Musings – Page 2 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Taken out of context?

Public discourse relies on the assumption that quotations accurately represent not only what someone has said but also what they meant. From traditional mainstream journalism in particular, we have the right to expect and assume that quotations on the news reflect both the intention and the context of the person being quoted. Quotations can be manipulated — intentionally or inadvertently — through selective editing or splicing separate statements together. This can exaggerate or change the meaning or the tone of what somebody said and in some cases it can completely invert the meaning from what the speaker intended. I know this, because it’s happened to me.

Back in the mists of time, I was embarking upon teacher-training. This would have been in around 1999. During the year in which I was training, the government suddenly realised that there was a teacher shortage and that the extremely recent decision that trainee teachers should pay for their own training was, shall we say, something of a mis-step. They announced that from the following year, not only would new aspirant teachers have their training paid for, those applying for what were classified as “shortage subjects” would be given extra cash: it was called the Golden Handshake. Given that there were no plans to remiburse the current year group of trainees for their costs, I was around £6000 out of pocket and I was pretty cheesed off, to say the least. I wrote to the Times Educational Supplement and received a response that they would like to use my letter. I gave them permission to do so and to be honest I felt rather chuffed about it.

They did not publish my letter in full. What they did was to take a few words out of it and included it in a wider article by one of their journalists. In itself, that would have been disappointing but acceptable, were it not for the manner in which they butchered the tone of what I said. In the context of my long letter about how I felt mistreated by the government, I mentioned that — as someone in possession of a PhD — I was one of the highly-qualified individuals that the government was saying it wished to attract into the profession. I referenced the amount of blood, sweat and tears that it had taken from me, all for the dubious honour of being able to title myself as “Doctor”, and made a joke about the fact that I was now choosing to enter a profession in which the generic title for women was — and always would be — “Miss.” They quoted this. They then jumped to the very end of my letter and took another quote, in which I summed up my rage at the fact that the government had forgotten about our year group and were happy to leave us in debt, whilst banging on about how important the next generation of teachers was to them. What therefore ended up being printed in the paper was something along the lines of this (although I cannot remember the precise wording): “I’ve worked really hard to gain the right to call myself “Doctor”, only to enter into a profession in which I will always be referred to as “Miss” … and I’m really angry about it.” This, my friends, is what it means to be quoted out of context. They made it sound like I was narked that my title would not be used in the classroom. Not only was this untrue, it was completely irrelevant to the purpose of my letter, which was to point out the fact that our cohort had been unfairly overlooked.

I complained. The TES acknowledged my complaint but said that they “didn’t agree that it made me look bad” and that I had after all “given my permission” for them to use my words, which is exactly what they had done. Of course, nobody actually reads the TES anyway, its sole purpose and use being the main medium for schools to advertise vacant positions, and within minutes of its production it was no doubt the next day’s proverbial chip-paper, but it gave me a small insight into what it feels like to be misrepresented in the press.

When someone speaks — in an interview, a lecture, a letter or a speech — the meaning behind their words depends on the full set of ideas they express longform. A quotation extracted from the larger discourse can lose the clarifying details, caveats, or reasoning that surrounded it. This practice is called contextual omission. For example, imagine someone says the following: “It would be terrible if people stopped participating in elections but, hypothetically, if no one voted, the law provides that the system would choose a winner.” A selective excerpt quoting them as saying “If no one voted, the system would choose a winner” removes the warning that voting is important and could even imply that the speaker is advocating for a system other than democracy. The quote remains “factual” but loses the speaker’s intended meaning entirely.

Equally powerful, in my opinion, is splicing. It’s what happened to me and what the BBC appear to have done with the speech made by Donald Trump after his election defeat in 2020. Splicing refers to the process of editing together separate audio, video or textual remarks into a single statement so that it appears continuous. This can create the impression that the speaker said something that they never actually said. Such manipulation is particularly powerful because viewers tend to trust the evidence of their eyes and ears — most especially if that evidence is presented on the BBC, that most trusted of British institutions, one which supposedly prides itself on its impartiality.

Whilst I often wonder the extent to which we suffer from this problem when looking at fragmentary quotations in our possession from the ancient world, it must be said that digital technology makes splicing easier than it’s ever been. Scholars can ponder the fact that fragmentary evidence of one philosopher’s beliefs will give us a frustratingly narrow and possibly misleading glimpse of his thinking, but audio and video editing software in the modern world can rearrange sentences, soften transitions and hide cuts completely: none of this was possible to do so seamlessly until recently. Thus, even when individual words and phrases are genuine, connecting them out of order can create an entirely new meaning. Despite all of this, I do wonder whether those at the BBC were even aware of what they were doing. People — hardened journalists very much included — tend to believe information that confirms their existing views: this is called confirmation bias. If a journalist already dislikes a politician or a public figure, they will read everything they want to read into whatever that that person says. For most of those working at the BBC, Trump is frankly beyond the pale and was unequestionably stirring up resentment among his followers after his election defeat: so they took what he said and magnified it, since they believed it’s what he meant. This, I submit, is not okay.

