Proceedings of the Castle Aching Parish Council, 1905

[Adam88]

23 minutes ago, Dave John said:

Nae comment.... 

 

 

????

[Compound2632]

6 hours ago, Adam88 said:

 

????

 

Staightforward. At the marina (evident from the characters' dress): "Are you after (i.e. looking for) a yacht? Which yacht are you after?"

Edited November 14, 2021 by Compound2632

[Northroader]

 

[Regularity]

My ex-wife told me that during the psychiatry block of her undergraduate medical degree, when the students  were introduced to the drug and alcohol abuse team, the Consultant psychiatrist began by making them all a cuppa whilst they watched an episode of Rab C.

He then asked them why they thought he had shown them it. Various mumbled replies, to which he retorted,

”I am from Glasgow, and I can tell you straight that there really are people like that: not just there, not just Scottish, but that’s the sort of patient we deal with here.”

[Adam88]

5 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Staightforward. At the marina (evident from the characters' dress): "Are you after (i.e. looking for) a yacht? Which yacht are you after?"

 

What a sheltered life I lead.

[petethemole]

7 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Staightforward. At the marina (evident from the characters' dress): "Are you after (i.e. looking for) a yacht? Which yacht are you after?"

I read it as "Are you off a yacht? What yacht are you off of?"

[Compound2632]

8 minutes ago, petethemole said:

I read it as "Are you off a yacht? What yacht are you off of?"

 

7 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

"Are you after (i.e. looking for) a yacht? Which yacht are you after?"

 

@Dave John, adjudication please!

[Dave John]

Well, Pete is right.

 

"Are you off a yacht? What yacht are you off of?"  would be as close as you can get. 

 

It is a cartoon by  Bud Neill, very popular in Glasgow papers during the 50s and 60s. Many made use of the Glasgow vernacular and perhaps influenced those famous Stanley Baxter sketches. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud_Neill

 

The Lobey Dosser statue is close to where I live. 

 

 

[Caley Jim]

The thing about Rab C was that it was so close to the truth!   There were many nuances in it that I'm sure went straight over the heads of those not familiar with the city and it's 'folklore'!

 

Conversation between two wee wifeys from Auchenshuggle on their way home after a day 'up the toon'.

 

First  wifey, "Errabus!"

Second wifey, "Wherreabus?"

First Wifey, "Errabusowerer."

 

Translate.  ( @Dave John ) you're disqualified from answering!)

 

Jim

[Regularity]

On 12/11/2021 at 09:57, Edwardian said:

As such, my Radio tells me daily that I am immensely privileged and oppressive.

You can afford to decide to stop voting Labour because they would deny your choice of sending your children into private education.

 

You are immensely privileged. The joint facts that you don’t see it and complain about are a part of what’s oppressive about your position. 
 

Instead of voting Tory in future, why not kick off a campaign to make state education so good that no one would need to consider private education? You will have to fight the Conservatives (who know that a good education is a massive privilege and also leads to their children making lifelong useful connections), the Liberal Democrats (who will want to end private education immediately, but not increase taxes to make the state system better) and Labour (who will want to end private education immediately, but only those who have already benefitted from it, and also because this much investment will require much higher standards of teachers, and they must be subject to the same sort of performance review as the private sector - but they will be paid for it).

 

Quote

I keep asking it, ''well, in that case, when is the fun going to start?!?''

It’s not about the fun. It’s about the far fewer obstacles you have had to negotiate to get to where you are (not saying there weren’t obstacles). Whilst your current position in life may not be fun due to personal circumstances, it is still a lot nicer than for 99% of the planet’s population.

 

I used to feel as you do. Then I realised I had no idea how much more difficult it was for people from different backgrounds. I dismiss people who think I do what I do and am what I am solely because of this “privilege” as being too negative to be able to help themselves, but I cannot deny that given the same natural abilities, then someone who wasn’t white, middle class and male would have had to struggle more to get to my position. If I had been born into money and a higher social status, and been educated privately, then maybe I would be even more privileged, but I am not going to be resentful of the likes of the current cabinet because their forebears did well: just disgusted at the level of self-serving disregard for nearly everything and everyone else. What a waste!

