I amsterdam - or at least I wish I was

I went to Amsterdam this week, with Joy.  And it was very good.  Excellent even.

I first became aware of the Netherlands during the World Cup of 1978.  They were nearly undone by Archie Gemmill's wonder goal for Scotland in the group stage, but then, after that scare, they managed to get all the way to the final.  Despite their ability to play the so-called Total Football, they mostly seemed to win their games in 78 by smashing the ball into the net from absolutely miles out.  Some of their shots seemed to originate in space.  This was especially necessary against the ultra-defensive Italians.  It was the only way, as they couldn't get anywhere near the goal.  like this..

Although the Dutch lost in the final to Argentina, they became my second favourite team from then on (actually considering England were my number one team, they were pretty much my first favourite team).

In the year 2000 I read the book Brilliant Orange by David Winner, and if I didn't like the Dutch before, I did then.  His literally brilliant book interweaves the story of Dutch football with the story of the Dutch themselves, and it's wonderful.

I have to admit, I did sort of go off the Dutch in 2010 when their football team got to the World Cup Final again, only to try and win the thing by forgetting they were Dutch, and kicking lumps out of Spain in a mostly forgettable kung fu fighting yellow-card-a-thon, which was a million miles from 1978.  But then in 2014 there was Robin van Persie's header, and all was well again.

The College Hotel, Amsterdam

Anyway, my love for the Netherlands came flooding back to as soon as I arrived on Sunday in Amsterdam.  All the signs are in English, the taxi driver wore a tie and was very polite, the hotel was a beautiful converted College full of eager trainee hospitality staff, and there are bikes everywhere.  But not bikes full of middle-aged men in lycra, bulging out everywhere.  They're full of stylishly dressed Dutch people, making it all look effortless and relaxed.

Look out!  It's rush hour...

I know the English have a reputation for not learning languages, but nowhere is as easy to get away with this as the Netherlands.  If the locals speak Dutch to you and you clearly don't understand, they effortlessly switch to perfect English.  If you don't understand the Dutch menu, just turn it over and there's English on the other side!

Sunday evening, shortly after checking in, we went for a meal to a place called Bouf, just a short walk from the hotel.  The lighting was so subdued I couldn't read the menu.  This contributed somewhat to both of us deciding to have the 4 course 'Chef's Choice', which was just whatever he felt like bringing us.  This began with an amuse-bouche, or appetiser of a small piece of meat on a piece of slate.  This panicked me as I worried it might be one of the four courses but it wasn't, and it was followed by a veggie risotto course, a fish soup, a meat course and a pudding.  None of the courses were very big, and I didn't really stop being hungry all night, but I liked the surprise aspect.

Bouf!

The restaurant is on a bend in the cycle path, so while you're sat there, you see a never ending stream of cyclists riding directly towards you, but then veering off at the last minute.  And mopeds.  For some reason mopeds are allowed on the cycle path.  They even have some really tiny two seater cars, that are a bit like mobility scooters, and you can ride them on their too.  Who'd have thought it?

Museumplein Amsterdam

The guidebook says Amsterdam is pretty small, so you can walk all around it quite easily in about 45 minutes, but a bit like Tony Blair and the deployment of those non-existent WMD, this estimate didn't turn out to be quite true.  Despite that, after breakfast on Monday (at Wildschut) we tried to do just that. It probably helps if you walk in a straight line, instead of around in circles, but hey ho!

At the Vondelpark on Monday

The weather was beautiful on Monday and so is the Museum District with its big open green spaces, and as well as going there, we also found the Vondelpark, and walked round there too.  After we'd walked ourselves almost to a standstill we stopped off for some Bitterballen (veggie goo in batter) and chips with mayonnaise, and then carried on towards the City Centre.  The queue for Anne Frank house was massive, so it was just as well we didn't really want to go there anyway.

Also, there were millions of boat tours going on, but they all had rooves on, and the boats looked like mobile greenhouses except for instead of tomatoes they seemed to be growing old people, and it was too sunny to be under a roof, so we hired a pedalo and explored the canals that way instead.  An excellent decision.

After pedalling round for an hour, we got back on dry land and stopped at another cafe.  The service was very slow, and it took most of the day to get our order.  I had a Dutch sausage toastie with tabasco and cheese, and Joy had a BLT.  We were in there so long, we gave up on trying to find the red light district that day, and decided to head back to the hotel.  Due to the foot knack we were now suffering from, we had to make one more stop on the way back to rest our feet and eat some giant pancakes.  It was nearly 5 by the time we'd had those, so it kind of ruined our appetite for a big dinner.  As a result we popped in to a deli on the way back and bought wine, cooked meat and some crackers and had that for tea instead of going out again.

Tuesday we were up early to go the Rijksmuseum.  It was another beautiful sunny day, and we stopped at a bakery for a breakfast of coffee and pastries, where again the lady who served us spoke immaculate English, and then we went to look at some art.

Here I am somewhere near the Night Watch by Rembrandt

I've sometimes found art galleries boring, especially when they're full of 200 identical portraits in gold frames, but some of the stuff in the Rijksmuseum is really good.  They've even got really famous stuff I've seen in books or on TV, and even though a lot of the paintings are worth billions, you can go right up to them and lean in with your face and look at the brush strokes.  And a lot of them are 400 years old, but they look new, like they were just painted yesterday.  They're not at all dusty.