In an era in which both the reality of “fake news” and the chilling effect of accusing anyone we disagree with as peddling “fake news” are a genuine threat, I find it absolutely inexcusable that someone at the BBC made this decision and I believe that they have serious questions to answer. I am no supporter of Trump, indeed I find his rise to power bewildering in the extreme, but I resent being misled and manipulated by an institution that wears its own claim to impartiality like a badge of honour. In my opinion, there are numerous other issues that the BBC report on (or choose not to report on), on which I also believe that their bias is palpable, but those issues are far too contentious for me to address on this blog. All I will say is that people genuinely believe in the BBC and therefore if something is reported or indeed not reported by them, that has a tangible impact on what people will accept as the truth.

As our global world grows ever more complex and mass-communication continues to become even more fast-moving, it is essential for all of us to question what we are told, even (or perhaps especially) when we are being told it by an institution that we trust and hold dear. Things, as the saying goes, are not always what they seem.

Unpredictable penmanship

I’ve just finished a novel about a superhero. I’ve never been a connoisseur of comics and haven’t bought one since around 1983, when as a small child I did indeed partake of the occasional copy of The Beano, but I never found myself particularly drawn to comic-based superheroes and their universe.

My brief foray into the world of Marvel came as a result of the fact that Lisa Jewell, a well-established contemporary novelist and one of my personal favourites, has been commissioned to write the first book in what has been billed the “brand-new Marvel crime series for adults, introducing fans to a grittier, street-level side of the Marvel Universe.” Whilst characters with superpowers are not my usual bag, I frankly didn’t care: if it’s written by Jewell, I’m definitely in. I placed the book on reserve immediately.

Responses to the novel have been predictably varied and it’s been a great deal of fun to watch people flailing with panic as the classifications by which they like their world to be defined take a superpowered punch to the gut. POW! BAM! BOOM! Comics and superhero stories seem to divide the world like nothing else can, inspiring cult-like loyalty and adoration from their fans, matched in intensity by the sneering contempt from non-fans, who consider the genre to be nothing more than commercialised tat, a world which has nothing to do with literature. As with all divisive topics, the truth no doubt lies somewhere in the middle. All in all, Jewell’s authorship of Breaking the Dark, a Jessica Jones Marvel Crime Novel seems to have annoyed absolutely everybody: an excellent reason to read it.

For me, there is something genuinely remarkable about a novelist who can turn their hand to a variety of writing styles. Jewell is pleasingly unpredictable as an author, and has penned stories in a variety of different genres, from poignant kitchen-sink dramas through coming-of-age novels up to dark, psychological thrillers. You never know what she’s going to write next and I absolutely love that about her. I punched the air with a BIFF when I discovered that Marvel had selected her as the wordsmith for their radical experiment with the genre of the adult novel, and I sincerely hope that she was renumerated to the extent that one might expect from such a potentially lucrative commission. Even if everyone hates it, the book will no doubt sell in the millions. KER-CHING as well as KER-POW.

Novelists that can turn their hand to a variety of genres make people a little uncomfortable, I think. Unless they are spectacularly successful, I suspect they make publishers uncomfortable too. When a writer has a success, most publishers want them to produce more of the same, and it can be a leap of faith for them to back a change of direction. Sometimes, authors write under more than one name, to indicate that change of direction. JK Rowling writes her Cormoran Strike novels under the name of Robert Galbraith, and indeed she approached the publisher under this pseudonym in a quest for genuine feedback. Ruth Rendell wrote psychological thrillers and crime fiction, whilst also writing more introspective, character-driven mysteries under the pseudonym of Barabara Vine. Some novelists, however, write with enormous range under their own name, leaving their fans guessing as to where their imagination will take them next: John Fowles, Kazuo Ishiguro and Lisa Jewell are three authors that exemplify this remarkable talent. While there is security in picking up the novel of someone predictable, there is real joy and adventure in entrusting yourself to an unpredictable penmaster. Jewell is one of those rare authors who writes so well in such a range of styles that I will try anything she produces: hence, this week I found myself immersed in the world of Jessica Jones, superhero, friend of The Avengers, who has superhuman strength, enhanced durability, rapid healing and the ability to fly (although she doesn’t like it). WHOOSH!

Not being in any way familiar with the Marvel universe, I read Jewell’s novel as a standalone and the character of Jessica Jones — a household name to die-hard Marvel fans — was new to me. A large number of those fans are infuriated by the imposition of Jewell’s writing upon their familiar world and an equally large number of Jewell fans seem to be incensed by the novel’s easy prose and youthful characterisation. “It reads like a YA novel!” wails one critic on GoodReads, as if the very notion of writing for a younger audience is an insult.

