Cheating Gits.

A very apposite article from the BBC about cheating gits trying to wiggle into university. I say that it's appropriate because I've been dealing with a couple of them today - one guy who blagged his way onto an HND course by expediently adding a number onto his results form, so that he had double the credits he actually achieved, and another begging for a fake results letter!
The arrogance of a minority of my students never fails to astound me. Only yesterday, one of them called, angry that he hadn't been granted a pass even though he had paid for the course! He obviously thought that payment automatically conferred a certificate.

27.7833333333333333333333333333333333333

,or 1666.666666666666667. Or 50,000. That's the scale of the challenge ahead of me. If I devote one hour per day to the national novel writing month, I will have to write this many words per minute. Freaky. I'm don't have any very firm ideas, beyond a vague plot involving two blokes and lots of pubs. I am, however, determined to do this - and, loyal, tiny band of readers, should you wish to donate anything for my endeavours via the button on the left, I will in turn be donating to Breast Cancer research.

3 days to go....

Turkish Accession to the EU

Here's the latest on this issue. I don't write as much as I probably could or should about Turkey, but Turkish Tork, Aegean Disclosure and Maviboncuk (all in the links on the left) do a good job.

On the meze front, by the way: A turkish friend has given me a vine roller! It's like a giant cigarette roller, and will also do, according to its accompanying blurb, 'sigara boregi (cheese puff pastries), mercimek koftesi, tekirdag koftesi AND lahana dolmasi (but only on the top setting).

John Peel.

I've literally this minute heard that John Peel's died. No bloody way. He was too young to go.

101 uses for a head of state...

....or rather, what is a president/monarch for?
Obviously, it depends on which country you're in. In the UK, we don't require much from our queen than to be inbred, equine-looking, and good at waving. For this, the taxpayer gives her a lot of money.
Likewise, our Prime Ministers are meant to be hard-working (but not ambitious), devout (but not in-your-face religious), clever (but not cunning), and decent (but not boring).
Of course, we are dealing in ideals. The monarch is the symbolic head, devoid of power in a political sense, but imbued with it; The Prime Minister is the one to get his hands dirty.
What about a president?
Well, a president is the boss of the entire government and its attendant civil service; He (or maybe she, eventually) approves or vetoes new laws, but cannot propose any him/herself; He is the commander-in-chief of a country's military powers; He represents a particular political viewpoint. So far, so basic.
But how far, exactly, does a president act as a symbol of a nation? Is the man the symbol, or is it the office of the president itself? In the UK, there is a clear distinction between the symbolic and the real. In a country with a presidential system, let's say, um, the United States, how does one make the distinction? And if it is difficult enough for a citizen of that nation to make the disctinction, how can you expect someone on the outside to do it? If the real and symbolic are one and indivisible, then surely the actions of the man (or woman) in office have a direct impact on how the symbol, and therefore the whole nation, is perceived by friend and foe alike.
I understand there's a big election for a president somewhere soon, and that it's too close to call. Now, I'm not the Guardian, with its spectacularly patronising and distinctly tongue-in-cheek advice to voters in Clark County, Ohio, but if I had to vote for a man (or woman) who would wield massive executive power and symbolise my nation for the next four years, I might want to ask myself the following:
In terms of representing me to the rest of the world, how will this candidate do? If the candidate is the president seeking a further term of office, how has he/she done?
Has the incumbent increased my sense of security, comfort and wellbeing through his/her actions, or will the candidate increase my sense of security, comfort and wellbeing, without compromising that of others?
As Commander-in-chief, has the incumbent taken reasonable, sensible and logical measures to protect my nation, or has he made my situation more dangerous? Will the candidate be a reasonable, sensible and logical commander in chief?
Has the incumbent allowed through laws that oppress, curtail and/or censor, my rights, freedoms and opinions? Is the candidate likely to pass laws with the same effects?
Has the incumbent allowed into office, through his role as boss of the government and civil service, those who should be disqualified from holding a role in government? Will the candidate do the same?

