It would have to be in the tracing. Whose bubbles have you burst this week, and do you have their numbers? Those contactless paper coffee cups you’re once again sending to landfill, are scored for the team, heard in the appreciation of expertly mixed recorded crowd noise. Fade it down, and feel the silence. Silence as Alan looked from his booked cordoned table past the other unoccupied tables and the one way arrows and inkjet no entry signs to the four pale spots in the sticky floor left by the removal of his favourite barstool in the urban tavern he’d stopped at for post-responsibility wind-down beer on his way home for the past ten years. His customary lightly hopped Armageddon Rhubarb Session Pale still tasted the same. Perhaps better, as the lines were cleaned more often. Soon it would be time to move past the five percent barrier, ordered via smartphone app of course, and venture a quip in the direction of the serving person. Except that of late the quips had to penetrate several layers of porous paper and probably at least one of clear plastic before lodging in cognition with only the paralanguage of eye contact to help them along. Eye contact it would have to be. The app offered a scroll of artisan beers. Flicking up, Alan spotted in blur effect hyper-scroll the primary colours and logo of his favourite New Jersey IPA. Blur flattened stock still with deft descending thumb, beer ordered, money tendered, he waited. Several passed in the street, in proximity alarming but for the interposing presence of plate glass. Bluetooth is no respecter of glass however. Smartphones in pockets of pedestrians spoke silently through the glass to Alan’s. ‘How the fuck should I know what an API is?’ an exasperated Alan had snapped in a meeting earlier that week. ‘Just call them and speak to them.’ The beer arrived, a cloudy treat in a contrived glass. ‘Do I need a spoon?’ The quip failed. Eyes above layered paper showed empathetic strained acknowledgement.

Alan and Dido had known each other since school. Adolescent gazing through Bunsen burner haze on stifled July Thursdays had been as far as either dared take it then. Now their relationship was more professional, if necessarily distant. He had considered asking her out, but that he decided would only complicate: too many touched surfaces, physical and psychological, to account for, electronically or otherwise. ‘We’d be eating out to help out, I suppose.’ But no. Fumbling through those early relationship manifestations of desperation to validate was something for which he no longer had energy. He had anyway been somewhat put off eating out after seeing a fast food worker spontaneously puke at high velocity onto the inside of their visor, early in the easing. Whether from too much handling circles of compacted entrails on greased hot griddles, or from violent pathogen onset, he never discovered. Suffice it to say his Distance Burger with curly fries and supersizing cola were left purchased but unconsumed on the counter.

Pretend you’re in a film. That’s the way through it, the way commuters and runners have been living their internal lives for the past several decades anyway. Now all we have to do is stay in that internal world, chosen back catalogue sound track rendering one third of a penny to its creator, until we think it’s safe to come out. Can’t be so hard. What’s there when we come out though? Jocular street vendors welcoming back casual office-bound mask-free coffee and sandwich buyers, livelihoods restored? Consume and commodify to help out. Choose a soundtrack for that scene, somewhere in the lull between the dummy villain vanquishing and the redemptive colour-washed HDR marriage montage. Leave room for an alternative timeline in the sequel.

Draft penultimate scene. Interior. Night. Alan’s central London flat. The latch turns on the inside of the front door. Alan’s face, expression paralysed by drink, peers in. He fumbles to place the keys in their accustomed spot by the phone, and makes uneasily towards the living room, fighting to dismiss an unaccountable nonverbal awareness that the matrix has been reconfigured. Diegetic sound fades to silence. His old friend Greta is waiting for him in his chair at the agoraphobic desk, smiling wryly as she surveys his collection of Dido photographs. Soundtrack silence persists. Greta looks up from the desk and directs Alan to a newspaper draped over the back of his TV chair, headline reading ‘Heathrow To Close – Minister Implicated’. Audiences, discomfited by the continued silence, reboot their routers, blow on their HDMI cables, check the terms of the force-purchased extended warranties on their Currys soundbars, access memories of their parents thumping the top of a CRT set when it glitched out, as though violence could somehow engender an electronic fix. Eighties style page curl transition to exterior local park, night. Grainy black and white. Still persisting silence. Alan and Greta emerge slowly from distant trees and progress to camera, happy, sharing a takeout flagon, Greta carrying the newspaper. As their figures begin to fill the frame, she glances down at the headline and punches the air. At the edge of audience tolerance, millions of fingers poised over subscription cancellation buttons, non-diegetic sound creeps up hyper-slowly, opening notes of The Boy With The Arab Strap just perceptible. By the time the song is fully audible, Alan and Greta are dancing arms linked ceilidh fashion in heavy rain. Run closing titles for the duration of the song. Optional happy blooper inserts.

