In May 2000 I moved to London. To Hendon, precisely. My plan was to teach music and convert to Judaism and, eventually, marry the boy I was chasing. I was nineteen.
I don't remember how long after moving there I got my first piano student in the area, but it wasn't a desperately long time. She was a lovely older lady who'd been on a "singing for the brain" course and wanted to study the piano in order to keep her mind nimble.
From then on, I always had students in Hendon and Finchley. Most were children, but there were various grown-ups too. It got to the point where I couldn't fit them all in on weekday evenings and started teaching some on Sunday mornings. When I went to Trinity this turned out to be a good thing: I kept going back on Sundays to teach, spending the weekdays doing (okay, avoiding) my academic work and Saturday as a day off. At one point I was teaching for nine hours on a Sunday, which was helpful, if tiring. Most of the teaching was in the morning -- I started at 8am -- or in the evening, after football and other activities had ended, and this left me with long afternoons. I often spent the time outside, reading or walking around, though if the weather was miserable I might head to Brent Cross instead or just take refuge in a coffee shop for a while. There was a period of time when I had friends living nearby so I would go to visit them, sometimes just falling asleep on the sofa for a while, and on one memorable occasion sticking my very broken glasses together with bits of wire and tape.
In my later years at Trinity I started becoming interested in Christianity again, which is perhaps a topic for another post. But it was in Hendon on those long Sunday afternoons that I had time to read and think about this, and it was at St Mary's Hendon that I found I could go to Evensong most weeks.
When I finished my degree I had to decide whether to move back to Hendon, stay in Bethnal Green or go elsewhere entirely. Marrying the boy I'd been chasing was no longer on the cards, and by then it was clear that Orthodox Judaism was not the right path for me. I chose Leytonstone for a variety of reasons.
I also decided that I couldn't be having with working on Sunday mornings any more (well, that didn't last long!). So my students, many of whom by now were the "we'd really rather have lessons on Sundays" crowd, were asked to switch to weekdays... and since then I've been going to Hendon and Finchley on Mondays and Tuesdays. Most of my students there are Jewish and in a strange way, teaching them has allowed me to keep Jewish practice, and interfaith issues, in my mind even while I'm now so involved in Christian worship, though besides knowing when the holidays are, ensuring exams aren't on Saturdays and teaching the odd bit of folk repertoire it hasn't been a major part of teaching, of course.
I knew this wouldn't be a sustainable strategy in the longer-term so I decided to take on no new families, letting the hours in North London taper off. The plan was that I'd gradually gain students in Leytonstone and the transition would be fairly smooth.
That didn't quite work out. At the beginning of this year, I was commuting nine hours per week to do three hours of teaching. I wasn't gathering much of a class of students more locally, mostly because Mondays and Tuesdays were completely unavailable. I tried cycling, but found it just as exhausting as the Tube and with no great saving in time. I tried finding other things to do locally, spending Monday afternoon in the library in Finchley. Eventually I had to admit that I was tired enough that I wasn't teaching as well as I know I can. So, this January, I gave my students one term's notice.
Today I taught my last lesson in Hendon, and walked back through Sunny Hill Park. It's been sad, these last few weeks, saying goodbye. One of the reasons I hung on so long was that I do genuinely like teaching, and I am very fond of all of my students. A half hour a week over a few years is a long time to spend with anyone in one-on-one situations and these families have been a significant part of my life. The students themselves have been a joy and a privilege to teach, through the difficult bits and the happiness (or just relief) at exam results and school performances. I was teaching only five at the end, but over the years there have been nearly forty students, and I have learned from each and every one of them, and I will miss them. If you're a former student, or a parent of one, and you're reading this: THANK YOU.
I suppose North London will still be there, but it feels strange that I no longer have any reason to go.
Tuesday, 27 March 2012
Sunday, 25 March 2012
Flash Compline, Monday 26th March
There will be a Flash Compline service at 8.30pm on Monday, 26th March, in the gardens of St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, near Liverpool Street tube and mainline stations - here's a map
Music: We will use this setting of Compline.We will have a small number of spare copies, which you can purchase for £2 if you want to keep them, or borrow if you don't. Don't worry if you aren't a confident singer -- follow along with the text and see what you can pick up. Everyone is welcome. If we don't have enough confident singers we can always say the liturgy instead.