Is it a literary classic? Of course not. Was Jewell setting out to write one? One presumes that wasn’t the brief. What she has done is to produce a highly entertaining read, one which this relative newcomer to the world of the superhero enjoyed immensely. And let’s be honest: there’s nothing quite so pleasing as a successful book that infuriates almost everyone.

Photo entitled *Comic Books From The Past in My Private Own Comic Shop Basement* by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

The road less travelled — pathways and how we learn new things

A few months ago, my husband and I discovered a local group of walkers in our village. The group meets informally every Wednesday morning and has grown over the years to around 50 people. There are a handful of committed types who turn up every week, plus dozens of others (ourselves now included) who show up regularly although not infallibly. We’ve met a variety of interesting people as a result, not least the couple behind the whole thing, both of whom appear to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the local area and its footpaths.

So many of the local footpaths were unknown to us before we joined the group and some, it turns out, were unknown to everyone. The aforementioned couple are both of the “can-do” and “why not us?” mindset, and over the years they have taken it upon themselves to take responsibility for opening up more than one village pathway that had fallen into disuse. And as Geoff put it to me, “once you open up the pathway, people start using it and then it more or less maintains itself.” The very frequency of use is what helps to keep a pathway established.

Imagine a field of grass that people often cross to get from one side of the field to the other. Over time, a pathway forms, along which most people walk: the grass becomes trampled, the soil compacted and the green fades to brown. This becomes an established pathway and will remain so just for as long as it’s used.

Now, suppose something changes: perhaps a new gate opens, a puddle forms on the old path, or people simply find a slightly shorter or more convenient route. Gradually, walkers begin taking this new line across the field instead of the old one. At first, only a few people use the new route. The grass along it begins to show faint signs of wear — blades are bent and bruised, and a pale strip starts to appear. As the weeks go by, the new route becomes more and more popular: the flattened grass eventually dies back, leaving a firm, visible track.

Meanwhile, the old path, now seeing fewer footsteps, starts to recover. Without constant trampling, the soil loosens a little, rainwater seeps in again, and new shoots begin to grow up through the bare patches. Mosses, wildflowers, and taller grasses reclaim it, softening its edges until it blends again into the rest of the field. Within a season or two, only someone who remembers where it used to run might notice a faint difference in the undergrowth or a subtle dip in the ground. The new track has become the main path — firm and easy to follow — while the old one has disappeared back into the living fabric of the field.

This is an illustration of how habits can change: the places where we pass most often grow clearer, and those we abandon are slowly forgotten, healed over by time and growth. It is also an excellent illustration of how our brains work.

Learning is a physical process, in which the brain changes in response to experience: the brain rewires itself as we practise, think and experience. At its core, it involves the strengthening and formation of neural pathways, networks of neurons (nerve cells) which communicate through chemical signals. Every thought, every memory, every skill we acquire is encoded within these connections. Our brain is quite literally rewiring itself day by day.

Each new connection represents not only new knowledge but also the remarkable ability of the human brain to change and grow throughout life. When we first encounter new information or attempt a new skill, specific groups of neurons are activated together. If this process happens repeatedly and is done proactively, the connections between those neurons will become stronger and more efficient. This is learning. Pathways that are rarely used may weaken through a process called synaptic pruning, a process which has evolved to make the brain more efficient by eliminating redundant connections. This balance between strengthening and pruning allows the brain to adapt continuously to new experiences and environments. Being aware of this is essential to an understanding of how we learn.

The brain’s remarkable ability to adapt and change is known as neuro-plasticity. As Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb said as early as 1949, “neurons that fire together, wire together”. Each time a pathway is used, the brain reinforces it, making it easier to activate in the future. Over time, this repetition transforms a once-effortful action into an automatic one. This, fundamentally, is why we get into habits – both good and bad. The really great news is that bad habits can be replaced with new ones: you simply have to start following the paths less travelled and keep treading upon them until they turn into the new, preferred pathway. The road less travelled may be difficult to start upon, but will become an established thoroughfare with repeated use.

Searching for Eboracum

As I write, my husband and I are spending a few days in the city of York. To my shame, and despite the fact that it has been on my bucket list for a considerable number of years, this is my first ever visit to this wonderful city. It is impossible not be awe-struck by York, which oozes tradition and culture from every corner. It also comes across as notably affluent throughout, which is perhaps unusual for a city; even the local Wetherspoons looks classy.

York feels like a place where multiple periods of history are jostling for your attenion. There are Viking streets and Georgian terraces, but York’s Medieval past and how this ties in with the history of the Church of England is most obviously dominant in its architecture. What is perhaps least obvious to the casual viewer is the city’s Roman origins, yet York was indeed one of the most important military and administrative centres in northern Britain, a legionary fortress and city called Eboracum.