Ever a peripheral eye to the dense trees, looking for approaching wankers either singly or herding.

It had started with that sweaty eight minute address delivered by Bojack Churchill from his wood bunker, ordering all to stay in their rooms like teenagers Emily Dickinson fashion and not come out, even for nachos with extra-cheesy jalapeno sauce. Very fast essential food can continue. Bojack Churchill succumbed thereafter and took to his bed, leaving Don in puppet string charge. Blank and bemused, his skills in leadership untested, Don tried daily to keep the people informed, to small avail, managing only to remind journalists vicariously that they were mute, and then remaining essentially mute himself. Bojack Churchill soon recovered, and returned to wakefulness, but shunned the public, venturing the occasional unkempt incoherence. This delivered tremors to Don’s sense of calm being, so he took steps to return to his former life as a teacher.

For a time he had sat in his empty classroom and admired the order. Time enough at last, Star Wars stocking feet on the permanently cleared desk, to reflect on then till now progression from when in those heeding former days he was offered his first responsibility as Second In Paperclips to here as Deputy Flightplan Head. Except there were no flights anymore. Only taped off distant perspex screened vacant desks, which had at first been occupied sporadically by children of less frightened parents. In the end all had stayed away. Scholarship and most eye contact went online, but the once spittle-dripped nightly sterilised screens served now merely to aid memory of a brief turbulent resurgence. The unread wall displays were in good order and every glue stick was accounted for.

The post-apocalypse August railtrack metal was rusted, all trains forever delayed, but as his grapefruit sour stained boots crunched onward through dried used toilet paper and discarded pasta, a single shining rivet somehow untarnished pushed a thin sharp sun needle into Don’s dry red left eye, forcing his gaze adrift of the track. A lone wanker was staggering towards him, emerging from the woods, a herd likely not far behind. The characteristic lack of grace and intense partially digested wild freshly chopped garlic breath were perceptible even at a distance of several metres. Don’s gut churned with apprehension as he saw that the wanker was spilling his can of intentionally hazy seven percent New England IPA all down his Berghaus Fellmaster jacket, optional fleece removed. Even though he knew there was no life in the true sense behind the wanker’s clouded eyes and decayed face, Don’s bowels slackened a little as the wanker’s arid Satanic incantation gained earshot. ‘In these unprecedenty locktimes when all our yesterdays are furlonged but death is still working full time, we need to kickstart our lives again. I refer you to this copy of the current guidelines which I have taped to the thigh of my Rohan trousers. If you want to sit on the sofa surrounded by fusilli, Andrex and wholemeal flour, good for you, but don’t tell me I can’t come to the woods on a sunny day and marvel at how basking sharks have nested here again for the first time in a hundred and fifty years.’

We needed to talk. Out of lipsync online simply wasn’t cutting it. Don’s arrangement of books displayed blurred on camera behind him never quite looked the right combination of erudite and bohemian well travelled. He had tried blank walls, piles of yellowing unread documents with broken electrical devices on top of them, even smearing the walls of the spare room with excrement in the style of a forgotten protest. Nothing worked. Nothing was as stately as those wood panels and flags featured so fervently in Bojack Churchill’s not quite live sweaty presidential address.

His enthusiasm for internal domestic space palled. Things were getting decidedly sub-optimal, so it was time to take to the road, or more precisely to the railway track. He hadn’t seen his son for a time not determined, and wondered had he succumbed to the multi-system pathogen?

