be – it is in a class – a genre of its own. 9/11 as we have since come to call it was arguably America’s worst, blackest day since the Japanese attacked the US Naval Base in the Pacific. World Trade Centre goes further than Pearl Harbour ever did.

No single handed heroics, hair brained attempts at avenging the atrocity, no big name actor’s ego to caress and build up (Nicholas Cage spent most of the film speaking in pained single syllables under the wreckage of one of the buildings) – this was as near to the real thing as we are probably going to get from Hollywood, certainly the nearest to how it felt in the catastrophe, for most of us, hopefully..

Unlike Pearl Harbour, this film had no ridiculous sub plot to lead us in – only McLoughlin- Cage, getting ready to go out onto the streets of New York on duty as a PAPD (Port Authority Police Dept.) cop. Looking in on his four sleeping children was the only sub plot we needed – who could need more on such a fateful morning.

We quickly went through the morning’s briefings and then we were into it – a puzzling, loud thud of an explosion somewhere, and then streets full of paper – dumbfounded commuters looking up at the towers, and then we were in the building – and it felt real. The building collapsed and Cage and his men were plunged into the Hell created by those two aircraft.

We heard the appalling crashes, watched the surviving two keep each other alive talking, and the film took us from the bowels of the destruction to the families coping with the news that hit everybody that day. For them it was more than unbelievable images on TV, it was the end – or threatened to be.

Stone showed Bush say something to the US and the watching world – who could have done otherwise in a film dealing with such a national emergency – but nothing more of what was to follow – what has followed to this day. Stone let the story of survivors and the bereaved tell itself. He did what no other producer has ever done – he left out a contrived sub-plot and just went for the shock and horror of it all. This was no news report or documentary – this was the first of its kind; a film that left the movie industry out of it. This a great film, but it is not entertainment. If it leaves any message, it is that life is precious – we sometimes forget that!
Robert L. Fielding

Air and Angels

2006-11-17T00:33:00.000-08:00

‘Air and Angels’: a musical serenade
Gabriele Malzahn – mezzosoprano
Camilla Hoitenga – flute
Stephen Aston - piano

Al Ain Rotana Hotel gardens
Thursday 16th November 2006

With a gentle breeze welcoming the large audience, a backdrop of palm trees and an occasional punctuation by builders working nearby, the musical evening began.

The flautist, Camilla Hoitenga, accompanied by our Stephen Aston on piano, started off with Jean-Marie Leclair’s Sonata in G Major. The persistent tappings, drillings and bangings from the construction site disturbed the ambience of the occasion somewhat but did nothing to diminish the beauty of the music.

The mezzosoprano, Gabriele Malzahn, came onto the platform to sing ‘Allerseelen’, a song Richard Strauss composed while only 20 years of age.

For many, the highlight of this first half must have been the entrancing solo for flute and voice, ‘Laconisme de l’aile’ by Kaija Saariaho. The flautist, Camilla Hoitenga gave a ‘tour de force’, combining aspiration, words and notes to haunt the air and mesmerize the audience.

Tea and coffee, served by liveried waiters, courtesy of the Rotana Hotel was welcomed, and the second half of the concert soon began, happily without the accompaniment of hammers and nails.

A lively caprice by Russell Webber settled the audience, before the soloist sang an example of Brahms’ ‘Lieder’, ‘Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer’, written, as the full programme notes informed us, when he was in his prime as a composer.

A rousing Shakespeare song came next; the well known ‘Hey, Ho, the Wind and the Rain’ set to music by Roger Quilter.

It was in the three traditional folk songs though, that the singer showed the range of her expertise; in the well known Irish folksongs, ‘The Salley Gardens’, ‘The foggy dew’, and then in W.B. Yeats’ ‘She moved through the fair’, Gabriela Malzahn moved from Hibernian trills to longer phrasing to keep the appreciative audience dazzled on this delightful evening of musical entertainment.

Finishing off with Charles Ives’ ‘Old Home Day’, and braving the stronger gusts of wind that constantly threatened to put their sheets to flight, the three performers gave us some more of what the evening had offered: precision accompaniment from Stephen, dexterity and flair from Camilla, and polish and virtuosity from Gabriele.

Let us hope the three can be prevailed upon again soon: to entertain us, and to give so many teachers the chance to dress up in their finery and enjoy an evening of fine music – while the glorious weather lasts!

Robert L. Fielding

When is ‘cool’ not so cool – speed kills

2006-11-01T22:41:00.000-08:00

Young people always want to be cool – to be seen to be cool – thought of as being cool – acting cool. But what is ‘cool’? It used to be doing your own thing – being an individual – something else. Being cool was never doing what everybody else is doing – it is/was always about making your own mark on your bit of the world.

Something else about ‘cool’ – you grow out of being it; it’s a youth thing. Youngsters soon grow out of motorcycles, weird clothes, loud pop music, trying to impress the opposite sex all the time, and getting up their teachers’ noses.

Some things are different though – speed still attracts the young, and the not so young. Driving with your foot down and flashing past slower vehicles is still attractive. What is not quite so popular is the devastating consequence of speed when it all goes wrong.

Because make no mistake, speeding soon leads to losing control – and that leads to death and horrible injury – to sadness and devastation – to lives ruined.

As the needle travels around the arc on your speedometer, as you go faster and faster, the chances of having an accident also climb – faster than the needle on the dial.

The reaction time you are capable of stays the same, but the time on the ground diminishes to nothing. All you need is another car crossing your path, slowing down in front of you, or worse, a person – a child in front of you and that’s the end – for all.

For the people who get killed, it is literally the end of their life on this earth, for people horribly injured, it is the end of a normal life, for relatives and friends of the victims, it’s the end of friendships, families – life.

And for you, the person who caused the accident, but who escaped physically unhurt, it is also the end – what you have done – what you were responsible for – what you caused to happen through your carelessness, through wanting to be cool by driving too fast – surprise surprise – it’s the end of your life as an innocent person.

As we all know, we meet our fate no matter what. The Police let us off, but our minds will not.
And that’s the strange thing – that if you had behaved as an individual – had thought before acting and then behaved responsibly, you would really be cool – forever – in everyone’s eyes – you would have become a member of the human race – respected, beloved, revered in everyone’s eyes, and most importantly, in your own – now that IS cool!
Robert L. Fielding

Traffic honking causes some discomfort to patients in hospital

2006-10-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

Traffic and Transport
Published: 10/22/2006 12:00 AM (UAE)
Motorists' incessant honking 'disturbs the peace in Al Ain'
By Aftab Kazmi, Bureau Chief
Al Ain: Residents have said inconsiderate motorists are disturbing the peace by blowing their horns excessively.
The nuisance, they say, has been growing with the increasing traffic.
Robert L. Fielding, an expatriate resident, in a complaint to Gulf News said: "The roar of traffic is actually not intense at any time, the sounding of car horns is. The culprits are the taxi drivers, forever trying to alert would-be customers to their presence," he said.
He said the authorities should enforce a strict ban on the use of horns in the vicinity of hospitals.
"Surely the Traffic Police could issue directives, put up signs and otherwise inform drivers in the area that the use of horns, particularly after sunset, is forbidden. The authorities should step in to ensure people behave responsibly and with due consideration to others."
Mohammad Khan, a taxi driver, said he and some of his colleagues occasionally used horns to attract people looking for a taxi, but not in silent zones.
Khan said taxi drivers were careful because they did not want to lose money to traffic fines.
Abdullah Ali Al Ka'abi, a UAE national businessman, said it was an internationally accepted practice not to blow horns in the vicinity of hospitals, schools, mosques, and residential areas.
"I think some people are violating this," he said.
Anjum Ara, an Indian housewife, said hospitals were purpose-built and hence the sound from the streets was not heard as much there as in some private clinics, which are not soundproofed.
"The heavy traffic flow on streets does create noise. This coupled with the excessive use of horns can certainly trouble people, especially the sick and elderly."
A Traffic Police official said there were road signs which indicte silent zones and motorists must abide by them.
He said his department would look into complaints and take strict action against people blowing horns in silent zones.
"We are tough on violators of traffic rules," he said.

Reviving the art of letter writing

2006-09-08T22:37:00.000-07:00

Our thanks should go to the 14 year old student, Hind al Hashimi, who recently had a letter placed first in an international competition. (Gulf News - Sept 9 06 p.6)

Hind asserts that although emails have their place in our fast paced world, it is in the writing of a letter that you find your creativity inspired and your true personality represented.

Letter writing use to be an art form - with the famous and the literate having letters published for us, their future readers.

T. E. Lawrence, later to become better known as Lawrence of Arabia, wrote prodigiously on all sorts of topics, from his archealogical/anthropological travels in the Levant of his day, to the 'dog fights' in 10, Downing Street and his own government's treatment of the Arabs and of his efforts to emancipate them from Ottoman influence and control.

His letters really represent what amount to what would be as valid as 'lab reports' to scientists; they are a truthful, sometimes subjective, account of the times in which he lived.

I mentioned the word 'subjective', in the knowledge that the word often makes people turn away, as if a truly personal account were something to shy away from. Yet, it is in a personal account, as opposed to, let us say, in an official one, that the real situation comes alive - in which feelings not normally portrayed in print come to the fore and bring life to what might otherwise be a lifeless account.

Hind is spot on when she says that the ways of expression and style are reduced to icons and rather simple words.

I would go one step further, and say that there is something in the pen that is not available in the keyboard - it is something akin to helping the continuity of thought. Whereas the technology of the keyboard, and the screen in front of you, gets in the way of real communication; it is as if this concentration on form comes in the way of one's ability to concentrate on content.

With a pen (full of ink) and a piece of blank paper, it can feel as if there is something embryonic about to occur.

In the famous film 'Doctor Zhivago' starring Oman Sharif in the title role, you may recall the blank page before him as he returns to writing his poetry, symbolising his return to a happier, more ordered life with his family out of pre-revolutionary Moscow.

The blank page can be intimidating for someone with nothing to say, but for the happy majority of us, it is a lawn upon which flowers will spring at the touch of our pen.
Robert Leslie Fielding

To admire greatness and rejoice in beauty

2006-09-03T06:28:00.000-07:00

Daniel Bell, writing in the 1990s, said that whereas former ages had been characterized by man’s struggle with the world of nature, and then the struggle with manufactured nature, this age of ours is characterized by man’s struggle against man.

There is something in man that needs to struggle, that seems clear. Barnes Wallace, the innovator responsible for the ‘bouncing bomb’ during the struggles of the 2nd World War, said that ‘life is a battle, and when the battle is over, so too is life.’

Man has conquered to achieve, and in his conquests found his greatest achievements. The ability to create machines that can fly, or till the soil, or kill has been his keenest, most developed ability.

To admire greatness, man has either had to conquer it, in its natural form, or produce it through innovation. Kipling urged us, though, not to be overtaken in our admiration of the machine; he said that ‘they are only the children of our mind’, putting them firmly subordinate to us, which is right and proper.

Now that we seem to have entered this final phase of Bell’s; one characterized by man’s struggle against himself, we have come to lack the greatness to admire. We no longer have Newton, da Vinci or Darwin to look up to and aspire to. In the West, in particular, the decline of our greatness in manufacturing has brought with it our obsession with the new, disparaging the obsolete as though it never existed or had its uses.

The geological map of Britain, and Dubai's Burj al Arab, signify, to me at any rate, all that should be admired and all that has beauty. True, neither has the beauty of a symphony, or the majesty of the stag in its highland haunts, but look beneath the surface, as you must with both artifacts, and you will learn of the vast amount of knowledge and expertise, the skill and the diligence necessary to produce both.

We can stand and admire a painting by Van Gogh, a statue by Michelangelo, or a dome by Brunelesci, as simple onlookers, marveling at their beauty, but it is only in the understanding of genius, partial though this may be, that true greatness and real beauty come to be apparent. And that is probably what we are losing, may have lost already, but it is in understanding that one comes to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty, from the hand of man, or his creator.

Robert L. Fielding

Some of my good friends and colleagues in The Merchant of Venice

2006-04-27T07:21:00.000-07:00

On April 22nd, in Al Multaqa Social Club, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, my friends and colleagues appeared in the Shakespeare comedy, The Merchant of Venice'. The performance was crisply delivered and entranced the audience, who loudly applauded at the end of the play. Let us hope that the players can be prevailed upon to give us some more Shakespeare as soon as possible. It was greatly needed and much appreciated.

This is my tribute to them.
Robert Leslie Fielding

Review: 'The Merchant of Venice'

2006-04-21T06:54:00.000-07:00

‘BRINGING SHAKESPEARE TO THE EMIRATES’

‘The Merchant of Venice’
United Arab Emirates University Al Multaqa Auditorium Al Ain

Ordinarily, ‘all that glisters is not gold’ but it was tonight at the Al Multaqa UAE University Social Club, where teaching staff from HCT , UAEU and Al Ain English Speaking School put together a glittering performance of Shakespeare’s comedy, ‘The Merchant of Venice’.

In the title role, Mike McPherson was loyal, generous and the perfect foil to John Rigg’s sensitive portrayal of Shylock. Mel Tyers (Gratiano), Caroline Goettsche (Jessica), Libby Stack (Portia), Ben McGrath (Lorenzo), Rick Johns (Bassanio), and Jeff Weiss (Judge), in fact the whole cast, contributed to a splendid evening’s performance that was professionally and convincingly delivered.

Jeff Weiss also directed the players and his experience learned in Vancouver, Canada, where he gained his BA in Theatre Studies showed; on and off stage, movement of the cast was exact, convincing and precise; the minutiae of all the entrances, exits, and movements was dealt with so that there were, as Jeff put it, “no empty spaces”.

From delivering a line to actually moving, Lorenzo (Ben McGrath) found that ‘on the stage, all movement is in curves; and he swept away his beloved Jessica as per directions.

Tricked in the final act of judgment, Shylock, resplendent in skull cap to mark his skullduggery, showed his dismay for all to see. Exultant in victory, Antonio’s relief was equally visible, with the devilish Gratiano rubbing salt in Shylock’s wounds with “O upright judge! Mark. O learned judge!” right in Shylock’s ear, repeating Shylock’s own comments only a moment earlier on the judge’s pronouncements, seemingly in Shylock’s favour.

Unwilling to show mercy, Shylock was arraigned by majestic Portia; “it(mercy) blesses him that gives”; he remained unblessed, stumbling at the hands of the law at the final hurdle, brandishing his knife with not a little relish before being denied his ‘pound of flesh’, Portia stating finally, “~as thou urgest justice, thou shalt have more justice than thou desir’st”.

Most pleasant contrast to the scenes in court was provided by Jessica and Lorenzo in Portia’s garden at Belmont; Shakespeare’s skill in creating images that would have stirred the audiences of the day, was beautifully and repetitively extolled with the famous lines that begin “In such a night ~”, first from Lorenzo waxing lyrical about the moon and the ‘sweet wind’ and then from Jessica, equally expressive on the events such a night would have witnessed down through the ages.

Shakespeare called this play a comedy, but a modern interpretation of the meaning of that word would have done little to mollify anyone coming to the play and expecting to be made to laugh much, but Bassanio’s (Rick Johns) joy at beholding Portia ensuring his never becoming a ‘heavy husband’ for her, was joyful; his prancing to and fro boisterous, his words joyous, and his species of ‘leapings and clappings’ perfectly and expressively executed upstage for all to see, hear and enjoy.

A very appreciative audience showed that the suspension of disbelief while being willing, was tonight totally unnecessary at this splendid evening’s entertainment.

All the proceeds of the performances were in aid of Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Doctors Without Borders, whose expressed mandate is:
To raise public awareness of the plight of the populations we treat
To raise funds for MSF missions around the world.

Let us hope the cast can be prevailed upon again soon to give us what we crave; more Shakespeare introduced to these shores.

Robert L. Fielding (Photos: Michael Rigg)

ROBERT LESLIE FIELDING - ENGLISH LANGUAGE LECTURER & FREELANCE WRITER

2006-04-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

Qualifications

MSc: Teaching English/ESP (Aston University 1997)

BA (Hons) Organisational Studies and Linguistics (Lancaster University 1987)

RSA Cert TEFL. (Pilgrims 1986)0

City and Guilds of London Institute: Full Technological Certificate in Mechanical Engineering Production (Oldham College of Technology 1972)

VOCATIONAL EXPERIENCE

EFL/ESP/EAP Instructor-English Language Lecturer - at the following:-

University of Durham Taught pre-sessional courses (August/September, 2002)
University of Bahrain English Language Centre (Sept 2002 – 2003)
Taught EAP/ESP at various levels
Sultan Qaboos University Language Center, Oman (1997 – 2002)
Taught English for students of Sciences & English for Educational Purposes. (Intensive & Credit Courses
Member of Editorial Board of ‘Forum’, the Language Centre’s English Language Teaching Journal
Regular contributor to ‘Forum’ (see Publications)
International Turkmen Turkish University, Ashkabad, Turkmenistan (1996 – 1997
Taught English for Academic Purposes, Phonetics, English Language through English Literature
Wrote material and tests for the above courses.
Bilkent University School of English Language, Ankara, Turkey (1993 – 1996)
Taught EAP and Writing for Freshmen students.
Dogu Akdeniz Universitesi, Magusa, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (1992 –1993)
Taught ESP and wrote materials and textbook
Cukurova University, Adana, Turkey (1990 – 1992 )
Taught EAP and was Speaking and Listening Coordinator
St. Joseph's High School, Izmir, Turkey (1998 – 1990)
Ege Lisan Merkezi, Izmir, Turkey (1998 – 1990)
El Meselemiya Higher Secondary School for Boys, Gezira Province, Sudan (1997 – 1998)

PUBLICATIONS

Teaching English Oxford University Press
'An Introduction to Writing Articles'
'Teaching Students How to Focus on Topics'
'The Teacher is a Learner and the Learner is a Teacher'
'Learning to Read the World: Using Literature in the Language Classroom'
'Oguz Nesil' Journal of Turkmen Turkish Educational Organization
'Lexical phrases and Native Language Interference in Writing'
'Bil Lingua' Bilkent University School of English Language Teaching Journal
'Language, Writing, and Creativity'
Applied Linguistics
'Communicative Coherence: A Different Approach to Teaching Grammar'
'Re-ordering and Re-combining: Manipulating Language to Re-draft’
'Forum' ELT Journal
'A Place for Eponyms in English Language Teaching’
‘Forum’ Sultan Qaboos University Journal of English Language Teaching
Academic articles: ‘Students’ Errors and their Implications for Syllabus design’
‘The digital future’
‘Using authentic language in the classroom’

NON-ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
‘Reflections’ Journal of Sultan Qaboos University
Short Story: ‘Reactions’: A new look at the short story
Article: ‘Cryptic clues to the pigeon-holes of the mind’
New York Times:
'Changes in Britain'
Cyprus Today
‘GAP’: Pumping Prosperity to Turkey'
Turkish Daily News
'Cinema and Society'
Oldham Evening Chronicle
'Greenery and Friendliness in a Furnace: The Sudan'
'Ginger's Tale'
The Travels of a Family and their Cat. (Available at Amazon.com & Barnes and Noble)
‘Other people-other worlds’
The collected short stories of Robert Leslie Fielding (Available at Amazon.com & Barnes and Noble)

Gulf News ‘Notes’

‘Writing is discovering’ (other parts to follow)
‘How to be creative with words’
‘The advantages of working in groups’
‘Taking exams’
‘Becoming a student’ (forthcoming)
‘Avoiding fallacious arguments’ (forthcoming)
‘Time management for students’ (forthcoming
‘Reasons to read’ (forthcoming)

OTHER INFORMATION

British citizen/Native speaker
Married to a citizen of Turkey
Holder of a clean British Driving Licence
Date of Birth: 25.9.1949
Website: http://www.whatsnewintheworld.blogspot.com/ (This site is used to provide my students with a broad range of reading material – from IELTS information, to articles about time management for students, advice when taking examinations, together with articles of a more general nature, and short stories and poems.
REFERENCES
Available on application

General Interest for English Language Learners #2

2006-04-12T01:09:00.000-07:00

Plan, plan and then plan some more

By

Robert Leslie Fielding

(This article appeared in 'Notes'/Gulf News - Nov.19 2005)

Robert Leslie Fielding says one of the best methods to manage your hours of study is by creating good lists and prioritizing.One thing new students at university find out is that there isn’t enough time to do everything you want to do — let alone for everything you have to do.

That is the first step — sorting out your life into the two sorts of things.The things you have to do and the things you want to do.This division may seem unreal to you — you may think that that both lists are equally important, and you are right — they are.So the first thing to think about is what you really want to do — what is your main goal?If it is getting a good qualification, you probably know that what you have to do is more important than what you want to do.If your main goal is to have fun at university, then the second list is the one for you.

Now try fusing the lists into one — this means combining work and leisure so that you come out cheerful as well as successful.

Get things down to one list:- What I really want to do. Then prioritise.

Sub-divide your list into immediately important to complete and not so immediately important to complete. Now you face what’s right in front of you and what is farther back.

Keep a diary/agenda — make it a visual one that is big enough to look at as soon as you wake up. Put your timetable on the wall next to your bed — it’s the first thing you see when you wake up — the times of your first lectures are in bold and highlighted, so they stand out. You wake up at 7.05am and your first lecture today isn’t until 10am — you have time. You wake up at 7.05am and your first lecture today is at 9am — you ought to get up — take a shower — get yourself ready — eat something — collect everything you need. You wake up at 7.05am and you haven’t got any lectures this morning — yippee! This morning is for other things — for you to catch up — do the things you need to do.It’s for all the usual things — washing, eating, all that stuff you do when you get up — but you now have a bit of time to do that other stuff you’ve been putting off or else haven’t had time to do.Prioritise — shops open at 9am; library at 8.30am.

Action — take books back to short loan (or pay a fine) and then go to the supermarket to pick up what you need to live.Keep a list on your mirror or somewhere you look at regularly — jot stuff down when you think of it (toothpaste is running low — milk is off — coffee is low) — add them to the list as you come to them while they are running low — not when they’re finished — you’ve got to brush your teeth before you go out. Coffee? You can get a cup at the place next to the library.

Prioritise and think. Be constantly on your guard — after a while it will become second nature. For more important stuff, write it down on something you look at regularly.

Get a notice board on your wall — to the left of the washbasin mirror — you look at that fairly often, don’t you? Put a smaller version on the back of your door so you see it when you’re leaving your room.

Add to the notice board — remove stuff that’s ancient — write in new stuff — use post-its and use colours to highlight important deadlines.

Fill your day. Don’t run about like a headless chicken though — give yourself enough time to do the things you need to do. And give yourself a break — sit down — talk to friends over a coffee. Don’t have too many breaks or coffees.

Eat regularly. Don’t let yourself get hungry or thirsty. Visit the bathroom as often as you need to (obvious enough, but you’d be surprised how many people get uncomfortable because they haven’t found time to visit the toilet).

Plan your day around the places you are timetabled to go — they are the musts on any of your lists of places to be at certain times. Remember, being late isn’t an option.

Lateness gets to you — you feel rushed, impatient, flustered, self-conscious, rude, and you miss things. A lot of important stuff comes early on in the lesson — don’t expect the lecturer to change just because you’re always late — she’s got deadlines, too.-

Keep track of time
Critical to doing things on time is remembering them with enough time to spare. Sounds obvious but your memory needs help sometimes.
1. Write down everything important
2. Abbreviate if you can
3. Place everything you’ve written down in a prominent place
4. Associate ideas- Wednesdays mean no classes in the afternoon - Mondays and Tuesdays’ classes start at 9am - 8.30am library opens; 10pm library closes - Lunch costs about Dh25 - 6.30–9pm means time for studying - Lunch is at 1pm every day - Keep some free time - Stop for one hour between 1 and 2.30pm every day - Rest after 9pm (Working too late will ruin your sleep)

Keep time for friends — and they’ll keep time for you - Friends who won’t wait aren’t good friends - Big swats are no fun — permanently serious swats should be avoided - Wasters are also a serious problem. Don’t become one and don’t hang out with them — you’ll soon become one if you’re not careful - A good friend doesn’t mind you having to work sometimes - Don’t lose your grip on time — control it/don’t let it control you!

General Interest for English Language Learners #1

2006-04-12T00:57:00.000-07:00

The wheel and the microchip

by

Robert Leslie Fielding

(This appeared in UoB News and Views
University of Bahrain - Issue No. 64 May-
June 2004)

Man's most important invention was the wheel, or so I was led to believe at school. In the years since leaving school the wheel has played a significant part in my life, as it inevitably has done in the lives of everyone.

Since the first wheel appeared, in Mesopotamia, some 5,500 years ago, its impact upon the lives of those who used it has been dramatic. Its first uses most probably would have been close to its primary uses today; aiding the movement of something or somebody over some distance, with other uses including the milling of wheat to make flour, for example.Later, some 4,000 years ago, the henges (stone circles) of Britain were built and used to mark the days of the year, early calendars, and used to study astronomy generally with the portals marking the solstices and the stones arranged in a circle to mark important times in the year. In what was then becoming an agricultural world, seeds could be sewn with some predictability, and crop harvests increased because of the optimum use of the growing season.

During most of the 20th Century, and more particularly in the latter half of it, the wheel figured prominently in the developments that changed the lives of everybody. In the fields of science and technology, in mechanical engineering, the wheel was and still is instrumental in producing everything from the airplane to the knitting needle. Even flat surfaces, toothed racks and the teeth of gearwheels are all generated using the wheel, revolving as a cutter, milling flats and shapes into metal, grinding precision components to dimensions accurate to tenths of thousandths of an inch. The sleek profiled curves of automobiles and planes, and the round plastic surfaces of children's toys are all manufactured using the rotation of the wheel at some points in the manufacturing process. Presses and drop forges make their mark on huge, red hot billets of steel, and gleaming sheets of aluminium and stainless steel, die-casting machinery moulds hot, malleable plastic or alloy into familiar household containers, tubes, bottles and packaging, all using the rule of Pi and its circular derivative creations to complete the pressing into shape of the submissive and ubiquitous substances: iron, steel, plastic and glass.

In the shaping of our landscape, in the damming of rivers, culverting of streams and draining of swamps, and in the construction of bridges, motorway flyovers, canals and docks, the wheel has been and continues to be the prime mover.

Circularity is so pervasive today that is has become part of our thinking. We talk of circular arguments, vicious circles and the like, probably without always consciously realizing the extent that the geometrical shape influences our lives, but a shape approximating to the circle would have only been evident prior to the invention of the wheel because of the natural world: through the sight of the moon and the sun in the Heavens above, and in the shapes of flowers and in cross sections of felled trees.

Similarly, in the related fields of history and culture, the wheel, the circular shape, figures prominently. The myths surrounding Camelot, and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have become metaphors for justice and right; forums and meetings are ideally held around round tables. Theatres in the round dominate the cultural life of many British cities. There is something democratic and empowering about the circle, and its utility in the form of the wheel is inestimable; the round table has no corners, and everyone sitting at it has no more advantage due to their position on its circumference than anyone else.

As a concept as well as a shape, the circle is related to revolution, the overthrowing, often violently, of the social order. In Thomas Kuhn’s terms; “political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit.” (Kuhn 1962) Essentially, in simpler terms, the coming to the top of those that were formerly underneath, the underlying principle of the circle and the wheel, and this suggests the principle of 'catastrophism' (Palmer 1999), which assumes that conditions on Earth during the past were so different from those existing at the present that no comparison is possible.

In terms of scientific revolutions (Kuhn 1962), the concept of ‘catastrophism’ also seems to apply more closely to developments in the advance of scientific progress. In Kuhn’s own words, a scientific revolution occurs “when an existing paradigm ceases to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself previously led the way.” (Kuhn 1962)

Finally, in mathematical terms, the circle remains an unfathomable puzzle, with the ratio between circumference and diameter evading a truly definite, absolute value, pi.Now, when half the world has moved away from primary industries such as mining, and even partly away from manufacturing, to tertiary, service industries, pride of place is given to the center of the technological revolution, the microchip. The wheel is still as useful as it ever was, but in a world where the movement of information is dominant, it has virtually no place. For in terms of anything substantial moving along the so called ‘information super-highway’ and telecommunications generally, little in the way of physical material actually moves.

The advent of the microchip clearly marked new ground in terms of what had gone before it. For Daniel Bell ('The Coming of Post-Industrial Society'), and other writers such as Alvin Toffler ('The Third Wave', 'Future Shock'), the tertiary/post-industrial phase is characterized, not by man overcoming nature (primary industry) or man overcoming the man-made world (secondary manufacturing industry), but by overcoming man himself, putting curbs and checks on ‘human nature’, and using it in fields such as marketing. In this last ‘conflict’ the microchip is arguably as important as the wheel was to those who invented it and subsequently came to use it.