This setting uses the words from Common Worship Traditional Language Compline. Various smartphone apps for this exist and it is also available from the C of E website on the day, if you're worried we won't have enough music or you'd rather just use the words.
You may wish to bring a torch or book light.
PLEASE ARRIVE QUIETLY AND DEPART IN SILENCE.
@FlashCompline on Twitter
Flash Compline on Facebook
Tuesday, 20 March 2012
Give us back our NHS
Scum who don't know how to feel
They're so rich they have to steal
Eyes all glazed from looking west
Give us back our NHS!
We won't take rule for the rich
While the poorest feel the pinch.
There's no mandate for this mess
Give us back our NHS!
Words by @Eithin and @LosTheSkald, music by me. Please sing it, teach it to people, make videos, write more verses, whatever. It's under a CC BY-SA license: this means you can make derivative works as long as you give us attribution. There's a pdf of a leadsheet here if you want to print it; I've done it in landscape format for ease of fitting two onto one A4 sheet if you have access to a photocopier or whatever.
Maybe it isn't nice, maybe it's just a bit beyond being "polite".
They didn't listen to nice.
Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:38_Degrees_NHS_reforms_billboard.jpg
Sunday, 18 March 2012
Laetare: #plent growth so far
So, I've been sowing some seeds each day in Lent. Some of them have failed; some I've planted on outside, where I try to protect them from the voracious ravages of "Brother" Snail. Some are still indoors in their pots.
I can't find an easy way to put all the pictures in the blog I've been keeping at tumblr, so I've uploaded them here instead.
And one final photo, not from the #plent project, but pleasing all the same; the bud on a fig tree:
I can't find an easy way to put all the pictures in the blog I've been keeping at tumblr, so I've uploaded them here instead.
And one final photo, not from the #plent project, but pleasing all the same; the bud on a fig tree:
Wednesday, 15 February 2012
What I am planning for Lent...
No, not the music -- more on that anon. I'm planning something else.
I'm planning on sowing, each day of Lent, some seeds for edible plants. I'll be posting pictures to Tumblr and those will turn up on Twitter; once a week I'll try and do a summary post of some sort, which I'll link to from here and FaceBorg and various other places for those of you who aren't into Twitter.
Do feel free to join me, and whether you do or not may you have a blessed Lent.
I'm planning on sowing, each day of Lent, some seeds for edible plants. I'll be posting pictures to Tumblr and those will turn up on Twitter; once a week I'll try and do a summary post of some sort, which I'll link to from here and FaceBorg and various other places for those of you who aren't into Twitter.
Do feel free to join me, and whether you do or not may you have a blessed Lent.
Thursday, 2 February 2012
It's Up To Us to Change the Narrative
I was thinking the other morning about community size, economies of scale, and our perception of other people as human beings worthy of care and respect. In larger communities, where everyone doesn't know everyone else, the media have quite a lot of power over how we see one another. And now Cameron's government have passed the Welfare Reform Bill.
I don't know whether the Daily Fail, the Sun and so on have always vilified the poorest and weakest in society, those reliant on others for help for whatever reason. I struggle to take such articles seriously, as I don't quite understand how intelligent people can believe them. But I know that the advertisements about benefit fraud, which I started to notice under a Labour government, seemed to be a sign of something very wrong with the way we perceive one another and the way we speak and write of one another. I'd like to remedy that.
In my head, I'd like there to be some requirement for legislators to work with those who their laws will affect the most. I'd like those legislating about welfare reform to work with people who don't have much money and with the disabled for a year before being allowed to make changes which will affect them. I'd like those who would further privatise the NHS (yes, further privatise -- this has been going on for a long time, too) to think about what it might be like to need medical care and simply not be able to afford it, as well as looking at the cost-effectiveness of various systems.
But I think the propaganda may be so strong and so widespread that it can override even personal contact. Victim-blaming happens at all levels, and contact doesn't always help.