A Roman presence in York began in the late first century AD. The ill-fated ninth legion, which has a mysterious history all of its own, established a large fortress on the north bank of the River Ouse in around the 70s AD. The fortress followed the distinctive plan of a typical Roman castra used across the empire: a defended rectangle with internal streets, command buildings, barracks, workshops and administrative areas. Over time, the original timber-and-earth defences were rebuilt in stone and a civilian settlement grew up adjacent to the military base. This, in fact, is the origin story of most Roman towns in Britain, and like all of them, York’s Roman origins can mostly be viewed piecemeal, woven into the fabric of what stands today.

York thrived continuously, from Roman times to the present. As the centuries slid by and when later builders needed stone, many Roman structures would have been pillaged for materials to support newer building projects. Most of the stones from the original fortress would have been removed and repurposed, but the Roman foundations remain: ramparts became the bases for medieval walls, Roman drains and sewers were incorporated into later systems and Roman roads turned into medieval carriageways and were given new names. My husband and I, both struck by the apparent affluence of the city, in which we found almost no disrepair, paused to ponder the single area of disuse we had come across: a large complex of buildings with boarded up windows. All became clear when we noticed a sign referencing an archaeological project attached to the railings around the area; it seems that a local building project must have come across something exciting beneath the surface, rendering the building works halted for now.

This indeed is what happened to the inn now called the Roman Bath pub in St Sampson’s Square. In around 1930, while work was being carried out in the cellar of the pub then called the Mail Coach Inn, which had suffered fire damage, builders uncovered a series of old stone structures and channels, which turned out to be part of a Roman bathhouse. Archaeologists confirmed that the remains were connected to the nearby garrison of Eboracum, and concluded that they were built by its soldiers for their own use. Thankfully, the man who owned the pub at the time was interested enough to preserve the remains, and today visitors can descend down to the cellar to see the original surviving hypocaust system. So, on entering the pub, you are greeted with the choice to visit the bar or the baths — or indeed, you can of course do both!

York has other places where one can poke one’s nose into its Roman origins. The Multangular Tower in the Yorkshire Museum Gardens is the most striking standing remnant of Roman occupation. It marks part of the south-west corner of the original legionary fortress, but what survives is a multi-period structure: it has Roman stone at its base, but evidences later reworkings (you can see the point of change in the picture below). There are also small stretches of the original Roman walls that are visible in the city, but York’s famous surviving city walls are of course Medieval. The Yorkshire Museum houses a collection of Roman artifacts, but to be honest it’s not exactly exciting unless you’re into looking at hunks of masonry. I know, I know. I’m a rubbish Classicist.

Given my day job, it was obligatory that to go looking for the Roman origins of York, despite my limited penchant for chunks of broken stonework. But to be honest, it is impossible not to be more intrigued by its Medieval history and by the things that mark out the city as unique: its glorious plethora of quirky ale houses, its equally notable profusion of churches, chapels and shrines and — perhaps most striking of all — its surviving city walls. Built originally to defend the city from rebellion, these structures were no longer used as a mechanism for defensive by as early as the 1800s. Parts of the walls from this point on became nothing more than a curiosity and began to be used as a walking route, so the surviving stucture was adapted to suit this new leisure pursuit. A new walkway was built inside the city walls to create a promenade and it is upon this walkway that you can survey the city today. In a world where it’s all too easy to convince ourselves that everything is always getting worse, I find it rather wonderful that what used to be an essential defence structure is now simply a place to pass the time and ponder.

Invention and the Shoulders of Giants

Exploring derivatives is a useful tool when learning vocabulary. Yet the connection between the meaning of modern English and the Latin root-word is not always obvious, not least because the usage and commonplace meaning of words can change – sometimes dramatically – over time. Take the example of the Latin adjective clarus, -a, -um, from which we get words like “clarity” and “clarification”. The Latin word did indeed mean “clear” or “bright”, but students are often puzzled by its (if anything more common) meaning of “famous”. But when you think about it, something which is “clear” or “bright” is something which is “easily seen” or “very visible” – hence the word also came to mean “famous”. I find it useful to remind students of English words which carry both a literal and metaphorical meaning: for example, the word “heavy” has the most obvious meaning of an item weighing a great deal, but it can also mean “serious” as in “this is a bit of a heavy subject to be discussing at the dinner table.” It’s useful then to point out that the Latin adjective gravis, -is, -e (from which we get the word “grave”) had this same double meaning, thus it can be translated as “heavy” or “serious”.