There is something as mysterious in the microchip as there is in the circular form, particularly to the uninitiated. The chip is a marvel of miniaturization, and the functions it can perform are staggering, but the dimension that is truly amazing is the time taken to perform an operation. With miniaturization has come the furious pace of micro-processing.Consequently, in terms of what has gone before, the spectacular changes in velocity and range, made possible by the advent of the micro-processor, amount to or will amount to, in retrospect, something more closely related to the principle of 'catastrophism' (Palmer ibid.), and while that notion is generally applied to the geological formation of the planet, it is a useful concept in any explanations relating to the history of the wheel and the micro-processor.

Social and historical commentators looking back on the events that surround these two technological developments, viz the wheel and the microchip, may well come to view the history of them in precisely that way.

The other major differences between the two inventions are the visibility or otherwise of each event, and the dissemination of each. With the wheel, the concept of rotation would have been well known, visible and logical, and thereafter the wheel would have become freely available to those needing it, in the area in which it came into being. The introduction of the microchip, on the other hand, involved relatively small numbers of specialists with technological expertise and access to certain resources not freely available, and the invention would not have been 'visible' to those not involved, and nor was it freely available initially, being protected by patents and by secrecy.The massive, almost cataclysmic change in the temporal velocity of the processing of data made possible by micro-processors is most easily demonstrated by the following comparison.

At a time when England was most productive, the Victorian era, when manufacturing industry was in its heyday, and virtually everything produced had the words ‘Made in England’ stamped on it, the cutting of material into the shape of a gentleman’s jacket was dramatically speeded up by the introduction of powerful and accurate presses that had been modified to cut shapes in cloth rather than metal. Thousands of suits could be cut daily, removing the onerous task of cutting each one by hand.By the time the micro processor had made its mark on the same process, different sized jackets could be cut just as accurately and far quicker one by one than the multiple cuttings of the heaving presses of Victoria’s age. Furthermore, the machine could be programmed to cut each length to different dimensions, a feat that would need a major re-tooling operation in former days. Many different sized jackets can now be cut individually much quicker than could a single stamping of say twenty uniform sized pieces of cloth. This comparison of modus operandi may be a simple one, but it is one that can be readily comprehended by those only used to thinking in terms of mechanical movement and limited speed.

In the waging of modern warfare, from the horrors of the Great War in Europe, and more recently, to the ultra high-tech deluge of weapons raining down on those below, the wheel is still a force to be reckoned with. Tanks and guns, tank transporters, personnel carriers, helicopters and planes all rely on the predictability and certainty of the wheel. Shells and bullets fly more accurately and deadlier to their targets because of rifling in circular barrels. However, now, instead of a speeding bullet or shell going in a straight line, we have the so called ‘smart bomb’, which is directed to its target by computer, turning right and left as the need arises. The rifling in the circular barrel suddenly has much less importance.For this is the nature of the world we inhabit, and in which the microchip holds sway; one in which a once productive sector of the economy has become virtually extinct, and with it, a significant proportion of the working population has found itself in a world it doesn’t understand, nor feels it will ever be able to.

The transition from a world where the wheel was the dominant form/icon to one in which a motionless piece of silica is dominant, has been a swift and unnerving one for many, and a welcome and empowering one for those who can adapt.

Wheels run on tracks, roads and lines, and have probably contributed to perceptions tending to be linear. The directions around which the micro-processor operates, on the other hand, are numerous and have causes us to challenge our ways of thinking, so that now, a more lateral rather than linear approach to the solving of problems is more usual and indeed vital. The old remedies and ways are giving way to a new, sometimes confusing plethora of answers and possible solutions.

Guns still fire bullets out of circular barrels, and four-wheeled tractors still plough land, but in the management and governance of people and how they spend their time, both in and out of the work place, more traditional modes of thinking have given way to what I will call a ‘multi-path approach’ to management.

Now, many more dimensions can be called up and utilized because of the speed and power of the micro-processor, and consequently, people have to attempt to ‘keep up’ or perish as others progress and succeed.

The development in information technology that has changed all our lives, of course, is the Internet. The World is a ‘global village’ and everyone is linked to everyone else. This is not quite true though; perhaps a majority of the people inhabiting the planet Earth still do not have access to clean, running water, proper sanitation or electricity, let alone a telephone connection to the Internet, or a pc to communicate with the rest of the world online.

For many of those unfortunate people crowding round the peripheries of our biggest cities, living in sprawling slums and ghettos, there is little use for the microchip or even the wheel. Manpower, or more usually womanpower, is still the dominant force; without roads or any sort of infrastructure, these poorest areas have little provision for the wheel, none at all for the micro-processor.

The Earth is round, but some of those living on its surface are differently positioned with regard to its wealth and opportunity. The true benefits of the wheel and the microchip have still not reached all four corners of the Earth.

References
Kuhn, Thomas (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions University of Chicago PressPalmer T. (1999) Controversy: Catastrophism and Evolution Plenum
Robert L Fielding

Education #2

2006-04-12T00:42:00.000-07:00

Creative Writing for Learners

by

Robert L. Fielding
(This appeared in 'Notes'/Gulf News)

You want to write a story but you don’t know were to begin. You’ve already started but you’ve run out of steam You’ve written a story but your English could be better. You think you might like to try writing a poemIf this is you, then here are some tips that might help you to overcome your problems.

Where to start.
Any story starts in your head – with an idea – sometimes ideas just pop into your head. Waiting for ideas to come along is one way of getting ideas – making them come along is better.

Start like this:-
Carry a notebook and jot things down as they come to you. Once you start, you’ll be surprised how often you get ideas –writing them down will help you remember them – that’s good for later.Write something every day – sit at your computer and write – keep a journal – do anything, but write – don’t worry about what you write – just write whatever comes into your head.

Get a focus- now use your notes to help you to write – writing develops thought processes. Read what you write – leave a little time before you read over what you have written – germs of ideas take time to develop – all the best writers will tell you that sleeping on an idea lets the subconscious work on it. Return to your writing and develop a theme – the focus of your writing.

Keep returning and keep taking notes – writing requires some dedication – don’t worry, once you get hooked you won’t be able to stop – really!

Read stories to enjoy reading – if you find the kind of story that you like, you’ll probably like writing them – read – enjoy – remember what you enjoyRead stories to notice – read a story that you like more than once – read for pure enjoyment the first time – read to notice things the second.

Notice how a story starts – how your attention is grabbed – compare stories – look at stories that don’t grab your attention – ask yourself why.

Notice how a story develops – can you tell what’s going to happen before you finish it – is the end a complete surprise – did the writer give you anything to help you forecast the ending.

Notice the people in the story – can you see them in your mind’s eye – are they real – how much do you know about them from the story – write down what you think you know about each person in the story – you’ll be surprised how much you do know.

Notice the action- what happens – how does the writer tell you.

Look at the dialogue – is there enough – good dialogue makes for good reading – it’s believable if you can hear it in your head – is there enough.

Show don’t tell – does the writer show you or tell you – are you there in the thick of the action or are you a spectator, hearing about it from someone else.

How does the story make you feel – do you want to read some other stories by this author – why – why not?

Return regularly to your own writing – start to write a story from an idea that has come into your head because of what you have written down or what you have read – write it down – leave it for a while – return to it- read it – do some more thinking – sleep on it – but don’t leave it too long or you might just lose interest completely – stay on task – keep a focus on your writing and on what you read.

You get a good idea, write about it – talk to a close friend about it – talk to someone you trust – someone who has your interests at heart – not just anyoneHave confidence in yourself – the uncertainty you feel is normal – you are no different from anybody else who writes.

Think of yourself as a writer now – that is what you are – what you have become – thinking that way will attune you to ideas and to language.

Know yourself a little bit more – examine your motives – understand why you are happy – what makes you sad – write it down – rest on it – return to it – use it.

How to continue - how your story develops depends on what you have already written. Nobody wants to be fooled by what you write, so look at what you’ve written already to find out where you can go.

Keep going like this:-draw story lines on a piece of blank paper – know where you are going – then go there – you can always scrap the idea if it doesn’t work out.

Put yourself in the central character’s place in the story – what could happen?

Put yourself in the reader’s place- what would you like to read about happening.

Be yourself – you are the writer – you can do anything you want or go anywhere you want.
Don’t expect to get it right first time – experiment – learn – try again.

Feel yourself developing as a writer – look at what you have written recently and what you wrote some time ago – are the two different – you bet they are!

Trouble with language; if English isn’t your first language, writing is going to be harder for you. You will have to develop your knowledge of English.

You can begin like this:-Begin with poetry – grammar isn’t such a problem in a poem – read some modern poetry and see for yourself. Learn to find words that express what you feel – look at the world and put words to what you see – write it all down – keep a record of words – live through the language.

Get a thesaurus as well as a dictionary – use the thesaurus more than the dictionary – get a feel for words. Use words creatively in poems – don’t worry about rules of grammar – let yourself go – only let others read when you are ready – get someone you trust to read for you – be encouraged by their comments – don’t be downcast if they don’t like it at first – maybe they aren’t like you. Move from lines of poetry to lines in a story – develop ideas using words that are not written in sentences – develop sentences when your ideas make you write more.

ELT Teaching Article #1

2006-04-12T00:35:00.000-07:00

Generating words from other words

by
Robert L. Fielding

(This article was published in UGRU Journal - United Arab Emirates University - Edition 2)

Language, like nature, according to the American poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. When you hear a word, it makes you think of another, and another, and so on. Whether words are thoughts or vice versa, it is obvious that words encapsulate thoughts and sometimes images of objects. The English word ‘dog’, for instance, conjures up the familiar animal so beloved of children, postmen, and gamblers.But say the word ‘dog’ and it is quickly followed by other words – ‘cat’, ‘Alsatian’, or ‘dirty’, depending upon the way your thoughts line up.If they line up horizontally, you are thinking paradigmatically, if vertical, syntagmatically.
Let’s look at this.
Paradigmatic – horizontal - dirty dog - dog in the manger - dog days - sheep dog
Syntagmatic – vertical - dog Alsatian cur mutt
These two planes of thought: the horizontal variety and the vertical one show us what is possible in the world of word-association. Horizontally patterned associations are probably prompted by words that are frequently heard in everyday speech.Vertical patterning, however, probably inclines us to use our creative side – accessing our knowledge of the world and the things contained in it that we are aware of.In the paradigmatic mode, those of us who produce similar combinations of words (dog days, sheep dog, dog in the manger) are likely to belong to similar communities of usage of words – speech communities.In the syntagmatic mode, people who can readily produce similar items from a single point of origin probably indicate by doing so that they share a similar interest or intellectual niche rather than a spoken one.By way of proof of this last point, if we take an arcane selection originating from the word ‘dog’, we will readily come to realize that those persons producing the names of several little known breeds of canines come from those amongst us who are interested in dogs, but who have virtually nothing else in common save this interest.‘Dog days’ and ‘dog in the manger’ are both expressions that are infrequently used these days and anyone aware of them and still using them would probably come from a group socialized in a certain region at a certain specific time in recent history.Using such patterning in ways that reproduce both current expression and similar fields of knowledge can and should be put to good use in the language classroom.After all, our students need to know or at least be aware of currently used collocations in language (chunking) as well as a generally expected world of discourse illustrated by a limited and more or less clearly defined lexicon, be it from the fields of medicine, geology, or meterology – whatever students feel is their intended field of study.Alternatively, the encyclopedic knowledge used by students might be captured by a vocabulary that approaches general knowledge – non-specialist, by definition.If this is the case, the vertical pattern will vary somewhat from patterning associated with a specialized field like dentistry or ornithology.Any brief look though a thesaurus will confirm that many words are either out of use or at least are not useful to us in our own everyday lives.With paradigmatic patterning and selection, we have any starting point within our range of reasonably frequently used words, and those combinations (and only those) that are used sufficiently frequently by members of our speech community.If we start with the unlikely word, ‘Hell’ we may come up with the expression, ‘Hell on Earth’, but not the more earthy expression, ‘ruddy Hell’.The first is found in common speech whereas the second is actually defined as a vulgarity. Educated people might well be expected to use the former but not the latter, in polite company.Moving on to sentences – syntactical sequences, though not necessarily semantic ones (‘Green ideas sleep furiously.’), we notice now that both paradigmatic patterns emerge as well as syntagmatic ones. Some have called this lateral thinking. I bring it to mind with regard to creative writing, and connected in particular with what has been called ‘brainstorming’ by some, and ‘formation of schemata’ by others like Rumelhart.Either way, I want to suggest that both ways of association – paradigmatic and syntagmatic, can be used to good effect with students traditionally ‘stuck for words’ when writing.Beginning writing a short story this way can and does lead students down avenues not previously explored, but profitable and productive ones for all that.Writing, “The man entered the room’ on the board or the blank page, immediately brings scenarios to mind, vertically and horizontally.Horizontally, we get, ‘The young man entered the dining room.’Vertically, we get ‘The bank-robber (usually male) entered the bank.’ If this word is used instead of the fairly neutral word, ‘man’ other related and associated words readily come to mind.A robber entering a dining room, for instance, rarely amounts to anything suggesting drama unless the hour is two in the morning. Entering a bank, however, robbers usually intend availing themselves of the contents of the bank’s safe without the need to sign a withdrawal form; they intend robbing the bank, which is why such men are called bank-robbers. The word,’ bank-robber’ readily and easily conjures up the word, ‘bank’, and a lot of other words like ‘gun’, ‘security cameras’, and comically and somewhat theatrically, the utterance, “Stick ‘em up!”And with the words, ‘robber’ and ‘bank’ come the intentions of the robbers and the expected outcomes of their visit . So much for vertical associations.To combine both horizontal and vertical, we could get, ‘The bank-robber entered the bank through the window that had been left open for him.’From this sentence it is clear that the bank is closed for business, or that the window in question is in some under-utilized part of the bank if the bank is still open.The words, ‘had been left open for him’ suggest there is someone on the inside helping the bank-robber. Sometimes the horizontal is more productive than the vertical plane. A skillful combination of both is probably the most productive of all.With students who haven’t many English words in their vocabulary, thinking of words in their mother tongue can be used to generate other words in the manner suggested above. The main thing is engaging students and helping them to produce words that they themselves have thought of rather than words their teacher gives them. ‘Ownership’ of language in the sense that the words and expressions, and the ideas too, originate in the student’s head and in that sense ‘belong’ to her.
Robert L. Fielding

Looking back at Oldham (written in the former dialect of the region)

2006-04-12T00:26:00.000-07:00

Looking at Oldham in 2003 and remembering how it was more than a hundred years earlier.

By Heck, in't it all grand, an' in't it all changed too. Thur's no chimneys, so I spose thur's no mills an' nowt to do fer t' folks as live in Owdham now.Things curtanly 'ave changed. I dunna know what me an our Sarah ud do today, 'appen we'd walk out an look at yonder 'ills like we did when we 'ad time off us wark, which weren't so often i’ them days.Them hills are t' same though, jus' same as ever thi were back then, aye an' t' weather too, that’s jus' same, wi clouds rollin' in from t' West to cover our mucky town an' wesh it too nearly every day of our lives. I reck'n Owdhamers today know all about t' weather o' our days, cept 'appen they've getten better clothes on thur backs an' better shoes on thur feet an aw.Them as worked alongside me an our Sarah ivery day of our lives ur o gone now, but we miss 'em, tha knows. Oh, aye, we do that. Why we even miss t'folks as owned t' mills an' made us all wark so 'ard fer so long fer so little. Ivery now an' then they'd lay us o off, jus fer a bit till everything picked up again, but they needed us jus like we needed them. We didna think so at t' time, but we did.That wer't secret o them days, yuh know, it were what kept us all goin' through thick an' thin, mostly thin, I can tell yuh. What kept us goin were each other, an' knowin' that everybody i’ t' town had summat to do, summat that contributed like to t' prosperity an' t' welfare o them as lived under those grey, cloudy skies. An' you know what I'm tellin' thee, knowin' that we were all like children playin' in some dirty back yard somewheer, appen i' Hell it felt like at times, knowin' that kept us from goin' mad, an' it kept us o together.We sent all us cotton all over t' world to them places we saw in picture books at schoo, wi them as 'ave dark skins like our collier lads comin' up from a days wark three 'undert feet below, an' we allus wondered what thid be like as were wearin' our cloth an our cotton. An' now we can see 'em walkin' about Owdham. That's summat, that is, seein' folk us we used to only know i' picture books, an' appen they're glad to be 'ere even though they don't see 'alf as much sun as they're used to seein' where they were browt up.But still, jus' you listen to what I'm tellin' thee, don't go argifyin' an' gettin' upset wi 'em jus' because thur different, because they look different and talk different. They're all God's childer, aye, each an' ivery one o 'em, jus like me an' our Sarah, jus' like them lads goin' 'ome from t' mills an' t' pits over theer. Them lads is black faced an' all, an' thur proud t' 'ave black faces, let me tell thee. Black faces means wark an' wark means brass, a bit anyroad, an' they o live in t' same sort o' houses close to thur wark like ah suppose you all do what's 'ere today, drivin' roun' in yon motor cars 'stead o' walkin' iverywheer like me an our Sarah used to do back in those days when life were simpler un we allus knew exactly who we were an' exactly what we 'ad to do t' get t'eaven.
------------------------------------------------------------------
I wrote this after seeing the photograph of Oldham hanging here on the walls of the Art Gallery. After I had visited the gallery, I sat on the terrace outside and had a cup of tea and looked at much of the area I had just been looking at in the photograph. It was this that prompted me to write the piece.

In the summer of that year, Oldham Municipal Art Gallery displayed the work on their walls, to accompany an exhibition of local photography of the town.
Robert L Fielding
University of Bahrain
April 2003

Multiple intelligences: what teachers can do to help children find theirs

2006-04-07T00:07:00.000-07:00

Multiple intelligences: 'lifelong garments woven on the loom of youth'

by

Robert L. Fielding

Intelligence is, they say, a matter of reaching sensible conclusions on the basis of incomplete evidence, but intelligence is surely also a matter of creating. This creating may take the form of drawing a picture, writing a poem or story, writing a song – anything in fact that involves at least one of the multiple intelligences posited by Dr. Gardner, and many others since.

These intelligences may well have been ‘woven on the loom of youth’ – encouraged by caring parents and insightful teachers, but they may equally well have been ‘woven in the womb’ that is to say that some may be more akin to innate characteristics than learned ones. I suppose it depends on whether you subscribe to the ‘nature’/’nurture’ view of the origins of personality traits and abilities.

Let us here adopt both positions and say that those talents that are God-given should be encouraged and added to, and those that a person has developed since childhood, possibly the products of such encouragement, should be further nurtured until they blossom and bear fruit.

Education is surely about both of these activities – encouraging what is innate and bringing on what can be learned. It is about something else too – it is about helping a learner to search and find new potential intelligences.

At school, I hated Art classes, mostly because of the teacher who sat at the front of the class and only seemed to actively encourage those pupils who showed some aptitude for art or willingness to improve. I mustn’t have shown either and so I was both ignored and ostracized, which shows a terrible failing in any teacher – only teaching those who he thinks he can teach.

However, who can truthfully say that they never concentrate on the better, more attentive students in class? Human nature militates against it being any other way, but most teachers are aware of their failings and try to be fair in their attention to everyone in their classrooms.

I think we must go farther than merely being fair with our time – we must create classrooms in which the young can explore in directions of their own choosing rather than only in directions that we teachers lay down paths to. It is in the laying down of directions, and discouraging others or at least not encouraging others to be followed that we do the most damage to the discovery of students’ potential multiple intelligences.
Robert L. Fielding

Memories are made of this #1.

2006-04-03T22:25:00.000-07:00

In Raffles Hotel
Steam trains and cowboys: a child’s vocabulary in the 60s
This A4 Pacific class locomotive ‘Sir Nigel Gresley’, named after the engineer responsible for its design, is an example of the type of loco that still holds the record fastest speed ever achieved by a steam train (123 mph). ‘Mallard’ named after our most common species of wild duck.

As eager children, we would journey up to York station to catch a glimpse of these fabulous engines – we were always rewarded – some days it would be ‘Mallard’ or ‘Sir Nigel Gresley’, but on others it might be ‘Bittern’, ‘Sir Archibald Sturrock’ or ‘Dwight D. Eisenhower’.

Towards the end of their time pulling express passenger trains up and down the country, they began to be replaced by the new ‘Deltic’ class of diesel-electric locomotives. These were named after former Epsom Derby winners, and had names like ‘St. Paddy’, ‘Ballymoss’, ‘Meld’, and ‘Crepello’.

I remember seeing one of these monsters in York station – the vibration from the huge English-Electric engines was so great that the lines cracked underneath its wheels and the passengers heading south had to wait until a replacement engine could be brought in and the lines replaced.
On the Manchester – Sheffield line, through the now closed Woodhead Tunnel, sky-blue electric locomotives pulled passenger and goods trains alike across Dinting Viaduct. They were chiefly housed in sheds in Reddish near Stockport and had names like ‘Electra’, which sounded marvelously modern to us children as we took down their numbers in our notebooks before transferring them into our ‘G. Bland’ pocketbooks, which held all the numbers of locomotives on British Railways at the time.

This was in the 1960s. Living as I did near a line (the Manchester Victoria-Huddersfield mainline), I never missed the chance to watch the huge, dirty trains hurtle through our valley of Saddleworth. In those days, you could set your watch by them with the Palethorpe Sausage train coming through at five o’ clock, pulled by a ‘black-five’, a ‘namer’ like ‘Bihar and Orissa’, or a Patriot class with windshields; ‘E.Tootal Broadhurst’, or ‘Private E. Sykes VC’. More usually though it was a workhorse 73 or 92 numbered locomotive. We soon grew tired of these and made a face at the drivers as their blackened faces peered out at us as they passed noisily.

After the train had gone, we mooched back for tea – dinner, and hoped we would see a ‘semi’ like ‘Sir William A. Stanier F.R.S.’or a Princess class engine – ‘Princess Alice’, for our collection of numbers.

As steam engines, which were responsible for the blackening of dry-stone walls in our valley, came to be replaced by diesels that were identical whichever way they were going, we were drawn down to the railway less and less. Instead, we took to the hills and did our own naming; we watched out for imagined ambushes in ‘Rustlers’ Den’ and the ‘tomahawk’ and the ‘Winchester’ figured in our talk. Slowly, the names of former American presidents, chief engineers from British Railways, the names of Indian states and heroes of Rork’s Drift and the like left our youthful lexicon.

We learned words like ‘lariot’, and expressions like ‘dry-gulched’; we rode through ‘Blanco Canyon’ with Wyatt Earp and Doc Halliday, and the ‘Dalton gang’ into Dodge City.

Our youthful minds were full of episodes of ‘Wagon train’, ‘Wells Fargo’ and ‘Laramie’, and the green and purple hills of Saddleworth with names like ‘Pots and pans’, ‘Alphin’, and ‘Alderman’ became so many ‘butes’ like the ones we had seen in the blood-red sunsets of Montana on our TV screens.

We used expressions like “Aw shucks”, and “Well, I’ll be” and talked out of the corners of our mouths in imitation of our heroes; Dale Roberston from ‘Wells Fargo’ and ‘Trampus’ from ‘The Virginian’.

We ‘toted’ revolvers - ‘six-shooters’, and wore ‘Stetsons’ as we re-enacted the ‘shoot-outs’ and ‘ambushes’ that we loved so much. We watched out for ‘sheriffs’, ‘deputies’ and ‘bounty-hunters’ as we crept around the bulrushes at the edge of Royal George Mill lodge, and learned to duck when one of the mill foremen spotted us and threatened to tell our fathers working away inside if we didn’t “skedaddle” or “beat it”.
Robert Leslie Fielding
.

Thinking skills: Part One of Several

2006-04-02T04:10:00.000-07:00

Critical thinking in everyday life
Most of us rarely achieve what we are truly capable of in life. For various practical and circumstantial reasons we do not become what we may have desired.

A commitment to learn is rare, but it is vital if we are going to do something with our lives. Many will think this sounds like some form of punishment – that you can’t have a life and a commitment to learning – but this is nonsense – we never stop learning, it’s just that most of the time we aren’t always conscious of the fact that we are.

It is not possible to become a success just by the act of willing it, though you do have to want it enough to succeed. There’s no substitute for hard work – changing your habits requires time and effort – think of it as a continual process of development – you are not going to suddenly wake up one morning and say to yourself, “Hey, I can think critically now!”

Stages of development as a critical thinker
Stage One: The unreflective thinker (who is not aware of any problems with his thinking – most of us probably fall into this category without really knowing)
Stage Two: The challenged thinker (on whom it dawn that there is a problem in the way he is used to thinking – still a lot of out there)
Stage Tree: The thinking beginner (who tries to improve but without practicing regularly – that’s where I come in)

Stage Four: The practicing thinker (who recognizes the need to practice)
Stage Five: The advanced thinker (who advances with more and more practice)
Stage Six: The Master thinker (who is skilled and insightful automatically)

Strategies to move from Stage One to Stage Six

Strategy One: Use your time more effectively

Everybody wastes time some of the time – even most of the time – we worry, regret, mope, sulk, wish – but we waste it nevertheless. Use that time practicing critical thinking instead of whiling away the hours in front of the TV. Ask yourself these questions:
· When did I do my best and worst thinking today?
· What did I really think about?
· Did I work anything out?
· Did any negative thoughts frustrate me?
· What would I have done differently today?
· Why?
· Did I do anything to help me achieve any of my long term aims?
· Did I act in accordance with my stated values?
· What would happen if I spent every day like today?
Spend some time over each question – write your answers down – look at them later, and then later again – rethink the questions. You will have probably found out some things about how productive or otherwise you are – about how much time you waste – how you could use that time in more productive, fulfilling ways. The next stage is to actually actively and consciously do something to change.

Strategy Two: Tackle a problem every day

Early each day, choose a problem to solve. Be systematic – this is not an exercise in daydreaming –
Ask yourself these questions:-
· What exactly is the problem?
· Can I put into the form of a question?
· Does this problem relate to my goals and my needs?
· How – in what way?

Steps to follow:-

State your problem clearly – imagine someone is listening to you.
· Work out what kind of things you are going to have to do to solve it?
· Be realistic here – work through achievable steps – otherwise you’ll give up or postpone decisions
· Determine the information you need to help you solve your problem
· Go through this information – analyze it – how can it help you – is it all relevant?
· Work out your options- write them down – record them into a tape recorder – play them back – see if they sound reasonable and plausible
· Work our a plan – step by step what you are going to have to do
· Monitor the results and implications of what you do – change if things aren’t going the way they should be, but BE PATIENT – allow time for things to reach critical points

Strategy Three: Internalize intellectual standards

Become more and more aware of the standards of good thinking practice:-
· Clarity
· Precision
· Accuracy
· Relevance
· Depth
· Breadth
· Logic
· significance

Strategy Four: Keep a journal

Write things down – be systematic – number and date everything you write – know where to find it

Journal Format

Write – describe 1 situation that was significant to you (at the time)
Write down how you responded to that situation – be truthful and precise
Analyze – think about – what is happening in that situation – go under the surface
Assess the implications of your analysis – did you learn something about yourself?

Strategy Five: Reshape your character

Adopt an intellectual stance:-

· BE tenacious – persevere – don’t let up or give up
· BE autonomous- self-reliant-individual
· BE courageous – it’s going to take courage to change and confront issues and/or people
· DON’T BE aggressive, intolerant – all those negative qualities that will stop you working with people
· HAVE empathy – look at things from others’ viewpoint
Try to work on ways of improving yourself in the 5 ways – monitor your behaviour – be aware of yourself – think about the way you think – examine any biases you have – get rid of unfounded prejudice

Strategy Six: Deal with your ego

It’s natural to have an ego – but as thinking beings, we must learn to recognize bias based solely upon the working of the ego – specifically:-
· Being irrational
· Being unreasonable
· Being illogical
· Being irritated
· Being irritable
· Bullying to get your own way
· Being too inhibited and oversensitive

More to follow from

Robert L. Fielding

2006-03-29T00:58:00.000-08:00

Developing thinking skills and using multiple intelligences

A Workshop given by Mario Rinvolucri 26th March 2006

Robert L. Fielding

It was fortuitous that Hans Lal - a representative on the University’s Professional Development Committee - managed to persuade Mario to come here today to give this useful workshop on using multiple intelligences in the learning environment.

Clarity of thought and the ability to draw upon different facets of one’s intelligence is vitally important when it comes to making decisions that affect the country, and as today’s undergraduates may well become tomorrow’s professionals, leaders, and captains of industry; their ability to think critically and realize their full potential is indeed vital.

The University General Requirements Unit (UGRU) is about to embark on courses designed to develop students critical thinking ability; vital in the world we live in, as well as in studies at university. Mario’s workshop gave thirty teachers plenty to think about this evening.