Early in his odyssey Don learned the repurposing of the selfie stick. Bonhomie and social bonding initially the principal drive, he had attached a smartphone to it for the socially relevant aim of arm’s length distant photography. As the masts died, some of them responsibly immolated in an attempt to appease the pathogen, the smartphone was eventually consigned to a wet ditch where its battery faded, flashing and beeping a fifteen percent warning in the face of a passing vole and then along with everything and everyone else switching to monochrome battery saver mode before switching off. The stick however. One day feeling slightly heady having sipped off the last of a limited edition presentation case of eighteen percent liquorice and blueberry Imperial stout, Don was coasting through a rural two platform station where the announcements still played out to the carpark on a taped standby powered loop, when he noticed a group arguing with vitriol. The argument was to do with parking, all spaces in the carpark taken and all roadside spaces for fifty miles in either direction over the lovely rolling hills occupied too. Designated drivers leaned demurely on the carpark’s dry stone perimeter, sucking on the last of their Waitrose coriander and locust bean frozen yoghurts, but their passengers, drunk and entitled to their very core on the last ever Ocado delivery of their special reserve eucalyptus and fennel wild yeast oatmeal yellow porter, fought and shouted for all they might have been worth had events panned out differently. Instinctively, teacher mode of old kicking in, Don intervened, trying to appeal to their better selves. Ay there was the rub, for the pathogen had shut down all conscious systems leaving only autonomic speech and movement. A kind of walking coma. ‘What’s it got to do with you? We’re as entitled as you are to be out walking. Why should they have priority parking? What are you talking about? I only live four thousand miles away. The current guidelines say my dog needs its daily exercise and its bagged up shit in the open air. Not my fault if the dog bins are full. I’ll just leave it here. I’m not paid to sort it out.’ It was then that the now classic selfie stick through the eye socket move was born, spontaneously and out of need.

Popping back to the very narrative hot August railtrack current, the stick had since been sharpened and a little modified aerodynamically, and the efficacy of the move perfected, encounters with strangers always opening with the mettle-probing ‘How many wankers have you killed?’. The basking shark spotter had finished his autonomic whine and was reaching into his pocket for another can of Fear And Emotional Evisceration. Muscle memory twitched Don’s hand down towards the stick. But then cause for pause in the familiar shape of a small boy riding the sleepers toward him on a brightly coloured seventies Chopper bicycle breaking the horizon shimmer. Smelling the onset of indifference, the wanker lost interest and moved across the tracks. The small boy dismounted. ‘For fuck’s sake Dad. State of you. Get yourself home.’

Belief also acts for many as a form of social cohesion. You spend money on your football team because you believe they are going to win. If your actions were only based on evidence there would be many Saturdays when you’d probably decide to save your money. Belief that runs counter to evidence in this way can also allow people to remain connected to those they have lost. Debbie Reynolds’ last words reportedly were that she just wanted to be with her daughter Carrie Fisher, even though humanity has seen no previous examples of such meetings taking place. Again it’s down to complexity. The feeling of a complex consciousness, with whom you have interacted in so many affirming ways, suddenly being excised from your life can feel too difficult to bear. Of course those coats and shoes have not been worn for the last time. That would be absurd: you’ll definitely see the person again some day. Before you know it this belief is shared and has collective rituals attached to it.

Paid work is in most cases a shared collective ritual. Belief in paid work is largely evidence based, in that if you don’t do it you can’t pay bills or treat yourself to that Ferrero Rocher baguette with chips and mayonnaise on a Friday night, washed down with a potato daiquiri of course. Aside from the hard evidence of money, this belief is helped along by the Protestant work ethic all the time telling you that any tasks you get through are self improving. So even a modest pension liberates you from all of that. The bonds are cut loose. But then inevitably you start wondering whether, if you’re not careful, you might lose contact with the forces that have kept you properly socialised until recently. This is where another form of belief comes in. You can go along to a local basket making club or volunteer in a charity shop, and your belief that these are self improving activities will sustain you. My problem, which I also had all the way through childhood, is that I’m very easily bored by organised predictable regularity. I belonged to a couple of sporting clubs when I was a child, but given that we were supposed to practise every week there were some weeks when I simply did not feel like going and got nothing out of it when I was there. This has in turn led me always to wonder why regular worship is considered a requirement of many religions. Belief, regardless of evidence, presumably tells you that the deity might in some way be displeased if you absented yourself. I’m more inclined to think she or he might be bored with seeing the same old faces every week.

