Jamie Oliver's Dream School

Let's have this right, "Dream School" is many things, but it is not really about education.

It is first and foremost a programme commissioned by a TV channel, which means its primary concern is to draw in viewers to placate the advertisers. So it has to a) entertain the watching audience b) try and extend coverage to the newspapers and the blogosphere, in order to attract further viewers to watch it.

I think on this level it's rather successful. Though I have no idea of the viewing figures, to judge by the chatter on twitter and the number of people (like me here) posting blogs about it, I think it's created the necessary stir and pother. Plus some of its famous names are people with ready access to the media, so Alistair Campbell can write columns in the Broadsheets and Simon Callow gets interviewed about the enterprise in the arts pages. Job done I'd say.

I think that despite this cynical recipe of reality TV-meets-celebrities-meets socially concerning issue (education), the programme has a lot of salvageable insights. But again, let's not dupe ourselves that it is attempting to redress the educational ills of our country.

1) The call to arms to celebrities to mount a rescue mission is a mechanism I find depressing.

However, the calibre of someone like Lord Winston is a bit different to an ex-soap star dancing on ice. Winston, Rankin, Alvin Hall, Jazzy B & communications maven Campbell, have all turned out to have a natural aptitude to lead, to instruct and teach. To reach kids written off as unreachable (and who in plenteous moments of squaring up to one another or just being distracted suggest they still have such a propensity).

But there is still a lingering feeling of this is for charidee, or a good cause at least. I wonder what the celebs' thought processes were? Did they genuinely think they could help reach some troubled kids? (Starkey's continous sniping on feral children and generational spite suggests he had pre-conceived ideas far removed from this). Were they keen to be part of a differing model of education, but then what interest and investment do they normally have in education? Were they just curious to see how this social experiment might turn out? Did they want to test themselves, see if they could inspire a hostile, tough crowd? Were they doing their old mate Jamie a favour, or because he leaned on them and played some guilt card? I wouldn't accuse them of the usual celeb motivation, trying to get a stalled career back on track, since palpably none of these have stalled.

The one aspect of celebrity really does gall me, is Oliver's own presumption that with his celeb mates, he can cure the ails of Britain's education system. He bores on about his own educational failings and how he's overcome that. In the show we still get his other agenda of healthy eating, one that divides opinion straight down class lines, but it seems to me a touch indulgent on his part. He's already done "Jamie's Kitchen" and "Fifteen", we don't really need to see his efforts at teaching as well as the other celebrities do we? Interestingly Oliver seems to have the least tolerance for the disruptive ways of the kids other than Starkey.

2) The kids are an eye opener on maybe the state of contemporary Britain and maybe they're not. How representative are they? I do find it interesting that they're drawn from both middle and working class families, from private and state educational backgrounds. Also was there some sort of selection process? The nature of TV programme production suggests these were not the first 20 kids to answer the call. They almost certainly would have been sifted from others, even if there was no formal audition process like with the talent shows. Programmes like this go for those they deem are likely to be the most televisual, the most charismatic, the most obnoxious, the most endearing etc etc. The group chemistry is not just between the kids, but so that all things are on offer to all viewers.

There's no getting away from the kids having what I take to be severe concentration and focus problems. It's been a while since I was at school, long predating mobile phones. So I can't understand why the kids are allowed in class with their phones, where they are forever afforded the opportunity to text rather than listen to the teachers. Same thing with giving them cameras, whether to do Rankin's homework, or just have a personal record & log of their experience. If they want to tune out, then I have no problem with them having laptops and just surfing the web for their own interests and knowledge as long as they do it in a way that doesn't impinge on those who do want to learn.

Having said that, there are some who definitely are engaging with the teachers. And what teachers like Campbell & Winston are showing them is that they actually already have a reasonable body of knowledge that just maybe needs arranging in their own minds and brought out coherently and cohesively. In Campbell's opening class on why politics? between them they knew about the Suffragettes and the Civil Rights Movement. But there again, only one pupil knew who Simon Callow was... There's celebrity and celebrity I guess. And how dreary that the majority cause they suggested to campaign on was cannabis. Henry, a self-proclaimed stoner and keen advocate of the legalise it campaign, has expressed an interest in being a fireman. A stoner fireman, yeah that'll work...