[Nearholmer]

A quick way through this is the "So, would you like to swap lives with X?" game.

 

What you rapidly conclude as a British, white, professionally qualified, male person, living right now is that the number/type of people you would honestly like to swap lives (I nearly mis-typed that) with is very small, not zero, but very small. Try changing each item in the list, one at a time, and maybe nationality would be worth a swap, but race and gender certainly wouldn't, and neither would qualification.

 

That certainly deals with the "priviliged" side of it. I'm less sure about the "oppressive", but if the only way to be priviliged is to appropriate, however indirectly, from others, then it probably flows from the first.

[Compound2632]

It seems to me that anyone who has the leisure and resources to indulge in this hobby of ours is by definition privileged and (by observation) likely to be (but by no means necessarily) white and male. I do though think that rather fretting ourselves into despair over how we have come by this privilege, we should be thinking about what we do with it. Probably a bit Whiggish of me.

[Dunsignalling]

I may be cynical, but state education will never get properly fixed until the offspring of those who legislate its nature and decide on its funding are forced to partake of it.

 

The other lot aren't blameless either; all those grammar school boys and girls who ascended the greasy pole to Westminster as Labour MPs in the fifties and sixties, then pulled up the ladder behind them....

 

John

Edited November 14, 2021 by Dunsignalling

[Regularity]

17 hours ago, Dunsignalling said:

I may be cynical, but state education will never get properly fixed until the offspring of those who legislate its nature and decide on its funding are forced to partake of it.

So, we have to wait a few more centuries, then?

That’s a fair point: I went through it and I wonder how anyone survived, or learned much.

But it will take decades before this happens: look at the current cabinet. Not just public school, but mostly a single public school. Where are the David Davises of the Conservative Party: although his view was, “I touched it out, so can you.” (Neatly sidestepping the fact that he went to Grammar School, which is largely no longer an option.)

Quote

The other lot aren't blameless either; all those grammar school boys and girls who ascended the greasy pole to Westminster as Labour MPs in the fifties and sixties, then pulled up the ladder behind them....

Actually, most of the local education authorities who pushed this through were Conservative.

That said, the biggest agitation for the change to comprehensive rather than selective education came from some of teachers, primarily because teachers at secondary moderns felt they were second class compared to teachers at grammar schools.
Grammar schools offered people like my parents a chance to get better jobs: neither came from families with any spare cash, and getting through the 11+ recognised their intellectualities and got them “office jobs” at 16, rather than bus conductor, lorry driver or housewife. For people like them, it was a potential path towards an academic training, lasting until age 21 or so. (My father went to work at 16 because his parents couldn’t afford for him to do A levels, my mother because no one in her family had got O levels before and that was “enough education”.) People who went to a technical school were supposed to be on the path to a skilled technical role, lasting until age 21 or so. There was a bulk left out, though.

The problem was that we valued a “grammar school education” as being somehow “better” than a technical training - we still do, witness “education, education, education” and countless degree courses for practical subjects which are all theory and no practice, and focus on the noun of the job title rather than the verb of the activity. 

Typically, rather than make the poor parts better, we threw out the baby with the bath water and made everything average. That’s good news for the wealthy elite - they don’t care about the rest of us as long as the bins are emptied - and also for the extreme left, who don’t want everything good, just everything the same, and no one “doing better” out of natural variation in their abilities than anyone else, and it doesn’t matter who empties the bins.
 

Fairness is not the same as equality.

 

Now that, I would say, is real cynicism…

[Regularity]

18 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

A quick way through this is the "So, would you like to swap lives with X?" game. What you rapidly conclude as a British, white, professionally qualified, male person, living right now is that the number/type of people you would honestly like to swap lives (I nearly mis-typed that) with is very small, not zero, but very small. Try changing each item in the list, one at a time, and maybe nationality would be worth a swap, but race and gender certainly wouldn't, and neither would qualification.