There was a self-portrait by Van Gogh and the Milk Maid by Vermeer, and the Night Watch by Rembrandt, but my favourite was a village scene from the 1600s.  In the days before photos and Facebook, where people now feel the need to do a status update just because they've eaten an orange, all those people would have lived and died their whole lives unseen and unknown by history, and the only record would be paintings.  I know nothing about art but what I noticed was how real and 3d many of the images appeared, and also how fine details like velvet and the pages of books were rendered with an almost photographic quality by the artists.  Speaking as someone who can't draw at all, I found it all pretty impressive.

After the museum, we had a waffle each (I had mine with cherries and whipped cream) and then we caught a tram into the city to find the red light district.  We could tell we were getting close when it started to look a lot like Blackpool sea front, and when the smell of weed was in the air.  At first it was just shops selling sex toys and bondage gear, but then I saw what I assumed at first glance to be the most lifelike tailor's dummy I'd ever seen.  When she started moving around, I realised of course it was a prostitute in the window.  There were quite a few more in the windows next door, and although I didn't like to make eye contact, they mostly were on their phones looking pretty bored.  There seemed to be one street in particular where the windows were mostly full of large black women.  A lot of the windows were empty or had curtains drawn, so I guess they were either on a break or had customers.

I'd started to wonder if it was possible to get high from second hand smoke, since the stench of drugs was pretty overpowering, but decided to challenge my equilibrium further by having a beer.  I don't really like beer, but somehow it tastes nicer abroad.  Joy had one too, and then nearly walked under the wheels of a muttering woman on a bike.  After that, we were going to go into the Botanical Gardens, but didn't bother because of the entrance fee, and we also went to the outside of Rembrandt's house and didn't go in there either, but I had a Rembrandt burger from just round the corner, and we shared another beer.

It was sunny and warm and it was great to be able to sit outside with a drink at the end of October while it's raining at home.  We got another series of trams back to the hotel by about 5, and feeling knackered we didn't want to go out for a meal, so had one in the hotel instead, although it turned out to be very small.  It was all very nicely presented and tasty, but sometimes what you really want is just a big plate of stodge.

I felt very sad that night and the next morning that our short time in Amsterdam was over.  I knew I'd miss the mood of the place and the lifestyle and the little bakeries and the people and the works of art, and the weather and the sitting outside with a beer.  The hotel staff asked me on checkout how many I'd give the hotel out of 10 and, without thinking about it too much, I said 8.  I never like to give anyone a 10 because there's always room for improvement.  But then they made me justify the two marks I'd knocked off, so I ended up getting into a protracted discussion about what they could do to improve the place, but it was early and I just wanted to go really.  I had a plane to catch.

Having said that, the hotel was generally excellent, in fact one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed in, although they didn't give us any complimentary coffees on the last day, and they gave us one pillow which had no filling and which was like sleeping on a pillow that didn't exist.  Oh, and also the room had the most confusing system of switching lights on and off I've ever seen.  It seemed to be only possible to switch lights on and off from the opposite side of the room to where the lights were.  But all these things are minor, first-world quibbles.  It's a lovely building, and the rooms are great, and the staff were all incredibly polite and helpful.

Coming back to England, it was of course raining in Manchester, and it was full of English people, and I missed the Dutch with their 'sit up and beg' bikes and their relaxed multi-lingual natures.  Going abroad is like holding a mirror up to your own country, and since I've been back, the parts of England I've been spending time in, just seem that little bit more bland after Amsterdam.

CELTA - Thinking outside the box, finding your inner Super-hero and starting to believe.

Last year I went on a crazy expedition, cycling from Land's End to John o' Groats, with a group of 18 strangers, many of them North Americans.  We journeyed the length of Britain following a continuous purple line, all in the name of conquering an acronym called LEJOG.  In total I cycled 1094 miles in 18 days and I almost destroyed my thighs in the process.

CELTA!

For this year's attempt at self-destruction, I didn't go anywhere.  I assembled a new group of 18 strangers but this time, my adventure took place in a basement in the centre of Leeds. and this time it wasn't my legs that got destroyed, it was my brain.

LEJOG!

This year's five letter acronym of doom was called CELTA.  It's an intensive 4 week course designed to equip you to teach English anywhere in the world.  The course is 120 hours long over 20 days, containing 8 teaching practices (TPs) totalling 6 hours, as well as 4 written assignments, and lots and lots of homework.

I know some people who've done the CELTA before.  They told me it was really hard work, and not to expect any sleep, or any free time at weekends, and I took all this with a pinch of salt.  I thought it was like the legal warnings at the gates to the Monkey Enclosure at Longleat, which say things like 'Be warned!  If you stop, these monkeys will tear your car to pieces'  And you think 'Yeah right, they probably have to say that for the insurance'.  And then you go in and before you know it, they're making off into the trees with your windscreen wipers and your wing mirror and the handle off your sun roof.  With the benefit of hindsight, I'd have to say that, if anything, those people who warned me about CELTA, they played it down.....

Here is Green Group.  All except for Sunny (we couldn't find him).  Again North America was strongly represented...

