Things are falling apart

Turner's Fighting Temeraire

As each successive month passes and the blood tide rises i do feel like older and older. For about a day i feel, oh my god, this is feckin awful. This is me, at 42, feeling like i want to just run and hide. Ghin is now also sick. He has a low fever. Not high enough to render him in capacitated, but low enough to go, he can't go to school. That would be pushing it. However, since i'm off work today as well, since it is the day after the course, i'm at home looking after him.

The weekend was full on, as usual, as all these weekends are. We spent the entire weekend discussing Steiner and drawing and painting and thinking about the curriculum. The thing about the teaching practise is that you really do need to be in front of a class to do proper teaching. The temptation is too great try to explain the lesson rather than actually teach it. We did clouds.

Two things i have to say about clouds. When i did it at A levels i detested it. My teacher spent whole periods droning on and on about the various kinds of clouds and properties of clouds. It was awful. There we sat, in the geog room, sleeping in the heat of the equatorial afternoon, drool on our sheets of paper and desks. It was terrible. The last thing i wanted to do was to repeat that experience.

The second thing i have to say is, i love Steiner education so much it is embarrassing. So i thought - let me see, what should i do with clouds. As always we work from reality, but but cultivate a deep feeling in the student so that we can awaken their interests and passion. So i thought we do clouds using Shelley's wonderful poem, we do clouds using Sisley and Turner, we do clouds using Stravinsky, which are all contemporaries with the history curriculum we are doing anyway. We do cloud chasers, we do it in the context of Gaia theory. We get the children to compose pieces based on clouds, so that they learn the properties of the clouds and then they do something with it.

Now THAT for me is exciting. And the teacher must be excited or else the children will most certainly NOT be excited.

The other thing that it did for me was, as was looking at the Turners and Sisleys brought back the times when i did stand in front of those paintings and went wow! But also not knowing what incredible paintings they were. Sometimes it is like that. I was at the Tate Modern, in front of the Fighting Temerarie and not knowing, not understanding the significance of that painting. And in a way i don't want to do that for the kids. I don't want to give them the art critic's point of view. I want to give them historical context, biography and then i want the painting to speak for itself. I want THEM to try and paint something like it. Take them down to Belfast Lough and get them to paint a sunset with the P&O cruise ship sailing into the sunset. That is what i want for them.

Well, i need to focus, hence the title of this blog. Honestly, i have been in a dream like state for a few weeks now, possibly a year, and i need to wake up. I need to take my life in hand and go, well last year was very good, and i enjoyed it. It was honeymoon, but i cannot live in honeymoon forever. I need to get back to being a bit more planted on earth. The luciferic beings have had their fair share of me over the last year. Now i need to start being a bit more awake and to that end i went running on Friday.

I have come to the conclusion that i now have some kind of in built ability to run forever Forrest Gump style. If i just jog at a certain pace, i can just keep on going and going and going. It doesn't not matter what the terrain is. Up hill or down. Just a steady jog jog jog. It was the first time i ran since July last year and i ran for 45 minutes. Seriously. And i felt amazing. I do not think this is normal for most people. When i told a friend that i had done this, he said, oh my god, i cant run for five minutes! But you told me you were starting your fitness regime, what did that consist of? Stretching. OK...i am terrible for the stretching. I do enjoy it and all, but really i just want to run. I think that inside i'm still about six.

I might try running today. See if this horrible feeling passes.

I wonder should i say anything about the flag protests. Actually the only thing i have to say is that how normalised violence can become. We were just discussing what roads should be avoided in order to get to where we are going. That has been how much we care about it or how much it affects us. OK, time to get up and get going.