pumpkinstrokemarrow

In this case, of a middle aged white male teacher who, so the DT tells us, had the oomph to give an insolent pupil a slap. The police, to give them their due, on receipt of a complaint from stroppy parent, declined to act and left it to the school. But one way or another, the teacher has resigned and the insolent pupil is now, presumably, the king of the playground. What on earth is a teacher supposed to do with such a pupil? I have heard it argued that a good teacher can manage without slaps - but I have also heard that such managing is a terrible drain on energy which might otherwise be spent teaching and I also believe that our teacher cadre is not that strong. We do not pay enough to get enough teachers of that class. And all this at a time when the BBB (vide supra) may have finally realised that paying expensive lawyers to write long books of rules (expensive lawyers, we should remember, get paid by weight, so for them the longer the better) and then paying MPs to vote those books onto the statute book and then paying policemen to try to police them between cooking other books to meet the latest performance targets, does not always achieve what one wants. They have started to bleat about putting action back into the community. But when someone tries that, the someone get bashed - and the offender walks. Teachers should be allowed to give something a bit closer to as good as they are getting - although I am not sure where that leaves small lady teachers in front of a class of large louts. And we must remember, that in so far as this particular incident is concerned, that we only have the DT version of events.

I was also amused in the same DT to see the loving care with which someone had photgraphed a large shark torturing a seal before eating it. I suppose the shark was only playing, but if it had been a person doing exactly the same thing, the RSPCA would have been down there like a shot. Interesting point, that when the shark does it, it is OK and it is OK for us to watch, but if we were to do exactly the same thing, having invited an audience, that would be nasty. We creep ever closer to Brave New World which featured intrepid wild life photographers capturing this sort of thing for our general entertainment eighty years ago. We all need violence in one form or another (although I dare say the amount varies a good deal from person to person, from the relatively benign to the pathological and dangerous), so until we really do develop a violent passion surrogate, we will have to make do with this sort of thing. Much better than the acting out from Italy which has been in the papers over the last week.

And sorry to see that some enterprising forgers of fine art may go to prison for their pains. I have always had a soft spot for people who manage to put one over the art and art dealing establishment. For me, if you cannot tell the differance between a copy of a Constable and the real thing, the two things ought to have roughly the same value. The thought experiment would be to suppose that we were in the world of Star Trek and that we had a machine which could replicate small objects down to molecular level, give or take the odd quantum disturbance. In that case the copy really would be identical to the original, so what would the art dealers say then? I recall reading somewhere that the Chinese are much more sensible about all this. Good quality copying is a perfectly respectable trade there - as indeed it was in our early modern era when old masters ran factories making copies of the pictures that sold well for the benefit of the emerging middle classes.

Lastly, I have lost an original thought. I have thought for a long time that, when entertaining or cooking, one usually does better when under constraint - of time, money or whatever - than when one has a free hand. And I have peddled this thought as an original in pubs for that long time. I now come across a sentence in the Scott Moncrieff translation of Proust which must predate my thought by at least seventy five years: "... but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further refinement of thought, as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their finest lines." Note that this is not too much of a show off, the sentence in question is only on page 19 out of 1141 (in volume 1 alone). And for those that care the Pleiade version reads: "... mais elle tira de cette contrainte meme une pensee delicate de plus, comme les bons poetes que la tyrannie de la rime force a trouver leurs plus grandes beautes ...". And there are no notes or variants so the English is a little longer than the French original. As well as reading a little clumsy when compared with the original. But that is not to say that I can offer anything better.

One is consoled by remembering that, as the preacher said, there is nothing new under the sun (somewhere in Ecclesiastes. Can't put my finger on the reference).