So. How to avoid declining into that retired stereotype of a red faced old man with a comb-over, wearing a dressing gown with brown Jesus sandals and grey socks and laughing distractedly into his copy of the Daily Mail as he sips his pint of Jack Daniels at 10.30 each weekday morning in Wetherspoon’s? The likely answer is self-belief. Tricky, because a pre-requisite for self-belief is a degree of self-esteem, and I guess I will come out of the closet and admit that I have always had trouble with that too. But I now have some time to work on it, alone – which is probably a required state for beginning to deal with self-esteem. As I’ve said, being a teacher helped me a lot as a person, but I was never really wired for being enmeshed with the fates of so many people simultaneously with no real boundary to the process and no release from responsibility. I’ll now focus on tasks that can actually be completed.

I was minded of all this while watching the recent BBC documentary on the last five years of David Bowie’s life, having previously not been aware of the extent to which he hated his celebrity status. There’s an obvious sense in which the media attention focused on him was self-inflicted. Why would he play out so publicly and ostentatiously such theatrical scenarios if he hadn’t wanted to draw attention to himself? He explains that he was a very shy person and when he performs in public he feels even more shy. Adopting a persona helps with that feeling. I can relate this to my teaching experience. While addressing the class or even while speaking to an individual student, I would sometimes switch without warning to an alternative voice, an alternative accent or both. When asked why I did it, my usual reply was that it just got me through the day alongside my unwillingness to take anything seriously for more than a few minutes. But I now realise that I may also have been covering performance anxiety. Fame can ultimately bring the possibility of choice though, so during the production of his final two albums Bowie took part in no publicity at all: no interviews, no locking himself in a fake house with other celebrities, no toughing it out in a jungle a couple of miles from a five star hotel, no cooking his signature dish on television while a professional chef pretended to be critical of him, no fake press leaks or pretentiously self-effacing Twitter posts. In fact, many of the musicians involved in his final creative endeavours had to sign NDA documents before they were taken on.

There’s that old cliché of making sure you don’t look back near death and wonder why you didn’t get around to doing some of the things on your bucket list.  Bowie had on his bucket list writing a musical and seeing it performed, reprising vicariously his character from The Man Who Fell To Earth. And the value of vicarious experience is not to be underrated if you ever get the chance to do any near-death reckoning of what you’ve accomplished in life. He returned to his his fave fictional character Major Tom more than once, commenting that he was his first so he held him in high regard. When asked why the preoccupation with space travel he said ‘It’s an interior dialogue that you manifest physically. It’s my little inner space, isn’t it, writ large? I wouldn’t dream of getting on a spaceship. It would scare the shit out of me.’ Often the interior version of the experience is enough. You don’t actually have to attach an elastic rope to your ankle and jump off.

Bowie also commented that the twenty-first century had so far been disappointing. Jury’s out, I guess, but he did live to see the availability of free personal micro-celebrity through social media. You can now repeatedly photograph yourself and share that image instantly with hundreds of people, in what must come close to an ultimate act of narcissism. Where previously it was the province of the traditional mass media to propagate images publicly, now pretty much anyone can do it. Your own face, your meals, your animals, what you are about to drink. Up to you really. It’s your Lazarus moment.

Not too surprising then that the first few days of January is a peak time for calls to divorce solicitors and debt helplines; holiday bookings too, as the next escape from reality is planned. I was also recently shocked to learn that domestic violence figures rise sharply during the Christmas period.