As an example of that, for every GP I've had who has been helpful and supportive regarding my own health conditions, I've had another who doesn't think there is anything physically wrong with me. This has led to delays in diagnosis which were mentally very distressing, not to mention physically risky. I remember being told my chronic pain was due to depression, and in the next appointment two weeks later being told I wasn't "really depressed". It turned out to be more complicated than that, of course.
Now, GPs aren't stupid. They've been through medical school, and you do need quite a few brain cells to rub together to get through successfully! And they work with people. Yet they still do victim-blaming, even with an articulate patient with good levels of self-awareness. So I have to conclude that the problem we face isn't one of intelligence or of contact.
I'm inclined to think that instead, the problem is one of narrative. A dominant narrative in the society in which I live is "You Make Your Own Life". It's an attractive narrative, because it seduces us into thinking that we can keep ourselves safe, that no matter how bad things get we'll be OK because our efforts will be effective. And it's a comfortable narrative for as long as health and wealth hold out, because it absolves us of the responsibility for the plight of anyone around us, even if we're directly abusive toward them. After all, They Make Their Own Lives, too. And it's slippery, this narrative, because we do seem to consciously choose our actions, we do think about consequences, some of our efforts do pay off. So obviously we must be in control of our circumstances!
But it's wrong. You don't Make Your Own Life. I don't Make My Own Life. Not entirely, and the wealth of self-help literature out there might be just a small hint that none of us do.
Now, I don't believe in full environmental determinism, and I do believe in free will. We always have a choice in how to respond to our situation. But we make this choice out of limited options of varying acceptability, and with limited foresight. Every choice includes risk. We don't get to decide on our circumstances, our limitations, any more than we get to decide on our biological parents. And there is no isolation: all of our choices affect everyone else, and all of everyone else's choices affect us, to some degree. We exist in a networked community with 7 billion interdependent active members, as well as countless previous members whose legacy still forms our environment. We don't make our own circumstances, and our circumstances affect our choices. We make our own choices, but we don't make our own life.
Yet this is the dominant narrative! The poor are poor, we're told, because they don't sufficiently desire wealth to take the necessary action to acquire it -- so we must change the incentives by lowering their benefits to make them hungry for work. (Literally.) Never mind the economic reasons why this won't actually help (people who don't have enough to eat will spend less, not more, and the economy will suffer further as a result, with fewer jobs and lower productivity...), the poor are poor because they choose to be poor and therefore they deserve to be poor. The disabled are obviously only suffering disability, we're told, because being disabled is a pretty good lifestyle compared to hard graft. So we must change their incentives by taking away what support they have and then they'll learn how to "adapt" to their conditions. As for the sick and the elderly, they wouldn't need so much medical care if they took proper care of themselves, so we'll cut the NHS: that will encourage them to develop healthy habits!
Gentle readers, this is all preposterous. People don't choose to be poor*: if you don't have enough money to live on, getting enough of it is not trivial. People don't choose to be disabled: in case you hadn't noticed, blindness, deafness, wheelchair use, and long-term illnesses are things that happen to people, not lifestyle choices. People don't choose to get sick: if they did, would anyone ever suffer from a common cold? People don't choose to get old, despite what the beauty creams would have you believe, and nobody has the intention of aging badly.
But these atrocities are what the "You Make Your Own Life" narrative leads to. This narrative has made our society sick, so sick that we're now actually doing the things in the last-but-one paragraph. Yes, I said "we"; whether or not they do so with our full support, the government act on our behalf.
I think we face two challenges here. One is to ensure that the vulnerable among us still receive care; this is going to be a massive effort, and I'm sure one at which we will fail in some cases, but we do have to try.
The second challenge is to find a better narrative and, somehow, make it supplant the one I've been talking about. We need a narrative that is more attractive than the idea that each of us can save ourselves, more comfortable than the idea that other people's problems are nothing to do with us.
I haven't found such a narrative outside of religion; the closest I come is the idea that we are all children of God and therefore worthy of respect and care and love regardless of our circumstances. But the "You Make Your Own Life" narrative is so pernicious that sometimes it actually invades religion, turning into "If you are ill/poor/old/disabled/unhappy it's because you didn't pray enough/love God enough/do what we say God wants." Grace becomes the means by which we are wealthy and healthy and favoured in this world, rather than the mystery which prompts us to help others. Ugh! This caricature is not what we need. On a deeper level I think religion does have a lot to offer, but simply making a more religious society won't solve the problem unless we can also purge religion of make-your-own-life-itis.