Yes, the whole point of the Black Lives Matter movement is to do this as a generalisation: take any role, any job, and see if it would be harder for someone not white, middle class (or “higher” - UK definitions), educated, etc, to get into that position. This  is measured from descriptive statistics, which by their nature talk in generalisations and not specifics. BLM is about addressing the institutional existence of barriers, and addressing the historical causes and consequences of it. 
What happened in Bristol with the statue of Colton being torn down and thrown in the Harbour was understandable but vandalism: putting it in the museum after retrieving it was brilliant as it raises awareness of the issue. Colton made his wealth via slavery, and the compensation paid to him and his family for 180 years (yes, until 2015!) after the abolition of slavery. Some of that wealth was used philanthropically for the benefit of Bristol (hence the statue) but other families were less community minded, such as the Cumberbatch family…

 

As for individuals, circumstances vary and generalisations never will fit. But when it comes to individual cases of racism, we can only call it out. Needs to happen a lot more than it does.

 

 

[Nearholmer]

Technical education at other than university level, and even to some extent at that level, has always done more-or-less badly in this country simply because as a society we have seldom seriously valued technical skills. There have been brief flurries of respect for technical matters, and a sort of respect for some craft technical skills, usually in hindsight, but technical education has never been valued alongside the older professions and trades.

 

What that under-valuing has done over two or more centuries is to very quietly and subtly sap our technical competence as a nation, leaving us at least half a step behind nations like Germany, Japan, and China, and to some extent France (and don’t underestimate the quality of technical educations in Poland, Spain, Greece and a number of other countries).

 

If I was to be rufty-tufty about it, I’d say  that at the root is the same problem as lies at the root of the more widespread “post code lottery” of quality of non-fee-paying education: class division and associated snobbery, even now, nearly a quarter of the way through C21st.

 

Result: the U.K. has a serious productivity problem, which leans us heavily in the direction of a low-skilled, low-wage, most people just-about-bumping-along economy.

 

Back to swapping lives, I think I might go for “everything the same, except West German”.

[Compound2632]

8 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Technical education at other than university level, and even to some extent at that level, has always done more-or-less badly in this country simply because as a society we have seldom seriously valued technical skills. There have been brief flurries of respect for technical matters, and a sort of respect for some craft technical skills, usually in hindsight, but technical education has never been valued alongside the older professions and trades.

 

Even at the highly skilled graduate end of things, there's a general failure to appreciate the level of skill and experience that is required to produce things - as opposed to managing the production of things. This manifests itself in a failure to invest in training (assuming that someone with the requisite high-level skills can be recruited in) and a trend towards management systems that assume that anyone at a given job title can carry out any task within that level. My other half is going through a reorganisation on such lines at present, nearly two decades after I did, which shows how far her organisation lags on the management fad curve.

 

I have to hang my head in shame though and admit that this method of management was introduced to this country by Guy Granet, Cecil Paget, et al. on the Midland Railway in the first decade of the twentieth century.

[Regularity]

A few years back I was teaching statistics, and a student had some data from G10 nations that he wanted to look at for time-series based analysis. Now, there were multiple holes in the data, as it concerned National spending on education and R&D and changes in GDP. The latter is recorded consistently by the World Bank, but the other data series were measured differently for different countries (and for the same countries, at different times) and had some gaps in it requiring interpolation. We couldn’t use the data for a published piece of research or anything, and it was getting close to anecdotal analysis, but as a teaching example it worked - the data covered different governing parties in the various countries, and all this is leading up to the following initial conclusions.

In the G10, education and R&D leads economic growth. For countries with a focus on production engineering, such as Japan, this lead was in the order of one or two years. Those with more “advanced” technologies such as space exploration or nuclear power (USA, France) the lead was typically 3-4 years.