I chose to do the CELTA at a place called Action English in Leeds, and I have to say, they were excellent throughout.  If you're contemplating this kind of madness yourself, you couldn't go to a better asylum.

My journey to the CELTA course every day over the last 4 weeks has reminded me very much of my schooldays.  I went to school between 1979 and 1986 less than a mile from Action English.  My walk up from the city centre was the same in both cases.  My younger self used to walk to school from the centre of Leeds to save the 15p bus money each day, first of all for sweets and then latterly for beer. The daily walk reminded me what temporary creatures we are, as despite the passing of 30 years, much about the walk remains the same, even if my bones are a bit more creaky these days.  

Despite LEJOG and CELTA being very different activities, there were certain parallels.  Not only the acronyms and the number of participants, and the presence of some North Americans, also some of my routines were the same.  As on last year's trip, I got into the habit of eating the same things for lunch every day, to save a bit of thinking time.  This year's favourite was cheese and red onion.  Also, like last year, the evenings became something of an eating competition, although this year instead of 3 course hotel meals, I called in almost every night to Trinity Kitchen and tried almost every food they have on offer.  Indian, Vietnamese, Mexican, Middle Eastern etc,  Each day the tea-time blow out on a big takeaway was my reward for surviving the day.

CELTA is full of mountain top moments.  Either you're on top of the mountain, or the mountain is on top of you...

As for the course itself, it was full-on from the start.  The first input session on Day 1 was about classroom management.  It was made very clear that as teachers of English we are there to create an environment which facilitates learning, not to stand at the front imparting wisdom.  I wrote in my notebook during it. 'Take your ego and throw it out the window'  And I meant it in two ways:

1) You're not there to be a wise man or a sage, a clown, a show-off or a stand up comedian, You're there to help people learn.  If they're not learning, you're not doing your job properly.  

2) You're going to get plenty of feedback on your performance, and some of it might be bruising.  It's not personal, so don't take it as such.  Whatever they say to you, whether you like it or not, take it on the chin and keep going.

But before we taught any lessons ourselves, we had to see how the experts do it.

I've been working for a charity in Leeds called St Vincent's since last October.  Mostly being a teaching assistant but I've also done a bit of amateur teaching.  After a few months of volunteering I thought my knowledge of the English language was pretty good, but one observed lesson with an expert was enough to reveal whole chasms of missing knowledge. I knew nothing about phonemes and pronunciation and word stress and intonation.

Another thing that stuck with me was my first TP tutor saying that you can have fun in the classroom, but you have to earn the right.  I figured out that was mostly going to be by knowing things, and getting something of a handle on phonemes later in the course was one of the parts of the course I enjoyed the most.

Hasta la vista Phonemic chart!!

It was pretty clear from meeting all the tutors on the course, that they practise what they preach. Every input session was run along the same lines as we were meant to run our own lessons, and every minute was worth paying attention to.  I remember thinking by Day 4 that the tutors were all sadists who were enjoying our suffering, but that wore off pretty soon.  It was undoubtedly just the tiredness talking.  I realised the course is hard for them too, and I know they felt our pain, but they had to be hard on us to get us through. Even in our darker moments and when it was necessary to give us difficult feedback, I always felt that knew and understood what we were going through.  

If only I'd had the mental capacity to take it all in.  I was writing so fast every day I nearly set fire to my notepad. My brain was so overwhelmed most of the time, the hamster in the wheel of my brain hadn't just died, he'd set on fire and his charred corpse was going round and round the wheel and setting fire to the bedding in the bottom of the cage, which then was becoming a wider fire hazard, which had the potential to burn the whole house down.  

How do I get myself into these scrapes?

My first real crisis came on the morning of Day 4, before my second Teaching Practice (TP2).  At 6 am that morning I was ready to quit the course.  I'd been awake between 10 pm and 2 am writing my lesson plan for the following day but then I was so tired I'd closed the file without saving the changes and so when I woke up again at 5 am all those changes were lost.  Despite the calamity, I talked myself into going in anyway, and the lesson went okay in the end, even if the lesson plan was a bit ropey.

During my volunteering at St Vincent's, even when I've had to take classes myself, I've never felt like a teacher.  I always felt like an impostor, someone pretending to be a teacher, but during my TP3, I had a period of around 15 minutes where I actually felt like a teacher.  It was like the Matrix subway fight between Neo and Mr Smith.  I knew I couldn't beat him yet, but I knew I was good enough to have a go.  I was starting to believe....

However, progress can have its ups and downs.  My TP4 on Day 10 wasn't such a success.  I was so tired by then.  I'd been following a sleep pattern advocated by Leonardo da Vinci, which involved going to bed for really short periods of sleep and then getting up again about 3 times a night.

Here is our basement classroom.  Escape routes via both door and window are possible....

It was a sunny day.  Our classroom was in the basement, but it had steps from outside the window leading back out into the real world, and partway through this TP, I really wanted to climb out the window and run away.  That hour was like an eternity.  It was definitely Crisis Number 2.  My intro to the lesson was too obtuse and abstract, and nobody understood it except me, and the lack of clarity knocked all the timings for the lesson to pot.