My husband and I spent this weekend with a friend who lives in Bristol, and what a fine city it is. If you have any interest in engineering, it’s a bit of a pilgrimage site. Isambard Kingdom Brunel is profoundly connected to the city through his ground-breaking engineering, the work of which left an indelible mark on Bristol’s landscape and infrastructure. Perhaps most visually striking is the Clifton suspension bridge, but he also designed and built Bristol Temple Meads railway station and the SS Great Britain, a steamship which is now preserved in the city’s harbour. Finally, and perhaps most significantly in terms of the city’s outreach, Brunel led the construction of the Great Western Railway, which linked Bristol to London and thus shaped the city’s relationship with the rest of the UK.

Yet Bristol’s engineering feats do not begin and end with Brunel. Bristol has a long and prestigious history as a centre for aircraft design and manufacturing. Perhaps most excitingly of all, the city was instrumental in the design of Concorde, and all ten British-built Concordes were manufactured and assembled at the Filton site in the north of the city. The first British prototype made its maiden flight from Filton and her last journey also ended at Filton, where the aircraft is now displayed at the Bristol Aerospace museum. We visited her in her very own hangar and were thrilled to discover that one can climb inside the fuselage and peer into the cockpit, a rare privilege indeed.

Being prone to labyrinthine thinking when my mind is full of new experiences, I found myself pondering what one might consider to be man’s greatest inventions. My husband would argue, without a shadow of a doubt, that man’s greatest feat of engineering is Concorde. To have designed an aircraft that can travel at a height and speed achieved hitherto only by fighter jets, in which the pilots wear oxygen masks and pressure-suits, and to make that aircraft comfortable enough and the ride smooth enough that the wealthy passengers who swan on board the flight will not spill a drop of their champagne, is a truly mind-blowing achievement. It was wonderful to read the accounts of the pilots who flew this magnificent machine, and one of them sticks in my mind in particular. He said various things about what an extraordinary experience it was to fly the Concorde, but he finished with: “the novelty never wears off.” I love the idea of a pilot simply loving the experience of flying this phenomenal jet, every single time he did so.

Despite my genuine love of Concorde and the engineering innovation and brilliance it signifies, my own candidates for the greatest inventions by man tend to be more prosaic. In this I am influenced by my father, himself an engineer, who used to torture interview candidates with this question. While they floundered in their attempts to come up with the most exciting modern leaps of nano-technology, my father would push them to consider man’s earliest achievements, the ones that defined us as a species different from all others, for better or for worse. The invention of the bow and arrow; the discovery that cooking food with fire not only made it more palatable but released more nutrients; the building of the rafts that enabled us to leave the land mass of Africa, Asia and Europe; the innovations of the ramp, the lever and the wheel, which enabled us to harness unimaginable power and move objects many times our own size and weight; the building of bridges, with which we find ourselves back with Brunel. As I wandered around Bristol, I found myself pondering all of these things, as we blundered in and out of the city’s quite bewildering array of coffee shops and hipster bars.

My brain then looped back around to the very meaning of the word “invention” and thus we are back to etymology. Students are often puzzled as to why the main derivative of the Latin word invenire, which they are taught means “to find”, is “invention”, when an invention is surely an innovation, not a discovery. The Latin verb primarily meant “to discover”, “to find” or “to come upon” but also “to invent” or “to devise”. It is created out of the preposition “in” and the verb “come” so it literally meant “to come into”. I am no philologist, but I have found myself pondering whether this comes down to the ancient beliefs about knowledge and discovery. For a civilisation that pioneered so many ideas and inventions which we now take for granted, the ancient thinkers didn’t actually set much store by innovation and originality. Plato believed that every single human is born with all the scientific and mathematical knowledge that exists in the universe, they simply need to have it uncovered for them via the Socratic method. Likewise, in the arts, novelty and innovation was not particularly valued in the way that it is today. People wanted to see imitation and mimicry: the artistry was in re-telling good stories with great effect, not in making up new ones.

All of this means that, in the ancient world, even those who made the most remarkable leaps of invention, merely saw themselves as uncovering already-existing truths. There is a humility to this that I believe we should cherish. Newton famously said, “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. He believed that his scientific discoveries were made possible by the knowledge and work of his predecessors, those very pioneers in the ancient world. I think there is something rather beautiful about the fact that those giants would have said the same thing about themselves.

Clifton suspension bridge during a balloon launch. Photo by Nathan Riley on Unsplash

Fit for Purpose

It’s now been several weeks since I decided to start running again and I am thrilled to report that I remain pain-free. Now confident that I am no less capable of running than anybody else, I have started to settle into a routine. With my anxieties behind me, what I’m left with is the long, slow road towards progress and my individual end goal, which is to be able to run to the next village and back. As a result of focusing on this, I have concluded that the app I have been using – my curriculum for running, if you like – is not quite fit for purpose.