Danielle arrived on the show it seems to me, clear that she had been given a priceless second chance that she could not afford to pass up. Hence she was the only one to stick out the biosphere experience and good for her, she's profited by it with a trip to Arizona. A simple incentive ploy that will be interesting to see how the other kids respond to it. Jourdelle seems similarly well disposed to making the most of the opportunity. He may not have many grades to his name, but it's not clear what he's doing there as clearly he is very able. Like anything in life, those committed to putting the work in, those willing to listen and learn, will most likely prosper. Not much of a lesson to be learned there. A lot of the chatter on social network sites that comes from other school aged kids, seems every resentful at the chance these 20 kids have been given. A reward for failing and bad behaviour they proclaim. While there maybe a modicum of logic behind such an accusation, they are only really demonstrating a similar the world owes me everything attitude as the Dreamschool kids. The 'if I can't have it, why should they?' attitude. Plus while there is a chance for educational rehabilitation, the larger opportunity is maybe being on television itself. To show your redeeming characteristics as maybe a self-promotional video. haven't most of the Dreamschool kids landed quite plum apprenticeships or courses? The show is an audition after all, but not for education, but for entry level into adult life.

Jenny is one who interests me, having already got into two fights, but very much on the backfoot in both it seems to me. But the moment I took to be significant, was when she was the only one who refused to have her picture taken, for her self-esteem is even more shot to pieces than the rest of the class. Rankin's simple genius step was to put each kid at the centre of attention, with adult make-up artists fussing over them like celebs, being the focus of his lens, having their images blown up large and mounted on projection screens, all things to boost their battered esteem (whatever their sound and the fury is meant to project, they have all been labelled failures and have absorbed this to their deepest cores). Any time a kid is praised for their work, you see their face light up like a beacon. And there's nothing wrong with that at all, except to reflect on how they've arrived at this state of being perpetually rubbished. I hope Jenny can be raised from her personal despond and poor self-image in the remaining shows.

3) The audience. What do people expect? Some slag off the kids. Because they don't have experience of such a culture. Many professional teachers are predictably up in arms about the show humiliating them by getting these rank amateurs in to do their professional jobs. They shouldn't worry. While some of the celebs have shown a natural bent to inspire, what school could offer the teaching resources of a biosphere, a CSI scene, an Intensive Care unit, two Saatchi creatives etc etc? We are hardly comparing like with like. It's called Dream School remember? For a reason, we can only dream of our schools being so well resourced. I suspect that even the gauges measuring PH, water temperature and the like used under Winston's guidance, are beyond the reach of most schools.

Like most reality shows, this contains elements of car crash telly, where people love to watch it through fingers splayed over their face "covering" their eyes and then complain rigorously about the rank bad behaviour and decline of civilisation demonstrated thereof. It's simple, if you don't want to get riled up, don't watch! But people love to feel superior. I think there's a lot to be drawn from such a programme, though none of it is probably central to what the programme purports to be doing. It is a window into some of today's youth. It does suggest that with the right inspiration, even the toughest kids can be stimulated. It tells us about attention spans and the changing demands this makes on learning structures. It shows us some of the values kids have, particularly notions of respect and disrespect, how they regard adults and celebrities. Their dreams of being famous and rich, but without an idea of a career to realise this endpoint. But it does not provide any blueprint for educational reform.

Rather it demonstrates the political football that education always is. From Starkey's blanket views and presumptions about children, about learning and 'standards', through to the reaction of teachers as expressed via social network sites. Education always polarises opinion - it was the only issue that made my father vote in elections, for once I'd finished my education, he stopped voting - and this show allows anyone on any part of the spectrum of belief to restate their opinions backed up with 'evidence' from the show. No one will keep a sense of proportion about the programme as it panders to all of most strongly held beliefs about a very sensitive subject.

The school is a dream, the show contains some distorted elements of reality, but in the final reckoning, it's all just diverting grist for the entertainment mill.

What Price Artists?

In the third of my series of politics and culture, I want to offer a devil's advocate case for why no art form ought to be subsidised by funding from the public purse. It isn't necessarily what I believe, but it's a debate that in the light of economic recession and new technologies ought to be had. The Arts Council have been charged by the UK ConDem Government to cut its subsidy budget by 25%.

Okay Diablo, over to you:

When like all good libertarians you were reading Kropotkin and Proudhon, did you, as I did, imagine we'd all grow into a post-work, leisure economy? One in which our greatest export would be the arts, seeing as we would be free to practice and hone our creations all day, along with some sporting excellence for those who couldn't sit still at school. Well I certainly got that wrong and rather than giving up work, seems like we're going to be asked to labour for longer than ever in order to repair the shortfall in the nation's coffers.