I believe that human beings have automatic worth, not based in ability or achievement or economic activity but personhood. I believe that human beings are interconnected and interdependent, each contributing to but not controlling our own wellbeing and that of everyone else on the planet. I believe that if anyone suffers at the hands of another, we are all much worse off, and when we work to help one another we all gain.
I believe it is urgently important that we make sure everyone knows this, especially those in power and those who will be in power in five or ten or fifty years. And because of the stickiness of the existing dominant narrative, it's going to be an uphill battle to do it.
Now what?
*Edit 12/04/2012: It has been pointed out to me that some people, usually those who are members of a religious order, do choose to be poor, at least in terms of material possessions. If any of them would like to comment on what their overarching narrative is, and how we might replicate such a narrative in wider society, I would be grateful. I think many people today crave such simplicity, but mostly those who are well-off enough to choose what they would give up.
I don't know whether the Daily Fail, the Sun and so on have always vilified the poorest and weakest in society, those reliant on others for help for whatever reason. I struggle to take such articles seriously, as I don't quite understand how intelligent people can believe them. But I know that the advertisements about benefit fraud, which I started to notice under a Labour government, seemed to be a sign of something very wrong with the way we perceive one another and the way we speak and write of one another. I'd like to remedy that.
In my head, I'd like there to be some requirement for legislators to work with those who their laws will affect the most. I'd like those legislating about welfare reform to work with people who don't have much money and with the disabled for a year before being allowed to make changes which will affect them. I'd like those who would further privatise the NHS (yes, further privatise -- this has been going on for a long time, too) to think about what it might be like to need medical care and simply not be able to afford it, as well as looking at the cost-effectiveness of various systems.
But I think the propaganda may be so strong and so widespread that it can override even personal contact. Victim-blaming happens at all levels, and contact doesn't always help.
As an example of that, for every GP I've had who has been helpful and supportive regarding my own health conditions, I've had another who doesn't think there is anything physically wrong with me. This has led to delays in diagnosis which were mentally very distressing, not to mention physically risky. I remember being told my chronic pain was due to depression, and in the next appointment two weeks later being told I wasn't "really depressed". It turned out to be more complicated than that, of course.
Now, GPs aren't stupid. They've been through medical school, and you do need quite a few brain cells to rub together to get through successfully! And they work with people. Yet they still do victim-blaming, even with an articulate patient with good levels of self-awareness. So I have to conclude that the problem we face isn't one of intelligence or of contact.
I'm inclined to think that instead, the problem is one of narrative. A dominant narrative in the society in which I live is "You Make Your Own Life". It's an attractive narrative, because it seduces us into thinking that we can keep ourselves safe, that no matter how bad things get we'll be OK because our efforts will be effective. And it's a comfortable narrative for as long as health and wealth hold out, because it absolves us of the responsibility for the plight of anyone around us, even if we're directly abusive toward them. After all, They Make Their Own Lives, too. And it's slippery, this narrative, because we do seem to consciously choose our actions, we do think about consequences, some of our efforts do pay off. So obviously we must be in control of our circumstances!
But it's wrong. You don't Make Your Own Life. I don't Make My Own Life. Not entirely, and the wealth of self-help literature out there might be just a small hint that none of us do.
Now, I don't believe in full environmental determinism, and I do believe in free will. We always have a choice in how to respond to our situation. But we make this choice out of limited options of varying acceptability, and with limited foresight. Every choice includes risk. We don't get to decide on our circumstances, our limitations, any more than we get to decide on our biological parents. And there is no isolation: all of our choices affect everyone else, and all of everyone else's choices affect us, to some degree. We exist in a networked community with 7 billion interdependent active members, as well as countless previous members whose legacy still forms our environment. We don't make our own circumstances, and our circumstances affect our choices. We make our own choices, but we don't make our own life.