However, the feedback I got after it was my favourite of the whole course.  It was that you can't think outside the box, if you haven't built the box.   I've been told before many times that I have a tendency to go off at creative tangents and I often have trouble keeping this in check, but sometimes it's necessary to hold myself back. And so the rest of the course and TPs 5-8 were all about building the box.

Also when I start talking it can easily become mangled into gobbledigook, so I realised the safest thing to do was to get the students to talk instead of me, and luckily that's what we're supposed to do anyway, so problem solved!

Despite the emotional ups and downs on the course, I always tried to keep a sense of perspective, and remember that although it was a course I really, really wanted to pass, it was still only a course.  I remembered reading about a female athlete in the Olympics who'd trained for years to perform in a race lasting minutes, and just before her race she calmed herself down by thinking 'It's only the Olympics'.  It helped her not to freeze on the day.  At times early in the course when I thought I might fail, I reassured myself that even if I fail, the experience wouldn't be wasted.  It's only CELTA!

Something else that helped me keep a sense of perspective was thinking about my mum, who died last year.  Again, this reminded me that it was only a course, and not life or death.  My mum left me a small amount of money when she died, and I spent some of it on doing the course, so even if I'd failed, it would have been her money I was wasting, not my own.  It was probably just as well she wasn't around during the course though, she would have only worried that I was running myself into the ground and kept pestering me to eat better and get more sleep.

It's a strange and artificial thing to teach a class with a tutor and 5 of your peers observing (the 18 trainees were split up into 3 tutor groups of 6 trainees each), but I tried to always remember that this wasn't a gameshow or a simulation, these students were real people, with real lives and real learning needs, and ultimately the least stressful way to deal with the whole course was to remember that it was all about them.  The times during my TP when I felt most at ease were when I tuned into a difficulty they were having and a lightbulb went on, and I thought 'Hey I can solve this'.  By a fortunate coincidence, one of the main emphases of the teaching was to tell us to take the focus away from the teacher and put it on the students so doing that actually worked in my favour.  Also, it helped me to stay calm and feel less of a rabbit in the headlights.

Mutual support.  Sometimes it's the only thing that stops your brain melting...

Mutual support from my peer group was another great help on the course.  It's sometimes difficult for experts in a subject to really understand the problems that novices face, but we had the support of each other, and we knew exactly what each other were going through. It's a good system (and another similarity with the Lejog I did).

The last week of the course I decided to scrap the Leonardo sleep pattern, and go to bed around 10 pm, but get up again at 4 am, and do 2 hours finishing off before the day ahead.  I was definitely more productive early morning than late on.  Thankfully TPs 5-8 showed a steady improvement and in each of them I tried to build on the successes and iron out the failure of the ones that had gone before.

There were a couple of 'A-ha' penny drop moments in my last few lessons where I knew that learning was taking place. And it's a wonderful feeling.  I had spent what seemed like 14 hours preparing for each 1 hour lesson, and getting a few of those moments made it all worthwhile.

Here's a drawing I did during my buddy Zahra's last TP, to try and encourage her to find her inner Super-Hero.  I really tried hard to find mine during the course.

The tutors on the course would often compare CELTA to taking your driving test.  All those lessons and maneouvres and 3 point turns and reversing around corners and stuff, but it's only to get a permission to drive.  The real learning takes place after.

I've said before that during really intense experiences, we don't have whole happy and unhappy days. We only have moments, and the swing from elation to despair can happen in an instant.  Well, I had enough moments of elation on the CELTA to know I want more.

The first weekend of the course, and to celebrate finishing my first assignment I'd been to see the new Terminator movie, and it was Arnie who saved my last lesson too.  I'd given the students some famous people to talk about and to one group I gave Arnie and also the Dalai Lama.  They had to decide as a group who they looked up to most and he would go through to the final.

Sadly, Arnie lost out and the last 2 minutes of that lesson were taken up with my tutor laughing uncontrollably at my muttered disappointment at his demise.  Just as well as by then I had nothing left to pad out the lesson.  The laughter that you have to earn, maybe I deserved it by then.  I'd worked as hard as I possibly could.  I doubt I could have given any more.

For some reason I often see parallels between scenes from my own life and scenes from Action Movies.  As well as Arnie, I felt a lot like Neo from the Matrix during CELTA.  Grappling to understood this crazy code he's been given to deal with.  In my case it was English I was trying to deal with, not the mathematical code of the Matrix, but by the end, I was starting to be able to read the code. Not just the overall language anymore, but I could see the building blocks too.  Stative verbs, phonemes, collocations, superlatives, lexical sets, modifiers, tenses.  I was starting to see them all.

Come over here and use a stative verb in a continuous tense (if you think you're hard enough)...

I'm not sure what the future holds now I've passed the course,  Initially, and now that I'm properly equipped, I'd like to go back to St Vincent's, and take my own classes, and put everything I learned on the course into practice.

But whatever I do in life, I now know that for a few hours at least I was an English Teacher.  And a proper one at that.  Not a pretend one or an impostor any more.  And that knowledge is in itself worth a lot.  It's nice to have started to believe....