In such an astringent economic climate, it is simply impossible for any arts body to ask for more public subsidy. But let's go even further in the national audit, why subsidise any art form at all? Possibly the UK's most successful art in commercial terms, is rock music. Yet of all art forms it probably receives the least in handouts. Wasn't it Mrs Thatcher who said the arts must pay their own way? Nonetheless, the taxpayer heavily funds Opera, Ballet, and about half of the National Theatre. Let's see them sink or swim under their own commercial efforts. Let's have the subsidised art galleries duke it out with the purely commercial ones.

But it's not fair I hear you chime. One is not comparing like with like. Bricks and mortar based art forms have far greater overheads than those art forms practised by individuals or small groups. Indeed and t'was ever thus. Within any organised society, art has always been associated with patronage, usually at the Court of the monarchs. By contrast, folk and popular art have always had to pay their own way, singing for your supper in taverns, or where ready-made crowds were gathered such as at executions and fairs, all the way through to the music hall, the jazz club and Tin Pan Alley. Just now the historical linkage with commerce seems to offer popular art the possibility of forging ahead of its laggardly, cost-bloated social superior.

Writers, singers, film and video makers and even certain visual arts can produce their art more readily and cheaply than ever before thanks to technology. But more significantly they can shape their own markets by directly selling to their audience and communicating with them online. The site-specific high arts of course struggle to do this. Virtual world and file sharing may just be shaping up as the prevailing market for the creative arts and if those classical forms mired in stasis cannot compete accordingly, then so be it. This is the pure market.

I'm not saying it's easy to tout your wares in what is a very crowded arts suk, but the means of production and distribution are now with the artists themselves. Most artists who build their careers online, are likely to be underpricing their wares at least initially in order to try and develop a fanbase. This raises questions as to just how do we as a society value our creative artists? If it's left to the market, then apart from the superstars at the top, then not terribly much. But again, QED when throwing that evaluation back on the current high arts we are still funding publicly. What does society see as the arts providing for its citizens? The high arts tend to be elitist, the low arts are seen as no less parochial. All sorts of theories abound as to the value added to the quality of life, an uplifting of the soul, the benefits of the aesthetic, the sublime and the cathartic. Mrs Thatcher didn't even believe in 'society', so where does that leave any of those theories? Love it or hate it, the internet bridges the atomised individual to the social network of the like-minded.

Art is at some level a medium of communication. From the creative imagination of the often absent artist (author, film director, choreographer, composer), to the receptive imagination of the audience. Let all art stand or fall on its ability to communicate thus. The successful pieces will speak to large audiences. The unsuccessful ones will slip beneath the waves. In doing so they will either pay their way or not. But that has to be the precise level playing field. No subsidy for any single art form. Put the onus back on us artists to reach out and find our audiences, communicate and move them. In this case the audience is always right. They vote with their fingers moving across mouse cursors, even if that is to order tickets for a site-specific event, rather than download a film.

So my challenge here is not solely to governments, but partly also to artists of which I count myself one. We are paid what society (the market) deems us worth. Again I'm saying it's far from easy to go out and find your market and then carve it out. But if you regard it as your calling, as a vocation, then you'll do what it takes won't you? No longer can an artist hide from his audience. Now we are all accountable.

To return to some political theory , may I suggest you read the below by Sergei Nechayev (if in your dim and distant youth you haven't already) and replace the word 'revolutionary' with 'artist' and 'revolution' with the word 'art'. Then, just then, we may get some worthwhile artistic production once again, that is neither resting on its subsidised laurels, nor wholly taken with its own delusions of originality. If the public want tradition, nostalgia, sentiment, they'll get traditional, nostagic and sentimental art; if they clamour for new ways of seeing, the market will provide.

"The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.

from “The Revolutionary Catechism”

Of course, an artist may not want to ditch his emotions entirely. Renders him far less likely to be able to connect with his fellow man. But the rest I believe holds up. Artists, forge your own value. Society is the market, is the size of your audience. Get talking with them.