Drawing upon the work of Dr. Howard Gardner, and applying it to teaching situations, Mario Rinvolucri illustrated the eight different intelligences proposed by Dr. Gardner by animated and highly instructive and enjoyable activities which ensured the success of the workshop as a learning experience for the participants.

The eight different intelligences proposed by Dr. Gardner are:
Ø Linguistic intelligence (“word smart”)
Ø Logical-mathematical intelligence (“number/reasoning smart”)
Ø Spatial intelligence (“picture smart”)
Ø Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence (“body smart”)
Ø Musical intelligence (“music smart”)
Ø Interpersonal intelligence (“people smart”)
Ø Intrapersonal intelligence (“self smart”)
Ø Naturalist intelligence (“nature smart”)

Each of the varied activities forced participants to ‘go into parts of the mind normally used to process things in other ways’.

Group members readily identified with certain points in the talk, recounting similar experiences that accorded with points made by the speaker.

In effect, Mario’s main point throughout the workshop was that there are other ways of teaching Mathematics, for example, than merely using numerical symbols to the exclusion of other items that draw upon students’ different intelligences, and this was held to be true for all forms of instruction and tuition.

The point was also made that in conventional schooling, people who learn in ways other than linguistically and logically are not always catered for in recognized teaching methodologies and testing tools.

To illustrate points made, Mario demonstrated teaching techniques that utilize ability from the other six intelligences. Forms of irregular verbs, for example, were taught using body movements instead of words on the board, and it became clear that otherwise drab lessons on uninteresting subjects can be livened up to make them more memorable and, more importantly, to teach in ways that accord with the varying abilities of learners.

Finally, and urging teachers not to use symbols and learning devices and mnemonics, for example, that are culturally unacceptable or which fly in the face of conventional logic, Mario rounded off an enjoyable and informative evening with exercises designed to allow students to find out something about their own, preferred way of learning.

Everyone almost certainly came away knowing something more about themselves and how they best learn, and how to use this to teach in ways that exploit the multiple intelligences that may or may not be dormant in all of us, I know I did.

Robert L. Fielding

BOOKS BY ROBERT LESLIE FIELDING

2006-03-26T03:05:00.000-08:00

GINGER'S TAIL

OTHER
PEOPLE
OTHER
WORLDS

by

ROBERT LESLIE
FIELDING
Click on the link below for details
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=Robert+Leslie+Fielding&userid=sA0Zbi0D1p&cds2Pid=9481

Entering the world of work #1.

2006-03-24T23:32:00.000-08:00

TRAIN FOR THE FUTURE – NOT THE PAST (NB. This has been published)
Robert Leslie Fielding

The speed of change in the economy is too fast for some organizations, and too fast for most of our educational programs.

‘The new economy: strong growth in the service sector, increased levels of productivity growth and globalized markets, means that the nature of work is different from the past. The diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) has changed the ways firms do business and create value, it has increased the flexibility of capital goods, making capital investment more productive and encouraging firms to substitute capital for labor. This trend contributes to the globalization of markets and has changed the nature of work and has implications for workers’ education and training.’
(Go to http://www.dest.gov.au/ for more)

Who will benefit from changes in education and training?

Education and training helps improve employee job performance and the quality of goods and services firms offer. Individuals who take advantage of training get higher wages and increase their chances of promotion. It makes sense to upgrade your skills and change.

If companies don’t get the workers they require, they will:

· Go somewhere else to get them
If companies go abroad for workers, or relocate entirely, those jobs will be lost to the economy forever
· Do without them
So, some companies will do without the right kind of worker with the right kind of skills, some will go out of business because they do not have workers with those skills.
· Have to train people themselves
Training their own workforce is a possibility, but could be too expensive for some.
· Get other organizations to train people for them
Getting other organizations to train people for them could be another option for firms, but this can also prove too costly for many firms.

Training needs to take into account that the workplace and what goes on in it has changed.

“In industries where a large proportion of the production process has been computerized, workers need a broader underpinning knowledge to effectively manage the production process, and the capacity to solve problems of a diverse nature.”
http://www.dest.gov.au/

Change is the only thing that you can depend upon.
Work changes, and then everything else has to.

“Basic clerical skills and basic computer skills appear to be a minimum requirement for most jobs.”
“Workers need the capacity to learn about new products and processes as they are introduced.”
Communication skills are increasingly valued in all occupations due to the increased complexity of interactions between workers and suppliers, colleagues and clients.”

Research organization in the UK have already identified skills needed for most jobs.

· Teamwork
Working in teams builds loyalty, strengthens commitment and one’s sense of responsibility.
· Problem solving
Problems come from many different sources and so solutions come from accessing different disciplines, ways of thinking about the problem, and changes in attitudes to problem solving.
· Communication
This is the big one; if you can’t communicate, you can’t operate, be effective, adapt to new situations, or pass on your knowledge or air your views.
· Management
This doesn’t just mean what CEOs do. Everyone has to manage; manage time, finances, resources, and interpersonal relationships.

Research has found out what small businesses want:-

· Entrepreneurial attitudes
This is a major change in thinking. Traditionally, people leaving school or university expect companies to employ them in ways that the company determines. This is still true, but employees now have to think as if it was their own business, take risks and create wealth.
· Capacity to identify and exploit employment and wealth possibilities
Again, instead of looking at the business world as a given, workers are expected to think laterally, creatively and in ways that often overturn norms and values.
· An ongoing capacity for learning
The idea that you stop learning when you leave school, graduate, or get promotion is long gone. Everyone in an organization is faced with continual change and has to adapt or become redundant.
Large businesses want:-

· Skills in oral and written communication
Communication channels include email, fax, telephone, video-interviewing, oral presentations supported by PowerPoint, for example, face to face dialogue, and written report.
· Skills in interpersonal relations
Informal/formal communications require different skills; cooperation and congeniality, firmness and warmth are the new watchwords.
· Numeracy
Every business has the need for skills in math, accounting and all forms of numerical data.
· Economic literacy
Being aware of economic best practices, the financial constraints associated with capital ventures is paramount in the ‘new economy’.
· Understanding of cultural values
The world is a village, cross cultural exchanges are much more common and tact and understanding are top priorities for companies operating in global markets.
· Worldliness
Being ‘street-wise’ has found respectability in trade and industry. A knowledge of how the world turns is vital.
· The ability to apply knowledge
Merely knowing is not enough: Being able to adapt and apply knowledge to changing and changed circumstances is at a premium.
· Ability to recognize, accept and constantly seek opportunities for change in the context of world best practices
Opportunities don’t necessarily merely present themselves, they have to be looked for, and they have to be recognized. Recognition of opportunities is as vital as searching for them.
http://www.gradlink.edu.au/

Action-planning
To face changes in the workplace, you need to be pro-active, you need to initiate change right now. Ask yourself three questions:
· Where am I now?
Deciding where you are now requires honesty and courage. Realising that you are not anywhere near your personal frontiers can be a shock. Be prepared to be shocked. If you are prepared, it won’t come as too much of a shock, but you may need something to jolt you out of your complacency.
· Where do I want to be?
Again, honesty, self-awareness versus romantic notions and idealistic ambitions. Those last two are not completely useless. Dreams can and do lead to fulfillment in life.
· How do I get there?
Take advice from those who are there to assist you, from those who have done it, and from those who have your very best interests at heart. Listen, listen, listen.

You need a roadmap.
START
· Organize your time effectively
Time is always at a premium, you just don’t realize it all the time. Keep notes, keep diaries, use anything that works for you but manage your time more effectively than you are doing. Be brutal with your time, but leave yourself some quality time for those personal things that matter, friendship and family, they will sustain you when you most need it.
· Identify steps needed to reach your goal
Be informed - Be careful cutting corners – Be constantly aware of consequences.
· Prepare ‘just in case’ plans
Have other plans just in case things don’t work out – Keep to your main plan, but recognize failure too. The tragedy of failing is failing to know you’ve failed or are about to fail.
· Monitor and evaluate your progress
Watching your progress carefully will help you avoid failing to recognize that you are not succeeding along the lines you planned.

The most important thing is:
DON'T STAND STILL, EVERYONE ELSE IS MOVING

In 1997, the Dearing Enquiry recommended students to received structured opportunities to become:
· More aware of themselves
Know your strengths and your weaknesses – Listen to others, and listen to your own instincts; they are often the most reliable facets in knowing yourself.
· More aware of how to learn
Self-reflection in all things, particularly in learning – Knowing what doesn’t work for you is equally as important as knowing what does.
· More aware of how to improve personal performance
Set yourself standards – Be proud of your attainments and your successes – They are worth as much as gold in the world you want to be a part of.
· Better able to cope with the transition to their chosen careers
All change, even change for the better, even voluntary change is stressful and can sometimes threaten your sense of worth, of who you are and of what you want to become.

About the author: Robert L Fielding spent 15 years of his life as a skilled machine tool operator in the engineering industry in Manchester, England. For the past fifteen years, he has been a Lecturer, living and working in six countries in and around the Middle East. He now lives in the UAE, where he teaches at the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain.

Environmental #1.

2006-03-24T23:29:00.000-08:00

Save Our Species (NB. This has been published)

You’ve heard all the arguments a million times – the list of endangered species is getting longer, and we’re on that list – animals have rights too, you know, and they’re not ours to destroy. And all that is true.

But as we face the Aids pandemic, as bird flu threatens millions, as cancer in all its forms resists a cure, we have one more good reason to stave off extinction for those who share our planet – the cures and remedies for all our ills are probably out there waiting to be discovered – and they are probably in the most unlikely of places too.

Take the case of the saliva from the Gila monster, a lizard from the American Southwest – a new drug, marketed under the name ‘Byetta’ has been made from the lizard’s saliva, and is now being used to combat that omnipresent chronic ailment – diabetes.

It seems that the Gila lizard can survive on very little food – it is able to digest what it eats phenomenally slowly, and now the drug made from the creature’s saliva gland extracts has proved not only to control blood sugar for longer periods, but also to decrease appetite, which leads to weight loss.

Type 2 diabetes, sometimes known as ‘middle age onset’ diabetes (I suffer from it myself) can also be brought on by obesity at any age, and can and does afflict children who are overweight.

In America alone, 18 million people now have the ailment, with over 200 million worldwide. In the Middle East it is rampant, afflicting children as well as older people.

I am not sure of the fate of this monster, but my point is that prior to finding out about the life enhancing qualities of its saliva, nobody much cared whether it lived or died. Lizards are not particularly attractive – and they’re not particularly photogenic, which counts a lot these days. Everyone wants to save the Giant Panda – “those things are so cuddly, aren’t they?” but who cares about lizards and snakes, spiders and scorpions – what we used to call –‘creepy-crawlies’ – the world would be better off without them – right?

Wrong! Every creature has the right to be here – just like us – and there are other good reasons for believing so besides the ethical ones.

Robert L. Fielding

FILLER What is ~? #2.

2006-03-24T23:21:00.000-08:00

What is organic?
(NB.For details of availability of this article,
please contact Robert L Fielding)
‘Organic’ is used a lot these days – we see the words ‘organic food’, ‘organic farming methods’ all the time, but what does ‘organic’ mean?

The word means ‘living’ – applied to foodstuffs - it means ‘grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides or fungicides’ – with nothing added and nothing taken away – without being modified genetically or otherwise – organic food is wholesome, healthy food.

‘Organic’ stands for:-

Ø In harmony with nature
Ø Bio-diversity
Ø GM-free
Ø Trusting our food
Ø Optimum health
Ø Value for money
Ø Authentic taste
Ø Protecting future generations
Ø Supporting small farms

http://www.organicfoodsandcafe.com/

Robert L. Fielding

What does it for you? #1.

2006-03-24T23:16:00.000-08:00

What drives you? (NB.For details of availability of this article,
please contact Robert L Fielding)

by

Robert Leslie Fielding

Are you driven by needs beyond your control – are you motivated by the need to create, or are you on automatic pilot, moved only by your basic needs?

Finding out answers to those questions could improve your life.

Believing that man is basically trustworthy, self-protecting and self-governing, and tends towards growth and love, the psychologist Maslow, put forward his hierarchy of needs to indicate what motivates and drives people.

He moved away from the pessimism of Freud and the behaviourism of Skinner to show that things like war, murder and deceit tend to occur when human needs are thwarted.

He divided people’s needs into physiological needs – our basic needs for food, air and water, safety needs – these are connected to establishing stability and consistency in our lives, and include such things as security and safety, love needs – belonging to others (family, group, community, nation, religious groups) we need to feel loved and accepted by others, esteem needs – the self-esteem that comes mastery or competence of tasks, and the recognition and attention that comes from others.

His final division is self-actualization – the desire to become everything that one is capable of becoming. It is this fulfilling this drive that makes the difference between an ordinary life and one that takes the road less traveled.

With Mums and Dads this can take the form of wishing the best for the children and in doing the best for them so that they achieve their true potential. It used to be said that success was improving on what your parents achieved.

For younger people though, improving on what Dad used to do might not cut it – individuals have a need to be just that, to strike out in some direction that takes them to their own ambitions.

In these terms, successful parents are those who give their children roots and wings – roots in the home and in the benefits and advantages that being properly brought up can give, and wings to fly, to find new space, room to move and be yourself, to do the things you truly want to do, not because your parents want it for you, though that is nice if it coincides with your own ambitions, but because they are of your own making and choosing.

But there can be conflicts here – between what is accepted by your peers and what are truly your own needs. Too many young people seem to put the need for esteem before the need for self-actualization.

For Maslow, the need for esteem comes before self-actualization – and here I think he is wrong. Your own ambitions and achievements, if they are truly your own, should ensure the admiration of those around you. If they do not, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are not worth admiring, but rather that they interfere with others’ sense of self-esteem and worth. “To thine own self be true!” was good advice to Laertes in ‘Hamlet’, and it’s good advice to you too.

In modern parlance, “Give it your best shot.” Achieve what you are really capable of achieving and your life will not have been wasted.
Robert L. Fielding

FILLER How to ~? #1.

2006-03-24T23:12:00.000-08:00

Coping with disaster

Every day we read about disasters happening all over the world – a train crash in India, an earthquake in Japan, a hurricane in South Korea – and lives lost, loved ones left to grieve – how do people cope?

Please God, it will never happen to you. What to do if the unthinkable happens. What should you do if your building catches fire? Be prepared – minimize the damage – you are going to have to cope. Here’s what to do:-

· Before a crisis
Ø Plan ahead
Catastrophes can’t be predicted accurately, but if you live in a region in which hurricanes regularly occur, you should be ready for the big one blowing in. If you work at a school, develop plans to evacuate buildings or clear play areas swiftly and safely. Disasters surprise, but they should not confound. Be ready.

Ø Build networks and relationships
Establish links with emergency services BEFORE, not during, there won’t be time to look numbers up in phone books – systems will be down – know how to reach someone quickly.

Ø Clarify roles
Everybody should have a job to do if something hits – people running around like headless chickens doesn’t help anybody – victims need help urgently – know who has to do what, and have back up plans if that person is out.

Ø Prepare and meet
Establish an organized team to focus on what will need to be done in the event of the unthinkable happening. But don’t be morbid. If you have taken steps, you’ll be OK.
· During the crisis
Ø Assess the situation - keep calm
Keeping calm during terrible times is probably the hardest thing to do, but if you can manage it, you WILL save lives, and you WILL be in a position to assess what’s going on. Role play exercises can help find out who can cope and who can’t in a crisis.

Ø Deploy staff to cover critical areas
If everybody knows their responsibilities and carries them out, all areas and situations should be covered. Someone should be responsible for seeing everyone is doing what they are supposed to be doing. Again role playing helps to clarify roles. Chaos adds to the danger.

Ø Ensure information is available
Information is vital during a crisis and yet it is often the first thing to break down. Ensure people know where to go to get what, and where to go for the different kinds of help needed – for medical help, as well as for information about people’s whereabouts.

Ø Educate staff about post traumatic stress disorder
If you are aware of it, you cam deal with it more effectively - recognizing it in others enables sufferers to receive treatment.

Ø Manage the media
Morale must be boosted during times of tragedy – messages should be constructive – tragic circumstances are not the time for recriminations. People cope more easily and more quickly if they cooperate.

Ø Communicate needs to relevant bodies
The plight of victims should be communicated swiftly and unambiguously to official bodies responsible for care giving and provision of emergency supplies.

· After the crisis
Ø Support long term healing
Continuous healing programs that acknowledge real and pressing needs and that take people’s feelings and opinions into account are vitally important in the months and even years after the initial disaster. Talk – Listen – Support
Ø Let others help you – help is a two-way thing – helping helps both parties.
Ø Take good care of all your needs – physical and emotional – eat well, get enough sleep, talk about your feelings, listen to others talk about theirs – realize you are not alone in what you are going through.
Ø Be patient – other people have problems too.
Ø Look after the children – let them know they are not responsible for anything
Ø Get some perspective – don’t expect too much too quickly.
Ø Support networks are vital – talk to neighbours and friends, and family.
Ø By action as well as by word – show you care – you can make a difference. www.extension.umn.edu

Ø Support memorials and donations
Memorials give people closure while still acknowledging the problem, they also reassure loved ones that others care. Donations are practical and necessary.

Ø Manage benchmark dates carefully
Don’t forget important anniversaries – forgetting sometimes seems like not caring.

Ø Handle physical reminders carefully
Remember that victims and their families are often sensitive a long time after the event – tread carefully – don’t ever hurt – nothing ever justifies it.
www.nea.org/crisis

Robert L. Fielding

FILLER: What is ~? #1.

2006-03-24T23:09:00.000-08:00

What is ATTENTION DEFICITY DISORDER (ADD)?

Marked more as a ‘difference’ than a ‘disability’, ADD affects children, giving them a reduced ability to do the following:-
Ø Maintain attention (poor concentration)
Ø Control doing or saying something without thinking first
Ø Regulate the amount of physical activity appropriate to the situation (hyperactivity)
Ø Be motivated to listen to people in authority

It can change the way children behave, think and feel. It is more common in boys, but girls can suffer from it too.

Here are some of the things to look out for in your infant son or daughter:-
Ø Extreme restlessness
Ø Constant thirst
Ø Difficulty in feeding
Ø Frequent tantrums and head banging
And in older children:-
Ø Poor concentration and brief attention span
Ø Increased activity
Ø Acts impulsively
Ø Fearless and takes risks
Ø Poor coordination
Ø Weak short term memory
Ø Inflexible personality
Ø Lacks self-esteem
Ø Sleep and appetite problems

Now it might seem to you that every child goes through all of these regularly – ADD can begin at 2 or over, and can be a lifelong condition (it is thought).

A class of 30 might have one child with the condition, and a child with the deficit can be disruptive in the classroom.

If your child is NOT diagnosed accurately and early, you will probably experience a lot of frustration at the child’s behaviour – this will probably turn to anger, and the child may develop feelings of poor self-esteem which could affect the child throughout his life.

Information from school could help you get professional evaluation of your child by an expert in children’s developmental and behavioural issues.

This should lead to assisting the child in the understanding of his weaknesses, and his strengths, and your understanding as a parent. This will lead to problem solving activities that can show you and your child the way to go – giving him a feeling of self-control, which in turn will lead to him getting his self-esteem back.

Don’t ignore symptoms displayed by your child – if you think s/he might be suffering, get professional help – don’t feel embarrassment or shame – this deficit affects millions of children.
Robert L. Fielding

How things start out #1.

2006-03-24T23:06:00.000-08:00

Wondering and discovering: Applying knowledge to practical problems
(NB.For details of availability of this article,
please contact Robert L Fielding –
fieldingrob3@hotmail.com)

by

Robert L. Fielding

Walking the hills around my home in the north of England as a boy of fourteen, I found myself wondering about my height above sea level compared with the height of the hills in front of me. I wanted to know how high I had to climb before reaching the top of the next hill.

I had a map, and I had found the hill in front of me on it. What I didn't always know was my exact position on the map, and so I didn't know how high I had to climb to reach the summit.

I walked up to the top anyway, but I always wondered how I could determine my height relative to my destination.

The hills around my home had strange and wonderful names. I can still remember them. Alphin, dark and massive, looking across Chew Valley at Alderman frowning back, two giant sworn enemies, and more gentle Noon Sun basking in the afternoon sunshine.

Further into the moor, names like Black Hill, Laddow Rocks, and Kinder Scout conjured up images in my young head. I still love those names.

Although their names intrigued me, it was their heights relative to me, or to each other that really fascinated me. Standing on Laddow Rocks, Black Hill several miles away looked much higher. Bleaklow Hill in the distance looked lower, and yet I knew from the map that it was quite a bit higher.

The television aerial on Holme Moss dominated that part of the skyline, and Crowdon Great Brook fell away from my feet.

On some days, the wind buffeted us about, and we had to find shelter among the rocks to eat our lunch in comfort.

Paper was easily blown away, and we knew not to leave litter anywhere. I wanted to make a gadget that would help me determine the height of each hill, but I knew it would have to be made of something more substantial than paper to withstand the blustery Pennine weather.

So, I set about making a sort of template from the only kind of material I had: cardboard. In the days before plastic bags, in the days before supermarkets, Clifford at the Co-op put the things my mother bought into cardboard boxes.
"Do you want a ride on the bacon-slicer before you go, lad?' he would say cheerfully.
I had to carry the groceries home. By the time we reached our front door, my arms were dropping off, as we used to say.

Mum emptied the box, putting the things she had bought into their proper places. Meat and dairy products went into a kind of meat safe that was always a bit cooler than the rest of the kitchen. Tinned stuff, of which there was very little, went into the pantry with the rest. Last of all, came the potatoes. These weren't new ones. New potatoes came from my father's allotment at the back of the house. These were old potatoes, and they were dusty and brown. It was my job to take out the spuds and put them where they wouldn't get damp. My father had made some shelves with spaces between them so that the air could circulate and keep them dry.

When I had carefully placed each potato so that it wasn't touching another potato, I turned the box upside down to empty the dust and the dirt.

Sometimes, the boxes would be so dirty that they were only good for making compost to grow more potatoes, but sometimes they were practically spotless on the outside, and I used one such side to make my template. I had to make sure it was absolutely clean, otherwise I couldn't bring it back into the house. This particular day I had a nice flat piece that was clean and it wasn't creased either. It was perfect. I cut it from the rest of the box with a sharp knife my mother used to cut up vegetables. The knife was dry and it was clean. I made the cut and then used my mother's best scissors to clean up the edges.

I had a square of good, clean, stiff cardboard to work on. The next thing I had to do was to work out what I wanted to draw on it. I knew from my arithmetic teacher that a circle could be divided into 360 degrees, so a semi circle had to have 180 degrees. The semi circle I wanted to draw had to be no bigger than my pair of compasses could stretch to. They would open to about a five inch maximum. They were quite big.

I drew myself a semi circle with a base line ten inches long. Now I had to divide it up into degrees. I had to decide how many degrees between each division. I decided upon ten degrees.

This was my way of finding out how to calculate the height of the next hill. I knew a little about trigonometry, and although I didn't like it very much whenever I had to do it at school, I knew enough to be able to use what I knew to construct this template.

I divided the semi circle up into 10 degree sectors, and then used the other side of the cardboard to construct a table of numbers: distances in miles, height in feet, one for every angle on my template.

It was a bit difficult and took up all my time that evening, and the next.
I remember bedtime coming up quickly on those evenings.

I did finish it though, and showed it to my Mum and Dad. They both smiled at it as I showed them how it worked. I explained about sines, cosines and tangents. How you could find the unknown length of the side of a right angled triangle if you had either the lengths of the two other sides or one length and one angle. At least that's how I remember it.

I remember that I wrote the values down from my little red book of mathematical tables, which included trig ratios and values. At least that is what I can recall now.

After the longest week, I took my gadget, as my Dad called it, up onto the moor. I remember that it was a bit misty as it could often be that high up, about 1,700 feet above sea level, and facing the prevailing weather from the Atlantic Ocean via the Irish Sea. Anyway, visibility wasn't perfect, but the cloud cover was patchy, and every now and then a corner of clear blue sky would appear, a bright patch from the quilted autumn sky.

The brief window was enough to try the thing out. I took it out of my rucksack, and my friend, John held it steady for me as I lined it up with Pule Hill about four miles away. I got John to stand back a little to tell me if I was holding the thing level or not. I adjusted it and then took a reading. In fact, it was really quite difficult to do that, to take a reading in the wind, wondering whether the thing was really level or not. I took the reading and then we sat down in the heather and entered the numbers we had in our little notebooks. We had both made charts, with ruled lines to make it easier to enter the numbers.

We worked out that Pule Hill was either higher than Mount Everest, I think, or something ridiculous like that. We were both a bit disappointed, but laughed at our results too. There were problems with the device. We knew that. We had known that before we set out, but like the lads we were, we tried to ignore them, and convinced ourselves that they wouldn't make any difference.

Back home, I did try to think how it could be improved. I thought it might need my Dad's old spirit level sellotaping to the bottom, but I didn't dare take his tools up onto the hills. We could have done something with a pop-bottle half full of water, John said, but we both knew that it would make the thing too cumbersome and clumsy, so we didn't try it. It was a good idea but it had its faults. However, the principles behind it were sound, we both agreed.

I still have that bit of cardboard somewhere at my parents' house, and I take it out and look at it sometimes. Looking at the markings on the front, the tables and numbers on the back, and reading my junior version of my handwriting, much clearer than today's scribble, I remember that tall gangly lad I must have been. I remembered my freckle faced pal John, now a surveyor for an oil company somewhere, and I am grateful for those days, for that bit of cardboard, for the hills, the heather and the wind and rain, and most of all for the making of who I am now, up there with the wind in my face, and an idea in my head.

Robert L. Fielding

My own views #1.

2006-03-24T23:03:00.000-08:00

Writing as therapy

Sure writing is therapeutic - haven't I always told you that. Well it is. I think writing on the computer or word processor is also therapeutic, plus it doesn't make your hands ache like using a pen does. Maybe it's that way with me because I'm getting a bit older - who knows?

I have recently been thinking about what happened to me when I started work as an apprentice at Glover Bros in Mossley. Engineering excites me - it did then and it still does - just seeing those machines making other parts for other machines makes me recall the good times I had in that industry.

However, those good times came later. I had bad times at Glovers. The only half decent times I had through the week were my lunch-breaks when I would go on my motorbike to meet Pete up at Heyhead or somewhere between where he worked in Carrbrook and where I worked in Mossley, on Egmont Street - a part of that town I still dislike.

Anyway, as soon as I began working in Glover Engineering, my life became miserable. I had to go to the shops for the men three times a day and they made my life difficult, I can tell you. Some - probably most - of the men were OK, I suppose, just kidded me a bit, but some were nasty and tried their hardest to get me upset. Coming from a village. I wasn't used to having to deal with townies and I found them very different to the men I knew nearer to home.

I remember Keith Shaw, who is probably dead now, being one of the nastiest men I have ever met. There was nothing in him you could find to like. He was relentless in his nastiness and since then I have come to realize that it was he who had the problem rather than me. I was the butt of his ill-humour but I wasn't the source of it. That was somewhere else - probably in his home life or his health or in his past life as a child. He may have had a hard time when he was a kid and so if that was the case I can forgive him. See, that is what I mean when I say that writing is therapeutic - I have never found it in my heart to forgive Keith Shaw until now, and thinking that his nastiness was the product of something nasty in his life has meant I can let go at last. I can stop hating him and that has freed me. Hate really is a wasting disease, isn't it? From now on, I am not going to indulge in it and I don't think you should either, even though you may have excellent reasons for hating, let them go - write it out of you - do it now.
Robert L. Fielding
(NB.For details of availability of this article, please contact Robert L Fielding – fieldingrob3@hotmail.com)

Prose Poem #1.