Well, those are a few questions. For myself, I don't trust symbols, especially when they get mixed up with real life: The king waving the sword, the eternal cowboy galloping into the eternal sunset, the gallant band of soldiers rallying to one bright and shining flag - myths, all myths.

Back to the Turtle!

I went out with a group of old friends on Saturday night, namely Dr. Lynne, Matt, Lee and his wife Kate, both of whom I haven't seen for over a year, and John Wild, who I've only seen occasionally in the past few years. We started off in our old haunt, The Coopers, which used to be a rock/goth pub but got prettified in the mid nineties, then went up London Street to the Sherpa restaurant for a curry, then rolled back down to the Turtle, where we proceeded to get utterly lashed. Last week must have been a duff one, clientele-wise, as it was a good, varied mix of people, including one spectacular Goth woman in full leather basque-and-boots getup. Towards the end of the night, three women were grinning at waving in my direction. I smiled back, but thought they were waving at someone else, so I ignored them. This pissed them off, apparently; When we were leaving, they said, 'Thanks for ignoring us!' 'What, me?', I said. 'Yes, we just wanted to ask if you were really Daniel Bedingfield'
What.The.Fuck?????????????/
DANIEL SODDING BEDINGFIELD?
My Arse. I have been compared to many famous people before, quite often insultingly - Emilio Estevez and Shaking Stevens come to mind. But this was taking the piss on a major scale.

Too good not to share, part two...

After my student's wild stab at trying to describe why he was writing about Thailand for his Academic English assignment, I sent him away to rewrite the whole thing, partly because it was bloody atrocious, but mainly because he'd plagiarised everything else. He's just bought back the revised edition. You'd have thought he would have understood the words, 'Now Charlie, this is an Academic English assignment. That means nothing about ladyboys, right? No cutting off dicks, OK? Describe the bloody country!', to mean Don't Mention The Ladyboys. And did he heed my advice?
Here's the latest effort:

After discuss long neck girls, lut us turn to disuses another people, who are men change denatured sex, those men are very different from normal gentlemen after operation. They cut off their dick; inject some medicine, which could change men become pretty ladies. After the operation, they usually join song and dance ensemble for dancing and being taken photography by visitors. Unfortunately they only can live until forty-years-old, and then the whole of them will dead, the reason is that operation.

Christ on a bike.

I have a strange, creative feeling..

..wriggling around in my head. It's that time of year again, when NaNoWriMo begins! It's the (Inter)National Novel Writing Month, and I'm determined I'm going to do it this year. I intended to in '03, but, well....
I'm going to post the fruits on here. AND, if I make any money out of it, half the proceeds will go to breast cancer research.
Join in here.

How to get a National Insurance number..

Here's my good deed for the day, prompted by Marcus trying to get a NI number for his wife. It looks like a catch-22 situation when you first encounter it; Without a number, you can't get a legit job, and you can't get a number without a legit job. Here's the way out of the maze, although you'll be hard pressed to find anyone in authority to tell you straight:
When you apply for, or get a job, explain that you have a temporary number - you create it like this. The first two letters are always TN (for temporary number). It is then followed by your date of birth, in dd-mm-yy format, then either M if you're male or F, obviously if you're female. so, if you were born on the 10th march 1976, your NI number will be:
TN-100376-M(or F).
See? Easy!
Once you've got the job, ask your employer for a letter, confirming that you're working for them, then make an appointment with the nearest DSS centre in order to get a permanent NI no. You should get one within a fortnight. On the day, take the letter, passport and any other documents you need to show that you are entitled to work in the UK, then you'll get a NI number in 1-3 months.
C'est un piece du piss.
Feel free to disseminate this bit of info - people coming to the UK to settle don't often get informed about this, as it means that they get stuck in shitty, badly-paid jobs with little security.

