Saturday 21 May 2016

On zombie books, and corpses in the garden.

The more I look at that title, the less sure I am that I even know how to write. Corpses. It looks wrong. It is a word - I checked on Google. I even looked up 'use corpses in a sentence', but I'm not convinced. It sounds like something that Gollum would say. I know the children at school have similar moments: a couple of days ago, the most intelligent girl in the class sat with her head in her hands, moaning that she'd forgotten how to spell 'when'. I know I'd fail the SATs grammar test our year 6s have just done. What the heck is 'past progressive', and why do you need to know when you're only 11 years old and struggle to put a comma in the correct place? I know that some schools use old SATs papers to test the intelligence of prospective teaching assistants. I would re-enact that scene from Shirley Valentine, where she rips her exam paper into little bits and throws it over her shoulder. Either that, or I'd creatively deface it. 'Tick one box in each row to show whether the word after is used as a subordinating conjunction or as a preposition.' I can think of an answer to that, but it wouldn't be one that would score me any points. I have nothing against learning grammar, but at age eleven surely you just need to be able to tell whether your sentence makes sense or not. Learn the finer points later. If you want to. 

Anyway. (And I know that's not grammatically correct, because a sentence needs a subject and a verb. Do I care?)

Going back to corpses (my little Hobbitses) - we have an assortment of dead animals in the back garden thanks to one of our cats, who has decided it is rabbit-hunting season once more. He uses our hammock as the roof of his outdoor eatery, which means that when the sun appears (ha ha), whoever wishes to bask has to clear up a little pile of rabbit ears and rejected hind legs. It's not pleasant. Especially when a major disembowelling is taking place when I'm trying to eat my breakfast. 

There are also a couple of skulls around, that Son Number One has found on his rounds as a Forest Ranger. I love my son's job title. It makes him sound like a character from Yogi Bear and gives us endless opportunities to take the piss and sing the Lumberjack Song from Monty Python. He found a roe deer skull some time ago, which we scrubbed with Jeyes Fluid and which now sits on a bookshelf. Because that was greeted with interested enthusiasm, he's also brought home a huge red deer skull and a fox skull, complete with jaw bone and rather wobbly teeth. The red deer was hard to identify as it came from an individual with deformed antlers, meaning we couldn't find it on any guide on the internet. So Son Number One took it to the Wildlife Rangers, who told us what is was. They've promised to show him around the whole wildlife department, and I'm wondering if I'll be allowed to go, too. (Apparently, they once had to shoot a crocodile.) We've become so used to having these skulls around, that they've faded into our surroundings, but we try to remember to put them outside when people visit, just in case they think they've found the headquarters of a Norfolk Satanic cult. I took the deer skulls to school a few weeks ago, because they'd been doing a bit of topic on types of teeth (but mainly because I knew they'd just like seeing some skulls). I drove the car to school that day, because the antlers stuck out the top of the bag, and I knew I'd get some funny looks. I don't get that some people think bones are disgusting or creepy. I'm with those children that stick their fingers in the brain cavity and go, 'Wow, this is where the spinal-stuff leads. Cool!' 

And on to zombies...
I was having an interesting book-chat with our school dyslexia lady yesterday. We discovered that we were in total agreement that there are such things as books for girls and books for boys - something that would get us lynched by the sexism brigade. (We agreed that we weren't saying that certain books should only be for boys or girls, by the way.) And that did link in with something I learnt from a book I mentioned a while ago: Invisible Ink, by Brian McDonald - the best book on writing that I've read. McDonald writes about what he calls the masculine and feminine aspects to a story - basically action vs emotional stuff - and how a good story will have a balance, but those without the balance tend to appeal to a particular gender. Anyway, the conversation got me looking at my bookshelves. I have realised that, in a literary way, I appear to be bisexual. Clive Cussler is sitting next to Jane Austen. Bridget Jones and Jack Reacher are sharing a shelf. Reading-wise, I have just ditched Sense and Sensibility for a zombie apocalypse novel. And, yes, it does seem to be because of the action. The most action in Sense and Sensibility seemed to be a group of people going for a stroll up a hill before someone had a headache and had to go home. I really want to send all my Jane Austens to a charity shop, and the fact that I haven't shows me up as being a raging book snob.



Anyway, I must go. This guy's got a broken leg, forty days of food left, and is stuck in his London flat, watching the undead slowly wander past. Actually, someone did write a book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I may give that a go...


Saturday 14 May 2016

End of an error

I have finished my degree. Apologies for the lack of recent posts, but I've been working on the short-story-plus-commentary that was my final piece for the Open University. I had to submit a plan for my final story in February and, since then, I forgot the finer details, changed the characters and the ending, and ended up with something that could only be linked to the plan by someone with a very good imagination. Fortunately, this made the commentary very easy to write, with it being a thousand words based around 'I changed this because...'. So, I clicked on the 'Submit your work' button for the last time and now have to wait until July for my result.

Thankfully, due to the result of my 'Religions and Controversy' course, I know what degree classification I'll be getting, so that's not a worry, but it would be nice to get a Pass 2 for this creative writing course (I don't think I'll reach the giddy heights of a distinction for this one, sadly). So, that's five years of study finished (I'm not counting the year I wasted when I ducked out of a linguistics course after finding it too brain-mangling, or the science course on volcanoes and tsunamis in which I discovered my maths was not up to working out the speed that vibrations move through the earth, for a one-mark question). I actually feel rather sad. I started the whole thing with a short course on psychology, because I was bored and there was nothing on television. I didn't have to pay for it because, at the time, the OU was taking Tesco vouchers for level one courses. And that was going to be it. But then I found that learning was as addictive as other OU students said it was and, several thousand pounds later, I can't for the life of me remember writing an essay on Harlow's attachment theory, but I did, and it's presumably residing in the hard-to-reach bits of my brain somewhere (the same place as the whereabouts of my sunglasses).

So, what have I learnt? Apart from the 'fact' that Milton Keynes is considered the spiritual centre of the UK (oh, how we did laugh about that...)

  • I'm not as stupid as my high school teachers told me,
  • I, very sadly, enjoy compiling a long list of references at the end of an assignment,
  • I would be sunk without my spell-checker and the thesaurus on Word,
  • I don't trust anything that isn't peer-reviewed and stocked in the OU library,
  • I have an insatiable need to keep learning new things,
  • I will never get a result that is good enough for me. 

The last point is rather worrying. While it's nice for the Boss Lady to praise the way I strive to improve myself, and while I love filling my head with 'new stuff', I'm already looking up prices of PhDs in Children's Literature (Cambridge Uni does one, and it's affordable, which I kind of wish it wasn't as I can see myself still being a student when I'm 90. On the other hand, the thought of the school children having to call me 'Doctor' could make it worthwhile). I'm finding learning very addictive, though, as I said before. I agree with that thing about 'the more I learn, the less I know,' although I can't remember if that's a quote from Socrates or Red Hot Chilli Peppers. 



The other option I'd like to consider...

Anyway. The Masters starts in September, so I'll do that, and see where the next three years takes me. Meanwhile, questions I'm getting fed up with hearing: 'Are you going to be a teacher?' Asked by staff members and usually answered by slightly hysterical laughter. 'When's your graduation?' Seriously? I could buy a huge pile of books for what it would cost me to fall up the steps at a graduation. 'How are you going to use your degree?' Ummm... 

For now, there is reading, which can now be done without feeling guilty that I'm avoiding an assignment deadline. And I will try to keep the blog more up to date.