Author: Hazel Frost

This is the cleverest cartoon I’ve seen in a long time, It’s had me thinking for a week about sheep and goats, and how a “non-homogenous sheep” might find themselves less welcome than a “goat” in some places. The original and a whole lot more can be found on asbojesus.wordpress.com which is a blog belonging to a Jon Birch and well worth a visit. His work reminds me of Adrian Plass in cartoon form, perhaps sailing a bit closer to the wind than AP, but often dealing with the same sort of issues from a similar perspective.

The global conference of influential evangelical anglicans is about to get under way in Jerusalem. Under the acronym of GAFCON, it ought to be good for a few jokes, but I haven’t heard any yet. I haven’t seen the agenda, but I’m confidently predicting that it will contain an item or two on homosexuality, the most high-profile issue currently facing the global anglican church. Chatting with a friend, himself a studious evangelical, I expressed surprise both that the anglican church has managed to hold itself together for so long, and then that the issue of homosexuality looks to be the one that finally rends it asunder. He said “it’s an authority of scripture issue”. Other issues, such as ethical decisions on whose regimes we endorse with our spending power, loving ones enemies, the rights of refugees, and responding to the needs of the alien, the orphan and the widow, apparently aren’t authority of scripture issues, otherwise presumably our learned colleagues would have chosen to hold their conference in an alternative location.

This is a sweet little gimmick (thanks Tia…). If you click on the graphic you can take a little quiz to find out what time you are. Apparently I’m 10.02… Funnily that’s probably quite accurate, it’s a time of day I like… late enough to be awake, and early enough still to have lots of day to have fun with.

We’ve been on the road the last few days, enjoyed staying with Viv, and visiting friends in Colchester, Mersea, Cranham, Felixstowe and Cambridge. The weather was fantastic, so we managed four walks in four days in between speaking at meetings. I saw my first cuckoo ever; I was listening to a cuckoo calling in a small clump of trees, when a cuckoo-sized, cuckoo-shaped bird flew out; and it still took the mighty brain cell five minutes to figure out what it was. Oh well. Heybridge Basin (temporary residence of said cuckoo) is a truly superb place for a walk; plethora of birdlife, and the ice-cream in the tea-shop was pretty good too.

One thing that Argentina and the UK have in common is that both countries used to have a world-class education system.
“Schooling” (I stop short of describing it as education) in Argentina has largely been reduced to a series of facts and procedures to be memorised and reproduced in response to the corresponding question, which is itself previously memorised by the student; i.e. really rather similar to the SATS system in the UK.

Argentina is different to the UK in that internal auditing reveals that state schools have both the highest and the lowest results, with the private schools occupying a nicely-dressed block of mediocrity in the middle. This seems rather strange to me as an English person, but it was confirmed by a friend who teaches at an expensive private school in Argentina, who explains that many parents appear to prefer a “creche service matching their social class” as a priority over educational content.

In the few weeks that we have been back in the UK, we have witnessed something of a genteel back-lash over the SATS tests. The non-stampede has been led by the Head Teachers Association, followed up by a less than complimentary report from a few education advisors. What I find most surprising is that parents are virtually nowhere to be seen; they’re certainly not leading the revolt, and they’re not even coming out to support the efforts of the head-teachers et al. When parents are prepared to move house, lie about their address, send kiddo to live with Auntie Jemima, give sizeable “donations”, or change their religion to secure those elusive places in a prime school for six years, it seems very odd indeed that the same parents apparently don’t mind very much if two of those six years are frankly wasted.

Could it be that the SATS have survived this long because they actually hook into some parents’ need for competition between themselves? Witness a place where I used to shop for books. Today in a space previously housing “books of fun activities for kids”, I find racks of “books of exam papers, poorly disguised as fun activities for kids”. Who buys them? I wonder. A head teacher friend confirmed “Oh the parents love SATS, it’s all about your child getting a higher score than someone else’s child”. My sister came across a magazine article on “packed lunches to help your child get ahead”. Among the recipes for alfalfa and apricot on ciabatta, the article included the advice that although a parent might relapse and include the odd chocolate bar, this should not be done on days when child goes to play at friends’ houses after school, lest lax parent be looked down upon by parents of friends. Key learning outcomes:
Image is everything
Lie if it helps to preserve image
Never give anyone a chance to accept you as you are
The old adage said that “education is wasted on the young”. I suspect the real issue may not be entirely the fault of the young.