Curriculum design is notoriously challenging and I’ll confess to being pretty depressed at how little thought and energy many Classics departments are apparently putting into it. I have countless clients in schools who are still blindly following the Cambridge Latin Course, right down to the detail. They make their students learn the vocabulary listed at the end of each chapter, presumably out of an inertia that prevents them from producing a more useful set of lists for students to learn. Some schools make an effort to remove words that are irrelevant to the GCSE examination, but they are in the minority. I have students who have been taught the gerundive of obligation purely because it appears in chapter 26 and despite the fact that it has not been on the GCSE syllabus since prior to 2018; I’d love to say that this is because their teacher believes it is exactly the right thing to teach them at that point, but the reality is of course that they are merely following the text book. It really is pretty depressing.

Since the last paradigm shift in the criteria used by HMI to inspect state schools, most departments have undergone a major curriculum review. Inspectors are looking for a clear and coherent narrative in a school’s curricula, one that can be articulated and justified by each Head of Department and by all relevant teaching staff. To me, this makes a huge amount of sense and indeed it’s somewhat alarming that the entire philosophy took so long to crystalise in the minds of our inspectors. Luckily for me, it was a process I had already embarked upon. I had long realised that courses such as the CLC were failing dismally in the task of preparing students for the GCSE examinations, and I had torn up the Scheme of Work I had that was based upon this course. I had the privilege of being the sole teacher of my subject from ab initio to GCSE, a powerful position indeed. I was therefore able to start from first principles: what do students need to know and what skills do they need to have acquired by the end of Year 11? Working backwards from that, I re-wrote the entire curriculum from the ground up.

Likewise, I have recently been reflecting upon my end goal when it comes to running. The Couch to 5K programme has as many detractors as it has fans and while I can see that it is terrific in many ways, it isn’t working for me. First of all, I am finding its attempt to provide coaching is totally missing the mark. The final straw was during the third week, when I found myself doubled over as I tried to catch my breath, listening to the voice of Steve Cram saying “you might find things are getting a little easier now.” Actually, Steve, they weren’t at that particular moment! He followed it up with “if you’re not finding it any easier, that’s ok too,” but frankly I was already furious. The very suggestion that I should be finding things easier had been voiced at one of my low points, and believe you me it’s not what you want to hear when you’re gasping for oxygen like a fish out of water. It’s also somewhat annoying that while you’re encouraged to repeat runs as often as you need to, doing so means you have to listen to the voice saying that you’re done with that week and ready to move onto the next one. All in all, there’s an obvious limit to how successfully one can listen to a coach who is not there in person, not witnessing the realities of your own individual progress.

So, I have ditched the app and instead I am using music as my companion. On a friend’s advice, I have made use of a quite remarkably geeky website which martials various tunes into beats per minute and have found a few familiar tracks that match my running pace exactly. At the moment, I have reached the point where I am running for the whole of one track, then walking for another. This means that I am now able to run for around three and a half minutes at a time, which is already a massive improvement on the position I was in a few weeks ago. I am also going to make proactive use of the route that I run to progress to the next stage. My goal is to be able to run along the canal to the next village and back, a distance of around three and a half kilometres; once I’m able to do this, I can then set myself the goal of gradually decreasing the amount of time that it takes me. The route is slightly uphill on the way out and downhill on the way home, so my plan is to attempt the whole distance on the home run first – the psychological benefit of being on the way home plus the fact that it’s downhill should make it much more manageable than attempting to complete the whole thing on the way out: I’m quite stunned at how much a brief incline can slow me down at the moment! But the run home is within my sights as the next viable target.

So far I am enjoying going it alone, without the smug voice of Steve Cram telling me I might be finding things easier. The process has been a reminder of many things: how tough it is to start something new but how rewarding it is to observe tangible progress in a short space of time, however hard the process still seems to be. It is a reminder that it can be easy to forget the progress one is indeed making: as I am panting for air at the end of three and a half minutes, I have to remind myself that I was doing so after 60 seconds just two or three weeks ago. The difficult thing about progress is that it is always challenging: if you’re not slightly out of your comfort zone then you’re not achieving much, so it sometimes feels like it isn’t getting easier. The truth is usually that you’ve improved beyond all measure: you just keep shifting the goalposts.

Rites and Rituals

As thousands of students receive their A level, T level, BTEC and VTQ results today, I find myself pondering the fact that the ritual of receiving such results is very different from how it used to be. The enduring image published in all the newspapers of students leaping into the air and waving an opened envelope had become a virtual meme it was such a hackneyed joke; yet students these days are much more likely to be alone in their bedroom when they receive the information about their next steps.

While many schools still present results to students in person in the traditional way, most students will already have received confirmation of whether or not they have secured their preferred college place via an online portal first thing in the morning: the colleges and universities know their results before they do, and these days such information can be communicated instantly. This very modern take on a traditional rite of passage can feel like a bit of a let-down for those of us who went through the system some time ago, and it has made me think about the assumptions we make when it comes to life’s milestones and the rituals that accompany them.