Four years ago today, at around 3.30 in the afternoon, my life changed in a seismic way. I don’t want to dwell on that though. Calendar dates are reminders, but the luxury exists now to at least consider a more teleological view of time.

There are some manifestations of ignorance that can’t be corrected by investigation. Nobody alive can describe the experience of death, other than providing an account of the outward appearance of someone else’s death. Accounts of so-called near death experiences relate only the physical and psychological sensations produced by the human frame approaching death. Self-awareness, a product of the as yet largely unmapped complexity of the human brain, lends a sense of absurdity to the ending of consciousness. We cannot know whether the death of the body causes consciousness to end, and so we speculate – also a product of brain complexity. Historically, when faced with the apparent absurdity of consciousness suddenly ending, faith has stepped in to rationalise ignorance. Suddenly there is life beyond the death of the body. So that’s OK, because the human life essence doesn’t reside in the body so in a way it doesn’t matter what happens to the body. When the body hurts chronically, we can take comfort from the belief that we are not just a body. Problems occur when rules are invented for the afterlife, rules that have become ever more intricate, often including the invention of a non-corporeal being who manages and judges the afterlife and reserves the right to bar people from entry. Different rule systems are seen as incompatible with each other. Intolerance and hatred ensue, based on what people routinely forget is just an invention. My non-corporeal being does not accept either you or your non-corporeal being. Let’s have a war then, shall we?

Something broadly similar happens with belief in extra-terrestrial life. The science tells us that even if they exist they can’t get here. But we tell ourselves that Einstein may have been wrong and that they may one day arrive, even though his track record so far is pretty good. We tell ourselves that aliens may plug the gaps in our frailties, vulnerabilities and weaknesses, but more often than not we make them in our own image.

The banishing of ignorance and the furtherment of complex knowledge should be facilitated by faster and more accessible communication. Shouldn’t they? This was certainly what was on the mind of Tim Berners-Lee when he invented the web. It appeared knowledge was on the verge of being truly democratised, with the content of the world’s libraries potentially pouring down the phone line into your screaming dialup modem and saturating your CRT pixels. (Watch those x-rays.) The earliest manifestation of IMDB was hosted at Cardiff University, was free of advertising and was a film enthusiast’s wet dream. A constantly updated Halliwell that didn’t weigh anything and that you didn’t have to look for as you paused the closing credits on your shaky VHS. Fast forward through those fuzzy white flickering VHS lines to 2017 and we are told by some websites that blocking advertisements hurts people. Really now. I rather think that it hurts commercial interests and that if your business model depends entirely on advertising you need to build yourself a time machine. Noah will be happy to discuss options with you.

So not too far off thirty years after the invention of the web, where are we in terms of knowledge, ignorance and communication? Well, media are now social. Great. I can stay in touch with friends and family in one tab and do academic research in another. Only trouble is, gee wiz, my Aunty at the other end of the country who I’ve only seen about four times since I was three, and doesn’t really know me, thinks I’m the spawn of the devil because I hold opinions different from hers. She ‘unfriended’ me once, whatever that means. I think that was after I said that the former shadow chancellor making a tit of himself on national TV was not really entertainment. Anyway she asked me to be her friend again a few days later, possibly because she felt guilty or because she’d sobered up, or both. The moral of the story, true or not, is that we are now completely accustomed to polarisation. Life is spent agreeing or disagreeing, or pretending to agree or disagree, according to perceived social need. But the space in between is increasingly blank, dark and cold. In my view the mindset cast by social media has been directly responsible for the EU referendum. What kind of sense does it make for us to vote yes or no on an issue of such extreme national importance, ignoring all complexity and gradation? On 24th June we had won, and so all migrants needed to leave the country that day, and we weren’t going to allow any more in. Simple. Those ponces in the High and Supreme courts had better not interfere with our right to be polarised or our right to ignore the complex issues.