There was one exception to this, with spending on education and R&D lagging economic growth, by a couple of years, where there was no real investment in the future.
You all know it was the UK, right?

 

 

[Regularity]

1 minute ago, Compound2632 said:

My other half is going through a reorganisation on such lines at present, nearly two decades after I did, which shows how far her organisation lags on the management fad curve.

Quote

REORGANISING
Should be undergone about as often as major surgery. And should be as well planned and as swiftly executed.

Robert Townsend, “Up The Organisation”, 1970.

[alastairq]

15 minutes ago, Regularity said:

Fairness is not the same as equality.

 

I absolutely agree.

''Equality'' seems to have somehow arrived at 'lowest common denominator?'

 

I'm an auldfahrt, who can barely remember anything to do with my education.

 

But, at an early age, I became 50% of a family under single parent status.

But, the single parent I was left with, came from what was once referred to as a 'meddle class 'family....professional grand parent, good job, nice pension, et al...and this influenced my parent's attitude to single parenthood. 

So instead of eh 'council house' and bread-earning job, I ended up being passed from pillar to post as 'somewhere to live, and a job' became the overriding intention.

Thus, I ended up in a 'Prep' school..[the breeding grounds for public schools]...with my mother getting the job as 'assistant matron', which included a room of her own, and a place for me at the school...in return for minuscule wages. Somehow more 'respectable' from a middle-class point of view, than a council flat, junior school for me, and a skivvy-type job for mother.

No 'home' for me though, but that didn't matter as I wasn't overly important in the bigger scheme of things...

 

3 years I went through that educational process [up to age 9]...  But, to give the 'prep' school its due,  educational advancement in each subject was entirely down to ability. Hence my progress wasn't entirely  by 'year group'. If I ended up with others of my age, that was purely accidental. One or two subjects, I ended up in the same class as 14 year olds, doing mock ''common entrance'' exams......

So, algebra, trigonometry, French, Latin, Geography, History, etc [and a bit of woodwork too]...were the types of subject I was encumbered with, as a 8-9 year old.  As well as what might be known as English Literature, Grammar, etc.....

Then, my Mother got the sack [or similar], and went into hospital for an extended period. I was fostered, for the remaining period of my 'primary education, and got sent to a  local  [state] Junior school.

I was absolutely, totally, lost.

My teacher, as I recall, couldn't actually, educationally, place me.  None of my education profile from age 6-ish fitted that expected of a child who might have come up through the State education system [infants/juniors]!!!

I had somehow missed out the basics of education the State normally provided.

I was at a level expected of a child in the 2nd or 3rd year of secondary education, in a lot of respects.

So, as a result, sitting in a class of my new peers, I was totally at a lost to understand what they seemed to take for granted. In many topics. Yet in others, I was streets ahead. Years ahead if progression were charted.

 

Vey confusing. I don't think State & Private education systems could in any way be compared....at the time  1950's/early 1960's]

The came the 11-plus! 

In the Prep [Private] school system the 11 plus was an option not promoted. The end game being the Common Entrance examinations at age 14, for progress onto a choice of Public School [a misnomer if ever there was one. They weren't in any way 'public' unless one acquired a scholarship....or paid.]

 

The 11-plus was [for me] nothing but a divisive system.

My junior school year was divided up into 3 or 4 classes....the 1st class being full of those expected to pass the 11 plus.

The 2nd class being full of those who 'might' pass [my class]  Classes 3 or 4 were destined for the secondary modern school regardless.

I was the only child out of 30-odd in my class to pass the 11-plus.

[Maybe because I was, by then, thoroughly used to 'sitting exams?]

Anyway, I had made some good friends at school, in my class...[as would be hoped,but not necessarily taken for granted] and it was the first  time I recall being mixed up with girls as well..[the Prep school was 'boys only']

Thus, come the September, I would be trolloping off to  one school [the grammar school, Warwick as it happened]...and all my chums were going to the local Secondary Modern school.....one heck of a jolt at a time when a child can do with some peer support when going into a bigger, new, school?]