2006-03-24T22:57:00.000-08:00

Lit (NB. This has been published)

by

Robert L Fielding

A book of verse, once opened, leads me through a life that is half over. Innocent and hearty, I read Lewis Carroll, wondering if I would ever see the Jabberwock with eyes aflame on my way home from school on those winter evenings when ice and darkness enveloped my path up the hill to the dancing fire and the roasting smell of my mother's cooking.
Later, standing in rows, our neckties strangling us, we sang,
'Who is Sylvia, what is she?
without wondering in the slightest who Sylvia was, or what she was. We just presumed she was a girl and left it at that. Singing by rote, high and straining to reach Mrs. Smith playing the piano, her face grimacing at our reckless rendering of her favourite song.
And later, listening to 'I wandered lonely as a cloud', we started to hear the words and see the daffodils waving beneath us. All was forgotten though, when, as pupils in pride of place in Miss Schofield's English class, we had to read the words out loud to the whole class, listening and giggling till it was their turn.
With Dot Squash, and later with Fez, we trod the paths through Hardy's Wessex, waited on Egdon Heath with Eustacia Vye for her wild love, Damon Wildeve, come in secret from the tavern below.
Fez, Donald Radcliffe, Mr. Radcliffe to our parents, Sir to us who even adoring him and his booming voice, were petrified when we had somehow annoyed him, Fez made Weatherbury live, made Gabriel Oak a real person to us, and Bathsheba Everdene a real woman, vivacious with a mind of her own, headstrong, some said foolish, and passionate.
Dot Squash, Dorothy Schofield, Miss to us, apples of her scolding eye. She led us, walking alongside Tess to her doom, stopped us from berating Angel Clare for his purity and his foolish, pious pride, remonstrated with us for asking the question, "Miss, didn't Thomas Hardy ever write happy stories?" What did we know of Greek tragedy, or any other kind of tragedy, save one of our number running under the wheels of a car one afternoon after school.
Years later, still reading, though with a more alert eye, enjoying less for not being taken in as much, but still enjoying, I traversed a purple moor, stepped through heather and ling, waist deep bracken to a little house on the edge of Egdon Heath, whistling Holst's tune of the same name, I came to Clym and Eustacia's house in the woods. Admiring it through the lens of my Minolta, shutter clattering up and down gaily in the late summer sunshine, a little head poked through a bedroom window, and apologizing for intruding, was invited in to see for myself, Alderworth, the house where the newly weds dwelt before everything started going wrong, Eustacia finally and tragically realizing she had fallen in love with a man who did not exist, the native returned to his heath, but now, after his wandering days were done, content to practise the work of a furze cutter, and the beautiful but willful Eustacia, her raven haired, proud head leaning into the wind coming off the English Channel, dreaming of lands she would never see.
Working up to examinations, looking at university entrance, Shakespeare in hand, the Scottish play, which, not being in the acting profession, we can call by name, 'Macbeth'. Selling petrol at weekends to stay at 'Tech' till I passed, memorizing the 'dagger soliloquy between cars, for Mrs. Christou, who encouraged us with her enthusiasm and her joie de vivre, and her laughing face.
Mr. McCann, a Scot, who did the Guardian Cryptic Crossword everyday whilst eating his sandwiches, leading us slowly through Burns' 'Tam o' Shanter', the words, the accent, the meaning, coming in his rich, ringing tones beneath his bristling moustache.
Discovering Kipling, Wordsworth, and Robert Service in the hushed, warm stillness of the Municipal Library, the monologues of 'Nosmo King', Stanley Holloway breathed out on cold mornings cycling to work, each word visible as if I had been exhaling smoke.
The trustees from the toolroom where I worked, wondering about a turner who read poetry in his breaktimes, instead of The soaraway Sun. Struggling with Thomas Mann, wondering if I should even be trying. A different perspective has its distractions and its detractors, all around me it seemed at times till my sister, Gill, my sister, reassured me that what I wanted to do was worth doing.
And now, writing words of my own, the long journey still not half done, thank God, retracing my steps through Central Asia, recalled to life, Sultan Sancar, and the love of his life, Yasemin, mourning her father, newly buried beneath the hard ground of Mary, across the wastes of Turkoman country, to the land of Anatolia, high, stony, beautiful Anatolia, and to Nazan.

Robert L Fielding

Future imperfect #1.

2006-03-24T07:20:00.000-08:00

The Digital Future: Something to look forward to, or something to fear?

by

Robert L Fielding

Advances in technology produce patterns in the communities with which they interact and into which they become assimilated. Some facet of life is replaced, enhanced, or altered forever, sometimes for the worse. Our ability to predict which of these paths the advance will take on in our lives never seems to improve. What look on the face of it like huge benefits to society often turn out to be less so, to varying degrees.
The advent of the television into our lives, for example, gave us an opportunity to disseminate information, to educate the masses, and to entertain. However, the television, it has been said, is largely responsible for the atomization of society, the breakdown of family ties and traditional forms of entertainment in the home, and worse, the spreading of ideas detrimental to the well being of society in general. None of this was foreseen when John Logie Baird's flickering images first entered our lives.
Where formal education is concerned, the digital 'future' is already upon us. The Internet, we are constantly told, promises to revolutionize education, the laptop computer will enter classrooms changing forever the dynamics of the classroom.
There is no doubt in many people's minds that these advances have indeed the potential to radically alter that way we educate our children, and ourselves.
If, however, these particular advances in technology follow the patterns outlined above, the benefits might be outnumbered by the detrimental effects on our lives as educators and as learners. If computers are going to enter the classroom, will they enhance, replace, or change forever what traditionally goes on inside them ? Or will they have an effect none of us could have predicted beforehand ?
Before such advances are transferred into our lives in the classroom, our motives for wanting such changes should first be examined. Then the things that already happen in the classroom should be considered in order to ascertain whether in fact we want to change them. Do we, for example, want to replace the interaction between teacher and student, and that between fellow students with something else ? Do we want to reduce the importance of books in teaching ? Do we want to alter the individual's private domain ? And last but certainly not least, are we able to say with any degree of certainty whether these changes can be controlled ones ?
The personnel often charged with responsibilities in the decision making process when considering whether or not to adopt such technology in classrooms are usually found to be those people least affected by the changes they so eagerly and persuasively propose.
Technological determinism is not and does not have to be the route educational establishments take, and yet it often is. Having a modern outlook, or just keeping up with new technology, are all poor reasons masquerading as good ones when it comes to the way we talk ourselves into buying new gismos and installing them in places they probably ought not to be.
Consultation, a great deal of thought and research, common sense, and honesty should be the watchwords, rather than ones like fashion and modernity. How we benefit from today's wonderful advances tomorrow will depend on whether we ask the right questions to the right people, and most importantly, whether or not we have the will to say no.
The vexed question of how new technology is going to affect us, however, is not a new one though.
To return, two questions, I have said, need to be addressed. First, why do we want to introduce technology into our classrooms, and second, do we want to change the things that already happen in the classroom ?
The answer to the first depends to a certain extent upon the answer to the second. Part of the answer must surely be though, because we want to improve the quality of learning, and this will surely have implications for the type of learning too. If the answer is anything less than this wish to improve learning, then we should expect other things to be different.
What goes on in the classroom without digital aids ? Teachers teach, and students learn, or at least that's what should happen. If this new interface replaces existing ones, can it perform the functions necessary for the conditions of learning to be improved ? Here we would need to say that technological innovations would not necessarily replace all interaction in the classroom.
Of the four language skills taught in our classrooms, it seems to me that reading and writing could well be aided by the introduction of computers. This has already happened in many institutions, including our own. What seems to be lacking in many is some sort of check on whether CAL assists learning or not, and if it does, how much and in what particular direction. Does, for example, completing cloze-tests on computer screens improve a student's ability to use those structures in his or her own written work. Merely installing what appear to be learning opportunities does not ensure that they are really of value to learning.
The provision of a spell checker on a computer does not really mean that a students ability to spell correctly improves with the use of the device. It may only mean that the learner remembers to activate it at certain intervals in his or her writing. A good thing for one person is not necessarily a good thing for all. Time is saved for those who can already spell, but time is lost for those who cannot. Technological innovations in any field do not of themselves mean improvement in our lives. Remember the TV.
Students' learning styles and teachers' styles of teaching need to be catered for by applications of new technology in education. At present, I think it is fair to say that the former is encouraged by educationalists, while the latter is sometimes actively discouraged. However, if students have different learning styles, then teachers must be both responsive and versatile. Any change in interface between learner and educator would need to be similarly so. Such versatility and responsiveness should surely be possible using new technologies in language classrooms. If this does not happen, it will not be the fault of technology but rather the lack of will to want to install such versatility. For this seems to be a feature of current thinking on the issue, that
some believe that the introduction of computers in classrooms will enable greater control over what happens in them. I equate control with power, the power to impose one's views on others. If those views do not include a wish to retain diversity amongst teachers to facilitate diversity among students, the outcome may be an unintended one. Remember the TV. words

Robert L Fielding
(NB.For details of availability of this article, please contact Robert L Fielding – fieldingrob3@hotmail.com)

Longer article #2.

2006-03-24T07:12:00.000-08:00

Constellations of signification: the crossword compiler’s art (This has been published)

by

Robert L Fielding

This appeared first in
'Mirat Al J'ama' (Mirages)
A Sultan Qaboos University Publication
Issue 50 November 2000
and then later in a modified, reviewed form, in
'UoB News and Views'
A University of Bahrain Publication
Issue No. 57 January-February 2003

The first crosswords appeared in the 19th Century, but the first appearance of a crossword in a British publication was in Pearson’s Magazine in February, 1922, and the first Times crossword appeared on February 1, 1930. Although crosswords appeared first in America, English crosswords developed their own style, and were and still usually are considerably more difficult than their American counterparts. Indeed, the type of crossword we know as ‘cryptic’ is peculiarly English, and so are many of the cultural references and encyclopedic clues in them. However, that is not to say that they cannot be completed by people from other places, and the vast majority of clues are sufficiently universal in construction to be accessible to any user of the English language from any community.

As users of words, we are used to dealing with their meanings, how they collocate with other words, their pronunciation and their spelling. However, when trying to solve cryptic crosswords in newspapers we are often called upon to look at other aspects of words: what they signify as a whole, or what each of their individual letters signifies, as well as their semantic meaning.
The confusion between semantics and semiotics, between meaning and signification, is at the heart of what the compiler does, how he confounds, puzzles, and misleads.

Edward de Bono has coined the term ‘lateral thinking’ to refer to ways of thinking that differ from more ‘normal’ ways. Categorizing items in ways that are unconventional and so leading us to think of alternative possibilities of thinking, is one such way.

For example, if we find the item ‘knife’ in the location ‘living room’ it sounds incongruous. That item is probably more often accompanied by the item ‘food’, or ‘lunch’ or a similar culinary term, and hence more often found in the location ‘dining room’. If neither of these is present, then it might be suggestive of other scenarios. Appearing in a play based on an Agatha Christie novel, for example, it might be associated with the words ‘stab wound’, ‘bloodstain’and labeled ‘murder weapon’. If it does not appear, it may be labeled ‘missing murder weapon’.

Considering the item ‘knife’, it may accompany the item ‘letter to be opened’ in the location ‘living room’, or something akin to ‘makeshift screwdriver’ in the event that the plug on the TV needs a new fuse. And it is precisely this alternative way of viewing items; words and letters that compilers of crosswords utilize to confound and puzzle us in the morning over our tea and toast. Instead of looking for meaning, which is one of the ways we view words, perhaps the main way, compilers use an array of means, more often closer to semiotics than semantics. They use the constellation of significations and associations as well as using ‘meaning’ in its traditional semantic sense, to lure us into their traps. As users of words, we habitually look for the meaning of a word, and it this that causes the delicious confusion in the mornings.

Academics traditionally look for some sort of order to the chaos that is their particular universe.
There is an order to the confusion in crossword clues that appear daily in the newspapers we read, and to substantiate my claim (something else that academics do) I have included a taxonomy of clue types with examples and explanations below. While it is hoped that would-be solvers and even would-be compilers like myself will find it useful and thought provoking, it is admitted that there is no real substitute for doing crosswords; trying to solve them, and looking at the solutions the next day in order to be able to complete one successfully some day.

Conventions, specific uses of terminology, and abbreviation are all common in any discipline. The discipline of the compiler is no exception, and accordingly a list of the more common conventions is provided to help newcomers.

Generally, anagrams are by far the most numerous type of clue to be found in most cryptic crosswords, closely followed by clues in which the whole word appears. Less frequent, but still popular are clues based upon encyclopedic knowledge, clues based around common collocations of words, and clues based upon the sound of a word or letter. Clues that use symbols other than letters, and those that cross word and syllable boundaries are much more unusual, but still worthy of comment and attention.

Conventions in crosswords

Crossword clues are liberally sprinkled with certain conventions, appearing again and again, making them noteworthy here. This list is not fully comprehensive, and you may find ones to add to it. The main thing to understand in thinking about conventionalized pieces of ‘information’ is that they must be sufficiently universal to be understood. Crossword compilers have idiosyncrasies, but they can be recognized with sufficient practice. If you can explain it in rational terms, any crossword clue or any part to a clue is valid; there are no rules except this one.

v/c/d/x as Roman numerals
weekend = K
dunderhead = D/fathead = F etc
4. Fourth of July = Y / air terminal =r
middle of week = EE/E
Ac = account or bill
R = Right/L = Left
North = N etc
E, G, B, D, F = Notes in music, thus ‘noted’
Sapper/engineer = RE (Royal Engineers)
Again = re
Navy = RN
Pound Sterling = L
Team/side = eleven
banker = river
The German = Der/Das

Items associated with the letters of the alphabet, including some common abbreviations associated with each letter.

All standard, well-known abbreviations can be and are used in crossword clues, but the associations of letters with other items are sometimes special, in the sense that they may not strike one as such immediately. Reading the solutions to crosswords does help in this respect. Here are some that readily spring to mind. Be on the lookout for others though.

1.A – article/A1 at Lloyds/A-grade/Grade -A
2. B – bee/spelling bee/B-roads/Bea for Beatrice/Grade B/Musical note
3. C – Hundred (Roman numerals)/ many/see/sea/circa=round about
4. D – old penny/exam grade/note in music/River Dee
5. E - =MC2/east/musical note/East
6. F – Fail grade/musical note
7. G – G-men( Feds)/GI/musical note/Gee!
8. H – dropped aitches/Ho for house
9. I – eye/I/ego/one/1/upright/perpendicular pronoun
10. J - 1st of July/January/jay
11. K – Kay/Quay/thousand/grand/kg
12. L – pounds Sterling/Hell/
13. M – many/abbreviation of Emma
14. N – North/No/Nil/None
15. O – zero/duck/nil/hole
16. P – Pen/originator of writing (pen)/pea
17. Q – queue
18. R – Right/Aarr!
19. S –/South/plurals/ SS for ship/steamer
20. T – tea for two/to a T/T-junction/T-shirt
21. U – U-bend/corner/up/you
22. V – shape/V/VI/IV (Roman numerals)/V-bomber/V-neck
23. W – West/with
24. X – cross/ten (Roman numerals)
25. Y – fourth of July/last of January/you/Why?/Y-fronts
26. Z – last letter/omega/A to Z/Zoo

Anagrams
Anagrams are ‘signposted’ in many ways, but there is a more or less definable pattern. The words, ‘agitatedly’, ‘bad’, ‘broken’, misguided’, ‘upset’, and ‘possibly’ are used in the examples here. The alert reader will notice that all these words are broadly synonymous with the word ‘chaotic’ or ‘mixed up’, signifying that an anagram is called for. In the first example, it as anagram of the word ‘strode’ that is being asked for, with the words, ‘around the head of a bank’ supplying the letter ‘B’(See Conventions above) to complete the conundrum and provide the solution ‘DEBTORS’.

If we were to read the sentence from the traditional point of view of semantics, using the system we know as grammar, we would be able to paraphrase the clue as something like the following:- ‘The people who had borrowed money from the bank surrounded the manager in a worried fashion.’
Appearing as it does in a cryptic crossword however, it means nothing of the sort. The remaining examples are similarly constructed, with some minor differences. See what you make of them.
Examples.
Borrowers strode agitatedly around the head of a bank 7 DEBTORS
When an East ender gets a bad cigar it’s not funny 6 TRAGIC
Something sticking a broken stapler 7 PLASTER
Gangs of assorted mates 5 TEAMS
It definitely shows one’s a poor misguided fathead 5 PROOF
If upset by the dog having no tail, it’s still a pet’s name 4 FIDO
Possibly useless harangues at the airport. 6 HANGAR

b) The word appears in the clue in full

This type of clue is probably the easiest to solve, but they do sometimes confound us.
Take the clue: ‘Capital city in Czechoslovakia.’ A colleague of mine gladly and quickly supplied his answer, PRAGUE, and was astonished when I told him the answer was ‘OSLO’.
The words in the clue that include the solution are usually phrased in such a way as to mislead, but the semantic clue is invariably given to assist in the solution, though as already stated, it may be ‘hidden’.
Examples.
No love from a stranger 5 ANGER
In the dictionary, a word meaning ‘ruling’ 5 EDICT
For me also loveless, they can be sustaining. 5 MEALS
Repair a bad situation in the Aleutians HEAL

c) Collocations

Were it not for the fact that much of what we say and write is idiomatic in the sense that it is heavily collocational, the job of crossword compilers would be far more difficult. All the clues point to well known collocates. With the clue for the word ‘duty’, the compiler could have used the other word that collocates with it; ‘free’, for example. Hence, the clue might have read, ‘Drinks are free of it outside the country.’ To take a dim view of something is quite a common utterance, though these things do go out of fashion.

Examples.
Piping? 3 HOT
One is obliged to do it or pay it 4 DUTY
Sort of view one may take of a power cut 3 DIM
Actor’s assistant, possibly Welsh 7 DRESSER

d) Encyclopedic knowledge

With General Knowledge crosswords, the trouble is that you either know the answer or you don’t. If you don’t, knowing where to find the answer is the next best thing. So it is with clues calling on one’s encyclopedic knowledge, and for that reason they are not as rewarding. You either know the answer or you do not, whereas all the other types of clues invite you to think laterally. Here are a few examples to illustrate my point. If you have never heard of Charles Dickens’nom de plume, then there isn’t much to be done except hope the other lines fill in the squares for you.
Examples
Spider on the snooker table 4 REST
Writer of Dickensian sketches 3 BOZ (‘Sketches by Boz’ is a series of short stories by Charles
Dickens.)
Moorish battle location 7 MARSTON (Marson Moor is the site of a very famous battle in English
history.)
South African boys 5 NATAL (Nat and Al are both boys’ names. NATAL is a province in South
Africa)

e) Collocations from encyclopedic knowledge

Again, if you do not know the name of the song known colloquially as Danny Boy, or The Londonderry Air then there isn’t much you can do about it. However, even if you do, you might not understand the conundrum, which is why the compiler phrased it in the way s/he did.
Examples
That boy with an air 5 DANNY (‘Danny Boy’ is in first line of the song ‘The Londonderry Air’)
Are they all named Atkins? 7 TOMMIES (Tommy Atkins-name of British soldier)
It’s deep in old Ethiopia ABYSS (Abyssinia is the former name of what is now Ethiopia)

f) Plays on letters

With these types of clues we are back in the realm of thinking about words and letters in a different way. The clue that reads, ‘White, like a layer of eggs’, the pun works several ways. The semantic clue is ‘white’, and the words ‘like’ provide ‘AS’, the words ‘a layer of eggs’ providing the remaining part ‘Hen’ giving the completed word ‘ASHEN’. Thinking of a hen as a layer of eggs, which is precisely correct, but not usually stated that way, provides us with the difficulty. Splitting the word ‘ashen’ into two parts also adds to the confusion.
In all the examples, the semantic portion of the clue is ‘hidden’ in a sentence or phrase written in such a way as to deceive. Having the solution does help though.
Examples
Speak rhetorically of the love for speed 5 ORATE
American soldiers method of operating a device 5 GISMO
White, like a layer of eggs 5 ASHEN
Trouble the medical officer just in case 6 MOLEST

g) Conundrums based upon encyclopedic knowledge

Examples
Mendelssohn’s cat 5 FELIX (The composer Mendelssohn’s first name was Felix, which is also the
name of a cat in a well known cartoon.)
Simple saint 5 SIMON (‘Simple Simon’ is the subject of a well known children’s nursery rhyme. Simon
was one of the apostles.)
When to make a start as PM 2,4 AT NOON (PM is the abbreviation for Prime Minister, and, in
lower case, post meridian.)
Game in which men get pushed around 5 CHESS (The pieces in a chess set are known as ‘men’.)
Conqueror written of as “Just” WILLIAM (William was the name of the incorrigible schoolboy in
Richmal Compton’s novel ‘Just William’.)

h) Clues based on sounds
Examples
.
When high suspicion is voiced, avoid being discovered 4,3 FIND OUT (Fine doubt=high
suspicion.)
She sounds Indian. 3 SUE (Sioux Indians)

i) Clues that cross word and syllable boundaries
Examples

Get away from the house adjoining the mine 3,2 HOP IT (Ho = house/pit = mine)

j) Clues that use symbols other than letters
Examples

Of these beasts, the wild one is about to get a cross 4 OXEN
Does it mean nothing chaps 4 OMEN
See a bar as smart C-LEVER

k) Combinations of types of clue
Examples

I leave the air terminal with a Russian 4 IGOR (air terminal =r)
Fear of an ancient deity, I see PAN-IC

l) Clues that use coincidence
Examples

A films star’s gratitude 6 T-HANKS (Tom Hanks)

m) Clues that use the different meanings of a word.
Examples

Concealing a bad defeat HIDING

n) Clues that use conventions
Examples

Sorceress accompanied round about WITcH

The compiler’s ‘constellation of associations’ for the word ‘damage’

The common enough word ‘damage’ provides the compiler with a mine of possible clues and their sources. Here are just some of them. Being aware of the possibilities open to the compiler helps the would be solver, but there is no real substitute for attempts, and looking up the solution the day after. In that way, it is possible to ‘get used to’ the way the compiler works, though well constructed crosswords are seldom simple, and that is their chief appeal, perhaps, that and the fact that cryptic crosswords, if completed, yield insights into certain facets and aspects of letters, words, and their meaning and associations. Above all, I feel that solving cryptic crosswords of the kind dealt with above is a valuable means of staying sharp, and seeing language for what it is, a system of manipulations of symbols that accords with certain of our cerebral networks, and a means of enlarging and increasing them.
Any possible association, abbreviation, or meaning can be used to make the clues more difficult to solve.
Word damage (6 letters)
Parts of speech Noun (countable) Verb (transitive/regular/infinitive)
Colloquial use What’s the damage? = How much does it cost?
Collocation No damage/brain damage/extensive damage/fire damage
Collateral damage
Associations D = Grade/Capital of Denmark/4th letter of the alphabet/Delta/
Shape of letter
Dam---Reservoir bank/mother/sounds like the curse word
Am—morning/ante meridian/part of the verb ‘to be’ reversed Master
Age—Length of time/long time/adjective meaning to grow old
Conventions: d = capital of Denmark
d = head of Dudley
D =Name = Dee (Simon Dee/ Dee as first name)
D = dunderhead
D = first of day
D = last of the dead
D = third consonant in the alphabet
D = sound of prefix in ‘detoxification’/ ‘devalue’ etc
D = last letter in regular past tense verbs
D = Exam grade (ie. Just passed/lowest pass grade)
D = Musical note (Doe, a deer, a female deer)
Synonyms of harm, injury, destruction, hurt, abuse, vandalism, ruin, havoc,
of ‘damage’: accident, loss, suffering
Synonyms of two words make up one word in the solution.Possible clues Era of the mother
based upon Mother’s years
associations: How old the reservoir is
NB. Clues are invariably written as propositions/sentences
in order to ‘disguise’ the clues’ real significance .to would be solvers of the puzzle.
Reservoir’s time
Length of time reservoir has been there
Anagrams: Made with the leader of Guernsey
Madge mixed up with Ann initially
Dunderhead with time in the morning
Dingus Magee first, initially
Clues that include anagram:
Hurt Madge and Ann initially. Dam(A)ge
Possibly meade in the capital of Germany, it’s destruction. Dama(G)e
Dunderhead with time in the morning to hurt D(am)age
Dingus Magea initially broken up to injure D(amage)
Sounds: Curse +Less quiet page (Page-p / Note convention of p for quiet/ pianissimo)
Dam(n) + page-p = age
Clues based on sound: Soundly curse less quiet page means destruction
Sound blasted era
Phrases such as ‘we hear’ convey that the sound of a word or part of a word is being offered as the clue or part of the clue.
Distortions-------------------dam + age— d + am + age

NB. If you are not aware that a particular word even exists, the constellation of associations and meanings surrounding the word will be unknown to you are unlikely to get the solution. The real beauty of this type of puzzle is that it is possible to work out what the word you need is by using the ‘logic’ I have outlined above. In this sense, crossword clues are not merely time fillers, but do exercise the mind in ways that are sufficiently unusual for them to be novel and appealing.

More often than not, compilers of cryptic crosswords use words that are in current use, it depends, possibly, on what sort of a fix they get themselves into doing the compiling. Crossword compilers are human too, you know.

Robert L Fielding

Mixed genres #1.

2006-03-24T06:10:00.000-08:00

TURKISH CARPETS
The art of weaving carpets was born out of necessity; the need to keep out the extreme cold of the steppes of Asia.
The migrating yoruks, the nomadic people of Central Asia, learned to use goat hair to make their tents and their yurts.
Since goat hair is much longer and stiffer than sheep’s wool, and perhaps more plentiful, it was used in a technique known as flatweave, and made the tents waterproof and windproof. However, the yoruks needed also to protect themselves from the damp rising from the ground, and applied the same techniques to making floor coverings, which they called ‘kilims’.
At this time of pagan belief, as designs came to be used on kilims, stylized depictions of worshipped gods came to be woven into the floor coverings. It would also have been only natural for the women weaving their rugs to portray objects, creatures, symbols from their lives of hardship on their way to more prosperous lands.
The yoruks also used kilims as blankets against the cold. It is easy to imagine fathers and mothers telling their sleepy children stories and pointing to the designs on their coverings before sleep made little eyes heavy. Pelts were used, adding pile to the basic flatweave to give some comfort and much needed warmth to blankets, floor-coverings, and to coverings on cradles, their corners tied to the tent poles overhead so that mothers could rock them back and forth to lull their babies to sleep.
Later on, the same materials and techniques were used to make the saddle-bags for the horses and camels that must have played a vital part in the transporting of homes across vast barren stretches of land.
On the move, all these materials could be folded and thrown on a horse’s back quickly and easily, making nomadic life more bearable for the womenfolk.
Knotted carpets were made, and the oldest surviving pile carpet was discovered in the grave of a Scythian prince in the Pyrak valley in the Altai Mountains of Siberia and what is now Mongolia. This carpet is at present displayed in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. This carpet was woven with the Turkish double knot and contains no less than 347,000 knots per square metre (255 per square inch) and has been carbon-dated to have come from the 5th Century BC. The Pazyryk or Altai carpet has a sophisticated design and weave displaying a long history and tradition of carpet weaving. Robert L Fielding

PATTERNS OF LIFE
by
RAMAZAN TURKOGLU *

The pattern of life and I do not just mean the life of my wife, my children,
our family, but I mean the life of our people, this pattern is something bigger
than all of us. It is decreed by the will of Allah who is looking over us, and
so it is right that everything we do reflects his will, in the patterns of our
life.

Birth and death, the joining together of two people, the bringing into this
world of new believers, woven into this pattern of our lives.
Everything around us, above our heads, and below our feet, running through our
veins, coursing in our bodies, is the blood of our fathers, and their fathers,
our ancestry within this same pattern, and this goes on and on.

In our houses, on our floors, where our children play their games in the cold
nights of Anadolu, there are carpets covered with patterns, and these patterns
represent the patterns of our lives, our hopes, our wishes for the future, for
our children, and for their children, and also for this earth which nourishes us
and keeps us, by the will of Allah.

This rug is called by us, naklemi hali, and the symbols that represent the
reality of our spirit on this earth, are harmonious, they express the wish for
happiness, for fertility, and for protection. That is all. What is there that is
worth more than these few words, and what lies behind them? Here, in Anadolu,
where the ground is hard, and the soil rough and stony, the weather above us
cruel and harsh for us that live in this part of our earth, we measure our
happiness, not as some do, by the wealth of possessions, but by the fulfillment
of life, living under a sky, upon a stony land, watching the patterns of life
unfolding daily. A person dies, a baby comes to one of us, this is life,
together in something that is bigger than riches, bigger than personal ambition,
bigger than fine clothes, costly jewellery, but not bigger than a child playing
on a rug, warm, well fed, watching for its mother's smile, a pat on the head
from its father.

On this rug you will find the edges are filled with running water, dragons,
scorpions, and stars. Running water stands for fertility, and purification. It
is good for water to symbolize these things, for that is what water does for our
bodies. It purifies and cleanses, and being pure and clean, we are fertile. Our
womenfolk are fecund, and we, the men of our village are virile and strong. pure
in our love for the one woman in our life, and the children that she bears us.

Dragons and scorpions protect us, for even under the sky, willed by Allah, we
need protection from those who would do us harm. The wild beasts of the
mountains would tear us limb from limb, but being creatures of Allah's creation,
they are free from blame, shameless, and at least they do not defile our names,
that is left to our kind.

The wolves in their lairs, know that we are sad crawlers on the hills, and we
must sometimes go that way to feed our beasts, so that they in their turn can
feed us.