The World Snooker Championships - It's Political Correctness gone Missing in Action

The World Snooker Championship is on at the moment in Sheffield.  Although I'm still quite interested in it these days, my interest is as nothing compared to how I used to feel about it in the 80s.  It helped that there were only 3 channels on TV then, and two of them had the news on and the other one had either Laurel and Hardy re-runs or westerns on, so a big sporting event was a really big deal.  To illustrate how little worth watching there was on, I used to even watch the boat race in those days.

Weren't glasses mental in the 80s?

And I remember watching the snooker being a big family thing in the 80s.  A family consisting of me, my mum, step dad Terry and my brother Phil.  We didn't spend a lot of real quality time together, but we always enjoyed shouting at the telly together during the snooker.

There are lots of pointless things in life, and shouting at the telly is just one of them.  No need to tell me it has no effect whatsoever.  I know this because we always shouted the loudest for Jimmy White, always willing him to win it, although he never did, and we always shouted for Steve Davis to lose, and that didn't work either.

Hey Phil, it's only taken us 30 years to make it to the snooker!  Happy Birthday! And to me too!

One of the few times Steve Davis did lose was in the famous 1985 black ball final against Dennis Taylor.  That one seemed to finish around 2 in the morning, and by the end it wasn't so much edge of the seat stuff, we'd all abandoned the sofa hours earlier, and we were on our hands and knees on the floor screaming at the telly.  And we were all desperate for Dennis Taylor to win, which he did.  Along with Botham at Headingley in 1981 and England vs Germany in the semi final at Italia 90, this might be up there in my top 3 most memorable sporting events I've ever seen.

After about 20 years of relative apathy, in recent years I got back into watching the snooker again, mostly because it was something I could do with my mum.  As her legs and lungs didn't really work for about the last 10 years, sitting and watching TV together was one of our main activities.  And because she was capable of hating certain sportsmen just because she didn't like the expression on their faces when they were concentrating, or because they did a fist pump to the crowd when they won, it gave us something to talk about too.  And when Phil and I used to watch it with her, and listening to her often quite arbitrary reasons for hating and loving certain players, we always said we should really get tickets and go to the Crucible to see it for real.  But we never did.

You can't tell, but we're both really annoyed in this picture at having to share 50 pence

I think that was why after she died in November, I thought it would be a good idea to buy Phil Crucible tickets for his birthday in December, so that we could finally do that thing we said we always would.  By some absolute fluke, the tickets I bought for him were for the day before my birthday in April, so if I got him to take me with him, it was like my present too.  This seemed appropriate to me, because when we were children, we would always get 50 pence sellotaped to the inside of a birthday card from my grandma, and she would always write 'Don't forget to share it with your brother'.  And we used to go mental trying to explain to mum that we shouldn't have to share our birthday money, but we always had to, because that was what grandma wanted.

Unfortunately, the two matches we were scheduled to see at the Crucible on Monday night were so one-sided that they were finished within an hour of the start, so we thought we might get very little for my money, but then they decided to wheel out some former stars to do a bit of 'entertainment'.

Look who we met at the snooker... Actually it just felt like we did

And that was where the evening started to get very strange indeed.  A so-called exhibition match started between Ken Doherty and Stephen Hendry and out came Dennis Taylor to commentate, the first time ever I'd seen him in real life, 30 years almost since I was screaming through the TV screen for him to beat Steve Davis.

And it was as if Phil and I had got in a time machine and gone back to the mid-80s to watch an episode of 'The Comedians'.  Ken and Dennis started cracking jokes and one-liners the likes of which haven't been seen on TV since the days of Bernard Manning.  Mick and Paddy jokes, and jokes about the Chinese and a few borderline homophobic remarks, and of course many of the audience were lapping this up, the big wide blokes with tattooed heads who we'd seen necking pints in the bar were delighted and started shouting out unfunny and drunken things to get their own piece of the action.

And the Chinese people who were there, who may have been relatives of the Chinese players or the Chinese referee didn't seem to know what to make of it.  And you could tell we were no longer going out live on the BBC, or they'd have been shut down.

And some of Ken's and Dennis's act was in parts quite 'entertaining' but it also left me quite glad that we've moved on from laughing at racial stereotypes, and people who are gay.

I found out this week that Terry died in 1999.  We lost touch with him in about 1990 when he and my mum split up.  He was in a bad way then, so in a way I'm surprised he lasted another decade.  Lots of things went wrong for him during the 80s, and as the decade went on, he just kept drinking more and more to try and deal with it until his life went out of control.  Just after mum died, Phil and I were wondering if he was still alive, and if he was, whether he would come to the funeral, and that was what prompted me to find out this week.  Although it's a long time ago, because I've only just found out, it's like it only just happened.

I'm not blaming myself for what went wrong in his life, because there were lots of factors at work, but I'm sure living with the 3 of us can't have been easy.  The 3 of us were very close, and I'm sure that was hard to break into and live alongside.  I know, because I've tried it myself, adding myself into an established family of 3, and apart from the not descending into alcoholism part, I'm not sure I was any better at it than him.  At the time of his leaving in 1990, it had become 'him or us'.  I wish things had ended better.  For all of us.  But often things just end, sometimes messily, and we don't control the ending.