It’s been a whirlwind tour. Sunday, friend Jo came to see us. Monday, we went to Oxfordshire to see friend Tania and her two little girls aged 3 and 5. Tuesday, we went to Berkshire to see friend John. Tuesday evening, we went to another bit of Berkshire to see friends Sarah, Richard and their twin boys aged 5. Wednesday we went to Colchester to see friend Faith and her prayer group, and Wednesday evening we went to Dovercourt to see friends at Kingsway Evangelical church.
Joni of course loves all the attention. It’s a good job he still needs his parents to drive him places, otherwise we’d probably be superfluous to requirements. We have also enjoyed ourselves catching up with lots of friends, and we were also encouraged by the warm response we received at the two meetings that we took. I was thinking last night that giving presentations to groups is a bit like crowd-surfing (you can tell the kind of gigs I used to go to as a student); person throws themselves onto the mercy and the upstretched arms of the crowd, who bear said surfer aloft, passing them to the back of the arena and safely restoring them to earth. Sometimes it went wrong and people got hurt, but that was part of the risk, and I never actually saw it happen in all my gig-going experience. So, we threw ourselves on the mercy and the upstretched arms of our supporting groups.

The church at Dovercourt have gone technical since we were last there, but unfortunately we couldn’t make our laptop talk properly to their beamer. So after a lot of fiddling by us, and patience from the church, we had to set up our (borrowed) beamer and use that instead. Having finally begun the meeting, I was disconcerted to see Martin exit with Joni and the nappy bag just at the end of my talk, when Martin was supposed to come to the front and do his bit. I swiftly moved into a time of “any questions?” but there are limits to the stringing along that one can produce, so I made my excuses, and leaving the stage empty, went to swop with Martin who was located changing the baby on a window sill.

Three days; three curries. By long-standing tradition we had a curry with Tania on Monday. On Tuesday we thought we’d go for Chinese, but Sarah and family live in a small village where the Chinese doesn’t open on Tuesdays, so we had another curry. On Wednesday, Faith had been reading our blog entries about curry, and made us one. Only another dozen or so and we’ll have stocked up enough to see us through the next couple of years of curry-famine.

A friend of ours died this week, I have known Jon since I was 19, he’s a top bloke, we share a reputation for asking the difficult questions. We feel sad for us that he’s not around, but he also knew very starkly the likely progression of his illness, and we’re grateful that he was spared the worst of the potential end-scenarios. Most importantly of all, he knew where he was headed, and I reckon his welcome party is just getting going. “I have run the race, I have kept the faith”.

The Independent newspaper is a fine publication. I read it every day, including online in Argentina. As well as keeping up with UK news, it is useful for monitoring progress of the “UK perspective on the rest of the world”. For a more accurate majority UK perspective I know I should be reading a paper with a wider circulation… but I scrapped that idea on realising that it meant The Sun, or The Mail.
Thus we have been able to follow debates on wheelie bin taxes, and hospital super-viruses. And thus we have also discovered that South America is truly a “forgotten continent”. In his book “Notes from a Small Island”, Bill Bryson says;
“If your concept of world geography was shaped entirely by what you read in the papers and saw on television, you would have no choice but to conclude that America must be about where Ireland is, that France and Germany lie roughly alongside the Azores, that Australia occupies a hot zone somewhere in the region of the Middle East, and that pretty much all the other sovereign states are either mythical, or can only be reached by spaceship”. Bryson, (1995) p32.
And of course even Bryson where he lists “America” actually only means “the USA”, along with every BBC newsreader who insists on referring to “the American president…”

In the month that we have been back in the UK however, there have been a couple of South American news stories actually made it to the UK press. The first, a bus crash in Ecuador involved British kids on a gap year project, otherwise it probably wouldn’t have featured. The Independent travel editor, one Simon Calder, described the country’s infrastructure as “basic”, and said:
“This is a third world country with all the problems that come with that.” There’s nothing like an insightful piece of analysis to enable the reader to understand the story… and that is nothing like an insightful piece of analysis, but it was quoted by the BBC, so presumably it was the best elucidation available and at least Mr Calder was able to identify correctly the country he was writing about, which is probably all it takes to put a journalist into the “elite” class when reporting on South America. This leads us on to the South American news story covered last week, i.e. the Bolivian department of Santa Cruz voting for economic autonomy. The story was interpreted in The Independent as “Santa Cruz voting on distancing themselves from Lima“. I rest my case.

Trying to find out what people give to teething kids in the UK. Apparently one “infant suspension” by Calpol. Puts me in mind of “ten green bottles” but if it takes his mind off his teeth…