- Devils' Advocate rests his case (The devil has all the best tunes)

Is art a vocation in the same way that nursing or teaching is seen as a calling and therefore viewed by governments as legitimately being lower paid because of the practitioners' commitment to their calling? Some other callings such as doctors, are not so shabbily paid. Who makes these judgements? But it is as the devil cites, very hard for arts practitioners to ask for more funding when other 'socially useful' realms are also going cap in hand. So what is an artist worth to their society?

Whatever Happened To The Political Novel?

In my second post on politics and culture this week, after yesterday's Academic History is Politics , I just want to consider why UK authors rarely produce political novels. After all in the US, virtually each presidency sees an anonymously penned best seller about goings on in the Whitehouse, such as"Primary Colours" and even now "O" already imagining the shape of a re-election campaign for Obama. Furthermore everyone can also play at guess the writer's identity to keep the interest bubbling.

Then there are those American Epic novels such as Philip Roth's "American Pastoral" or Don DeLillo's "Underworld" which are profoundly political works looking at generations of recent American history, or Roth's "The Plot Against America" which though smaller in timescale, is no less politically charged as it looks at an alternative history of an America under a pro-Nazi Lindbergh Presidency and remaining isolationist throughout the Second World War. There have been books aplenty about the Twin Towers, terrorism and the like, but very little over here in Britain, despite the fact that our suicide bombers were homegrown.

Britain used to have a fine history of the political novel, from Swift's satirical "Gulliver's Travels", through Dickens, Orwell and Koestler. But no more it seems. Maybe it's a by-product of us belittling and eviscerating our politicians through TV drama from "Spitting Image" through "Yes Minister" to the various Michael Dobbs' creations all of which DID start life as novels.

I will read any book I start all the way through to its end. No matter how much it stinks, there is always some redeeming element of it no matter how tiny. EXCEPT in two instances, though I still did crawl my way through to their sorry conclusions. And both were POLITICAL novels.

The first was "Demo" by Alison Miller which had a promising premise of starting on an anti-(Iraq) War demo, but turned out to be about the angst, loves, lives and gripes of a couple of Trustafarians. (For those unaware of the term, it refers to rich middle class kids who slum it, buttressed by the surety Daddy's trust fund when they tire of not having running water). The political backdrop was soon forsaken for a bout of navel-gazing little more sophisticated than a sixth-former's jottings in their creative writing notebook. There was still one - albeit happily tangential - redeeming feature of the book, in that the photo of a demo on the cover of the paperback edition I have, provided me with the title for my own political novel about demonstrating, the limits of opposition and homegrown suicide bombers.

The second book is by a Nobel Laureate no less. It made the Booker list for the year it came out. "The Good Terrorist" by Doris Lessing was a knockabout, overlong cartoon sketch about delusionary Far-Left radicals forming a terrorist cell. It was set in Brixton, a cliché which sets the tone for the novel's sledgehammer cracking of a walnut. All the characters were odious and you could almost visualise the author's sneer at her creations while she was writing them. I was so irritated by the book, that on reaching the conclusion I actually hurled it across the room towards the bin, a manoeuvre I have never done before or since. One of the inside leaves ripped in flight, the one and only time I have damaged a book.

So there we are, a metaphor for the lamentable state of the British political novel. I'll happily take recommendations of any you have come across in the last decade or so. I will accord David Peace's "GB84" a worthy mention as it dealt with the Miners' Strike, but even then it is really only Peace's remarkable writing style that carried me along, rather than the narrative content itself.

The question has to be asked, is the dearth originating because authors aren't writing these novels in the first place. Or is it that the publishers and arbiters of taste are knocking them back consistently. Or of course, that combination of the two, whereby authors look at the market and seeing the lack, deem that they'd be wasting their time penning a political novel and thus censoring themselves.

History & Politics Go Together LIke Space And Time

The David Starkey argy bargy on Channel 4's Dream School got me casting my mind back to my own experiences of the subject, which I studied to part degree level.

The furious debate waging over Starkey's treatment of the kids taking place on blogs and Twitter essentially come down to which side of the political line you stand. The liberals are appalled by a man in a position of power and responsibility stooping to personal insults and put downs to a child. The conservatives applaud his view of the moral and behavioural decline in standards as evidenced by the children in the show. Sages point out that what did people expect, sending in a University lecturer into a secondary schoolroom of pupils who had evidenced an unwillingness to go through the school system? The logic being that University students are driven and want to be there to be lectured, whereas these kids pretty much don't (though the tenor of Dream School is that given the right guidance and inspirational leadership, they actually pretty much do).