Me and my mum - sometimes things just end, often when you're not expecting it

Thinking back now to that evening shouting at the telly in 1985, it's strange to know that two of the three people I watched it with are now dead.  And it's a vulnerable feeling.  When I see Phil now, I talk to him sometimes about how there are entire passages of my life that, aside from my own memories, he is the only living witness to.  Stories from the past that I would talk endlessly to my mum about, he is now the only link to.

I was reading a book recently about mental health, and it said in there that the thing we're all most afraid of is the obliteration of the self, that the person we are will one day be completely lost.    One day no-one will remember these memories that are so pivotal to my life, not just the 1985 snooker final, but a million other things too, and if no-one can remember things, where will the evidence be that they really happened?  Maybe that's why I write about things, to try not to lose them.

If mum was still alive, I'm pretty sure we would never have got round to going to the Crucible, and that's a weird feeling too, knowing that I was provoked to finally do something by her demise.

It's very easy to simplify things in life and for the sake of narrative to think in terms of heroes and villains, especially when you're young.  It used to be very black and white in the 80s.  Love Dennis Taylor and Jimmy White, hate Steve Davis.

Sorry Steve Davis.  If only I'd been more supportive in the 80s.  You actually seem very nice.

30 years is a long time, and I think in that time, if I've learned nothing else, it's that Steve Davis is a lot more likeable than I thought, and as of Monday, I discovered that Dennis Taylor is a bit less so, and that he needs to move with the times and get some new jokes.

In 1985 I was an arrogant 17 year old who thought he had all the answers.  And sometimes I would talk to Terry with that arrogance and I wasn't above pointing out to him where he was going wrong in life.  I'm 47 now, and having had almost 30 years of being an adult, and trying to manage homes, jobs, relationships etc, I realise now, that being a grown up is much harder than it looks when you're 17.  It's a shame I'll never get to tell him that.

But I have finally solved the age old problem of what to do about mine and Phil's birthdays.  It's always been a struggle to think of what to get each other.  Now I know I just need to buy us both a present for his birthday in December, and we can go and enjoy it together on mine in April.

I think grandma would approve, and I'm sure mum would too.

Sheep Farming for Beginners - The perks of doing voluntary work

Yesterday I was trying to explain to a group of young people what the point of voluntary work is.  It can be a shocking concept to some people the idea of working without getting paid.  Don't get me wrong, I like money as much as the next person, but sometimes it's just not a good enough reason to do things.

I gave up paid work last year, so that I could move back to Leeds.  Mostly this was so I could be some support to my mum, who'd been seriously ill for the last year or so.  Unfortunately, she died in November, and she doesn't need my help any more.  So I thought I'd better find some people who do....

Catching Lambs - easy once you know how

For the last 6 months or so I've been volunteering in Leeds at a charity called St Vincent's Support Centre.  They do lots of things to support people, but one of the main things they do is provide free English classes to speakers of other languages.  And that's the area that I help with.  I've always loved language and English in particular, so I thought I might like to try and explain what I like about it to other people. 

Because I'm sort of an expert in English, what with being a native speaker and all, I thought I'd be really good at this type of work, but what I didn't realise is how hard it can be to pass my knowledge on, especially to people with very little English.

The people I meet are from all over the world.  Some are asylum seekers and refugees, some are here for other reasons.  Some are recent arrivals, and some have been here for ages.  I often ask them how long they've been here, but I don't ask them why they came.  It's none of my business, and there's always the possibility it's not a very happy reason.  Thankfully I don't work border patrol so I didn't have to decide whether they could come in or not, but now they're in, I just try to make them feel welcome in my home town.  

I haven't got the space or the time to write here about all the brilliant people I've met since I started volunteering, but one thing I figured out is that they're saving me a fortune in travelling expenses and airfares.  I've never been to Eritrea, or Sudan, or Syria, or Kurdistan, or Hungary, of the Czech Republic, or Congo, or Cameroon, or Poland, or Argentina, or Brazil or Morocco, or Portugal but I've managed to get a snapshot of what all those countries' people are like, by having them come to me.  I hate airports anyway, all that queuing up in funnels to be strip searched and not being able to carry liquids, and my favourite TV programme is Air Crash Investigation so probably as well I don't fly much.

Matt and Julie - the real stars of the show

What's all this got to do with Sheep Farming, you may ask?  Well, one of the perks of being a volunteer is that I sometimes get invited along on away-days that are organised by the Centre.  In March we went on a guided tour of Malham Cove, and last week I went on a lambing trip to a farm near Horton-in-Ribblesdale.  The trips are organised by Matt and Julie, two managers from the Centre, and it's a privilege to be able to go on them, as well as being great fun.  They're organised in partnership with Judy, a lady who works for another brilliant organisation called People and the Dales.  The farmer we met was called Rodney, and he was our guide and inspiration for the day.  Instead of just telling us stuff, he gave us a much more hands-on role, by taking us out into the fields and getting us to round up and catch some lambs.  

This was so that they could be tagged with an electronic tag in their ears, and have their tails docked, and then they got painted green (just a bit), and got castrated if they were boys.  This sounds pretty nasty but it just seemed to involve having a small elastic band put round their newly born testicles, so that in a couple of weeks they'll just drop off.  No knives were involved.  Some of the lambs looked a bit stressed for a few minutes after having this done, but there seemed to be no lasting damage (if you don't include the lack of future testicles).