 

As it happened, all changed [beyond my wit to recall why..I think I was simply left in the dark?}...and come the new school year I found myself in a very old Grammar boarding school [one of very few in the country]....mostly populated by Forces children......yup, my mother got a job there after coming out of hospital, 'cured' [she had been in the prevailing psychiatric system...yes, cold showers, , electric shock treatment, etc etc]....so she had a 'flat', which I wasn't allowed anywhere near, in term time....Also, boys-only school...very old, full of history..I got myself expelled after 3rd year...

Then went to a local mixed grammar school for the final two years up to O levels.....thoroughly enjoyed that bit, I did....with some sense of a family normality, a 'home' to go to after school, etc etc...

Got a packet of O levels, and that was it....Nowt since aside from the odd sojourn with City of London Poly,and a college in CArdiff, both part of my chosen career path.....

CAreer?

What a load of old boswellox that idea was, ?

Well, the above perhaps puts the two education systems into some sort of perspective in my eyes.....

Now, I have no idea what working class means?...Or middle class?   Nor could \i care.....I think we simply have the 'haves', & the 'have-nots'..

I pobble around between the two, really, now I no longer am in the workplace environment.

My Education did nothing for me, job-wise....except perhaps in some pub quizzes?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Nearholmer]

Something that always gets ignored when past systems of education, and the virtues of grammar schools in particular, get discussed, is how bl@@dy awful many ‘secondary moderns’ were, and the reason why the qualifications they taught towards were called Certificates of Second-rate Education, and TBH I think that many Technical Colleges were decidedly patchy too.

 

The school I attended was fairly newly-converted secondary modern to comprehensive, and even as an eleven year old I wondered how come a county as conservative (both sizes of C) as East Sussex was into this controversial system, much debated on the radio and in the papers, while next-door Kent wasn’t. I still don’t know, but suspect that what swayed it was how bad the secondary moderns were, rather than how good the grammars.

 

 

 

 

Edited November 15, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Tom Burnham]

Anthony Eden was I believe very interested in expanding the role and raising the status of technical schools, but lost office after Suez before he could do much about it.

[Edwardian]

On 14/11/2021 at 17:17, Regularity said:

You can afford to decide to stop voting Labour because they would deny your choice of sending your children into private education.

 

You are immensely privileged. The joint facts that you don’t see it and complain about are a part of what’s oppressive about your position. 
 

Instead of voting Tory in future, why not kick off a campaign to make state education so good that no one would need to consider private education? You will have to fight the Conservatives (who know that a good education is a massive privilege and also leads to their children making lifelong useful connections), the Liberal Democrats (who will want to end private education immediately, but not increase taxes to make the state system better) and Labour (who will want to end private education immediately, but only those who have already benefitted from it, and also because this much investment will require much higher standards of teachers, and they must be subject to the same sort of performance review as the private sector - but they will be paid for it).

 

It’s not about the fun. It’s about the far fewer obstacles you have had to negotiate to get to where you are (not saying there weren’t obstacles). Whilst your current position in life may not be fun due to personal circumstances, it is still a lot nicer than for 99% of the planet’s population.

 

I used to feel as you do. Then I realised I had no idea how much more difficult it was for people from different backgrounds. I dismiss people who think I do what I do and am what I am solely because of this “privilege” as being too negative to be able to help themselves, but I cannot deny that given the same natural abilities, then someone who wasn’t white, middle class and male would have had to struggle more to get to my position. If I had been born into money and a higher social status, and been educated privately, then maybe I would be even more privileged, but I am not going to be resentful of the likes of the current cabinet because their forebears did well: just disgusted at the level of self-serving disregard for nearly everything and everyone else. What a waste!

 

Yes and no.

 

The people who are truly privileged, as opposed to just pejoratively so, I suggest, are those who are able to live off savings, investments, capital and the work done by others.