The Purple Turtle

I met up with a few old friends on Saturday night, including Dr. Lynne, back from her Oz jaunt. Very good to see old faces again, but come 11 o'clock, I made the mistake of staggering off to The Purple Turtle for a few late beers. Apart from wasting my money, it was a somewhat saddening experience: From what I could see, a large minority of the clientele were early middle-aged blokes with paunches, grey hair and glasses. Time was when the Turtle was a real kick-ass place, particularly before it moved from Duke Street; Now, it looks like it's become part of the fogey Heritage Trail, with men trying to recreate the youth, live a little riskily (ha!), and get down with the kids. Sad.

Too good not to share....

...or an example of the kind of stuff I have to put up with on a day to day basis. The following is an extract from an Academic English assignment, handed in by one of my Chinese students. In it, he's explaining why he's decided to describe Thailand. Everything is as he wrote it:

I very interesting about two special people in Thailand, this is cause I write about Thailand for this country description. On the one hand those are the long neck girls, who have lived in east of Burma for nearly 4 century. Since 1948s, they were Persecuted by Burma, after that most of them moved to the hamlet for refugee in Thailand. The long neck girls have not any trick to earn the money expect their long neck. Since the little girls are 6-years-old, they have been trained wear the circle of copper. On the one hand that is can be earn some money for their needy life, on the another hand, they believe long neck can take good luck for them; another special people is a man change in sharp of sex, (I don�t know the name of them actually, although I am looking up the dictionary, unfortunately I still can not find out that name.) that men are very different from normal gentlemen. They cut off their dick, and inject them some medicine, which can let men become pretty ladies. After that operation, they would join a group, and dance for the show, take photograph with the a tourist.

What can I do, but bang my hand against the wall?

a bloody awful photo of me an Nur 

crushing grapes - and yes, my mum did sterilize her feet first. 

harvesting grapes for wine. Me, dad and mum. 

The Day the Thames Dried Up (After Orhan Pamuk)

Here's a small bit of fanciful writing.