I was easily able to outsmart this newborn lamb - I just used my massive human brain.

Lambs are actually pretty easy to catch, especially if they're in a pen that they can't get out of, and if there's a few of you.  I've never caught any before, but I have caught pigeons before in shops I've worked in (that's another story) and I've picked my dog up before and put him in the bath.  Also, I used to play in goals, and although I'm not as good at bending down as I used to be, I do have some basic handling skills.  

The first thing to mention about Rodney was his Jedi-like calmness.  He was the epitome of leading by doing things and being really good at stuff, rather than speaking.  Also, he noticed everything.  One of his greatest assets was the much underrated skill of just paying attention.  He was aware of individual sheep and he noticed whether the new lambs were getting milk or not, or if any of them were not being cared for by their mums, and any that were looking like they needed a bit of extra care were brought inside so he could keep a closer eye on them.  

As far as times and places to be born go, this takes some beating....

At first I didn't understand why he was Baa-ing at them, but when one answered that had fallen down a ditch, and then when a mother went to look for her lamb because he told her to, I started to get it.  He was so in tune with the work he was doing, and so expert at it without being a show-off, there's a lesson there for all of us.  

I thought in advance that a trip to a sheep farm might put me off eating meat, seeing lambs been born, and knowing that in a few months they'd be slaughtered for food, but it didn't.  Maybe it was because of the care with which they were being treated, and I reflected that even if it's a short life, it's still a good life out there in the Dales.  If I had to be born as a sheep, there are worse places for it to happen.  All of us have comparatively short lifespans in any case, that we don't know the when and the where of the ending of, so we're not all that different from sheep anyway.

Here's me trying to impersonate a sheep farmer

The weather certainly helped, in that it was a beautiful day, and we saw the Dales at their best, but the highlight for me had to be delivering a lamb, at the end of the day, just before we got back in the bus.  Rodney offered to let one of us pull the lamb out of its mother, and no-one else volunteered, and I thought 'Why not?, I may never get the chance again'.  It didn't actually need all that much pulling, because it was pretty slimy and it came out easily.  I found I didn't mind the slime, because I was on a high just from being there at a new birth, and when the new lamb tried to walk after only a couple of minutes I really wanted it to succeed, as if it really was my own child, but then like other real-life fathers who've done the easy bit, I went off in a minibus and let the mum get on with bringing it up.

Here's a lamb I made earlier - to be fair the mother and Rodney did most of the work

I think that 'high' has lasted all week, and for a whole week I've told anyone who'll listen about how I delivered a baby lamb.  

Sometimes I feel completely clueless in the classroom when I'm trying to help people learn English (I hesitate to use the term teacher, since I'm not trained as one yet), but I have to remember that Rodney didn't become a Jedi overnight.  He's been sheep farming all his life, it's second nature to him now.  Sometimes I think I'm getting absolutely nowhere in my English classes, especially when I do things like trying to explain English humour to a class of 17 beginners by trying to tell jokes (they were a tough crowd, silence, tumbleweed etc etc) but I figure that currently, despite my regular uselessness, I occasionally touch on absolute brilliance.  

Julie and Brenda standing a really long way in front of the tiny Ribblehead Viaduct.  I often amaze Brenda in the class we teach together with the amount of rubbish I can speak in perfect English.... 

It's only for the briefest of moments, maybe less than 5% of the time, but I hope one day to be brilliant for at least 15% of the time, so I intend to keep going.  A lot of the time in class I feel about as composed as one of those small newborn lambs, who's just been elastic banded, but on the odd occasion when I think I've truly connected with a stranger from a strange land and communicated something worthwhile about my native language, I feel amazing.  And the high I feel then is similar to the high I felt when that lamb popped out last week.  I forget about myself, and all my petty worries and problems, and in that moment I know what I'm here for.  

And so that's the point of voluntary work I think.  Not only are you doing something useful to help others, but sometimes alongside the thing that you're volunteering at, you get other opportunities, and really amazing and accidental things can happen, which make you feel really, really good, and you realise that you're a part of something special.  

Don't look at the Sun - you could die! - How not to watch a Solar Eclipse

I went to look at a solar eclipse today.  Although strictly speaking you're not allowed to look at a solar eclipse because you can go blind.  Anyway, because there was one today and I'm not blind, I must not have really looked at it.

I decided to go to Garforth not to look at it.  Not looking at solar eclipses is pretty memorable (I can still remember where I was when I didn't look at the last one in 1999, ie on a river bank on Teesside).  Because I don't like it much where I live, I decided I didn't want to have to remember it here, but I'm okay with Garforth, so I went there.

Is this Heaven?  - No, it's Craighouse on the Isle of Jura

I wasn't sure exactly when the eclipse was but I thought it would happen around 9.20 am so I walked around randomly either side of that time, trying to keep the sun side on, so that at worst, if I did look at it, I might only lose the sight in one eye.

I'd heard that it was going to be a 90% eclipse, so I was expecting it to go 90% dark, but I hadn't factored in the fact that the other 10% of the sun is still really bright, so it only went a bit dark.