This week I started watching a drama on Netflix. It seems to be one of the multiple television productions that has passed me by over the years, as apparently it was first aired on ITV several years ago. Finding Alice stars the wonderful Keeley Hawes as a woman whose life is upended when her husband dies after falling down the stairs of their newly-built home. The series explores the secrets that Harry left behind and the impact on his family. Episode 2 centres around Alice’s unconventional decision to hold Harry’s funeral (and burial!) on their own property, and one is expected to make some serious stretches of the imagination in terms of how she gets around the legal ramifications of such a process. This didn’t particularly bother me, as obviously a drawn-out exploration of the administrative nightmare that would be triggered in real life would not make for gripping drama.

What I did find myself irritated by, however, was the portrayal of Alice’s selected Celebrant for the funeral. It was made clear in the drama that the deceased was not religious and that there should therefore be no religious elements to his send-off. As if we were in a drama from decades ago, the Celebrant appeared bemused and perturbed by the notion that there would be no references to the Christian religion whatsoever. On the day itself, she even — and by this point I was shouting at the television — started to perform the sign of the cross in front of the gathering before she “remembered” that there was to be no religion involved and managed to stop herself mid-blessing.

Now, depending on what community you hail from, it may be the case that you have not had the opportunity to attend a non-religious funeral. Let me assure you that they are commonplace and uncontroversial. There are a plethora of Celebrants who lead such ceremonies and many of them will point blank refuse to include any religious references, never mind trying to sneak them in. Some take a more eclectic approach (one which my mother, who trained as a Celebrant for Humanists UK, used to call the “Pick ‘n’ Mix” option) and will throw in a prayer or a hymn if you want one. It was genuinely mind-boggling to think that a drama written as recently as 2021 would choose to imply not only that non-religious funerals are unusual and extraordinary, but that even those who provide such services find them so! With almost 40% of the UK population identifying themselves as “no religion” in the 2021 census, it really does beggar belief that non-religious ceremonies are still being portrayed on our television screens as a bizarre and unusual turn of events worthy of quirky comedy value.

As a person of no religion myself, I have a wide variety of friends with a range of beliefs. I have attended religious ceremonies, but I have also attended many funerals entirely without religion. Sometimes they have been held in a traditional crematorium, sometimes in a woodland burial ground. When the Celebrant has been a member of Humanists UK, the ceremonies have been strictly non-religious, but others have woven in a small nod to faith at the behest of some family members. I have even attended a baby naming ceremony run by someone who described themselves as “an inter-faith minister” and that one was possibly the weirdest. If there’s one thing I find myself agreeing with the deeply religious on, it’s that you surely can’t just pick the bits that happen appeal to you from a variety of religions, like some kind of spiritual smorgasbord.

Unlike the celebrant in Finding Alice, I do not believe in doing things the way they’ve always been done out of a misplaced attachment to ritual. Hopefully, the students receiving their results today will only benefit from the smoothness, immediacy and efficiency afforded to us by our new gods of technology. It is all too easy to be misty-eyed about traditional rites of passage, when in fact the modern way of doing things is far better and frankly less agonising than the way things used to be. These days, decisions are made immediately and the clearing process is a thousand times better and more efficient than it was in my day. You can even clear up as well as down! Everyone benefits from this. I have no doubt that plenty of students will still be leaping into the air when they receive their results, whether the Daily Mail is there to photograph them or not.

Trying again

“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”

Stephen McCranie, artist and author

Currently, I am making a second attempt at something I have previously failed at. The process is challenging for multiple reasons, but most especially the fear that I may fail again. Failing is disheartening and painful, and this particular failure was painful in a very literal sense last time I tried.

As regular readers will know, I am a recent convert to fitness-related activity. What readers may not know is that my first foray into this world took place several years ago, when I decided to make an attempt to complete the NHS Couch to 5K programme, a running app that aims to take non-runners from zero to 5 kilometres in just 9 weeks. The programme has its detractors and I will say from the outset that I believe that it is way too intensive: I would not recommend attempting to complete the process in 9 weeks. But the principle of the app is good, as it consists of a course of activity in which running is broken up into very short bursts of ever-increasing length. There are other criticisms of the programme, which I will touch upon as I explain why I have decided to try it again.

When I first attempted the programme, I had done no reading whatsoever about the importance of strength and balance training (or rather I had managed to filter out any advice in this area and banish it from my consciousness). I was ignorantly convinced that I was as fit as any normal person should expect to be and that running was therefore well within my grasp. I thought that all I had to do was to build up my cardio-vascular endurance by actually doing the running. So, I bought myself some running shoes and a strap for my phone and off I went. It may be pertinent to point out at this juncture that a second major criticism fitness experts and physiotherapists have of the Couch to 5K programme is that it gives no advice on strength training prior to and during the process.