In Chapter Two of his wonderful The Black Book, Orhan, in his guise as the columnist Celal Salik, describes a moment when the Bosphorus dries up, exposing its many secrets to the columnist (anti-) hero, who goes looking for a legendary Cadillac, containing the corpse of a Beyoglu hood and his moll. In a strange way, it expressed a similar desire of mine, but on a considerably smaller scale: What would happen if the Thames, as it passed through Reading, dried up entirely?
It was a notion I entertained on those lazy days I spent fishing on its banks in the late seventies and early eighties, usually during the summer holidays, with a background of tennis from Wimbledon, or the World Cup or Olympics or some such sporting endeavour, and the music provided first by Donna Summer and disco, then the Pistols and the punks, then Ska, Two Tone, Reggae and New Romantics: What would it be like, to see this river reduced to nothing more than a trough in the ground separating Reading from Caversham?
I imagined day after hot day, spent lazing on the banks, noticing how the torrent over the weir slowed to a trickle and its rich green odour was replaced by something ranker and more defiled; How the water table sank centimetre by centimetre, leaving banks of newly exposed mud, first gleaming, then crackling into hexagonal shapes; The river weed withering, then being replaced by willows, buddleias, plantains, reeds, sycamores, brambles, grasses, and dandelions, and the ducks, geese, swans, coots, moorhens and grebes being supplanted by sparrows, thrushes, robins, blackbirds, crows and whatnot; And when there was no more than the odd steaming puddle to remind the citizens of Reading, who crowded and hurtled across the bridges on their ways to and from work, of what had once been, I and my playmates would scour the drying riverbed for signs of our history.
Amid the numerous corpses of shopping trolleys, we would discover the coins we�d given to the river in supplication at the beginning of each fishing season in the hope of catching plenty. Where once they floated on the tranquil surface, the narrowboat owners would have set up their crafts on the steep banks, propping them up on old bits of scaffolding appropriated from the river bed , and constructing verandahs from pieces of flotsam. Creeping through the scaffolding poles, we�d discover, along with the inevitable cans and bottles hurled by generation of drunk after drunk, buttons, caps, wallets fat with filthy rotting notes, odd trainers, strange trousers, things flung away in fury or shame, plastic things, metal things, worthless things, things. And we would collect these exhibits of our society in the thousands of old, mud silted plastic bags we would find lining the surface of this new valley.
But once my friends had gone home, I would stay on in this new playground, and start digging for that history beyond my own present: For example, I would walk carefully through the swampy ground until I got to Caversham Bridge, now arching high overhead, and with a handy willow stick I would scratch the moist earth for evidence of the Chapel of Our Lady of Caversham, destroyed in the Reformation, to which, according to contemporary sources, �An Oone Winged Angell did bringe the hede of the speare that did perce oor saviours side�: Perhaps I would even find It myself, the Spear of Destiny, here in a (as I discovered later) not particularly remarkable town near London. Then again, I could walk back to the weir, and try to find evidence of the great battle between the Vikings and the Saxons in 760 a.d. � perhaps a broadsword, maybe even a longship, sunk with a perfect cargo of rowers, their skeletons waiting patiently for an order to pull on their oars that would never come. I would come across the tiny skeletons of the victims of Mary Jones, who, in the nineteenth century, was convicted of the murder of seven infants in her charge, but was suspected of the deaths of many, many more. Perhaps I would come across the relics of some saint, once venerated at Reading Abbey, but dispersed by Henry VIII�s wrath. Then again, there would perhaps be the black and putrid ribs of one of his sailing barges, having sunk with its cargo of beechwood for the ceiling at Hampton Court. Stepping through the rusted metal maze of shopping trolleys, bicycles, stolen motor bikes and car parts, I might come across cannon shot and musket balls from the Civil War. In this slimy green valley, where once swans dappled the surface and fish patrolled the depths, and where now kids performed tricks on their mountain bikes or smoked spliffs in the shadow of the old weir, and the beggars and addicts who haunted the town during the day came to their makeshift beds at night, and which the local paper bemoaned and implored the local council to do something about, I would compile a list of all those discarded objects that filled it, a list that would tell someone who we were. And from that list, I could compile story after story, each one related to Reading and its secrets. My book would have a double, a triple, a multiple meaning, each one more mysterious than the other, depending on the reader�s ability to pierce words and phrases for further meaning. The book of Reading, that is, the book of the settlement of the people of the mysterious leader known only as Reada, or �Red�, would also be the book of reading, an instruction into the mysteries of books and words themselves, and the reader, or Reader, would become sucked into this strange construction itself. Reading, reading; a place, no more unusual than anywhere else, it would be transformed into Minos� labyrinth, Dante�s journey, Gulliver�s travels, Ibn Batutta�s great lifelong quest, simply by the act of recording it all; And when I finished the book, I would set it in a witch-jar, seal the top, and bury it in the bed of the Thames just as winter�s rains finally began, and the river flowed over the trees and the beggars and the poles holding up the narrow boats and swallow the mystery once more for another generation to discover.
And then, of course, I would wake out of my reverie (How could I not? All stories are dreams, after all) to find my fishing line snagged on something in the flowing, rich-scented river; some weed perhaps, or an old bottle - something I couldn�t see, anyway.

sod this for a lark...

...all this bloody work malarkey. I'm knackered: I haven't had much time to myself since the last entry. Thought I'd write something down, though, before my next class.

Sue's funeral went as well as these things can. The crematorium chapel was packed - there were about 300 people by my reckoning. Afterwards, we had an enormous wake at my dad's house. He was in quite a state, so we made sure his glass remained filled. I may write in more detail later.

Spent last weekend indulging in various bucolic pursuits, namely making cheese on saturday (a surprisingly easy process) and making wine round at my mum's on sunday. She has a vine in a corner of her garden, and we pulled off 60 pounds of grapes - enough to make about 10 gallons of wine. After we'd gathered, mashed and mixed everything up, we sat down to a huge lasagne, salad and loads of red wine .