I'm just going behind the Moon for a bit, I won't be long

I saw some schoolchildren and they were all huddled round with their backs to the sun, and they were trying to capture some light from it through pinholes onto pieces of paper.  The kids were all really excited but the teachers seemed more nervous than anything.  They were probably all looking forward to it being over in case they got sued by the parents of some child who'd burned his own eyes out.  

When the sky was at its darkest, I was in a graveyard.  I didn't plan to go there, it was just where my sideways walking led me.  The graveyard is next to Glebelands playing fields where I used to play football when I was a child.  One particular corner of the field, where I used to play regularly, is now full of graves.  I guess the churchyard got full, so they had to expand.  It's a sobering thought, to realise not just how much time has passed since I used to play there, but how many people have died since then, and how many of them are now under my old football pitch.  

I wasn't trying to do it in a voyeuristic way, but I couldn't help look at some of the names on the graves, to see if I recognised anyone.  I didn't find anyone I definitely knew, although I think a dinnerlady from my junior school might have been there, but a lot of the surnames were familiar.  These could have been the mums and dad or the brothers and sisters of people I knew but I wasn't sure.  

I've been getting ready to move house again this week.  I usually like to move around every 11 months.  It keeps me on my toes.  Because I don't want to have to move stuff that I don't use or need, I've been sorting through all my drawers and cupboards this week.  Including looking in some which boxes I don't normally look in, except for on weeks when I'm moving house.  Amongst other things I've been sorting through old photos and papers, including going through the remainder of things I acquired from my mum, when she died last year.  

It can be a jarring process looking through documents and photos which span my entire lifetime, but a real highlight of the week was having another look through my mum's holiday photos.  Many of them were taken on package holidays in the sun that she went on over the years.  If there was a competition for the worst photos ever taken, these would surely win.  They all seem to have been taken in the dark, with thumbs over the lenses, mostly of drunk people with no heads who are very, very far away and who are looking at the camera in the style of a surprised cavemen who is astounded at the novelty of the experience.  Sometimes there is just a dot of a head at the front and the rest is just ocean.  Sometimes there is only ocean.  Even the pictures of my brother's graduation that she took appeared to have been taken in a tunnel at night.  In terms of sheer badness, they are unsurpassed.

In amongst them though I did find a team photo from of a British Army football team which was taken in Seoul in Korea in 1954.  The names of the 11 players are written on the back of the photo, and they all have typical fifties army nicknames like Taffy, Smudge, Spider, Grasshopper and Ginger.  I had to look a few times but I'm pretty sure the one called Ginger is my dad.  I didn't even know till yesterday that my dad ever played football, although I knew he'd been to Korea.  I think he made mashed potato during the Korean War.  I was told recently at a family reunion that I look like him but less Ginger, so I guess I should be glad that didn't make it through the genetic selection process.  

As well as the photos, I also came across my collection of death certificates this week.  So far I've got  ones belonging to a wife, a mum and dad and two grandparents.  If I get any more I'm going to need a bigger envelope.  My two other grandparents had the good manners to die before I was even born, so thankfully that was someone else's admin burden.   

Another person who may or may not be dead is my former alcoholic step dad Terry.  When he was around the age I am now, and shortly after his own brother and dad had died, he said to me that he wasn't afraid of dying, because he knew lots of people that were already on the other side.  I used to think that he wanted to die too, but he didn't have the nerve to commit suicide in one go, so he was just trying to do it in instalments by drinking and smoking himself to death.  

Although I could already relate to what he was saying, because my dad and grandparents were already dead by then, I've got a lot more idea now, because lots of other people I know have died too.  As well as Beverley and my mum, there's Joy who I used to work with at the bank, who was so supportive when Beverley was ill, and who then ended up getting the same thing.  There's Matthew who I used to play rugby with and who I shared a room with in Italy, but who had a faulty heart.  There's also Bob who drove the backup truck to many of my crazy cycling expeditions.... And lots of others, both old and young.

So what has all this got to do with the eclipse?  I don't know, except walking around in a graveyard not looking at the sun during an eclipse is as good a time as any to start idly wondering about the meaning of life.

This is my room at the Jura Hotel

And one of the thoughts I wondered was this:  I wondered if the people we've lost are like the sun during an eclipse.  They're not really gone, they're just hiding round the back of the Moon for a bit.  Like I was when I was behind the Paps of Jura on holiday.  Unfindable by any mobile phone signal in the technological desert of the Jura Hotel, I was still existing but just out of range for a while.

And if so, like the Sun come back from its temporary excursion, will I see them again?  I hope so.  

I'm not too sure what the afterlife will be like, but if, at the end of the big while tunnel that some people get halfway down and then come back, there's a much bigger version of the Jura Hotel where all my dead friends and relatives are staying, I think that would be pretty good.  

I guess I'll find out when I get there....



Postscript - A few months after writing this, I found out that my step dad Terry is also dead. He died in 1999 aged 54.  Eventually he did manage to smoke and drink himself to death.  I wish I'd been a bit more understanding towards him when he was the age I am now.  I didn't agree with the way he handled things, but I could at least have been a bit more sympathetic.  He used to say that I was arrogant when I was 18.  He was probably right.  It's easy when you're 18 to think that you've got all the answers, but in fairness you haven't had to test those answers out against adult life yet.