Ride

Recently read

I've always wanted to try and keep track because I can't remember

Roald Dahl
- Taste: dinner party, betting your daughter, gourmet/gourmand, loyal servants
- Royal Jelly: undernourished baby, milk and honey, on being married to an apiarist
- Georgy Porgy: prudish vicar finds new home
- Pig: READ THIS! so much fun! gifted chef becomes one with his craft
The Best of Roald Dahl: Perfect bedtime stories for those who relish sleepless nights, Penguin, (1984)

Susan Minot
- Lust: Recommended by Elizabeth Wurtzel in the excellent Bitch, modern American writer, honest, not overly cynical or poetic catalogue of early sexual experiences. The bit Wurtzel discussed, '...the second a boy put his arm around me, I forgot about wanting to do anything else, which felt like a relief at first until it became like sinking into a muck'
Lust and other stories, Vintage, 1999

Stay indoors

Molly Drake

Amazing poem written by Nick Drake's mother, Molly and read by his sister Gabrielle from the documentary A Skin Too Few.

The Shell

Living grows ‘round us like a skin
to shut away the outer desolation,
for if we clearly marked the furthest deep,
we should be dead
long years before the grave.

But turning around within the home, this shell
of worry, discontent, and narrow joy,
we grow and flourish, and rarely see the outside dark
that would confound our eyes.

Some break the shell.

I think that there are those who push their fingers
through the brittle walls and make a hole,
and through this cruel slit, stare out
across the cinders of the world
with naked eyes. They look both out and in,
knowing themselves, and too much else beside.

Ivor Cutler

At the end of a festival in a stumbled upon tipi we found some strange people dancing on tables. One of them, a sailor known simply as 'Lou from Bristol' inspired many a crossed wire and mixed metaphor. In exchanging information about Cup-a-soup, the open seas and party drugs, she talked about Ivor Cutler. Who? I replied, (smothering a chuckle at the inevitable 'Ivor Biggun'). I've only just now bothered to look him up and he is quite something. You (my numerable readers) probably know him as he is quite famous; he was a Scottish poet, novelist, songwriter, humourist and teacher at A S Neill's much admired (by me) Summerhill School (progressive free school). Anyhow, he's brilliant.

Try this: Looking for truth with a pin

J D Salinger

A lovely obituary from The New Yorker

'I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody'
Franny from Franny and Zooey (1961)

Extract from 'Imprisoned in the Global Classroom', Ivan Illich & Etienne Verne, 1976

'...Once the graduates of teachers' colleges were given a public monopoly to decide what constitutes good education, they had to use it to disqualify learning which happened outside their control. Schools became the only legitimate recipients for public funds destined for education. Inevitably learning was translated into 'education', and this in turn became a commodity which could be obtained only from accredited schools. The guarantee of a minimum education was translated into obligation to attend a minimum number of years. Soon dropouts, forced into the nether world destined for the so-called a-social, would be denied jobs. But the guarantee does not only work against him who does not use it. The monopoly of schools over education made education into an intangible commodity. It turned the result of learning into an invisible software, which is guaranteed by the code number on the certificate. Those pupils who obtain only the legal minimum find out that they wasted their time in school: what they acquired is devalued on the market because others have more or a newer program'.

'Schools were not originally created with the intent of creating an industrial complex for the production of knowledge; they were meant to give everybody a chance to learn. But they became a form of compulsory insurance of every child's future productivity. The governments of the world all established the monopoly of a profession, giving them the right to decide how much of their expert treatment each citizen should get...'

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