Can I just nail that last illusion for a start? I attended University to study history. By the middle of my second year, I was ready to drop out because the University lecturers had killed any love I had for the subject. They weren't interested in teaching us, only in pursuing their own researches. Students were a contractual obligation. I learned nothing new about the subject in 18 months than I had at school. I merely covered different periods of history and countries. I only stayed on because I started writing stageplays which I could get produced by hungry student thespians. And not least because I changed my course to Sociology and Politics, an act which almost caused a riot in my conservative College since it had a reputation for being a history specialist and here was the first person in four years to jump ship to what they regarded as a wooly Lefty pseudo-science. All my tutors had to be found from outside my college. Said it all really. One of my courses was on Revolution and was a shared course with History, but my tutors were now from a Politics bent and not a History one.

History is made by the academics. For the discipline and rigours of historical research seemingly have to be signed off by presentation to academia for rigorous falsifiablity testing, even if the historical author is working outside of the University system. And that means academics, who are contracted to produce papers and publish learned books, are partly filtered in their choices by the market system. No one wants another book replicating the thesis of one that has gone before. New academics, seeking permanent tenure, look for a historical gap in the market.

Academic History is also made according to political allegiances. The very notion of a Whiggish view of History, of a slow but steady historical movement towards progress, is the liberal view writ large. That man's lot can always be improved through enlightenment and a more equitable levelling of wealth. This is of course anathema to conservative historians.

The Whiggish view I had been taught at school offered that from the first formal British Prime Minister Robert Walpole in 1715, through the Industrial Revolution, the First Great Reform Act of 1832 extending the vote, represented a triumphant march of progress only felled by the First World War and the Great Depression. In my conservative college, my tutor moved the datelines, back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (securing the British Monarchy for Protestantism for once and for all) up until the same Great Reform Act, was actually a triumph of conservative reactionaryism, as it held back a true universal suffrage and preserved huge imbalances of wealth. Just by moving the datelines by 27 years. He based his argument on research into a horde of up until then unexplored pamphlets and tracts by the Jacobites (The Catholics), 'proving' that their view was a whole lot more widespread than had been held perviously, even if they lost the wars and the battle for Royal Succession.

But here we still have the politics of those on high. This isn't the First Estate of the Clergy, the Second of the nobility, the monarch who stood outside of the Estates, this was the unofficial Fourth Estate of a fledgling literate media elite. This was still high politics, ignoring the grass roots of all those lumped together as the rest, in the form of the Third Estate. History until the modern age of recording technology of camera, of tape recorder, of microfiche and now digital technologies, has always been the realm of those with scribes and chroniclers. It has only ever been about High politics at Court, until those monarchies collapsed with the First World War. In those eras when edicts and ukases made by State rulers could still deeply impact on citizens, whereas now it's not the politicians so much as market forces which determine our lives, unless those disempowered leaders decide to take their countries into wars.

History is politics, both the politics of the hierarchies it has traditionally studied and with the personal agendas of the contemporary academic historians making those researches. Should we be surprised that David Starkey has made overtly political statements in all the furore over what in the final reckoning was an adult's lack of self-control of his tongue when addressing a child? I don't doubt that there are some very credible historians with less of a political agenda, but as is always the case, the TV historians such as Starkey and AJP Taylor before him, are not necessarily the best academics, merely the most photogenic or TV savvy of them. If Dream School wanted to pick an academic historian, maybe like with Mary Beard for Latin, they should have just gone for a non-TV brand name. But then I can't really see the point of having more than one University lecturer on the staff to see if University lecturers can inspire and teach secondary school kids or not.

We are always counselled to know our history because it repeats itself and we would be better prepared accordingly. This enables all sorts of political agendas to be wrought, appealing to various historical happenings for back up. The problem is that we never know which bit of history is going to repeat itself when, so such an argument is specious.

If I may be so bold as to quote from The Gang Of Four (no, not Mao's bunch, history see?) can I leave you with the following video:

What Is Experimental Fiction?

Beats the hell out of me.

And yet as a shorthand, sometimes I apply it to my work and myself as a writer when challenged to define myself.

I don't like the term. Experimental always exudes the notion that the work isn't finished. That it's still in progress, still a tad tentative, to be yet further moulded. It also forever defines itself in opposition to what has gone before. It is a break with the past, or at least a deforming of it. If evolution is an unfolding, an opening out, convolution is a rolling back up on itself. I can't help feeling experimental evokes the later rather than the former.