Yet this is the dominant narrative! The poor are poor, we're told, because they don't sufficiently desire wealth to take the necessary action to acquire it -- so we must change the incentives by lowering their benefits to make them hungry for work. (Literally.) Never mind the economic reasons why this won't actually help (people who don't have enough to eat will spend less, not more, and the economy will suffer further as a result, with fewer jobs and lower productivity...), the poor are poor because they choose to be poor and therefore they deserve to be poor. The disabled are obviously only suffering disability, we're told, because being disabled is a pretty good lifestyle compared to hard graft. So we must change their incentives by taking away what support they have and then they'll learn how to "adapt" to their conditions. As for the sick and the elderly, they wouldn't need so much medical care if they took proper care of themselves, so we'll cut the NHS: that will encourage them to develop healthy habits!
Gentle readers, this is all preposterous. People don't choose to be poor*: if you don't have enough money to live on, getting enough of it is not trivial. People don't choose to be disabled: in case you hadn't noticed, blindness, deafness, wheelchair use, and long-term illnesses are things that happen to people, not lifestyle choices. People don't choose to get sick: if they did, would anyone ever suffer from a common cold? People don't choose to get old, despite what the beauty creams would have you believe, and nobody has the intention of aging badly.
But these atrocities are what the "You Make Your Own Life" narrative leads to. This narrative has made our society sick, so sick that we're now actually doing the things in the last-but-one paragraph. Yes, I said "we"; whether or not they do so with our full support, the government act on our behalf.
I think we face two challenges here. One is to ensure that the vulnerable among us still receive care; this is going to be a massive effort, and I'm sure one at which we will fail in some cases, but we do have to try.
The second challenge is to find a better narrative and, somehow, make it supplant the one I've been talking about. We need a narrative that is more attractive than the idea that each of us can save ourselves, more comfortable than the idea that other people's problems are nothing to do with us.
I haven't found such a narrative outside of religion; the closest I come is the idea that we are all children of God and therefore worthy of respect and care and love regardless of our circumstances. But the "You Make Your Own Life" narrative is so pernicious that sometimes it actually invades religion, turning into "If you are ill/poor/old/disabled/unhappy it's because you didn't pray enough/love God enough/do what we say God wants." Grace becomes the means by which we are wealthy and healthy and favoured in this world, rather than the mystery which prompts us to help others. Ugh! This caricature is not what we need. On a deeper level I think religion does have a lot to offer, but simply making a more religious society won't solve the problem unless we can also purge religion of make-your-own-life-itis.
I believe that human beings have automatic worth, not based in ability or achievement or economic activity but personhood. I believe that human beings are interconnected and interdependent, each contributing to but not controlling our own wellbeing and that of everyone else on the planet. I believe that if anyone suffers at the hands of another, we are all much worse off, and when we work to help one another we all gain.
I believe it is urgently important that we make sure everyone knows this, especially those in power and those who will be in power in five or ten or fifty years. And because of the stickiness of the existing dominant narrative, it's going to be an uphill battle to do it.
Now what?
*Edit 12/04/2012: It has been pointed out to me that some people, usually those who are members of a religious order, do choose to be poor, at least in terms of material possessions. If any of them would like to comment on what their overarching narrative is, and how we might replicate such a narrative in wider society, I would be grateful. I think many people today crave such simplicity, but mostly those who are well-off enough to choose what they would give up.
Saturday, 21 January 2012
Flash Compline, Monday 23rd January
There will be a Flash Compline service at 9.00pm on Monday, 23rd January, in the gardens of St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, near Liverpool Street tube and mainline stations - here's a map
Music: We will use this setting of Compline.We will have a small number of spare copies, which you can purchase for £2 if you want to keep them, or borrow if you don't. Don't worry if you aren't a confident singer -- follow along with the text and see what you can pick up. Everyone is welcome. If we don't have enough confident singers we can always say the liturgy instead.
This setting uses the words from Common Worship Traditional Language Compline. Various smartphone apps for this exist and it is also available from the C of E website on the day, if you're worried we won't have enough music or you'd rather just use the words.
You may wish to bring a torch or book light.
PLEASE ARRIVE QUIETLY AND DEPART IN SILENCE.
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