The stars look down, and they are looking even when we cannot see them in our
daylight. They are still watching us, so we find our happiness under the stars,
even under those we cannot see, and so they represent our happiness.

Our children play under the stars, and they play on our rugs, with stars all
around the edges, and with the will of Allah, they will be happy, as we, their
mothers and their fathers are happy.

*Ramazan Turkoglu is a nom de plume of Robert L Fielding

DISCOVERING WRITING

2006-03-24T06:05:00.000-08:00

This appeared in
'UoB News and Views'
A University of Bahrain Publication
Issue No. 58 - March-April 2003.

Introduction
I was prompted to write this brief exploration into what is involved in writing, which I have entitled, 'Discovering Writing', chiefly by my own love of writing. I have been a writer since I was old enough to scratch a pencil across a piece of paper.
From those early years, perhaps my 3rd or 4th, to this my 51st, I have written things down. I have filled diaries. I particularly remember the diary I had prior to going up to university in 1984.
Much, much earlier, I had written poems about the hills around my home in Saddleworth, and the birds that flew up in front of me whilst walking about in my beautiful corner of England.
I wrote a collection of notes for birdwatchers when I was about eleven years old, and this is probably still gathering dust at my parents' house.
Whether I have been writing letters to friends and relatives, short stories, poems, newspaper articles or academic ones, I have always found writing a very enjoyable activity. I have found out what I wanted to say through writing, and I have discovered a side of myself I didn't know existed. That, for me is the benefit of writing, finding something out about yourself that you never knew. If you can do that, as well as entertain your readers, you will never look back. You will be glad you started to write.

1-
You can write.
Writing is the skill most of us learn after acquiring speech, and after speaking, it is our main means of communicating with each other. It is one of our basics, arguably the most important after reading and speaking, yet how many of us write. We write letters to our friends and relatives, notes to the milkman, and that's about it.
Yet writing for our own pleasure or for someone else's is a great way of finding out about ourselves; perhaps the best way. And since the invention of printing, reading the writings of others has been one of our most important recreations.
We read what others have written, but it doesn't always have to be that way round. We can write, you can write, and others can read what you have written, and as well as you finding out about yourself, other people can find out something about you, as well as finding out something about the world and everything in it. Perhaps you have felt a need to put something down on paper. Just the act of writing a letter to a friend to say what you have been doing will make you think, make you remember something you did, and make you relive it and enjoy it once more. For unlike speaking to someone, which is also therapeutic, writing is permanent; you can reread it, go over it in your mind and rewrite it. And in the writing of it you can discover new meaning, new significance in what you have done. That is how writing teaches us something about ourselves.

Writing about something we know about but haven't actually done, or about somebody we know about but haven't actually met, this kind of writing, to be read by ourselves or sometimes by others, is called creative writing. You create a person, an event, an idea or whatever, and what you have created remains yours. Someone said that our mistakes are the only things that we can truly call our own, but I reckon we can also claim our thoughts put down in print as our very own.

Sure, you might say that there is nothing new, that someone has written it all before, but is that really true? Shakespeare wrote tragedies, comedies and historical dramas, Agatha Christie wrote whodunnits, Charles Dickens wrote about the times he lived in, but that still doesn't mean everything's been covered; your thoughts are still unique, as unique as you are.
The things inside our heads, our thoughts and our feelings, are what can make us vulnerable, and if sharing our innermost thoughts can be threatening, how much more intimidating is it to have those thoughts on paper, for all to see and confront us with. Creating in writing is a bold step, but once taken can be the way to increase personal confidence. It is this making a commitment to your views that brings about confidence; the confidence to say what you believe. But take heart, it's not vital that anybody else reads your first efforts. The act of writing is the thing, it's a beginning, a start to finding out something you didn't know about yourself. Sharing that new knowledge with a partner, friend or confidant is a step in the direction of greater psychological health, for you and your partner, for your relationship, and for your life.

Like you, every writer has felt a need to write; physical, or mental, or both. Dickens had to write to prevent himself and his family going the way of his father; into prison for debt, and because he felt compelled to comment on and criticize the world he had been born into. Hemingway was driven by his sense of adventure, expressing the things he experienced in perhaps the only way he could, and in the way only he could.

Jane Ellice Hopkins said, 'Gift, like genius, means an infinite capacity for taking pains.' Dickens, Hemingway and Shakespeare had this infinite capacity, but maybe they weren't aware they had it until they started writing. Another better known aphorism is that there's a book in everyone. Those who have already started to write have realised the truth of this, and have started to discover their infinite capacity for taking pains.

The exercise I recommend you try at this stage is to identify some of your needs to write, which will not always be your openly stated reasons for wanting to write. Above all, be honest with yourself.

-2-
But can you read? Learning from what you read.

To write you need to read, but having read, the thing is not to copy but to develop your own style of writing, or I should say, styles, for different genres require different styles.
Within the genre of the short story, for example, it is obvious that a tale about the gold rush in the Yukon will be written in a different style to a story about a suburban dilemma in England.
I prefer to use the term 'voice' when talking about any particular style. As you write words down, you will hear them in your head, and if they sound right, and are consistent your, audience will attune to them whilst reading. In the same way, whilst reading a short story, you will get used to the writer's 'voice' in the words s/he has written. The more you read, the more 'voices' you will hear, and your repertoire of 'voices' will increase.
I have no intention of telling readers which books to read. We all have our favourite authors and our favourite subjects; some prefer detective novels, some sci fi, and some horror stories. The point in reading to improve your writing is not to necessarily move away from your favourites, but to notice things whilst reading them.
There are several things you will already have noticed in your reading, and some others you may not have. The structure of the novel or short story is one thing to notice, although the structures of short stories vary enormously from those of novels, and for a very good reason; the novelist has much more space and time to develop characters, for instance, or to describe scenes.
The question, 'Who is telling the story?' is an important one. In the marvelous novel by Charles Frazier, 'Cold Mountain', the story is narrated by two characters, Inman, and his former love, Ada, and the story switches from one to the other until they meet at Cold Mountain, after the journey Inman takes to get back to her. This is not an uncommon way of telling a story; Dickens uses a similar technique in 'Bleak House'. But there are others, plenty of others, and the distance from the action can also vary with whoever is relating it. The all-knowing author is one, and maybe characterised by such writers as Jane Austen, or Sir Walter Scott. But more usually, in modern novels, the writer gives clues to the reader, rather than stating in overt terms what the reader's conclusions must be. In 'The Bonfire of the Vanities', Tom Wolfe never really offers an opinion on the central character, Sherman McCoy, but rather, through the things he says and does, gives the reader pretty clear indications that the man is heading for a fall, despite his own feeling of invincibilty, and the title helps too. However, plot is something I wish to deal with later in this series, so let's leave it there, for the time being.
The point about who does what in anything you happen to be reading is that you notice it, notice and remember. For then you will have choice, and that is what ultimately gives a writer freedom; the freedom to tell the tale in the way s/he wants to create an impression on the reader. The impression the reader gets from reading is her/his own business, there are as many interpretations of any particular piece of fiction as there are readers of it. I would say that the best a writer can hope to do is to keep the reader interested, keep her/him turning the pages.
Besides the structure of the novel; the plot and the identity of the narrator, the next thing to notice, and probably the more difficult, is the language the writer uses. At sentence level, for example, it is easy to notice that Hemingway uses much shorter sentences that Jane Austen, but within sentences, the words writers use will be different too, as will the structuring of each sentence, and this will, of course, vary from sentence to sentence. There is a great deal of difference between: 'the cat sat on the mat', and 'the mat was sat on by the cat' using a very simple example. But might not the writer have written, 'the cat matted down', or 'the cat flopped matward'? The main difference as far as grammar is concerned is that the first two sentences are conventional, whereas the second two are not; the former uses what appears to be a new word, 'matted', and the latter a portmanteau word of my own coining. Either way, the same thing happened; the cat sat on the mat. What I'm getting at is that all four sentences have a different feel about them, a different 'voice'. Noticing the linguistic tricks writers use is one of the steps to becoming a better writer, and a more alert reader. The different ways writers use words cannot be just put into the simplistic pigeon-holes; formal and informal. Better is, how salient is the action being described, or how incidental? In the examples above, the first two sentences seem to give the cat's sitting itself on the mat some kind of prominence, whereas the second two treat the cat's action as something incidental to what is really going on, making it sound trivial.
Which one the writer chooses may depend on this salience rather than on any aspect of grammar, but more of grammar later.
A nice exercise after reading this might be to pick up any four novels at hand, and open them at any page to read and notice any differences in 'voice' you can identify, and then, having noticed that there are some, to examine what it is that makes them different. To read through the words to get at the action is one thing, to stop at them to see how your attention is being manipulated is quite another.

-3-
There's a book in everybody, is there one in you?

Whether this question can be answered positively in your case, doesn't really depend on a reply like, 'It depends if you've got what it takes.'
In one sense, everybody's got what it takes, the discovery of what 'it' is, is a journey you must take before you can find out. That journey might be arduous, but it will be enjoyable, it will be tiring, but it will also be rewarding, so take it. If you don't, you'll never know, will you?
You could do a lot worse than by starting with a short story, not because this is any easier than writing a novel, but because it is a shorter process; two thousand words takes less time than two hundred pages. You need to be determined, not discouraged, and although it is certainly true that the two require different skills, some learnt in the writing of shorter pieces can be transferred in the writing of longer ones.
Some schools tell their would be authors to start with what they know, and this is good advice. The pitfalls in this approach are that you might know your subject so well that you unconsciously assume the same of your reader. I once wrote what I thought was a hysterical monologue about the place I was brought up, only to find out when reading it aloud to my friends, that the references were incomprehensible, and thus removing the comedy for them.
Mentioning enough, but not too much versus not mentioning nearly enough always sees the first the victor over the second, a poor third being mentioning too much. It's the same way when you tell a joke; overdoing it kills the humour, underdoing it cuts out the humour altogether.
Trying out your efforts on a disinterested party will have the effect of bringing you up short if you are guilty of either.
So, you have an idea for a story. You could do a lot worse than starting by trying to imagine who you are writing for.
And by this, I do not mean, just Fred and Lilly next door, but rather, adults or children, or adolescents, and then sharpen your focus; Fred and Lilly wanting something light to read whilst waiting for their flight to be announced on an airport monitor screen, Fred still wanting light reading while dinner is cooking, or heavier stuff to be read when there's more time, say at weekend.
If you are intent on teaching your reader something, forget writing and become a teacher. Like the readers' impressions, any lessons to be found in your writing is up to them.
Generations of avid readers of Tolkien's 'The Lord of The Rings' have doubtlessly read all sorts of things into that marvelous book, but Tolkien himself once said that he 'cordially disliked allegory'.
If a person reading your work finds allegorical meaning on every page, that's up to her/him, but trying to put it there could be perceived as an imposition on a reader, and readers so imposed on usually stop reading.
Don't try to do too much. A small incident you remember may be enough. The very fact that you have remembered it at all may mean that it has enough in common with the human condition to render it interesting to those who are only being told about it.
Make a start, but don't start too early; what you had for breakfast that morning may only have significance if you happen to vomit before lunchtime. Remember the evils of mentioning too much. And remember your limitations; 2000 words come up very quickly, even quicker than your fried breakfast, if that's what you are writing about. Initially in writing, you are the only judge; writing is a lonely pastime. Once you've put it down on paper however, it becomes everybody's property, to disembowel, poke fun at, or just throw away unread. I said that writing for others can be intimidating, and I meant it.
The exercise today then could go something like this; rummage in your memory for an incident, which you think would stand being read about. Don't start writing straight away, dwell on it, turn it over in your mind, talk to anyone else who can recall it with you; you might have forgotten an important part. Sleep on it, then try it out. Once you have written even part of it, reread it to see if it's going where you want it to go, and if you're feeling brave, let somebody else read it. But it is maybe better left till it's complete, paper's cheap enough. -4-
Getting started.
So you've already started to write about the incident you remembered, and now you've dried up, you've run out of things to say, and the blank page in front of you is a constant reminder to you that you haven't got what it takes. Wrong. The best writers in the world, past and present, have all gone through what you're going through right now. Just how you cope with it is up to you. My reply to the question, How do you cope with a writer's block? I keep writing through it, which sounds facetious, but that's one way. And when you've found your touch again, throw away the rubbish you wrote getting through your block and start up again. Writers' rubbish bins are full of false starts, the better the writer, the fuller the bin. Above all, do not despair. The loneliness of writing means you can't turn to anybody for help. You're on your own. And coming through it on your own will boost your self-confidence, and remove your doubts. We're not talking open heart surgery here, if you mess it up, start again. Enough encouragement.
I believe there's such a thing as the story leading the writer on, which is an approach I sometimes try when I get stuck.
Consider the opening sentences:- The man entered the building.
Now if we substitute words, and add words, we get the beginning of a scenario. Here goes:-
1. The man entered the room. (add your own adverb)
2. The woman entered the room.(change 'room')
3. The child entered the room nervously. (continue with 'because'
4. The Minister entered the conference hall confidently.(continue with; but soon....)
If you added the word 'happily' to the first sentence, you have already committed yourself to something that has already happened, or is about to happen, and so it is with any adverb you choose. Similarly, if you chose to replace 'room' with 'doctor's surgery' in the second, then you have placed yourself in a certain array of scenarios, it's up to you.
A word of advice though, don't reveal everything too early unless you feel the need to; you have to have somewhere to go with your story.
Now you can play with these sentences forever or until you hit on something that stirs something in you. This might seem like child's play, but it serves to illustrate what I'm talking about; getting your head in gear and your pen in your hand.
Of course, you may be one of those fortunate people for whom words trip gaily from your pen. A word of warning here too; dashing down anything and everything that comes to mind may well work for you, but then again, you may find in the rereading that you have wandered off course. It's so easy to do, and no less enjoyable for that either.
Re-reading and re-writing is your safety net; you can do what you please, with the proviso that what you do gets you some way towards where you want to go.
The words you write constrain you, but they also give you direction. I spoke earlier about the story leading you on, and that is how it happens.
The alternative to this, and one that the novelist must use, is the planning of a story. You leading it, rather than the other way round.
An exercise this week might go along the lines of trying both approaches; firstly using sentences similar to the ones above for the story that leads, and for the planned approach, to jot down ideas, do some thinking, then some writing. This will leave you having written two stories, not a bad start.

-5-
You too can be a Master of The Universe!
Writing is an art, or at least it can be, and in art anything is possible. Anything can be used in any way, as long as it intensifies the image it seeks to create, so it is with writing.
Becoming a writer means seeing significance in what most people regard as insignificant. Noticing things in your everyday world as well as noticing things in your reading, and so you should start to be more aware and jot things you notice down on paper for later use perhaps
Significance can be used to intensify meaning or lessen it, but like all good things should only be used sparingly, and with thought. An overuse probably has the opposite effect to the one intended by the writer; overuse numbs, anaesthetizes, and deadens the reader's senses.
However, finding significance, and using it well can replace half a page of description, and so is invaluable to the short story writer, limited by space.
Have you ever seen one of those balancing toys; a trapeze artist on a unicycle, who can balance on a washing line because his outstretched arms hold poles with weights on the end, lowering his centre of gravity to a point just below the line on which he cleverly balances.
I saw one every day for three weeks recently while on holiday, in my father in law's garden, and I thought it as having some significance.
This week's exercise is to choose a variety of referents for this cleverly designed toy. Think about it; in choosing an object, which would be the most appropriate, think of a situation, or a person in a situation, and apply it to that.
Here is my application;
'John, feeling that his life had come to a standstill, contemplated the little man balancing on the line in front of him. The toy was incapable of movement; up or down, right or left, forwards or backwards.
"That's me," he said to himself, and shrugged his shoulders involuntarily.' The toy has one fairly clear characteristic with which 'John' can identify with, and perhaps more importantly, which the reader can recognize. And he remarks upon it, which is a quick, easy way of telling the reader.
But that is by no means the only way the toy could be used, nor is it the best way; that depends on your person, the situation, predicament, or whatever, but most of all it depends on your imagination, your ability to focus the reader's mind to your way of thinking about a problem.
Anything can be used in this way, and it doesn't have to be an object either, an action would do too.
So, two exercises this week; the second being to choose an object or an action, or anything, and use it to signify something, some emotion, somebody, whatever. My limitations are yours; three sentences, in which to mention the object, the person, and a hint of the situation.

-6-
Your resources; the world and everything in it.
There's a world out there, you know, and there's one inside your head too. Strange as it may seem, there's probably a bigger, more wonderful world in your imagination than exists spinning through space.
And in your writing you can choose either; the world out there, or the one in your head. Writers choose both, one or the other, but more likely a mixture of both. Tom Clancy, the writer of thrillers, uses his painstaking research to flesh out the world of his imagination. James Joyce used his vast knowledge of language, literature, and myth to fill a dream in Finnegans Wake.
I wrote earlier about writing about what you know, writing for the world of your experience. That needs a minimum of research, but something merely related is not telling a story, it's writing a diary. To make it into a story requires something else, that something else is your imagination. The event you focus on occurred in real time; A preceded B, or did it? Maybe somebody did something, or said something, but that doing or saying was preceded by thought, or was it? And what is time anyway, if not elastic. You can go to and fro through it as you wish, taking the reader with you using little signposts to tell her/him where you are. Your imagination can ask the question: What if? Plant that question in the reader's mind and you open up a vast cluster of possibilities. More importantly, you get the reader to ask the same question, to think, to apply those thoughts to his/her own life, and that makes for good reading.
The realm of pure imagination in fiction is the world of sci-fi, but yesterday's sci-fi can become today's reality: the novels of HG Wells and Jules Verne. Perhaps a better denomination would be 'i-fi'; 'idea-fiction, which could then include the works of Tolkien, Mervyn Peake and many, many more.
All genres of fiction impose their difficulties; the world of human drama involves the problem of what I would call 'believability'; calling on your understanding of human nature must accord with your reader's.
We are all bound by earthly laws, and although our thoughts can develop along lines that are illogical, the reader needs a system of consistent signs to help fathom the logic, or the apparent lack of it.
With sci-fi, the writer can impose logic, overturn gravity, people a planet with strange beings, travel faster than the speed of light, but is still compelled to bring the reader along into this 'new world', thus allowing attempts at forecasting, understanding the future by referring to what has gone before.
Writing 'i-fi' means no less dedication, probably more. To understand the strange, convoluted world of 'Gormenghast' in Mervyn Peake's trilogy, is to more fully enjoy it. And it is to get inside Peake's world, his imagination, and go with him through it. It is to lose oneself in a world created only by words. If you can do that in your writing, you're on your way to becoming a great writer.
A lot to take in this week, so a variety of exercises. One; take your remembered event and put a time scale on it. Decide what comes first, the thought or the deed. If what happened caused an effect, is there something in the outcome that could have been foretold before it?
Two; create a small world of your own. You don't have to go too far. Imagine your cat can tell you about his day, describe the things in your lawn at people level, or any minute world, which is not ordinarily open to us humans.
Whichever one you undertake, the main thing to do is to think. Think and imagine, the forerunners to good writing.

-7-
Language; words, grammar, and convention.
The artist; the poet, the painter, the sculptor, and the writer of fiction, can all seek recourse to 'poetic licence'. The poet uses assonance, the painter and the sculptor, proportion, and the writer; the writer has all sorts of devices s/he can use.
Linguists have recently realised that grammatical structure and what they call lexis; words, are much more closely related than was formerly thought. Grammar and lexis, plus punctuation; language, is the medium the writer works in.
Within structure, the writer is 'free' within broad and clearly defined boundaries; s/he must be grammatically correct, which sounds rather stifling and somewhat old-fashioned. It is within the realm of lexis that writers find real freedom, coining their own words, which includes all the parts of speech, with the possible exception of articles and prepositions.
Hamlet says, "it out-herods Herod", Dylan Thomas regularly uses words in his own unique way; 'jellyfishing', 'Bible black and starless', and 'viper through her', and many more in his panoply of language, 'Under Milkwood'.
Notice the parts of speech replaced here; Hamlet uses the name of Herod, the tyrannical king of Judaea, as a verb with 'out'. He could have said, 'outdoing Herod'. 'Jellyfishing' is not fishing for jellies, but is a verb that Thomas used to replace something like 'flooding over', 'Bible-black' is a compound adjective to describe the darkness of the night, and 'viper', a noun, is used here as a verb to denote how a downtrodden husband imagines the poison he is about to put in his wife's tea will pass through her body.
Here is the mixing of structure and lexis the linguists talk about. But is it English? It is, creative English. The days of absolute correctness in prose are gone, if they were ever here.
The point about being creative with language is not being clever with it, but using it to heighten meaning.
Lewis Carroll showed how words that don't exist, could do, if our 'rules' of spelling were applied further. He used portmanteau words like 'slithy', and purely non-existent words like 'vorpel' and 'mimsy' to relate the tale 'Jabberwocky', making Alice puzzled but certain something horrible had happened.
The coining of entirely new words seems to belong to the world of scifi, but was their a word 'hobbit' before Tolkien wrote about one?
Joyce's Finnegans Wake reads like the clues to some fabulously esoteric crossword puzzle, and must have been a nightmare for the typesetters who produced it, but a master like James Joyce is allowed his literary convolutions. He wrote 'the Wake' to "keep professors busy for years", and to synthesise language to do the things he wanted to do and say the things he wanted to say.
To be honest, coining new words, or using old ones in a new way, seems to be moving nearer to poetic language, and so care should be taken. You could get away with it in a fantasy but perhaps not in a social drama.
Using pronunciation creatively is far more constraining, but can be done. The word 'yes' could be written as, 'Yes!' or 'Yes?' This is not entirely creative, for the word is frequently used in speech in this way. It takes a little more mental gymnastics to write 'No?', but it is authentic nevertheless.
But what can easily be done in speech is more difficult when writing. Remember the little girl, who is asked by her mother to go next door to find out how old Mrs. Smith is, returning with the reply, "She said, 'Mind your own business'"? Making sense of the written version of what the girls mother actually said would be the business of the reader, unless the girls question, "My mother wants to know how old you are" were to be given as well, which defeats the joke somewhat. There is practically no way of indicating intonation other than perhaps by italics or bold type, or by the written reaction of the listener.
Exercises here could go along the lines of turning nouns into verbs or adjectives, and putting question marks behind utterances that are not normally questions to see if they make sense as such. If they don't work, you'd be stretching the reader's patience by using them.
This is all about giving you more choice, more freedom in your writing, and again, it's about making the reader do some work too.

-8-
Style: how to say what you want to say in the way you want it to sound.
Grammar, words, punctuation, sentence length, and repetition all combine to contribute to style. You might read the learned writer Geoffrey Leech on what style consists of and yet still be unable to manipulate your own, in the same way that you might read how to ride a bicycle and then fall off immediately you try to do it.
By far the best way of learning about style is to read different ones.
But that still won't enable you to develop styles of your own. You will already have one style, of course, but it might not suit the writing you want to do, and style can make the difference between being read and not.
As you read, you might notice that there is a relationship between style and what is being written about. I think style acts upon the reader in a disguised form, or let's say that the reader is unconscious of a style until it's perceived as the wrong one for the subject. This might sound to you like being confronted with five closed identical doors and being asked to open only the right one, but there's more to it than that. I have already hinted that attentive readers make better writers, and it's true.
Let's look at the styles in the made up extracts below:-
1. 'Cyd oozed out of the limo, delicious syrup from an upturned jar.
"Hi, honey," she purred, "wanna dance?"'
2. 'Margaret, the secretary, got out of the taxi carefully.
"Would you mind holding these for me, please?" she said.'
3. 'The car screeched to a halt, and the kid shot out like a cat from a backfire. "You want sump'n'?" he menaced.'
Three people getting out of cars and asking questions.
My questions are:
a) Tell me something about Cyd, Margaret and the kid.
b) How do you know the answers to (a)?
c) What helped you; words, grammar or what?
Very simple, but if you have answers to a, b, and c, then style, and the words I used gave them to you. Now you try it with a situation. Feeling what the characters are like will help. Be careful with cliches, there's one in (3) above.
Now for places:-
1. 'The cave he now crept into was totally black. A movement of air across his face told him he was in an enormous gallery. His breathing, irregular from exertion, cascaded round the walls and rushed back at him like a series of throaty explosions.'
2. 'After the cool of the morning, the library felt stiflingly warm, and the fusty smell of unturned pages made John's breathing short and soft.'
3. 'The steam, clamming up nostrils, damping a clean shirt down till it felt soiled, made getting undressed easier.
"Is it always this way?" Replies came in puffs of cloud, lighter than steam, from mouths that couldn't be seen. "Hotter".'
And actions:-
1. 'The deadening inertia bent his legs, his back strained, but slowly the lid came off. The wheels moved, imperceptible to the eye. Tom felt the car inch forward, two feet and the engine roared through the tailpipe, a puff of blue smoke made him cough.'
2. Walking at Jack's pace instead of his own meant that he couldn't get up his own rhythm. The pavement blurred out under his feet, the cracks that would have sounded out a tune in his ears evaporated in this hurrying to get home.'
3. 'The pages flicked past his eye, p-p-p-p- sounding dry and uncreased,
proud p-p polyanthus p-p phonetic. What was the word? 'Parlance: way of speaking as regards choice of words'. That was what he wanted.'
Exercises? You bet. With 'places' find some adjectives I could have used, and with actions, have a go at describing the same ones in a different way. Maybe you could do that with all of them?

-9-
The plot thickens.

The essence of good drama is conflict: 'The King is dead', is a report, 'The King was shot dead', is the beginning, or end of a drama.
'The King was shot dead, and the Queen pined away with grief' is a plot, according to the author E M Forster.
But who shot the King? Somebody with the means and the motive, if not a madman with a gun. Either way, as your story about the assassination of the King unfolds, someone mentioned earlier must have done it. If it happens to be someone who comes in at the last page to do it, then what you have is an imperfect plot, and unsatisfied readers. Take heart though, good writers can do it; Dickens' 'Bleak House' is just such a story with a perhaps less than perfect plot. Hortense, the maid, it turns out, is the person who killed Mr. Tulkinghorn, the lawyer, rather than those who had better reasons.
Suspense, so we are told by Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, occurs when the audience know something the characters in the film do not.
Giving readers information that you withhold from your characters places you in the position of all knowing author, that is unless you make another character let the cat out of the bag for you.
Dragging your readers along through the darkened room without telling anybody that a masked man with a gun is about to pounce on your hero, is another way, but why not use suspense and leave the hero to his own thoughts, to work it out for himself. In that way the reader can join in the working it out, leaving her/his opinions confirmed, or moved in another direction.
The first person narrative style of telling a story can still contain elements of conflict. Place doubts in that person's mind and there's your conflict. She doesn't know what she's going to do next, and neither does the reader.
Your event from your own experience, mentioned ages ago, should have an amount of conflict in it, and by conflict, I do not necessarily mean that blood has to be spilt. A mother expecting her son home by ten and then having to wait till 2am has conflict. A resolution, even better, an unexpected resolution, is what you need for the event to be worth relating in the first place. The main trick with plots, after devising one that is, is to remember it and keep on course. You don't want to back yourself into a corner you can't reasonably get out of just because you forgot what was happening.
In longer work, you'll need sub-plots too; stories within your main story, but this isn't absolutely necessary in a short story; there just isn't time.
Even sub-plots need working to a conclusion though, and one that contributes to the main one too. But all that is for the novelist.
One of the main problems writers of short stories have is that they often give themselves too much to do in the space available. A baffling array of plots and sub-plots will be too much for you to handle, and far too much for your readers. A sensitive treatment of one, fairly minor conflict, with a satisfying outcome, is much better than a super complicated one that is haphazardly resolved, involving weird and wonderful inventions to accomplish it. An intricate plot in a short story may leave the reader with the feeling that it has been heavily contrived, and thus unrealistic. Be fanciful, but not in ways that are overtly so.
I wasn't going to supply an exercise this time, but then I thought...
Think your way through a conflict. Think about each element; a promise broken, or about to be, help not returned, a reaction that wasn't quite the one that was desired or expected, something you have lived, something you maybe haven't.
Jot it or them, down, play with it, think about it, decide who tells it, or if two sides of the same coin will do it better, and remember human nature, whatever you perceive that to be.

-10-
"Dialogue, you say!"