 

Everyone else is a hapless wage-earner, assuming they are lucky enough to have a job - in a system that seems perfectly designed to only ever yield little more than subsistence.  Now, that can be subsistence at some considerable level of comfort, but that's still fragile, like all subsistence by its nature must be. Those you would include as immensely privileged are often those who have simply greater financial obligations and greater debt. Greater exposure when subsistence dips into dearth. Dearth caused by the modern equivalent of the Nature that the subsistence farmer prays will be kind; the financial markets. That, of course, means the truly privileged, for whom money, and wage-earners, make money, and who want to play with that money to see if it might grow some more. 

 

Perhaps if I were born in the 1860s - when a profession meant a share in the ownership of the means of production in the form of equity partnership and doctors and lawyers and the like could live like gentlemen - your point, and the media darlings', might hold up better, but, as Stephen has pointed out, I was born a century too late to enjoy the fruits of an oppressive system. In modern times middle class professionals more often than not have been made mere wage-drones, same as everyone else. A higher earning wage-drone, perhaps, but without much security and facing higher costs and larger debts. They have little more flexibility or room for manoeuvre if a job is lost or even if costs go up faster than their wages.

 

I lived for the best part of my forties unable to heat my family home and without hot water, not knowing from one week, sometimes day, let alone month, to the next whether I would go under and drag my family with me. It's been tough. It's never been much more than subsistence and its been dearth more often than not. So much so that things were definitely looking up at the point we lived for three months in a touring caravan. Now, again, Covid's effect on the economy has reduced my income and pulled me below subsistence. Hopefully, like the farmer,  my prudence in the good years will allow me to pull through, but I'm not out of the woods yet, by any means, and I know that as matters stand, I can never afford to retire. A death in the traces awaits. And surviving day to day remains bloody hard work, frankly.

 

I don't complain. I think that if one emerges from this pandemic, assuming I do, (a) alive, (b) with some kind of income, that's a win. And I count my blessings daily. Health, family etc. I wake up each morning and thank that Other Englishman that I was born in this country. Not because I live in some complacent particularistic fantasy world where we once won the Battle of Britain and a World Cup and that these past glories somehow mean everything, but because we are relatively free, relatively protected, relatively tolerant and we have democracy and the rule of law. and freeish health care.  These are all things that Rogues and Charlatans among us have been eroding, so we have to fight to preserve our imperfect way of life as well as fight to perfect it.  But, we still have some values worth fighting for.

 

So, when some privileged white middle class person on Radio 4, endlessly preaching to an increasingly jaundiced choir, tells me, every day, several times a day, that everything is my fault because I happen to have had the poor taste to have been born who I am, and that the only decent thing left for me to do is to seek self-immolation on the liberal barricades in the Culture Wars, I'm inclined to to say "feck off!" and change to Radio 3.   

 

So, maybe the 'know betters' in the media should walk a mile in my shoes and find themselves knee deep in sh!t! 

[Nearholmer]

The ‘laugh’ isn’t, I hasten to reassure you, in respect of your misfortunes, but your robust  attitude to the R4 crowd, which did make me smile.

 

As a lifelong (well, since 13yo, when I broke my arm badly in two places and spent a month listening to the radio 24/7 through a fog of horse-tablet painkillers) supporter of R4, I’m in a grumpy mood with them currently for fielding too many US academics. Some is good, but the way they trot them out you’d think there were no academics with interesting things to say from any other country on the planet, and that all thought grounded in the US experience was directly transferable to every other country, which it isn’t.

[Edwardian]

Don't get me wrong, I love Radio 4, it is my preferred medium for news, arts and much entertainment etc, but sometimes, sometimes, the accumulation of clunky messaging (which isn't exactly reaching the unconverted) does overwhelm me with its self-righteous and comically ignorant finger-pointing, and this sets my teeth grinding!   

 

But, then, if a national media platform is to err, there are far worse directions it could lean!

 

 

Edited November 16, 2021 by Edwardian
Grammar