During the very first run, I was getting painful twinges in my spine. Serious ones. I suffer from scoliosis (curvature of the spine) and my back was giving me some very clear warning signals that all was not well. Convinced of my fitness, I loftily ignored them. Twinges are normal, I told myself, I just need to get used to the process. Well, by the end of the third run I found myself screaming in agony. Genuinely. I have never experienced pain like it (admittedly, I have not experienced childbirth!) I was alone in the house on my return and quite seriously considered calling for help. The pain was severe enough to make me afraid that something was terribly, dreadfully wrong. Eventually, it subsided and I was left with the rather bleak realisation that my body had let me down. I was devastated, perhaps more so than I have ever shared with anyone, including my husband. While there are a thousand things that my scoliosis has theoretically prevented me from doing, none of these things were something that I wanted to do. I don’t want to be a ballerina, a gymnast or indeed a performance artist of any kind. This failed attempt at running was the first time I had embarked upon and failed at something that I wanted to achieve and had assumed myself to be capable of. I dealt with it pretty badly. Friends and osteopaths had multiple suggestions for activities that would bring similar health benefits to running without the high impact, but none of it cheered me. I wanted to run and I had believed that I would be capable of it. I engaged Sulk Mode.

After a few weeks, I got over myself. Running was not for me and that was fine. The only trouble was, when I started researching into why I might have struggled so much, I drew a blank. Nothing I could find gave any indication that scoliosis should be a complete barrier to running, indeed there appeared to be a considerable amount of evidence to the contrary. What was I to think? It was puzzling. One thing that’s true is that the definition of scoliosis is pretty broad and generic and it is quite difficult to zero in on research that relates to what might be going on for a particular individual. So, I ended up concluding that, for whatever reason, my particular spine configuration simply didn’t tolerate the high impact of running and that was that. Plenty of health experts acknowledge that running is not for everyone and I accepted that I was one of those people, albeit reluctantly.

This summer, for reasons I am still unsure of, I had a bit of an epiphany. It suddenly occurred to me that the last time I had tried running was prior to all of my other efforts to improve my fitness. Before I started the work that is necessary to build muscle and improve balance, I was genuinely useless. Weak as a kitten. My core was hopelessly feeble, hence why I strained my back on a regular basis: since working on the muscles in my core, I have not had any back strains, I suddenly reminded myself. Similarly and equally relevant, I have swapped legs that were as wobbly and useless as pair of pipe cleaners for some genuinely respectable trunks of muscle. They are visibly, tangibly different, indeed I feel like I’ve got somebody else’s legs! While I have always been able to walk long distances, I can now do so without feeling like I have done so. In previous years, a 10-mile walk was certainly possible for me, but I would have felt it the next day: now, it just feels like I’ve been for a stroll around the shops. So, it suddenly occured to me, is it actually possible that the problem with running was not the shape of my spine but the simple fact that the muscles in my core and my legs weren’t up to the job? It seemed plausible. And once I’d thought of it, I couldn’t let it drop.

I gave myself some thinking time and pondered the situation. Then I made myself a deal. I would try it again on one condition: the first twinge, the very first whiff of a warning sign from my vertebrae and I would stop. Any nascent pains in my back must be accepted as a chequered flag. Last time, I ignored them and I paid for it. I must not let that happen again because nothing is worth the pain I experienced as a result of that negligence. So, armed with my new promise to myself and my new and improved musculature, I started again. I am now past the point when the agony set in last time and the only thing even relating to a twinge I have experienced is what our friends across the Atlantic hilariously call “runner’s butt”, but which is technically known as gluteus medius syndrome. Basically, it’s a mild ache in one butt-cheek after running (not during). Interestingly, this is the one and only issue I have read about which is recognised as a potential problem that can arise from running with scoliosis: it can arise for all sorts of other reasons too, but scoliosis is undeniably on the list. I shall monitor it and see how it goes, but my glutes are very strong, and so far stretching them out is managing the problem. If it fails to do so in the future, I may have to stop. So be it.

All in all, I am currently enjoying the challenge and it feels really emancipating to try again at something, in the full knowledge and acceptance that I may fail. My current plan is to repeat every single week of the programme, thus doubling the length of time that it takes to complete. This is recommended by some physiotherapists, who have seen way too much fall-out from people who have attempted to complete the programme in the ridicuously short allotted time of 9 weeks. If that turns out to be too quick, I will slow down even more. I will continue to listen to my body and I will obey its commands: the consequences of not doing so are not to be sniffed at. But, for whatever reason, I am simply not willing to accept the fact that running is not for me without a fight. I’ll keep you posted.