No kitchen sink drama involves everything that is ever said in the kitchen, or anywhere else for that matter. Dramatists don't report conversations, they invent them. They select out what doesn't contribute to the unfolding drama. Were this not so, kitchen sink dramas would go on all night.
Conversational analysis, the transcribing and dissecting of each and every word, every pause, false start and noise made by two or more interlocutors, is incomprehensible to all those except the analyst. Even the persons whose speech has been recorded and transcribed wouldn't recognize the transcription as their own, at first glance. And transcribing conversation is the most time-consuming, tedious activity I can think of. So forget that amount of 'realism', it isn't worth it, and would drive an audience to distraction, not to mention the actors toiling with such a script at rehearsal. The same goes for a story.
For drama, on the stage, or in the pages of a book, is not reality, it is art posing as reality, and that is quite a different thing altogether.
I would say that brevity, clarity of meaning, and precision are what makes good dialogue. But a moment to reflect on what people actually say will help. People don't talk in sentences. That's the first thing. They interrupt, talk at each other while the other person is talking, do not talk when they are bidden. To be masterful at writing dialogue is to be masterful at handling silence, and that goes for actors too. The playwright, Harold Pinter is a master at giving silence meaning.
Brevity, saying enough, and no more is a good watchword, both in writing dialogue and narrative. A character that goes on and on will only be tolerated if that is the personality you give him and make others react to it, otherwise he'll just sound tedious. Jane Austen often gives Mrs Bennet in 'Pride and Prejudice' lots of words, but little to say, and that is how we come to know what she is like. Hemingway's characters are often taciturn, but what they do eventually say has meaning. Clarity of meaning; using words that have salience to the reader, which means being as brief as it takes, is another important characteristic of good dialogue. There might be misunderstanding between your characters; there should be none between them and the reader.
Lastly, precision; by which I mean writing dialogue that has the right amount of meaning. Don't forget that people use many different ways to convey the same meaning. We often say something other than what is expected, as a way of avoiding the subject, often called changing the subject. Done sensitively, it can still have meaning.
All the feelings known to man can be insinuated through words: blind terror, unhappiness, hate, love, sarcasm, comedy, all can be written into dialogue. Every type of response can too; truthful ones, deceitful ones, open- hearted ones, love, hate, any kind you care to name.
So, exercises for this section will be to listen more acutely, even if that means eavesdropping. Listen to the way people refuse, and acquiesce, to the way they give permission, and refuse it, and to the way they change the subject as a way of denying a proposition.
Write a short dialogue that contains an element of conflict, and don't use the words, 's/he said', after every line of utterances. Try to give your characters something to do while they are speaking; people rarely sit still while they are talking unless they happen to be on a train or as bus, and even then they might read a newspaper or unwrap sandwiches. Doing this will make your dialogue less intense, and more realistic too.
Reading dialogue in novels and short stories will give you clues to how it's done, remembering perhaps, that a character from Dickens will not use words in the way they are used today.

-11-
Writing is useful: the function of literature

In Britain, as recently as the first half of this century, whole areas of our biggest cities were covered in slum dwellings. Fortunately, most of them have been cleared away, but in Victorian times, arguably the most prosperous period Britain has ever known, large numbers of people lived in conditions that would not have been out of place in some of the poorest countries on Earth. This anomaly, of a fabulously prosperous country in which many of its population lived in conditions of abject poverty, was seen by some as the failure of the system of government, of mercantilism, and of laissez faire politics in general. Out of such a society grew the British Labour party, which pledged itself to implement social reform, which it did on a grand scale; and the birth of the National Health Service, the 'envy of the world' grew out of such social mayhem.
As well as opinions voiced by philanthropic industrialists, some courageous and determined politicians, and the will of the people at elections, a vociferous opinion has always emanated from the field of the arts and literature. Many famous writers have voiced their discontent publicly at meetings and in their writing. Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Robert Tressell, D H Lawrence, H G Wells and George Bernard Shaw were just such writers. Although they lived at different times, came from very different backgrounds, and wrote in widely varying styles and genres, they nevertheless all shared a discontent with the status quo and the apparent inability of those charged with such things to change for the better the lives of those responsible for the country's wealth.
Dickens' 'Hard Times' showed the failings of a society organised along utilitarian and industrial lines, and its almost willful neglect and inability to feed, clothe and house its people properly, despite the vast wealth made by its entrepreneurial classes.
Orwell depicted the squalor of many people's lives in England in his 'The Road to Wigan Pier', while H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw wrote pamphlets and treatises on social, economical and political injustice in what was supposed to be the home of democracy; Britain.
Writers such as D H Lawrence were as much concerned with the spiritual wellbeing of industrial society as they were with the physical living conditions prevalent in industrial areas, while Robert Tressell's 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' did as much to raise awareness of society's ills as it did to encourage the birth of socialism. Many still regard that 'novel' as the major text extolling the virtues of socialism, and that despite it being ostensibly a work of fiction.
The point I want to make is that the literary figures of the day, arguably amongst the more sensitive portion of the nation's population, saw social injustice as a stain on that nation's accomplishments. They saw it as a devaluing of all that was great or good about Britain.
Works of creative fiction can touch people in ways that other forms of mass communication cannot. The messages they attempt to convey are more believable simply because they possess the quality of altruism and grace.
Perhaps more importantly, literature is able to undermine the intellectual base of dominant ideologies, by illustration and example, and thus remove the moral base upon which such ideologies are founded. Examples abound in popular literature; surely there has never been a finer denunciation of the maxim: The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, than Dickens' portrayal of Jo the crossing sweeper in 'Bleak House' nor a clearer condemnation of the love of money for its own sake than is shown by the fate of George Eliot's Silas Marner.
All such works are usually referred to as 'the classics', which is to say that the truths they extoll have stood the test of time. They are no less valid in the new millenium than they were when they were written, and while there is still injustice, social or otherwise, literature is able to confront it, and bring to our notice the fact that nothing is new in the world. Injustice has a history, as do kings and queens.
If a nation is to improve the life chances of its population, then those who are able to visualize alternatives are invaluable. The raising to public awareness of values that are essential to the healthy growth of a nation is vital if conditions are to improve, and one of the main functions of literature is the raising of that awareness in the public consciousness; the messages that literature in general is still capable of conveying.

-12-
The things to have round you.

The things I have round me when I'm writing? Well, I have a cup of tea, that's essential, and some music, that's essential too, but it may not be for you. I should say that the most important thing to have is space, your own space where you can be quiet, where you can talk to yourself, and where you feel comfortable. Things to have near you; some kind of machine that retains what you've written; a word processor, or a computer. I clung to an old typewriter for years until I discovered the convenience of the micro-chip, but a pen and some paper will suffice if times are hard.
I can put my right hand on a dictionary, a good one, an encyclopedia, my left on a book of quotations, a thesaurus and the Writer and Artists' Yearbook, and that's it. I use a pocket dictionary for spelling and quick checks, and a larger one for more detailed definitions. My encyclopedia gives me detail that can't be found in a dictionary. You could use the Internet, but that might mean leaving your text, and a one volume encyclopedia is quicker anyway; surfing the Net might be enjoyable, but it stops you writing.
My word processor has its own thesaurus, but is nothing like as comprehensive.
A book of quotations comes in handy sometimes; I've used it two or three times writing this.
The Writer and Artists' Yearbook is really only of any use when the thing's finished, more of that later.
Everything else I need is between my ears, or in a novel in my bookcase.
When I'm not writing, when I'm out and about, I should carry a notebook and pencil, but I don't. I've tried it but it was empty after the first week, and by the second I'd forgotten where I'd put it. I don't work that way, but you might, so try it.
One technique I have when going somewhere different, somewhere interesting, is to try to notice two or three things about the place in some detail, and if you happen to notice I'm not in the conversation at one point, that's probably what I'll be doing.
To write with any serious intent is to live and breathe writing. It becomes an obsession. I once asked a prolific author friend of mine how he kept at it. His reply was that writing had got to be a habit he couldn't give up; he had to write. That is how I feel about my writing, and that is how you'll feel if you give it a chance.
Don't go anywhere or do anything without remembering what you are; a writer. Being more aware of your surroundings, your actions, what you say, and what others do and say, is the way to a fuller, more enjoyable life.
It might sound a funny thing to say, but remember to keep yourself fit as well. Sitting at a desk writing isn't the best way of taking exercise, and you'll feel a lot less tired, and a lot more alert if you take exercise regularly.
Forget the image of a room full of cigarette smoke, a whisky bottle half empty, and a writer hard at it creating a masterpiece. That's pure fiction. Surround yourself with everything you need to suit you, get a good night's sleep every night, be joyful, and your writing will be the better for it, suffering for your art went out with Vincent van Gogh.
No exercises. Just get yourself organised, and kitted out with what you need to write. Don't forget paper.

-13-
Getting it into print.

Well, that's the easy part done; you've written your story, and now you want to see it on a bookshelf.
Where you want to see it published will depend on whether you've targeted it's destination thoroughly. If you've been writing the kind of story that normally appears in a woman's magazine, you should familiarize yourself with the content, type and length of stories that regularly appear in it. Check also with an up to date copy of The Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, which will tell you if the magazine you had in mind accepts unsolicited material; some do, some don't.
If you've written a collection of stories and want it to be published, your best bet is to get in touch with an agent, again you'll find details in TW&AY, which also gives good advice on: submitting material, writing for newspapers, writing magazine articles, as well as invaluable stuff on self-publishing, vanity publishing, marketing plays, writing for broadcasting, and copyright laws, as well as a lot of other vital information, plus names and addresses of editors, publishers, literary agents and broadcasting companies. At about $12 a copy, it's great value.
It seems these days that publishers and their agencies are more interested in making money than art. Maybe it's always been that way, I'm not sure. But if a publisher or an agent can be convinced that there's a follow up, or better still, several follow ups to the book you've just written, you might have a better chance of getting it published, provided that is, that it's good enough to warrant reading in the first place.
For unusual one off stuff, it might be worth your while going to a literary magazine rather than to a publisher of books.
'Stand Magazine' takes short stories, poetry, translations and literary criticism, as well as taking entries for its biennial short story and poetry competitions.
'Staple' takes the same kind of material, but doesn't offer competitions.
'Raconteur Magazine Short Story Competition' at 44, Gray's Inn Road, London WC1X 8LR, and the excellent 'Writing Magazine', 'Writers's News', 'Writers' Monthly', and 'Writers' Forum' offer advice to new writers, plus details of short story and poetry competitions. You'll find all the details in The Writers' and Artists' Yearbook.
Just the act of entering writing competitions, let alone winning them, provides great incentive; at least somebody is going to read your story.
Not hearing whether you've won or been short-listed probably means you haven't. You shouldn't be disheartened. Hemingway, it was said, could paper the walls of his room with rejection slips at one time. Don't give up, you need determination, and a belief in yourself and your writing. You need self-confidence, and you'll get it writing. Good luck!

Robert L Fielding

Story #1 from 'OTHER PEOPLE - OTHER WORLDS'

2006-03-24T06:02:00.000-08:00

ANTI-DISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM (NB. This has been published)
by
Robert Leslie Fielding

The last load was put on the pile, and the Leaf Army rested. The Command-ant spoke to his troops. The Leaf Army rose as one and formed the Transport Module. Every ant knew its position, and they quickly joined together without the need for further orders. Particip-ant 2578 linked with Particip-ant 2579, who in turn linked with the next Particip-ant, to support the weight of the Adjut-ants, who supported the weight of Gi-ant 9. Gi-ant 9 gave the Command-ant the orders for the rest of the hour and the Transport Module began to move.
The Transport Module moved swiftly over the debris. Apples had fallen last night, and the Dispers-ants had been unable to move all the wreckage. Apples always fell at this time in their lives, and always would. First they grew big, and then they fell, sometimes wreaking havoc below.
At such times as these the Gi-ants encouraged the workers to think only pleas-ant thoughts, but the workers often found it difficult when their dead comrades were lying all around them as they carried out the unpleas-ant work of clearing up after an apple had fallen. Most of the workers in the bottom layer of the Transport Module carried on without complaining, but Particip-ant 2578 and Particip-ant 2579 grumbled as they worked. They were both well known throughout the bottom layer as Irrit-ants who asked too many questions, and some even suspected them of being Milit-ants.
Particip-ant 2578 and Particip-ant 2579 both dreamed of the hour when the other Particip-ants would join them and leave the Gi-ants to struggle with their ungainly bodies. Particip-ant 2578 and Particip-ant 2579 worked hard at their task of seeing their dreams fulfilled, and hoped that they would live to see such an hour. Every minute now the number of Irrit-ants grew.
One hour something happened. A Transport Module met with an accident. An apple had fallen, and many were killed and injured and the Transport Module fell into disarray. Eventually it became re-organized but Gi-ant 9 had to be left until replacement Particip-ants could be found to carry the him. Eighty Particip-ants lay dead or dying, and there were too few remaining to support the weight of Gi-ant 9. The Gi-ant was angry but there was nothing to be done. Nobody was to blame. The apples fell every hour now; it wasn't any ant's fault. Gi-ant 9 lay on his back helpless. In his rage he shouted at the Particip-ants to hurry. The Adjut-ants in their confusion, yelled at the Particip-ants, and they hurried back to the pile to re-group.
On the way back Particip-ant 2578 and Particip-ant 2579 both realised that something was happening. Some of the younger Particip-ants, particularly those from the centre of the bottom layer where the work was heaviest, were leaping about, apparently mad with the joy of their new found, if short lived freedom. They were suddenly freed of the nauseating weight of the upper layers of Adjut-ants and the hated Gi-ant itself.
The weight that had always dulled their senses, was suddenly removed. Their drudgery was over, for the time being at any rate. The drudgery that is believed to be inescapable, thought to be part of one's lot in life, and passively accepted, comes to be easier to bear. The body and the mind become accustomed to it and it is forgotten, or if it is remembered, one becomes reconciled to it as one's lot. Unrest comes with the knowledge or the realization that there might just be an alternative. Freedom from choice is an underestimated freedom. The Particip-ants from the centre of the Transport Module, suddenly freed of the upper layers, realized that there was indeed an alternative, and this had an incredible effect. First they started dancing wildly among the debris. Then, as they grew breathless from the mad flurry of activity, they sat and talked. They laughed and joked. When they had calmed down, the talk became earnest. It became heady and full of passion. Particip-ant 2578 and Particip-ant 2579 listened with baited breath. The talk turned from the new found freedom that they were enjoying to talk of not going back just yet, of prolonging this state of weightlessness a little while longer. True, there would be recriminations when they eventually returned, but the general feeling was that it would be worth it. At this point, Particip-ant 2579 was quick to point out that their lot could hardly be worsened. Their working hour could not be lengthened; their food could not be rationed, for they needed every ounce of it to muster enough energy to carry out their work. The only punishment that could be inflicted, short of death, was that of having to work in the tunnels below the surface, but since every Particip-ant began his life there, this was hardly a punishment anyway. Particip-ant 2578 and Particip-ant 2579 looked knowingly at each other. Both were thinking the same thing, of rebellious workers in the tunnels with the young, inexperienced workers. It was a possibility which neither had considered before, but which excited them. The thought of rebels coming straight from the tunnels, instead of the naive, almost servile novices that presently emerged into the cold light, entered into the minds of both the Milit-ants. Meanwhile the talk was beginning to flag. The limited imagination of the other Particip-ants was dulling the flame of conversation. Particip-ant 2578 and Particip-ant 2579 quickly jolted them with fresh ideas and suggestions. The Particip-ants were slow to respond. An expected lifetime of unabated drudgery made them unwilling to believe that such things could or ever would change. Particip-ant 2578 realized that something was needed if the original impetus was to be maintained. He quickly suggested that they should return to where the hated Gi-ant was lying hopelessly stranded and kill him. He shouted at them. He ordered them to do it, and being used to taking orders and acting in unison, and without thought or question, they stood up and moved to where the Gi-ant lay.
One by one the Particip-ants got up. First, the ones sat at the back started to move, then the movement spread like fire until the whole of what remained of Leaf Army was on its feet, led by Particip-ant 2578 and Particip-ant 2579.
As they marched forward, for they could not get out of the habit of walking together in lines, the Irrit-ants amongst them started to hum forbidden songs. These were songs that every ant knew, but which were rarely sung aloud, although some of the workers hummed them as they went about their work in the centre of the Transport Module. As the humming spread some of the Particip-ants mouthed the words of the forbidden songs until the Particip-ants became bold in their numbers and started to sing the songs aloud. The noise grew and grew until the air was filled with the words of the song.
"Ants can walk. Ants can sing. Ants are free."
They marched into the clearing still singing. As soon as the Gi-ant realized which songs the Particip-ants were singing he raged and shouted at them.
"Forbidden, forbidden. Stop singing. Singing is forbidden, Stop singing immediately." The front row stopped quickly, but the Particip-ants at the back kept up the rhythm of the song. The Gi-ant shouted again.
"Stop singing. Songs are forbidden." The words of the song that the ants were singing became jumbled and incoherent as successive ranks lost the will to sing. The front ranks started to disintegrate in disarray. Particip-ant 2578 and Particip-ant 2579 both knew that something had to be done. Particip-ant 2578 rushed forward and shouted at the Gi-ant.
"We can sing. We can all sing." He turned to his comrades and shouted at them to sing. The workers started to sing, but were still uncertain whether to obey the Gi-ant or this Particip-ant from the underbelly of the Transport Module.
"You heard him," shouted Particip-ant 2579, and stood at his comrade's side.
"Sing, sing," he shouted. The singing grew stronger and more confident. Suddenly another sound halted the singing. It was a high pitched whine that seemed to come from somewhere behind the two Irrit-ants. The Gi-ant was turning away from the rows of workers in front of him, and he was roaring skywards with all his might. Particip-ant 2578 and Particip-ant 2579 stood dumbstruck. The crowd of workers was puzzled by this sound that they had never heard before. They fell silent, their mouths agape, listening to the strange sound coming from above.
As they stood wondering and staring upwards another sound reached their ears. This new sound grew and grew in volume until it drowned the bellowing of the Gi-ant. The new sound had a rhythm and the rhythm grew steadier and louder. Particip-ant 2578 and Particip-ant 2579 both knew what the new sound was but stood firm, facing the Gi-ant. The workers were frightened and confused, and started to run about wildly. Still the new sound grew in volume, and the rhythm intensified until nothing else could be heard. Some of the Particip-ants fled in terror, while others blinked uncomprehendingly. The ground shook. The foliage of the surrounding trees and bushes suddenly parted and revealed rank upon rank of stern faced Combat-ants. The sound and the shaking stopped, and were replaced by a buzzing noise, which came from the tops of the trees above them. The swarm reached the clearing. It hovered overhead. The Gi-ant scraped his way to where the two Irrit-ants stood. The nearest Particip-ants instinctively withdrew from their comrades'side. The Irrit-ants were easily identifiable. The Gi-ant pointed at them. The swarm fell from the sky in a black cloud, covering Particip-ant 2578 and Particip-ant 2579.
"Watch, watch," shouted the Gi-ant above the din of the swarm as they devoured the two ants. The swarm divided. Some of the bees continued to devour the two ants, while some moved towards the Gi-ant. The workers retreated in fear. Gi-ant 9 was surrounded by the swarm. The workers watched. Quickly, as if the force of gravity had suddenly been reversed Gi-ant 9 left the ground, supported by the thousands of furry bodied bees. The buzzing sound that had momentarily ceased, resumed its monotone as Gi-ant 9 was transported away from the clearing.
The Particip-ants, still shocked by what they had witnessed, trudged back to the piles of leaves and their life of drudgery, most of them utterly convinced of the folly of trying to go against the natural order of things. The Combat-ants, still stern faced, for that was their habitual expression, followed behind in ranks, thankful for not having had to attack their unarmed comrades. The daily routine of drudgery continued unabated, with the majority of the Particip-ants being thankful that they need not become involved in the upheaval to life that must necessarily result from an overturning of the normal order of things. They nodded their heads knowingly and reassured themselves with the comfort that they were acting wisely in doing nothing. This sagacity was confined mostly to the older element of the Transport Module. The younger workers secretly nurtured a dream, seldom expressed openly, that the martyrdom of Particip-ant 2578 and Particip-ant 2579 would not be in vain and, that the actions of that hour would be avenged. The germ of discontent had been sown in the minds of the young, impressionable, idealistic Particip-ants who had not yet fully accepted their role as workhorses. Every hour now, snatches of songs could be heard, sang in the anonymity of the Transport Module as it went about its irksome task. These songs had rousing words about freedom, dignity and right. Seemingly impenetrable cliques were formed, full of stern faced Particip-ants who addressed their comrades vociferously, but who quickly fell silent when one of the Adjut-ants approached. The rumblings among these young Particip-ants grew stronger daily. A vague awareness of this discontent reached the Gi-ants ears, and tainted their conversations. Some of them talked about it with an air of disbelief and indifference, whilst others, taking the rumours more seriously, promised to punish any offending worker who spoke out openly against the status quo. However, as yet they did nothing, except rely on the daily edicts that were shouted by the Adjut-ants and the Command-ants to the workers of the Transport Module as they worked.
Those workers that had been most affected by the killing of the two Particip-ants in the clearing, went about their work in the same desultory way, but now, instead of complying obediently with the wishes of the Adjut-ants and the Command-ants, they began to ignore the orders and sometimes quite openly, to go against those in command. These ants that were somewhat less than obedient, became known in the ranks of the Module as Obstin-ants, and a new word was used to describe the way they behaved. This word was Obstinance, and those that practised it were quite different from the others, who had been given the disparaging label of Compli-ants living their lives, hour in and hour out in Compliance. The older, former rebels, that had become either too tired or too old to resist, and who had once earned the name of Resist-ants living their lives in Resistance, became known as Recalcitr-ants and lived and worked in a state of Recalcitrance. There were some workers who were thought to watch the to-ings and fro-ings of the of the Obstin-ants, and these were euphemistically known as Observ-ants, and were jeered at and called Serv-ants by the others, who in their turn were labeled Miscre-ants by those workers of varying persuasions. The Adjut-ants and the Command-ants knew of the factions within the Transport Module, but appeared to turn a blind eye to them. In fact they actively encouraged this factionalism. It had been mentioned to them that while the Particip-ants continued arguing between themselves, they no longer presented a strong, or indeed a serious threat to the Gi-ants and their Queen.
The intentions of the Obstin-ants seemed in danger of becoming both reviled by their own kind, as well as vilified by the Gi-ants and their kind. The Obstin-ants were starting to be known as Ped-ant, and were ridiculed as Pedantic by the Gi-ants and the Command-ants. Those who favoured change and those who favoured things staying the way they were became known as Ped-ants and Obscur-ants respectively, although both terms had come from the mouths of the Gi-ants. Those who were known as Obscur-ants called the other Particip-ants, Ped-ants, and they in turn called the others Obscur-ants, though perhaps neither group really understood the names by which they had come to be known. The major trouble with these names was that it seemed impossible to belong to any other grouping once it was seen that you were fraternizing with one group or the other. Workers who were not interested in either group or their thoughts and beliefs, felt in a real dilemma, for although they did not want to side with either, they felt almost duty bound to join either one side or the other. The Gi-ants did nothing, but were told what was going on by the Observ-ants and their accomplices, the Inform-ants. The Ped-ants felt strongly as one ant that something had to be done if their cause was not to be considered valueless, with the consequent loss of support from the ants in the rest of Leaf Army. Within the Ped-ants, a small number formed a sort of elite known as Resolut-ants, and these ants passed Resolutions in which each ant promised to accomplish an act that would further the aims of the Ped-ants.
Although it was generally agreed at the meetings in the very heart of the Transport Module as it went about its daily work of keeping the clearings clear, that an act such as killing one of the Gi-ants was more or less out of the question for the time being, it was agreed that an act that would disrupt the daily routine of hated drudgery and servile toil would not only be feasible, but very welcome. Anything that would halt, however momentarily, the work that killed numbers of workers every single hour, would be progress indeed, and may be just the thing needed to increase the numbers of their group within the middle of the Transport Module.
The question was what would accomplish that result. What could they do without getting themselves and their innocent comrades killed and mutilated in the process? As is always the case in such matters, or at any rate seems to be, there were those hot headed individuals who were all for going for broke and risking everything in a desperate attempt to be done with the Gi-ants and their Queen for good and all. There were also those in the group who wanted change right enough, but who were for gradual change rather than cataclysmic change that would destroy more than it created or changed for the better.
Among these more sensible ants, were the articulate ants that could always be relied upon to win the day where arguments of this sort were concerned. After much argument, and much maneuvering between the members of the bottom layer, the young Irrit-ants decided on a plan of action. They had decided to disrupt the order of things. They were going to surprise a few of their old comrades and perhaps bring some of them back into the old groupings of Irrit-ants and Milit-ants. It was generally agreed that if they could throw the system into chaos, and recruit some new Particip-ants, it would be a good hour indeed, and even something worth celebrating in song.
There was to be a gathering, and all the Gi-ants, and the Queen herself, were coming together in a clearing, beneath the trees, below the apples. The big day was near, and the workers, the Leaf Army, under orders from a Gi-ant, had cleared an area big enough to seat the Queen, and her entourage, the Gi-ants, and the favoured ranks of Adjut-ants,Command-ants, and Dispers-ants. The workers despised these higher ups, and many of them secretly hoped something would go disastrously wrong. Some even spoke of a plot to make something go wrong, which was being hatched in the lower layers of the Transport Module. There the work was heaviest, and the discontent strongest. In the underbody, the ants were not climbers, they had become accustomed to a life of drudgery and pain and suffering, but they had not resigned themselves to it. They hated every minute of it, and every hour spent at the numbing work fuelled their anger. Something had to be done to change things. The lower orders had to come out on top eventually. It was the law of nature. It had to be.
One night, before the big event, hundreds of workers, under cover of darkness, had swarmed up into the trees, and had attacked the stalks, which held the apples to the branches. By doing this, they had in effect, moved nature on an epoch or two. They had brought forward the time when the apples were due to fall. The Gi-ants had assured their Queen that the time was safely an epoch away, that no apples would fall to wreak their usual havoc on the Leaf Army, that was the Leaf Army's hazard, which only they had to face. The Queen was safe. The time was right. Everything would go as planned on the big day.
As the day approached, the workers who had been up into the trees, constantly glanced upwards at their handiwork, wondering if what they had planned would work. It was planned for a gang of workers, the fittest and the strongest, to go up into the trees the night before the big event, in readiness for the arrival of the Queen and the hated Gi-ants. Then, when the Queen and her entourage, hangers on they were called by the workers, when the hangers on arrived, the workers up in the trees would attack what was left of the apple stalks, and down would come the apples, wreaking devastation on those below.
The Queen was magnificent. Even if you hated her, as most of the workers did, you still had to concede that she was magnificent, and her majesty, and her magnificence, and the grandeur and the ceremony all contributed to a feeling that life was great, everything was good, it couldn't be better. The obedient workers among the onlookers, and that was most of them, saw the Queen and her entourage, and got a lump in their throats, swallowed hard, and hoped that the plan would fail. Nothing was said, no opinions expressed, but in the heady air of the event, each worker had the same thoughts. Of course, the Milit-ants, the Irrit-ants, and all the other discontented workers among the onlookers, had anticipated the jingoistic nature of the day, and had prepared themselves. They had quickly gone around the crowd of workers, and handed out song sheets, with orders that the songs be sung at a signal given by one of their number. The individual workers had very little will power, and none of them could resist the entreaties of the bolder workers who had organized and planned for this day. As the Queen, surrounded by her party of Gi-ants, the hated hangers on, a signal was given to those above, gnawing at the stalks in the branches above, and the apples fell.
The first one to fall landed in the middle of a crowd of workers, and scores were killed and maimed. The second, third, fourth, and fifth, however, made their mark.
The Queen was dead, and the funny thing was that no ant said long live the Queen. The Gi-ants were in total disarray, and could not prevent the disaster from escalating. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of workers had seen the Queen die and now the Gi-ants were dying right in front of them. It was over, no interregnum, no status quo, everything was done, and the sound of forbidden songs filled the air in a glorious litany to a new beginning. Every ant felt special, that they had had a hand in the overthrow of the tyranny, which had enslaved generations of ants. If every ant was blissful to be alive, the young were in heaven. The old names were banned. No more Irrit-ants, no more Milit-ants, Dispers-ants, Particip-ants, Combat-ants, Command-ants, Compli-ants, Recalcitr-ants, Obstin-ants, Ped-ants, Resolut-ants, Observ-ants, and above all, no more Gi-ants and no more Queen. A new word was coined that day, a word that summed everything up in a nutshell. That word was ‘Antidisestablishmentarianism’, and that word meant the whole world. It meant no more being trampled underfoot, no more antidemocratic organizing. It put the word 'ant' first. It meant that ants could walk, ants could sing, and it meant that ants were free.