Okay, so even lacking a suitable nomenclature for what it is I write, I still feel reasonably confident over what its constituent elements are. And what maybe they aren't but are often confused as being 'experimental'.

Firstly I believe the fundamental foundation stone is that such literature is to be an art form. It may even prize artistry above more humdrum aspects such as story telling or character. Such artistry is in the realm of the aesthetic, that is reading such a book is an aesthetic experience. A thing of beauty, of spatial conception, both within the book's presentation, but also within the reader's contemplative mind during and hopefully after their passage through the book.

There are the aesthetic possibilities of the book as an artefact. Its visual presentation which shouldn't stop at the covers. It can extend to the typographies, other design features within the book, any visual formalism employed that means the text is not Xpp of block printed text. Having said that, the visual and design elements have to emerge organically from the text, not just be bolted on as some sort of eye candy.

But what writers I feel constantly overlook is the aesthetic of language itself. If the writer hits all the right notes through their sentences, through their word choices, there is an ineffable harmony of and through language communicated to the reader. Poets execute it, but to do so over the length of Xpp novel is far more demanding. It can be a lyricism and a rhythm, but I actually think it's more to do with the resonances of the words themselves. Most words have some sort of spectrum of shades of meaning. Look up their etymologies, see which have deviated from their origins and which have stayed fairly true to their roots. Consider those words that have similar meanings to one another, but how they actually differ. You can set up an almost unending set of reverberations by employing words that manage to intimate both or all of their shades of meaning simultaneously as they occur within the sentence. For example the word 'cleave' has two diametrically opposed meanings of cleaving something together and cleaving something apart. Then throw in the auditory (and when we read, we vocalise at some level inside our heads, we 'hear' ourselves read the words) component and maybe you can also have the c-Leave & clea-n echoes play around too.

So on the one hand you have the formalism, the look of the text. And on the other you have the linguistic possibilities. Both offer up non-linear writing. No longer do sentences have to proceed in orderly fashion, either visually or obeying strict syntactical ordinations. One can equate a sentence with a stem cell, in that all possibilities are still possible, even though the writer has made a selection of words on the page. I would always equate non-linear writing with how our human brains fire anyway. Language is formally linear, but human thought and human emotion are far from linear. They cut across one another, they inform one another, they cause some thoughts to fall away uncompleted, while others more vital tug at our consciousness for expression.

To my mind, somehow our formalist experiments ought to try and get to grips with these structures and represent them. There are new theories of mind, the counter-intuitive logic of quantum mechanics and the like which offer us stimulating models to jump off from in our works.

So what isn't experimental fiction? I think it's where narrative conceits in which certain metaphorical assumptions are laid out for the reader maybe about the irregular passage of narrative time or space in the novel (think magical realism for example), where these are explained in the text rather than emerging formally through the 'shape' of the text. It's where narrative explains itself and its conceits, rather than just have them emerge organically.

What is experimental fiction? At this juncture, it is catching up with the rest of the artistic world. It is revivifying the book by considering its form as artefact (and not as e-reader fodder). It is about reinjecting the primacy, the vitality and the duplicity of our language's plasticity. It's about reflecting on the nature of the relationship of fiction itself, in that menage-a-trois between author, reader and fictional character. And finally it's bringing all these elements together to provide an aesthetic pleasure within the reader as well as whatever pleasures are to be derived from story, from insight into the world, from emotional responses.

It is about returning literature to its pedestal as an art form, with the emphasis on both art and form.

Badges - Fridayflash

His mum and dad were very loyal to their country. They unfailingly heeded the Tourist Board's entreaties to visit the delightful countryside and the history-laden towns up and down the nation, rather than jet off to foreign climes. They bunked down in boarding and guest houses. In people's spare rooms let out for the summer. On camp and caravan sites. And from each place they were sure to invest in a tiny metallic memory to remind them and mark their progress through the landscape. They bought an enamel badge with the name of the county etched on it, or the coat of arms of the town. And his father unerringly pinned it to the outside of his rucksack so that in time it took on the appearance of a swarm of multi-coloured bees at the honeycomb of his canvas.

His own birth didn't halt their wanderings up and down the kingdom. They purchased a papoose thus conferring on him a frontal view of his land, his heritage. If his father was in front, he had an untrammelled view of the badges on the rucksack in all their dazzling glory. He would stare entranced for all the hours on the hoof.

