Love isn’t all around us

3 September, 2012 (18:28) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

We are reliably informed that love is a many-splendoured thing. It is just around the corner yet all around us at the same time, making the world go round; it’s crazy but it’s the sweetest thing; you can’t hurry it, but love, well… all you need is it. It’s here to stay.

Love can be blazing and quick and full of fire and fury, like a sparkler; slow and mellow and comfy like a warm duvet on a frosty winter’s morning. Sometimes love’s like my dog: all it needs is a walk once in a while to keep it happy. Sometimes it’s like the cat: loud, demanding and oh-so-hard to satisfy without some sort of blood sacrifice.

But most of the time, like the Bard said, love’s like a flower: it spends a lot of time dormant or hidden, it has to put up with extremes of heat and cold, flood and drought, feast and famine, but all the time the prettiest bloom is somewhere there, waiting for a little warmth to bring out its beauty. The Bard, or maybe it was Bette Midler.

You may have noticed that a few people have found quite a few things to say on the subject, so it is of course very hard to be original.

But once in a while, prompted maybe by the sight of sunshine and suits, white dresses and bright flowers, little girls in bows and ribbons, smiles and optimism, it’s good to think of love.

It’s what the world needs now, or that’s what Hal David wrote, and when you consider he wrote the lyrics to some of the greatest pop songs ever likely to be recorded, I reckon he knew a thing or two on the subject.

Frankly, I’d sooner listen to Hal David – 24 Hours from Tulsa, A House is Not a Home, Alfie, Anyone Who Had a Heart, Close to You, Do You Know the Way to San Jose, I Say a Little Prayer, Make It Easy on Yourself, Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, The Look of Love, There’s Always Something There to Remind Me, Trains and Boats and Planes, Walk On By, Wishin’ and Hopin’, You’ll Never Get to Heaven (If you Break My Heart) – than almost any of the public figures mentioned on this blog week in, week out, of whom more right now…

I wanted to start with something warm and fluffy this week, because unfortunately it looks like we’re going to end with the opposite. Still, as the great and godlike Cohen reminds us, love and hate sometimes march side by side. So let’s move onto hate, which brings us neatly to Michael Gove.

“Poor teachers to face sack under new zero tolerance procedures”, screamed the headline, alongside a picture of that towering example of intellectual achievement, Gove, a man so politically inept he doesn’t realise such tiresome bullying, such cowardly threats, such pathetic excuse-making for societal failures that have absolutely nothing to do with teachers, do nothing but make him look like the ineffective, frightened, bleating, posturing rich boy he really is.

I’m with Independent columnist Mark Steel, who, driven to distraction by the revolting excrescence’s grandstanding for the Neanderthals of the Tory right, tweeted: “Is there any solution to the problem of Michael Gove that doesn’t involve his face and a shovel?”

To be fair, it’s not just Gove. We have a long and very unproud history of blame. We have children who, possibly, aren’t up to the standards we’d like in maths and English, for example. How much easier to blame teachers rather than divorced parents, jobless parents, texting, television, no bedtime stories, lack of resources, leaking primary schools, secondary schools the size of Wales, role models like Jordan and John Terry, Hello magazine…. No, all of those and a thousand more demand that we look at ourselves and how we live, demand that we make an effort to enthuse and involve and educate children too.

And why would we do that when EastEnders is on or, in the case of Gove and his chums, there’s a private school to which we can send the kids, paying the staff to do all that tiresome empathising.

The fact that the private school will turn out sick jokes like Gove, with no idea of life and how to live it, no idea of real people and their earthy problematic lives, with absolute certainty that money can cure all problems and so the only thing that matters is getting it, escapes them, of course.

I’d write more, but I’ve got the kids to myself to look after this morning. My other half, a teacher, has given up her Sunday morning to go to the village church to represent the school in prayers for those involved in a local accident at the weekend.

I worry. Maybe giving up more of her own time will make her tired for the start of term on Wednesday? Will she be effective?

You have no idea how much I would love it if the wretched coward Gove would come and tell her and me that she’s not doing well enough – but believe me, it would take a damned sight more courage than that sorry puppet of the cretinous right has thus far displayed to face me on the subject of teaching. Really.

He wants pupils to be made to read to Ofsted inspectors. Achieving what, precisely, other than yet another falsely achieved and pointlessly demonstrated stick with which to beat a profession that tackles more day-to-day real politics, real-life issues, than an overpaid wastrel like Gove could ever imagine?

Maybe it’ll distract Ofsted inspectors from one of their regular main criteria for assessing teachers: consistency in marking.

Oh.

If there were any justice, any decency, any hope in the world, Michael Gove would now be standing shivering in his underpants on Tower Green awaiting exquisitely painful torture applied by thousands of teachers, pupils and their families, broadcast live on national television to a cheering audience of billions.

Now if only I could find a teacher to explain to me how it is that one world can support somebody as sweet and giving as Hal David, and somebody as utterly joyless and life-denying as Michael Gove….

Comments

Comment from One Old Fiddle
Time September 3, 2012 at 10:42 pm

It behoves me to say the following: one of your finest! Bile of the finest order, and, (I quiver as I write this) so richly deserved.

Comment from One Old Fiddle
Time September 3, 2012 at 10:47 pm

Move over Hamster! Here’s One Old Fiddle’s Top Tip: When your welly socks wear out at the heel (as they surely will) turn them over when you put them on, so the heel (with its hole) is on the top of your foot.Then they’ll last twice as long. You know it makes sense.

Comment from One Old Fiddle
Time September 3, 2012 at 10:49 pm

Of course drink has been taken! Does a bear….?

Comment from Hamster
Time September 9, 2012 at 1:34 pm

only three comments? Where have the others gone?

Comment from One Old Fiddle
Time September 9, 2012 at 7:21 pm

I was wondering that. Maybe Guinness washed them away…

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