Robert Leslie Fielding

Stories, sketches and monologues from 'OTHER PEOPLE - OTHER WORLDS' by Robert Leslie Fielding

2006-03-24T05:56:00.001-08:00

From ‘OTHER PEOPLE – OTHER WORLDS’
by ROBERT L FIELDING
(Search Amazon.com for details of how to purchase my books)
OUTLINES
A Few Grains of Sand - a mother's final days with her family
Two Lives - how to friends went their separate ways
Flowing - last reminiscences
The Way of the World - an old soldier's tale of war at Gallipoli
Out of Our Class - class boundaries work their way out
Just Sleeping - coming back to see loved ones
Shades and Levels - how painting in Brisbane reminds a painter of life in England
The Eyes of The Beholder - blindness and how it feels to be blind
Nervous Systems - emails from different parts of the body

Substitute Goods - a pensive mood makes you realise how well off you are
Unstable Equilibrium - a victim of a road accident recovers
Expiry Dates - puzzling dates on headstones tell a tale

Anti-disestablishmentarianism - what ants get up to (see this site for the full story)
Derbyshire Neck -public execution, and the private thoughts of the hangman
The Sultan's Invitation - greatness personified
Erzurum - life in rural Turkey
Trabzon -a day in the life of a market
A Christmas Story from Turkmenistan - a miraculous recovery
In A Distant Land - returning to Cyprus brings its own rewards
Pamba's Hotel -A Kipling poem comes to life
A Time and a Place - a Falklands Diary
Patterns of Life - the symbols on Turkish carpets woven into a tale

Kidnapped - a girl with issues tells it like it is
Ties of Friendship - unexpected outcome from a wager
Simultaneous Transactions - a modern update of O Henry's classic, 'The Gift of the Magi'
A Beginning and an Ending - life and death in an instant
The Name of the Rows - top CEOs meet to talk about terminology

Great Minds - a computer saves a life
Growing up the Hard Way - ambitions and how they can bear fruit
Grace's Volcanic Birthday - born on this day in history
The English, the Turks, the Dutch and a Pole - oh, dear, how did that happen?
The Watchmender’s Curse - the penalties of not being punctual
The Spirit of Free Enterprise - a golden opportunity to make money
Blind Date - don't try this at home

Limited Partnership - a pair of climbers depend on each other
Music - how Gustav starts to write music
The Bennet Family: Chapter One - lives of family members
Cyprus - having the temerity to question the status quo
A Good Question - why should we hurt others to get what we want?

Quiz Night - a sketch
Drink Ten, Get One Free - another sketch on the perils of strong drink
At The Bus Stop - how one boy got rich
A Woman's Work is Never Delegated - you know what your trouble is?
Mid Life Crisis - everybody gets 'em
Pauper’s Paradise - lucky break for an itinerant

Longer article #1.

2006-03-24T05:43:00.000-08:00

Why we laugh at the things that make us laugh )

by

Robert Leslie Fielding

This appeared in
'UoB News and Views'
A University of Bahrain Publication
Issue No.58
March-April 2003

Everybody likes a good joke. We like to be made to laugh, it seems, and we like to make others laugh. Since doctors inform us that laughter is good for us, it is fortuitous that we feel this way. However, just why we laugh, and what makes us laugh is difficult to say.
We laugh at visual jokes, which we call 'custard-pie' or 'slapstick humour', and we laugh at jokes that involve language. Hal Roach, the well known director of silent films was a master of what is termed the 'slow-burn', which is the equivalent in humour of suspense in more dramatic genres. With this form of gag, all the conditions for the outcome/punchline are steadily built up for the audience, with the final denouement happening at the most opportune moment, for audience and protagonist and, most important, the maximum amount of mirth.
'Slapstick', visual stuff, usually involves variations on the man slipping on a banana skin, and as long as nobody gets seriously hurt, we find it funny. Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplain and Buster Keaton were all masters of this form of silent humour. What is interesting about it is that it doesn't seem to wear thin with age. People still find Chaplain, and Laurel and Hardy absolutely hilarious, and that despite the fact that their films are often 'silents', and in black and white, and about things that have changed.
Humour based on language however, does seem to date, and we outgrow certain forms of it. For example, the type of joke appearing in a children's comic might not seem very funny to an adult reader. Here are two examples of this type of joke.

1st man: What do you have for your lunch ?
2nd man: I have a pie. If I'm hungry, I cut it into four pieces and I eat all four pieces.
1st man: What do you do if you're not so hungry ?
2nd man: If I'm not very hungry, I only cut it into two pieces.

And:

Good books: The Haunted House by Hugo First
Falling off a cliff by Eileen Dover

Similarly, puns that were once popular often lose their appeal in later life.

1st person: How did you get that black eye ?
2nd person: I walked into a bar."
1st person: "Did you get into a fight or something ?
1st person: No.
2nd person: Then how did you get your black eye ?
1st person: I told you, I walked into a bar.
2nd person: I still don't understand !
1st person: It was an iron bar.
That might not suit everyone's taste as a funny joke, but then that only serves to make my point; some things are just not funny any more. Here you might argue that the reason why they aren't funny is because they are such old jokes, or are what we call 'corny jokes', which seem to fall under the category of jokes that are unsophisticated, and therefore just not funny.
Jokes at other people's expense have come into vogue, or perhaps they never went out of fashion. Try the following.

"I went into a Turkish baths, took off all my clothes and sat on a chair and went to sleep. When the steam cleared a little, I woke up and discovered I was sitting in a busy Fish and Chip shop."

Some jokes are connected with some of the issues of the day.

Woman: When human organs come to be freely available for sale, I think a woman's brain will cost less than a man's brain.
Man: Why do you think that ?
Woman: Because the woman's brain will actually have been used.

Some are at the expense of certain minorities.

A man from Poloonia goes into a shop and asks for a packet of cigarettes. The person behind the counter says: "You are from Poloonia, aren't you ?" The customer says, "How can you tell, is it because I've got a different accent ?" The shop assistant says, "No, I can tell because this is a chemist's."

And:-

On the day buses in Manchester changed and had drivers who collected the fares from passengers, instead of conductors, a bus crashed into the front of a large store in the city centre. The Police came along immediately, and asked the driver how the crash had occurred. The driver replied that he wasn't sure because he had been on the top deck collecting fares at the time of the accident.

While some seem not to target anyone in particular, and have some charm.

The teacher of Class 2A asked her pupils to write a short essay describing their family pet. Robert and Gillian Fielding, twins in Class 2A submitted their descriptions the following day. The teacher said to Robert, "Your essay is exactly the same as your sisters. The words you used are identical to those your sister Gillian used. Can you tell me why ?"
"That's simple," Robert replied, "same cat."

Some are just plainly ridiculous and perhaps touch our funny bone because of that quality.

"A bandit bursts into a Chinese chip shop and demands the money. The Chinese woman looks at him calmly and asks, "To take away ?"

And we laugh despite the ridiculous nature of the proposition in the joke.

The three men lying in the morgue looked very different. One man had a look of pure agony on his face.
"What happened to him ?" asked one of the attendants.
"He was hit by the 2.15pm to London."
The next man also looked as if had died in some pain.
"How did he die ?" asked the attendant.
"He was involved in a car crash," was the reply.
The third man had a nice smile on his face.
"What about him," asked the attendant. "How did he die ?"
"Oh, him," said the other attendant, "he got struck by lightning." The other attendant looked puzzled. "Why is he smiling then ?"
"He thought he was having his photograph taken," replied the other.

Or:

A man went into the doctor's surgery walking with a limp.
"What seems to be the trouble ?" the Doctor asked. The man lifted his hat and showed the doctor a huge lump on his head.
"A bucket full of concrete fell thirty feet and hit me on the head," he said, in some pain.
"What about your foot ?" the Doctor asked.
"I was standing on a nail at the time, Doctor," the patient replied.

The question still remains the same: Why do people laugh at certain verbal conundrums ? And why do we find such jokes in certain formats funny ? Consider the following formulaic jokes.

How many surrealists does it take to change a light-bulb?
Answer: A fish.

How many psychologists does it take to change a light-bulb ?
Answer: Just one, but the light-bulb has really got to want to change.

Knock, knock.
Who's there ?
Felix.
Felix who ?
Felix my ice cream again, I'll get really angry.

Late arrivals: Mr. and Mrs. Butter and their son, Roland.

What do you call a woman who has just dropped her bus-fare ?
Answer: Ingrid.

Here is a news broadcast; A ship carrying red paint has collided with a ship carrying blue paint in the Gulf. Both crews have been marooned.

Did you hear about the man who thought Sheffield Wednesday was a Bank holiday?

Did you hear about the man who thought that Sherlock Holmes was the name of an estate agent's ?
These last two rely on the listener having some specific cultural background, while the one about the ships depends on one word having two meanings.
They strike us as amusing because they force us to change our frame of reference, or force us to think laterally in order to see the funny side. The fact that they are in many ways silly and yet still make us laugh, probably indicates that they appeal to a side of our nature that we so often deny in the world we inhabit; the child in ourselves. Now, the fact that some do not find these types of jokes funny, and would never be heard telling them may testify to the amount of self-alienation they have undergone in the name of 'getting on' in the world, and trying constantly to appear rational, sensible and thoughtful.
Interestingly enough, when an adult gets the chance to play with a train set, they often find it easier to excuse their behaviour if it is their own son's toy. Most adult males would probably never own up to enjoy playing with a toy train set, but would play endlessly with their own children's set, justifying it to themselves as showing their kids how to use it.
Humour, particularly the unsophisticated type illustrated above, probably illustrates a similar trait. They are the type of jokes we find hilarious with close friends and relatives, but nothing like as funny when we find ourselves with those with which we wish to create a certain impression.
Some jokes are peculiar to the male of the species. Among these are those jokes we call 'dirty jokes', and while laughing uproariously at them in male company in a public house, we certainly would not find them amusing were they to be told in mixed company.
Likewise, we may laugh till we cry at the type of humour that is made at the expense of a certain minority, and yet be totally embarrassed if that same joke were to be told in the presence of a member of that minority.
The type favoured by me are those that are not made at anyone's expense, but rather depend for their power to amuse on the unusual nature of their endings. A pun, a play on words, a formulaic joke, all fall into this category, and all have one very useful quality. They can be funny or not, but this depends as much on the listener's sense of humour as it does on the humour displayed in the joke. They invite the listener to participate. In the shared act of creating amusement, both find something in common.
Robert L Fielding
1,691 words

Robert Leslie FIELDING - Curriculum Vitae

2006-03-24T04:02:00.000-08:00

ROBERT L FIELDING: ENGLISH LANGUAGE LECTURER & FREELANCE JOURNALIST

Qualifications

MSc: Teaching English/ESP (Aston University 1997)

BA (Hons) Organisational Studies and Linguistics (Lancaster University 1987)

RSA Cert TEFL. (Pilgrims 1986)0

City and Guilds of London Institute: Full Technological Certificate in Mechanical Engineering Production (Oldham College of Technology 1972)

VOCATIONAL EXPERIENCE

EFL/ESP/EAP Instructor-English Language Lecturer - at the following:-

University of Durham Taught pre-sessional courses (August/September, 2002)
University of Bahrain English Language Centre (Sept 2002 – 2003)
Taught EAP/ESP at various levels
Sultan Qaboos University Language Center, Oman (1997 – 2002)
Taught English for students of Sciences & English for Educational Purposes. (Intensive & Credit Courses
Member of Editorial Board of ‘Forum’, the Language Centre’s English Language Teaching Journal
Regular contributor to ‘Forum’ (see Publications)
International Turkmen Turkish University, Ashkabad, Turkmenistan (1996 – 1997
Taught English for Academic Purposes, Phonetics, English Language through English Literature
Wrote material and tests for the above courses.
Bilkent University School of English Language, Ankara, Turkey (1993 – 1996)
Taught EAP and Writing for Freshmen students.
Dogu Akdeniz Universitesi, Magusa, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (1992 –1993)
Taught ESP and wrote materials and textbook
Cukurova University, Adana, Turkey (1990 – 1992 )
Taught EAP and was Speaking and Listening Coordinator
St. Joseph's High School, Izmir, Turkey (1998 – 1990)
Ege Lisan Merkezi, Izmir, Turkey (1998 – 1990)
El Meselemiya Higher Secondary School for Boys, Gezira Province, Sudan (1997 – 1998)

PUBLICATIONS

Teaching English Oxford University Press
'An Introduction to Writing Articles'
'Teaching Students How to Focus on Topics'
'The Teacher is a Learner and the Learner is a Teacher'
'Learning to Read the World: Using Literature in the Language Classroom'
'Oguz Nesil' Journal of Turkmen Turkish Educational Organization
'Lexical phrases and Native Language Interference in Writing'
'Bil Lingua' Bilkent University School of English Language Teaching Journal
'Language, Writing, and Creativity'
Applied Linguistics
'Communicative Coherence: A Different Approach to Teaching Grammar'
'Re-ordering and Re-combining: Manipulating Language to Re-draft’
'Forum' ELT Journal
'A Place for Eponyms in English Language Teaching’
‘Forum’ Sultan Qaboos University Journal of English Language Teaching
Academic articles: ‘Students’ Errors and their Implications for Syllabus design’
‘The digital future’
‘Using authentic language in the classroom’

NON-ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
‘Reflections’ Journal of Sultan Qaboos University
Short Story: ‘Reactions’: A new look at the short story
Article: ‘Cryptic clues to the pigeon-holes of the mind’
New York Times:
'Changes in Britain'
Cyprus Today
‘GAP’: Pumping Prosperity to Turkey'
Turkish Daily News
'Cinema and Society'
Oldham Evening Chronicle
'Greenery and Friendliness in a Furnace: The Sudan'
'Ginger's Tale'
The Travels of a Family and their Cat. (Available at Amazon.com & Barnes and Noble)
‘Other people-other worlds’
The collected short stories of Robert Leslie Fielding (Available at Amazon.com & Barnes and Noble)

Gulf News ‘Notes’

‘Writing is discovering’ (other parts to follow)
‘How to be creative with words’
‘The advantages of working in groups’
‘Taking exams’
‘Becoming a student’
‘Avoiding fallacious arguments’ (forthcoming)
‘Time management for students’
‘Reasons to read’

OTHER INFORMATION

British citizen/Native speaker
Married to a citizen of Turkey
Holder of a clean British Driving Licence
Date of Birth: 25.9.1949
Website #1: http://www.whatsnewintheworld.blogspot.com/ (This site is used to provide my students with a broad range of reading material – from IELTS information, to articles about time management for students, advice when taking examinations, together with articles of a more general nature, and short stories and poems.

Website #2: http://www.fascinatingfillers.blogspot.com/ (This site is used to illustrate the different genres and styles I write.
REFEREES
Available on request

Short story #1.

2006-03-24T04:00:00.000-08:00

The Eskimo Widow (after Luis Untermeyer's story of the same name) (NB. This has been published)

by

Robert L Fielding

1
This is my story. I am Nana. I live here where the sun only shines for half the year. My husband is dead, drowned off an ice floe, and frozen solid or else food for the fishes.
Now that I am too old to work, too old to go out for food, too old for anything really, the people in the huts about here bring me everything I need. I eat but little these days, and my poor hut is rarely lit, and poorly heated. I sit in my bed, remembering my youth, going to school in Anchorage, skipping through the streets on my way home. Now there is only ice, cold and six months of dark. Things changed in my little hut one morning when I heard something moving across the ice. I know the sound of my neighbours tramping heavily across the snow. This was a different sound.
Moving towards the noise, a murmuring sound an animal might make, I found a decrepit bundle of matted ice and fur. It was a polar bear cub, still too young to fend for itself, but still too heavy for me to lift up and carry back to my hut. I could only drag the bundle, a few feet at a time, but we eventually made the door of the hut. I dragged it indoors, brushing the ice off the cub's face, seeing its eyes moving slowly, feeling its heartbeat.
Since I had no oil for a lamp or my little stove, all I could do to warm it was to wrap it in oilskins and put it under my blanket on the mat I use for a bed. It worked, the cub thawed out and slowly began to move. After an hour, it was dripping wet. The ice had melted, and so I dried it quickly to prevent the cub from freezing. In these sub zero temperatures, even during the daytime, any moisture is death. Sweating has to be avoided, although it is almost impossible to sweat except when doing hard, physical work. The moisture freezes quickly and toes and fingers get frostbitten, turn black and have to be amputated at the hospital in Anchorage.
Dry, warm, and later fed with scraps I was going to eat, Chinga the cub moved around the hut to look at his new surroundings. There was no doubt he felt strange, sad and lonely for he called long, plaintive wails for his mother, who I guessed would have been killed by hunters. His crying awoke my own maternal instincts that had lain dormant for so long in these frozen wastes where there is little time for anything else except surviving the long, long winters.
I called the cub, my cub, Chinga after my own dead child, dragged from me stillborn, back when I was much, much younger, when my husband, Nanook, was fit and strong.
Chinga grew bigger and leaner, stronger and taller until he occupied the same space as Nanook had done. When Chinga rose from our hut and came back with fish, I felt so proud of him. I called him Chinga, my child in the privacy of our hut. Chinga was the child I had never had, the child I had longed for through the cold, lonely nights since Nanook went out one day and never returned.
2
We were all used to the hardships winter brought. We sat in our huts uncomplaining, huddled together to share the warmth of our bodies. This winter was a particularly hard one. I knew Chinga would not have survived it alone. Chinga instinctively knew it too.
As food got scarce, the people of the village got restless from hunger. Some of the younger ones were looking for a scapegoat, for something to blame, as well as for something to eat. One night, I heard a group of young men coming quickly across the ice, talking heatedly, approaching my door. I looked for Chinga, but the cub had gone out some time earlier. Suddenly, there was a loud rapping on the door of my hut.
"Open up, old woman," they shouted. I peeped through the cracks in the side of the door. I saw cold, angry faces.
"What can you want with me at this hour?" I asked, scared and somewhat distressed.
"Open up, we will tell you what we want."
"And what if I don't want to open the door?" I shouted, summoning up some courage from somewhere. The answer came loud and clear.
"It will be the worse for you if you don't," shouted one. I recognized his voice.
"What do you want, Yorger, son of Olaf?" The young man answered sheepishly.
"We only want to talk to you."
"Then talk," I said, still bold.
"Where is Chinga?" another asked.
"In a place you can't find him," I said, "and thank God for that." I heard the men mumbling and grumbling in the cold air. "Come," said one, "we have no work here."
I allowed the sound of their heavy footfalls to die on the evening air before I dared open the door. Looking out I listened for Chinga's step, much different from the sound of any human movement. There was none. The night was chill and the air was frozen into stillness. No sound came to my ears. I shut the door and knelt and prayed for the safe return of Chinga, and for the coming sun to bring life back to normal.
In the morning, I arose to another sound. Pressing my ear to the door, I heard what sounded like people, a lot of people, and I heard the sound of Chinga too. I became terrified for Chinga's safety. I flung the door open. Already the light was becoming stronger, but it was still icy.
"Old woman," shouted a neighbour, "come out and tell us what your Chinga is trying to say to us." Chinga was beckoning to the people. Chinga was telling the people to go with him, but to where?
Outside, Chinga was waving his paws, clutching his white belly, pointing yonder, over the mountains of ice to the north of the village.
"Chinga wants you to go to where there is food," I cried with joy in my heart.
"Food, there is no food, he is the only food there is for us," shouted the same young man who had knocked on the old woman's door.
"I know what he is saying," I cried, pleading now. "See!" I shouted. "See how he is clutching at his belly. That means he has eaten and there is more to be eaten."
"Let us at least go to see," said a woman, reasoning to the others.
"Yes, let us go," said another, "and if there is no food, we can kill him and eat his flesh."
3
" Now, forty years later, the old widow woman is dead. She died happy. She died in the arms of her beloved Chinga. Chinga pined away and died shortly afterwards, in the arms of the villagers, who revered him as their saviour after he took them to the huge bull seal he had fought and mortally wounded, lying bleeding on the ice-pack.
That was the year of the hard winter, children, that was the year Chinga the Great saved the village. That was the year our fortunes changed. That was the year that we were taught something about the life that surrounds us. We learned in those hard days that dumb animals are not really dumb, it is just that we cannot hear their words, we cannot always understand them. They speak to us, nevertheless, and now, after Chinga the Great, the bear I once wanted to kill for its meat, Chinga, brought us to life giving food and fuel, and now, we listen to all living things."

Robert L Fielding

Seasonal #1.

2006-03-24T03:55:00.000-08:00

The Twelve Days of Christmas

by

Robert Leslie Fielding

It sometimes seems that Christmas lasts for only about two days – Christmas Day and Boxing Day, not twelve, doesn’t it. It’s over before it’s really got the chance to get going, and Christmas Eve isn’t even one of the twelve, though it does seem important, leaving New Year’s Eve/New Years Day aside for the moment, with apologies to the Scottish who always make more of Hogmanay.

But no, Christmas consists of twelve days; starting on Dec 25 and lasting until June 5 – twelfth night before Epiphany starts on Jan 6, which has special significance too, being the time when the Magi came bearing gifts to the infant Jesus, still wrapped in swaddling clothes and laying in a manger. In Latin American culture, Jan 6 is Three Kings Day. Should we have the thirteen days of Christmas – perish the thought.

The song though most definitely has only twelve days in it, and twelve gifts from ‘my true love’ to ‘me’. Most of us can reach the ‘five gold rings’, and remember the ‘four calling birds’, the ‘three French hens’, ‘two turtle doves’ and last but not least the ‘partridge in a pear tree’. It’s when we try to go beyond five that we come unstuck, with the ‘lords a leaping’ and the ‘ladies dancing’ conflating into eight of the latter and nine of the former, or is it the other way round. The point is made. We have to hear someone sing it to be able to remember all of it.

It wasn’t always that way though; the song, or so some believe, was really an ancient (16th Century) mnemonic device to help children learn the catechism in times when owning up to being a Christian wasn’t always sensible. And like finding out that an old friend has a wardrobe full of skeletons you didn’t know existed, so the Twelve Days of Christmas has these hidden significances and meanings.

To skip through them; ‘my true love’ is held to be God, ‘a partridge in a pear tree’ Jesus Christ, and even ‘me’ – so integral to the song, is the Christian flock or mankind if you prefer, and we’ve hardly begun.

The ‘turtle doves’, of which there were two, signify the Old and New Testaments, the ‘three French hens’ the three theological virtues: faith, hope and love. It gets easier – the ‘four calling birds’ are the gospels, but again more obtuse as the ‘five gold rings’ represent the five books of the Old Testament - the Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – the children of those times needed all the help they could get.

‘Six geese a-laying’ are the six days of creation, ‘seven swans a-swimming’ the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit: prophecy, ministry, teaching, exhortation, giving, leading, and compassion, according to Romans 12:6-8.

The eight beatitudes: Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and last but certainly not least, those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake are labeled the ‘eight maids a-milking’ in the song.

The ‘nine ladies dancing’, it is nine and not eight, you see, represent the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Galatians 5:2)

Easy again; ‘ten lords a leaping’ must be the ten commandments, ‘eleven pipers piping’ the eleven faithful apostles, excluding Judas Iscariot, and lastly, the ‘twelve drummers drumming’ take care of the twelve points of doctrine in the Apostle’s Creed.

Rarely has indoctrination sounded so melodic, but if the children of the day learned nothing else over the twelve days of Christmas, they would have been well served by the song and its lighter, pictorial side that we usually hear several times at this time of year.
Robert Leslie Fielding

Dolphin watching #1.

2006-03-24T03:48:00.000-08:00

This letter was written for submission to the letter pages of the Gulf News, which prints letters extolling the virtues of the region occasionally.

Dear Sir,
Ten passengers and a driver (at least that's how one referred to the man sitting at the back of the boat) sailed (without any sails) out of The Blue Marlin yachting marina on Friday. We were hoping to see some dolphins out in the Gulf of Oman.
Sitting at the front (bows to you landlubbers) right and left, sorry, Port and Starboard seemed like a good idea till we got out of the calm waters of the harbour. Once in the open sea, it felt as if we were out there in the North Atlantic, searching for Moby Dick. The sea did more or less what it wanted with us, and what it wanted was destruction. It hurled the white fibre glass hull about like a cork. It swept over the gunwhales of the boat, (I'm getting into this nautical stuff now) and over us, and it did its unlevel best to make our lives uncomfortable. The Captain remained sensibly dry at the tiller, 'tilling' us across the blue till we spied dolphins. A few at first, then scores of them, adopted our boat as a sort of flagship. They swam alongside, dove swiftly in front of the bows from both port and starboard sides, playing "Last one across" kind of games with us. And we cheered them every nautical mile of the two-hour trip. We marveled at their sleekness and their prowess in the water, leaping out of the water in rows of up to ten or twelve sometimes. I wondered what kind of Red Arrow-like messages were going to and fro in the water either side of us to enable them to come up in exactly at the same moment.

Other boats full of mesmerized passengers floated past us from time to time. They looked astonishingly dry in such a heavy swell. We waved at them. They waved at us. And back we went to the enthralling job of dolphin spotting.
'There's some more over there," shouted someone pointing. All heads turned and the laughing and cheering started up again.

Why do dolphins jump out of the water? To take a look at the humans; to breathe; for the heck of it; because they can do, for the sheer joy of being alive.

Like all good things, the trip was over too soon. We waved the fish (or are they mammals?) goodbye, and sailed full speed back to the shore, to warming cups of tea, even more warming gentle sea breezes, and heartwarming memories of a great morning with those loveliest of God's sea creatures, dolphins.
Robert L Fielding

Something personal #1.

2006-03-24T03:46:00.000-08:00

Why I write
Robert L. Fielding

Why does anyone want to write: to express themselves, for therapeutic reasons, for a hobby, to see their name in print, to make their mark on the world, as a means of becoming rich and famous, or, in the words of Stephen King, because ‘Not to write is a kind of suicide.’

Well, yes, for all those reasons – well most of them, but the last one – King’s opinion sort of sums up what writing is for me although I wouldn’t go as far as him, but I know what he means.

I write as often as possible – every day – two or three times a day – because I have to. On the days when I can’t get to my keyboard or a notebook (rare), I don’t feel right.

Or let me put it this way; when I write – while I am writing – rereading what I have written – changing it – editing it and adding to it again – I feel alive, I feel part of the world.

A writer is an observer – true – but writing isn’t passive, it’s an activity, like talking. Writing is doing something – making something new. And that’s the attraction for me – making something new from my thoughts – from my own words.

Don’t ask me how – I don’t know – who does? Nevertheless, that is what I do – and why I do it. I know this is going to sound like a cliché – I’ll say it anyway – writing is discovering – discovering who you are and what you know – it’s synthesising, coordinating, creating, and yes, discovering – discovering what you know and what you think.

And if I didn’t write, there would be a part of me that I would have less access to, but I do write and I do know more about myself because I write – that’s why!
Robert L. Fielding
(NB.For details of availability of this article, please contact Robert L Fielding – fieldingrob3@hotmail.com)

Review: Exhibition #1.

2006-03-24T03:44:00.000-08:00

Changing trends in architecture through 29 years of advancement in the United Arab Emirates University: (NB. This has been published)
A photographic exhibition by Khalid Mohiuddin in The UAE University Social Club (11th – 13th Sept. 2005)

The exhibition of photographs by architect Khalid Mohiuddin, from the University’s Department of Architectural Engineering, currently on display at the Al Multaqa Building in the Islamic Institute, represents a survey of the buildings on the five sites of the United Arab Emirates University, in the city of Al Ain in the University’s 29 year history.

Beginning with a photograph of the father of the nation, Baba Sheikh Zayed approving the plans for the University to be constructed in the garden city of Al Ain, in 1974, Khalid Mohiuddin, an architect here at the University, takes us through a series of fine colour photos, from the University’s beginnings to the present day.

A photograph of the mosaic of Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Khalifa, recently put together by the female students of the University, greets the visitor upon entering the Multaqa Building.

The life-sized version of the mosaic recently entered into record books as the largest of its kind anywhere in the world.

Under Al Ain’s changelessly blue skies, Khalid’s beautifully taken photos give male students the opportunity to see buildings on the Female Campus, and vice versa.

They can see sports halls, food courts, lecture theatres, gymnasiums that double as examination centres, mosques and minarets, and plush marble and glass entrance halls, as well as features of architectural importance like patterned glass domes, stairwells, and windows looking out over green lawns and covered car parks with numbered spaces.

The progress made at the University also represents a microcosm of the giant steps taken in the whole country, which has emerged as a modern country in less than two generations. The father of the nation, Sheikh Zayed, would have enjoyed Khalid’s exhibition illustrating the great leaps taken in the creation of his vision since he first approved the plans more than thirty years ago.

Robert L. Fielding

Travelogue (Local/Nostalgia/Impressions) #1.

2006-03-24T03:39:00.000-08:00

Diary of a genetically unmodified traveller: ‘Hasn’t it all changed’

by

Robert L. Fielding

Well, of course things ‘ave changed. Everything does – that’s the only thing that’s constant – change!

And so it is with people, houses, pubs, factories, offices (called ‘Business parks these days), even bus services have changed.