A tad older and someone bought him an enamelling kit. He could make his very own badges and assiduously he applied himself to the task, tongue poking out the corner of his mouth with concentration. Being young and stubby fingered, the enamelling was far from perfect, but in time he had a green metal frog, a pink iron butterfly, a cobalt blue fish and a steel black dog. As rightly proud as he was, he couldn't bring himself to wear them as badges. Somehow they seemed to have no context, no meaning personal to him other than the satisfaction of rendering them. But they just didn't, to his mind, symbolise anything. He put them back in their box and placed it in a drawer.

For one of his birthdays, he dressed up in a newly acquired cowboy outfit, together with cap gun. He was so elated by the ensemble. He refused to swap the outfit for everyday clothes day after day after day. Eventually a mixture of his growth and the wear and tear on the faux leather meant he had to shuck them eventually. But he rescued the tin Sheriff's badge and pinned it proudly to whatever attire he was wearing each day. God how he loved that badge and partly inhabited some of the authority it dared to suggest was due. But one day he neglected to unclip it from his sports sweatshirt and it ended up going through a wash cycle in the machine. Its five points were all curled up towards its heart like a crab. The tin battered and abraded so that the legend 'Sheriff' was no longer discernible. He was heartbroken.

He enlisted in the cub scouts and even though several of the activities did not come naturally to him, he strived his utmost to secure the proficiency badges. He earned every single one of the brightly coloured triangles and circles and sowed them on his jumper with immense pride. When he had completed the last one, he left the troop, though he kept his bedecked jumper in his drawer.

Then came his rebellious phase. He got into rock and roll. Drinking and necking and boozy fights. He collected badges from every band he saw and fastened them to his graffitied school knapsack. He even took an outsized safety pin and stuck it in his nose, in an echo of the very anatomy of the badge itself. Unfortunately the pin wasn't sterile and he infected his nasal tissue, so that was the end of that. When he left school, the knapsack went into the artifact drawer.

His first job was in a fast food restaurant. He sported a clunky, rectangular laminated badge with his name, photo and five places for gold stars to be appended for his customer service. After quickly securing the first, he resolved to have nothing further to do with the incentive system, as he had uncovered several things that were to his dislike. Firstly there was the issue of the meat he was being asked to serve. Some online research into the journey from living beast to slab of gristle oozing bloodied juice, quickly had him foaming at the mouth not in savour but in outrage. Then there was the terrible conditions for him and his work colleague. In no time at all he advanced himself as an agitator for better treatment of staff, while by night he engaged in a parallel but secret campaign against the inequitable treatment of the animals. He lost job after job with his trouble-making, but figured it best to work from inside the industry. In the end he secured a post with the Trade Union and went round visiting every fast-food establishment in the country. In each he had a special visitors pass made for him when he flashed his Union pin badge nestling in his lapel.

And came the time gathered behind the barbed wire and overseen by the guntowers. When his country had reached back into history and plumped for a radical solution to its economic woes. That same country so beloved of his parents, who by dint of their ethnicity now found themselves also in such a camp, though at the other end of the country, in a new town that they themselves had visited but now found unrecognisable. For his part, the son was adorned with three badges. A yellow star like his parents. A pink triangle. And a red one for his Trade Union activities. And the stripy pjyamas that he found himself wearing? They were undoubtedly fabricated at one of the child-labour sweat shops, where children wore badges with the cameo of five gold stars awaiting appendages that never came.

Dreams Are Better

Dreams.... Fantasies... Imaginings... Aspirations... Here's 10 songs on the theme of dreams. Because of the varying musical styles and genres, some may well be dreamy. Some may represent altered states. Some may be nightmarish. Let me know your faves.

1) New Order - "Dreams Never End"

2) Ozzy Osbourne - "Dreamer"

3) Supertramp - "Dreamer"

4) The Bug - "Thief Of Dreams"

5) Jay-Z - "A Dream"

6) Pauline Murray - "Dream Sequence 1"

7) Sonic Youth - "I Dreamed I dream"

8) Suicide - "Keep Your Dreams"

9) Jimi Hendrix - "Still Raining, Still Dreaming"

10) Gang Of Four - "We Live as We Dream Alone"

Let's face it, it wouldn't be a Sulci Collective chart without at least one Gang Of Four track included.

Sweet Dreams

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