In and around Delph, pubs are turning into Chinese restaurants (Cross Keys) or Indian restaurants (Rose and Crown). I don’t say it’s a bad thing – far from it, but it is a change.

I remember when large parts of Manchester were being demolished – the pubs were always left standing – islands of refreshment in the midst of a sea of dereliction.

And shops – they’re changing too – website addresses emblazoned across the bottoms of windows – strange and inviting names – ‘Bay Leaf Restaurant’ – ‘Christoria Beauty Clinic’.

The oldest cooperative in Britain- craft shop, cobbler, café, picture framers – all under the same roof with the same door into the High Street – six businesses on three floors – since 1979.

Houses – more of ‘em – smarter, brighter stonework – window frames and doors made from clean hardwood or anodised aluminium alloy.

Buses – double-deckers only rarely – single-deckers mostly – and minibuses; mountain goats climbing out of Delph, up Stoneswood Road with names of their destinations on the front – Friezland Church – by a circuitous route – it would have to be, wouldn’t it?

Factories, or should I say former factories – some falling down – others like Lumb Mill (once the home of Compoflex from Asa Lees’s after the fire) – now split into so many units – all sorts of thriving enterprises – carpet stores and the like but sadly little in the way of manufacturing now.

A few things hardly change though – Jim Taylor out mowing t’bottom meadow before he stops for a brew at Thurston Clough Farm (Jim’s as fit as he was thirty years ago by the look of him) – Mrs. Taylor brewing up indoors - not quite everything changes, does it?

Robert L. Fielding
(NB.For details of availability of this article, please contact Robert L Fielding – fieldingrob3@hotmail.com)

Travelogue (local) #2.

2006-03-24T03:38:00.000-08:00

Diary of a genetically unmodified traveller: Air conditioned bowling

by

Robert L. Fielding

‘Phew’, I hear you say, ‘it’s too hot for me!’ And it is warm – certainly, but let’s not complain too much lest…

Instead, let’s do like ‘Christians in Sport’ who meet every Tuesday morning between 9.30am and 11.30am for tea, coffee, a chat and a game or two of Short Mat (45 feet) Bowling – without the air conditioning though – that was just wishful thinking on my part.

Passing Zion Methodists Church in Lees yesterday morning, I noticed that ‘Tea and Coffee Are Now Being Served’ and popped in for a brew. Met by Harry Steele and Dorothy Brierley (formerly of the Chronicle) and who run the sessions, I was quickly and warmly greeted by all the players, plus the ladies making the tea.

On a strip of green ‘felt’ (6 by 45 feet), pairs of bowlers battled it out without succumbing to sunstroke – with the characteristic loud cheers of the group winning. Age is no barrier, and nor is being partially sighted as one lady playing was.

The Reverend Kofe Ansah, a native of Ghana and born on a Friday – hence his name – told me that his church facilities are in continual demand – Mothers and Toddlers on Monday – Wives’ Meeting later that evening – Chiball exercises Tuesday, plus Short Mat Bowling, of course, an Age Concern organised dinner for the elderly on Wednesday – table tennis on Thursday and Karate Friday, with the hall hired out for things like Hoe Downs and the May Queen Festival at other times.

So, rain or shine, hot or cold, winter or summer, people come from far and near to enjoy the company of others, the exercise and the fun and games – oh, and the tea and coffee too. See you there next Tuesday folks.

Robert L. Fielding

Travelogue (Local) #1.

2006-03-24T03:35:00.000-08:00

Diary of a genetically unmodified traveller: ’I used to work there, I did.’

by Robert L. Fielding

Walking along by the canal – the cut – from Wade Lock in Uppermill (how long is it since that bit went through a pipe?) to the Diggle end of the Standedge Tunnel – the highest, deepest, longest tunnel in England, and built at a staggering cost (for then) of £128, 804 (about the cost of the average semi-detached), I noted the icons of a bygone age.

A set of railway signals near the Ward Lane bridge, the sheds, wharehouses and former machine shops of Dobcross Loom Works, now and for a long time WH Shaw’s – pallet makers – and the locks, embankments and bridges of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal – Saddleworth’s former sustainers, lifelines and connections with the markets for its products; wool and machinery for turning raw material into fine cloth, and from there to Weaver to Wearer in Yorkshire Street.

Along the canal towpath – icons of a quite different age – anglers – people walking dogs – people just out walking, like me – an age of leisure activities – the Brownhill Visitors’ Centre, longboats lined up to be towed in eights through the tunnel to Marsden, and the other way, through Greenfield, Mossley and Stalybridge, linked to the Peak Forest Canal via Portland Basin in Ashton Under Lyne, and on to Buxworth and Whalley Bridge.

But work here still goes on – for some – hillsides covered with grazing sheep – a small Canine Centre in a small corner off the canal, upholstery firms, car body lads, and firms that fit window systems operating out of Warth and Ellis Mills – and the Diggle Hotel bar staff working away to serve the ever growing crowd at the front enjoying a lunchtime in the sun.
Robert L. Fielding

Travelogue Impressions #1.

2006-03-24T03:34:00.000-08:00

Diary of a genetically unmodified traveller: The sounds of summer

by

Robert L. Fielding

A glorious day – a glorious weekend in fact – mid July and looking promising – fingers crossed, eh?

The sounds of the summer are all around – sheep plaintively insistent on the green hillsides of Diglea – a dog barking (probably at the sheep) – rooks cawing in the tall trees that are giving welcome shade – the odd car and a passing tractor (work still goes on for some even if it is Sunday lunchtime)

And another sound – equally familiar though unhappily less frequent – typical of a village green in the north of England – an echo from Whit Friday – a brass band tuning up. Meltham & Meltham Mills (1846) about to entertain a crowd sunning itself outside the Diggle Hotel.

Two Australian lasses tucking into roast beef and Yorkshire pudding – a chap who remembers following the band of the Salvation Army on its way down to the Citadel on Union Street when he was a little lad back in the 1920s – toddlers with their Mums and Dads – babes in arms, Grandmas and Granddads enjoying the somewhat rare sunshine, keeping safely in the shade of the tall sycamores with the rooks cawing accompaniment to the band about to begin.

Stuart Fawcett – a grand chap – a band chap – the band’s jovial, knowledgeable conductor, sharing a joke with the junior members of the band, watching him to give them the sign to start blowing.

Stu recalls when he was a jig borer at Brook Motors in Huddersfield, and when, in Meltham, if you didn’t work for David Brown Tractors you probably didn’t work at all.

Cheerful Phil Beck selling raffle tickets in aid of the band. He sold me a roll and then never called my numbers at the end – cheers, Phil – really!

Young soloists – a cornet player probably doing her A-Levels – a lad with spiky hair – a wizard on the drums, and the heavyweights – euphonium players – trombonists on the back row, ready to boom their base barreltones when the conductor nods banging out An American Trilogy and Mephistopheles especially for me at the end. The melodious tones that go entirely with the views up the valley to moorlands flecked with sheep and lumps of millstone grit – punctuated now and then with the train to Huddersfield as it plunges into the blackness of nearby Standedge Tunnel.

Then it’s over and Stuart and his pals, all much appreciated in the usual way, packing up with a wave and a thank you. A grand day out.

Robert L. Fielding

Travelogue Humour #2.

2006-03-24T03:32:00.000-08:00

Diary of a genetically unmodified traveller: #4: Bad language (Please don’t throw hotel guests down the stairs their towels!)

by

Robert L. Fielding

Holidays abroad are always fun – they give you a complete change in almost everything – culture – food- drink- temperature, and language – the English language.

As far as the lingo used by the natives wherever you are, the best you can hope for in 2 weeks in ‘iki bira, lutfen’ or ‘tuvalet nerde?’ but you will certainly have problems with English now and then – not the Queen’s variety but theirs.

Don’t get me wrong, I congratulate any foreigner for even attempting my language in the country of their own - you come to Oldham and try to get anybody to speak so much as one syllable of Spanish, Italian or Greek!

The spoken variety of English is fine – after all, we have the non-linguistic clues that accompany most utterances. A man clutching his posterior is hardly likely to be asking for directions for the nearest Post Office, is he – and it works both ways. You ask for whatever it is you want by standing in front of it and pointing at it.

It is the written variety that causes the non-plussed look on the face of the quest.

Take the simple word ‘mere’ , instantly understood in the phrase ‘a mere acquaintance’ - ‘just a friend’ but much more puzzling in the phrase ‘shaving mere’ as in the instructions – ‘Please don’t cut yourself- use the shaving mere!’

Similarly, ‘lays’ seems like an unusual word, but is quite common as the opposite of ‘gemmen’ and found over the doors of respective facilities.

Next come the instructions in your hotel room – again in a variety of written English guaranteed to prevent you from getting to sleep.

Take for instance, ‘If you do not require heat in your room, control yourself!’ or ‘In case of fire, alarm the landlady!’ – who can sleep staring at them?

In the foyer – the ‘fire ‘ we get asked; ‘Please leave your values with us!’ – and finally, as Dennis Norden is fond of saying, ‘If this is your first visit to Moscow, you are welcome to it!’

Robert Leslie Fielding

Travelogue Nostalgia #1.

2006-03-24T03:30:00.000-08:00

Diary of a genetically unmodified traveller: #3 Nostalgia’s not what it used to be

by

Robert L. Fielding

Wandering nearer to home – around the haunts of my misspent youth – pubs and such – well, trying to, with all the non-stop traffic along the High Street of one of my favourite villages hindering my progress like it never seemed to do back in the days – and nights when I took two forward and one back on my way home after closing time.

Now it’s all Ye Olde Tea Shoppes and Estate Agents with windows full of overpriced des res’s, but it is a lot prettier than I remember it on my way to school, walking past fields and spaces between houses – patches of spare land – now mostly and sadly built on. Rarer than plutonium are spare patches of land in Saddleworth these days, and probably just as costly too.

Cash points in the gable ends of almshouses – it’s just a metaphor dear - former mills made up into so many nice flats – and me wondering where that good second hand bookshop went to.

Slices of pizza and a coffee to go instead of the Milk Bar in The Square – remember? You must do if you’re my age.

And nice sunny weather for a change, giving everything and everybody a summery look at last – shoppers looking up and smiling at other shoppers rather than looking down at the pavement to avoid getting their feet wet.

Shops with their doors open – rays of sunlight speckled with dust and pollen and me with time on my hands – time to crane my neck in the manner of lovers of books everywhere – a nice helpful bloke looking after his daughter’s shop while she ‘s at a Book Fair in Huddersfield looking for more books to fill her shelves.

And sandwiches and cups of tea – folks chatting on forms in lovely, flowery St Chads.

No, nostalgia’s not what it used to be – but it will be one day!

Robert L. Fielding
(Contact Robert L. Fielding for details - fieldingrob3@hotmail.com)

Travelogue Humour #1.

2006-03-24T03:28:00.000-08:00

Diary of a genetically unmodified traveller: Sand

by

Robert L. Fielding

Cavorting half naked on the beach, diving into white-horsed breakers, swimming out to crowded platforms – all wonderful – the perfect memories of a beautiful summer holiday by the sea. Afterwards comes the inevitable crinkly fingers and toes from staying in the water too long or the slight shiver that gives you the same message or the ever so slight feeling of being a bit mucky that contact with salt and sand gives.

A nice hot shower, lots of shower gel and shampoo and a huge, perfectly dry bath towel are all you need to get over whatever it is you were feeling – apart from the unpleasant feeling of having had too much exposure to the old currant bun, as my Dad used to say.

Now comes the relaxing feeling that putting on a clean white cotton shirt and a nice light pair of trousers gives you. Now you feel the day is complete. Now you feel able to do justice to a plate of fish or a kebab or a juicy steak.

If like we do though, you prefer camping on lonely beaches without facilities like showers and airing cupboards, you will know that that most ubiquitous substance – sand – will conspire against the comforts just referred to.

Unlike its more fertile cousin – soil – sand is suggestive of relaxation on beaches, but like soil, which we call ‘dirt’ when it turns up in a place we’d rather not have it, sand can sometimes be a nuisance.

Sand invades swiftly and is loathe to depart once ensconced. It is the most regular and democratic substance known to man – after water, diamond and air. Its angle of repose is uniform whether in the deserts of Sudan, or under the scorching sun of a Nevada sky.

This homogeneity – this lack of imaginative behaviour – is due to its basic structure – which I will call its grittiness. Chemically speaking, sand is a rich and concentrated cocktail of all manner of abrasive substances, each of which is guaranteed to make you itch – chiefly, I suppose, silica, quartz, and a liberal peppering of whatever happens to be the indigenous rock of the area.

The sands of the Bay of Naples are black, reflecting the volcanic origins of much of what lies beneath that fertile and green crescent of sunshine. But it is its gritty nature that impedes our comfort once we have left the beach.

In between your toes, under the collar of your shirt, or between a piece of lettuce and a piece of cucumber in an otherwise delicious and refreshing sandwich, it is most unwelcome.

Unlike soil though, which you recall we sometimes call ‘dirt’ when it annoys us, we have no negative word for sand. Is this lack due to our associating sand with fondly remembered holidays, or is it because most of us landlubbers rarely see it, except on building sites and in egg timers?
Robert Fielding

Travelogue #2.

2006-03-24T03:27:00.000-08:00

The diary of a genetically unmodified traveller: Travelling by air

by

Robert L. Fielding

By ‘travelling’, I mean the act of moving yourself and your belongings – a couple of plastic suitcases and a holdall - from A to B, as opposed to sitting around in departure lounges waiting for connecting flights.

I have long been aware of the fact – since I grew to be a six-footer – that shin bones could have been better designed to take into account our seemingly genetic need to travel.

Unfortunately, nothing in the double helix covers this most human of traits – to be uncomfortable in seas that are marginally just too close together for comfort.

Plane makers never consider people with my leg length when life’s seating plan is being worked out.

The incentive to cram as many seats as possible into the cabin of a 747/37/27 or anything bigger than a Cessner is the greater number of passengers that can be made uncomfortable for the duration of the flight to Bodrum, and the increase in revenues from being able to sell more tickets per gallon of aviation fuel.

As far as genetics is concerned, all that has happened is that either technology – the nuts and bolts and microprocessor stuff – has long outstripped the specifications of the DNA of travellers or else it hasn’t caught up – I favour the latter.

All this leads me to the kind of adage my grandmother was fond of; ‘If God had meant us to smoke’, she used to say as I was lighting up, ‘we would have had chimneys fitted.’

My variation is, ‘If God had meant us to travel by plane or bus, we would have been kitted out with a set of second (reverse) knees, or we would have been born pygmies or dwarfs.’ (No offence to either, by the way)

The fact – the sad fact – that we are neither double kneed nor short (most of us) means, doesn’t it, that it would be better for us if we stayed home and satisfied our wander lust by watching holiday programmes on TV rather than trying it out for ourselves and suffering in the process.

I will certainly bear that in mind prior to my next holiday – but for now, alas, it’s too late; I am half way through this year’s ordeal of modern flight – see you in Bodrum.

Robert L Fielding

Travelogue #1.

2006-03-24T03:22:00.000-08:00

Raffles Hotel

by

Robert L. Fielding

Rudyard Kipling once famously said, “Feed at Raffles!” I can see why he said it, though I have not yet dined here.

The ambience of this famous edifice, historically connected with Sir Stamford Raffles and the beginnings of the Straits Settlements, is a joy.

Sitting taking tea in the elegant Writers Bar, one can easily imagine W. Somerset Maugham penning in his notebook, the words, ‘Someone said George wants to blow his brains out.’
‘Will you do anything to dissuade him?’
‘Good Heavens, no!’
And we sat down and waited for the sound of gunshot.

These words may never have been uttered, but they are axiomatic – pointing to different days in the history of the Englishman abroad. No din from the traffic disturbed the taking of afternoon tea, no towers inhibited one’s view, and Beach Road really was next to the beach – that strand of sand along which evening strolls were taken as the settlement settled, the coolie rested and all was well with the World or at least that part of it upon which the sun never set.
Robert L. Fielding

Local features #1.

2006-03-24T03:20:00.000-08:00

My native Lancashire

by

Robert L. Fielding

The only member of my family to be born in Lancashire, I travel a long way every summer to be here with them.

Like them, Lancashire is much changed – on the surface and in parts (the northern boundary was once the River Duddon, in what is now called Cumbria) – but also like them, underneath, it remains unchanged – much loved – missed greatly for ten months of the year.

The skies of Lancashire change constantly – but there are patches of blue in between the grey clouds that I hardly ever remember until I stand under them. Quiet until mid August when the Premiership gets going, The Reebok Stadium rears up in the sunlight like something out of War of the Worlds, while the long sheds of Horwich Carriage Works remain in the long shadows of the hills, east of Bolton.

The green hills flash by speeding up the M61 – Preston and Lancaster rushing up on big blue signs - the M6 – Forton Services and the gentle undulations of the Fylde peninsula, bounded by the Ribble and the Wyre give way to the terminal moraines of Cockerham and Thurnham – the geomorphology of more glacial times under changeful Lancashire skies, and former cotton mills now used for summat else entirely – Botany Village!

Then we near busy Glasson Dock, looking slightly less busy now that the Isle of Man steamer the King Orry has gone – and Coniston Old Man (once the highest point in Lancashire), and the mighty machine shops and sheds of Vickers at Barrow in Furness, birthplace of nuclear subs, with Black Combe (dread name) to the north looking over

Walney Island, and Ulverston, birthplace of Stan Laurel and commemorated in the town by the Laurel and Hardy Museum where me and my mates once spent a wet afternoon sitting in old cinema seats roaring at the Sons of the Desert on video. Cockerham Sands is our destination for today – the frowning monoliths of Heysham Nuclear Power Station dominate the shore of empty channels - boats left high and dry by the vanishing tides that were too quick for a bunch of Chinese cocklers a while back, poor lads.

The caravan is soon set up and day trips out are easy, attractions near. Sunday’s mammoth car boot sale at St. Michael’s on Wyre beckons us as it does a lot more – where else but a car boot sale can you pick up, look at and put down again – books, videos, antiques, not so antique items, real oddments – an eclectic display of bric-a-brac and household hand-me-downs, the sometimes useful and the mostly useless - thousands of cars parking free, hundreds of stallholders at eight quid a piece and all going to a charity to fight cancer. I managed to find a copy of that marvelous Richard Attenborough/Bryan Forbes film, ‘Whistle Down the Wind’ with Bernard Lee and his delightfully wayward children –
Kathy, Nan, and little Charles, and their remarkable discovery in the barn of their farm on the moors above Burnley.

An evening run up to Silverdale and Arnside – mustering point of the cross Morecambe Bay Walk from Kents Bank, a precarious walk only ever best tackled with a pilot who knows the treacherous sands like the back of his hand. The tide rushing in – fast as a galloping horse, and anglers who could once find flatfish in the tidal mudflats by standing on them with their bare feet.

And returning – getting lost in the little lanes that weave around Arnside Knott, incredibly, a signpost to Gibraltar, and on past the most romantic railway station in the world – Carnforth
a brief encounter on the London-Carlisle line. A morning stroll to Cockersands Abbey – the white brush strokes of Lancaster University and the tall student accommodation block - Bowland Tower - across the meadows, deceptively close, a longer way than the crow flies – a lot longer around the winding roads and lanes by Thurnham and Glasson Dock, Galgate and Alexandra Park (newly built accommodation for students at the Bailrigg Campus).

Heysham Power Station looms again after breakfast – the Battery Hotel and then a promise to myself – a visit to see Eric Bartholomew (Morecambe) – his statue laughing down the steps to circles with the biggest names in showbiz written on them. The steps, with the words of Eric and Ernie ’ s signature tune – ‘ Bring me sunshine’, and some of Eric’s memorable lines – ‘ What do you think of the show so far? ’ – inviting the answer, ‘Rubbish!’ – ‘Some tea, Ern?’ and Eric’s refrain of ‘Bumm ooh ya-ta-ta-ta’ to Ernie’s singing ‘Will you miss me tonight when I’m gone?’ Both sadly missed, by me and another bloke paying homage as I was, wondering why they weren’t both at the top of the steps, united in death, and in our hearts and our memories Eric and Ernie – Morecambe and Wise.

The Freeport in Fleetwood – famous names (I didn’t recognize any of ‘em, but what do I know?) at knock down prices, and then roadside signs for a Steam Engine Rally at Hambleton, farm grown new potatoes everywhere, a pottery at Pilling, caravan sales, and the pleasant flowery greenery of Lancashire, west of the heathery moors of the Trough of Bowland, and I recall the sad loss of Pat Seed’s beloved husband in an underground reservoir one evening at Abbeysteads – Lancashire – my Lancashire – the one that is out there, and easy to find, if you know where to look.
Robert Leslie Fielding

Investments #1.

2006-03-24T03:04:00.000-08:00

KNOW YOUR DIAMONDS - INVEST WISELY- MAKE MONEY

by

Robert L. Fielding

1. Investing in gems
Diamonds are forever, they are a girl’s best friend, and they are precious. But the terms precious and semi-precious have little meaning in reality. Investment grade is a better guide to the value of gems. It may surprise you to know that precious gemstones are not as good an investment as semi-precious stones; they often appreciate in value more and are easier to liquidate, sell, to me and you.

You can make money investing in gemstones, but you need to know what you are about; don’t expect to buy from retailers and increase your investment in a short time.

Primary dealers offer the best prices; they mine and cut the stones

Secondary dealers buy from wholesalers and primary dealers and sell to retail outlets still well below retail prices.

You can find pre-owned gems at flea markets, pawn shops and estate sales, but again you have to know what you are looking for and what you find.

Look on the Internet, and in trade magazines for listings of dealers.

Beware! Low priced gems get a higher price markup than expensive gems up to three to five times higher.

Cut gemstones are not the only things to look at rough gems, mineral specimens and finished jewelry also have potential for investors.

Selling your gemstones is the next step; realizing their value in places like jewelry stores, auction houses and online auctions.

The greater the difference between wholesale and retail, the more chance you have of making a profit but everything is relative; you would surely accept 10% profit on a $40, 000 stone, but might not be prepared to accept that on a more modestly priced item.

A lapidary can turn low value into high; buy rough and allow enough markup to justify the work you put in.

Gem cutters can up the price of your gemstone if you do your homework, this is one of the best ways of adding value to your gemstones.

2. Diamond buyer’s guide
The 4 Cs: Clarity, Colour, Cut, Carat and of course, Cost, are the main considerations when buying diamonds.

Clarity
Diamonds invariably contain inclusions natural identifying blemishes, known as nature birthmarks or fingerprints¦. The greater clarity - fewer inclusions, the more valuable the diamond.

Inclusions that are visible to the naked eye affect the flow of light through the diamond’s sparkle can be lost.

Diamonds with inclusions visible to the naked eye are graded 11-12; those with small inclusions are graded S11-S12, and those with very small inclusions are graded as V11-V12, or smaller still, VV11-VV12.

Rare diamonds with no inclusions are flawless(FL) or internally flawless (IF)

Colour
Diamonds seem colourless, but many have faint colouring; the more colourless the diamond, the more valuable it is.

Set in gold, warmer colours are better, in white gold, silver or platinum, white or near colourless diamonds look gorgeous.

Carat
Gem weight was once done using the weight of a carob seed hence the term, carat.

One carat weighs one fifth of a gram, and a carat is divided into 100 points 33 carat diamond is the same weight as a 33 point diamond.

The larger the carat, the more valuable the diamond, but two diamonds of the same weight can have differing values because of their Cut, Clarity and Colour.

Cut
The word ¡¥cut¡¦ refers to the physical shape of the diamond, to the angles and the proportions a craftsman creates to release sparkle and fire from within the diamond.

A diamond’s cut allows light to be dispersed and reflected from one facet to another. Well cut diamonds allow the greatest amount of fire and sparkle to be reflected from one facet to another, and of course, this will increase the value of the diamond.

A well cut diamond is more valuable than other diamonds of the same colour, clarity and weight.

Cost
The cost to you, the buyer, will increase because of any one of these (Colour, Clarity, Cut), but what is beautiful is really a matter of taste, but value is a function of the three, plus its setting, which must also enhance the diamond’s qualities.

3. Choosing a diamond
Diamonds are graded into many categories, which can be a source of confusion for the uninitiated, but are generally graded on the 4 Cs: colour, clarity, cut and carat.

Colours D, E, and F designate the highest grades colourless
G, H, I, and J are next down near colourless or white.
K to Z are tinted yellow or yellowish
K, L, and M are set white, they will appear white if set in gold.

Along the alphabet, tinting gets stronger and value lower, until you reach extreme colouring - fancy coloured diamonds - the price of these goes up again.

Colour grading is simply a matter of comparing diamonds¡¦ colours and seeing which is closest. This is relatively expensive though.

More commonly, batches of similarly coloured diamonds are grouped together as GH or IJ ¡V the diamonds are in those ranges.

If you have a very expensive diamond, you could have it graded (grading can cost over $100), but this is not cost effective for the majority of diamonds.

Clarity is determined by size and number of inclusions in it.
Clarity grades use the letters V, S, and I (Very, Small, and Inclusion)

Flawless diamonds are graded: VVSI1 (Very, Very Small Inclusion One) through VVSI2, VSI1, VSI2, and SI1 and SI2.

Down the scale, there are: I1 and I2: eye visible inclusions but still gem grade diamonds.

Grades P1 and P2 are not usually considered gem grade because of the fact that little light passes through them.

Caveat emptor. 1 carat diamond rings costing $299 may not be a gem but an industrial grade of diamond.

Cut can be a hard property to judge. Watch out for:-
Brilliance of the gem
Terms
Single Cut Old Mine Cut¨ (These may only have 17 facets, a brilliant diamond has 57!)
Shape of the gem (ideally symmetrical, not lop-sided)
The girdle of the gem is the widest part seen from the top and the thinnest viewed from the side (if cut too thin, it will have a weak area that may give trouble later)
If two diamonds are the same grade, but one is brighter than the other, the cut is different.

Carat is the easiest to fathom; smaller diamonds are commoner than larger ones, smaller ones cost less.
Robert L. Fielding

Topical and current #1.

2006-03-24T03:02:00.000-08:00

Labelling role models

by

Robert L. Fielding

A lot is said about role models – how they are the wrong ones, mostly, or how we should all become better ones for our children to emulate. But the probable facts are that children adopt the ones they want despite our worries, and model themselves only in part on what they see in their parents.

Let’s face it, most children probably don’t know what role models are until some well meaning social commentator labels one. That’s not to say they don’t exist, but most likely not in the ways we think.

And people change role models as they go through life – adults might not have them – they might just fulfill the needs of impressionable minds that aren’t fully aware of their own identities, or at least their fully formed ones.

For young boys, we think footballers fill that role. For adolescent males, similarly aged film stars could play a part. The probable fact is that, even with today’s blanket media coverage, the young only ever get part of a celebrity’s persona.

Before the media took over our lives, we were exposed to even less – I liked Bobby Charlton, the Manchester United center forward of the 60s and early 70s when I was a lad, but I hardly ever heard him speak, let alone air his views on anything.

Now though, everybody can lip-read Wayne Rooney’s ‘comments’, listen to film stars talking off the set, and read about their innermost secrets.

All this doesn’t mean that young people are necessarily adversely affected – let’s give them more credit than they usually get – a teenager is just as likely to think someone is behaving idiotically as anybody else is. It’s just that being older we can sometimes forget what it was like to be young.

Having said that though, youngsters have many more people to choose from than I did, I think! But still, a person you know is more likely to be a role model for you than someone you only see for five minutes several times a week on TV.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – youngsters mimic their peers – watch what they do and you’ll have a handle on what your own sons or daughters are getting up to.

Robert L. Fielding

Art Review #1.

2006-03-24T02:58:00.000-08:00

The work of LD Vincent

As dusk falls on Jalan Batu Ferringi, Malaysia, the nightmarket comes out onto the sidewalk. Stalls are soon filled up with row upon row of shiny, copied Rolex, Omega and Breitling watches, and a thousand other oddments for tourist dollars.

One stall that has no truck with copies belongs to the artist LD Vincent. A Malaysian Portugese, born in Malacca, Vincent produces vignettes of life around him - the crowded, hot street-life of the Orient that is Penang, Malaysia.

With pen and paint - rarely oil - and via various mediums: ceramics, canvas, water-board - the scenes of the East come alive to attract and fascinate.

Exhibiting his work only occasionally, Vincent seems a shy, retiring man - leaving the selling of his paintings to his wife, but he IS a talent, and uses techniques from surrealism, impressionism and more abstract art to create his work.

After diverting from singing the blues in 1972, LD now produces high quality, unorthodox and hauntingly beautiful art to tempt the tourist looking for something to encapsulate places visited in the Orient. In the work of LD Vincent, he finds it in a true and original style.
Robert L. Fielding