Agnotology is an emerging discipline that looks at the deliberate propagation of ignorance in order to achieve a specific goal. It was first developed in relation to the tobacco industry. The science linking smoking to lung cancer is half a century old at least, and nobody who is not in denial would challenge it. If you want to give yourself lung cancer, and possibly as an added bonus your nearest and dearest too, go ahead and smoke. But our industry is centuries old and is properly regulated. Why should science interfere with my income? I like my house and my sports car. And after all a person has a right to smoke. I know: we’ll introduce doubt. Don’t look at the facts. That’s too much like hard work. There are only a few studies that indicate smoking might be bad for you, and they’re probably wrong. Aren’t they? Social media will help. No-one can ever be arsed to read beyond the ‘continue reading’ prompt. Better to use pictures anyway. A heavy smoking guy in a Barbour jacket pointing at a long line of dark people should do it.

More detailed work needs to be done. Work that promotes absence and suppression of detail is to be avoided, and is ultimately the product of wilful ignorance.

Teaching has never been how I defined myself. It was just something I did for a while. You can’t simply believe in your own professional world because you’re in it. Other criteria need to be applied, like whether you feel culturally or emotionally supported or nurtured by your working environment. Too many teachers I’ve met have seen classroom practice as a battle of wills rather than a collaborative enterprise, sometimes boasting about making children cry in what I have always seen as an absurd act of cruelty. For me it was largely about making students laugh and helping them to debunk the system, while at the same time learning some stuff. Aggression and confrontation never seemed to do anything other than break down communication and cause resentment. If someone gave me a coherent reason for handing in that day’s work the next day, or even if the reason was incoherent and the person seemed upset, that was always fine. If they needed to call their parents on their mobile phone about something that they saw as urgent, that was fine too. I generally allowed people to eat or drink in the classroom, as long as they put the wrappers and cartons in the bin. If the room was cold, they kept their hats and coats on. This is what it is to be human. We are not resources or statistics, but people.

Until the twenty-first century, I had only ever encountered a reasonably tight consensus on what learning was. New knowledge or skills were acquired and could then be applied in future acts of analysis, decision making or reflection. The point was always that you couldn’t establish whether learning had taken place until you had seen the person try to apply the new knowledge or skill several times, over a period of at least several weeks. Now, the teaching profession in England and Wales is forced to live with a notion of micromanaged learning: learning must be seen to have taken place within any ten minute chunk on which an observer chooses to eavesdrop. When I first heard the term ‘learning walk’ in 2012 it evoked teacher-led nature trails on summer afternoons when the besieged students for a change didn’t have to do anything except walk, pretend to listen and breathe the fresh air. Sounded nice. It soon became clear that they were actually run-for-your-mortgage opportunities for managers to see learning taking place in randomly selected classrooms, in that golden ten minute window. What a sack of rotting faeces. In reality it’s a cycle of performance. Lessons are timed to the minute, for fear the students may get the chance to interact with each other or with the teacher in a way that’s purely social. Heaven forfend that social interaction should interfere with learning. And then we wonder why the average teacher’s Sunday night resolve to dispense with reaching for alcohol as a stress reliever has been abandoned by Tuesday.

Of course I understand that it’s Ofsted driven, and I’ve heard many times the mantra that if we don’t do what Ofsted say they will close the school, but the problem with Ofsted is that they have changed their minds so many times about what they’re looking for, since they breach-birthed themselves slippery and wailing like dementors into the classrooms of the previously content twenty plus years ago, that they cannot possibly be an organisation fit for purpose. Imagine Trading Standards revising their framework of inspection every two or three years. Many people in the profession have confirmed this opinion, privately of course, always with one eye on that mortgage. But still we get those giant vinyl banners cable tied to railings, proclaiming ‘Ofsted Outstanding’, as though that judgement were a permanent vindication of the school’s or college’s approach. In the real world the currency of the judgement has begun to fade before the last cable tie has been pulled tight, and that teacher who called in at the pub on her way home to reward herself for that Monday afternoon’s Outstanding observation has her approval rating set back to zero the very next wet Tuesday morning in November at 8.00am sharp. Ofsted’s stand out achievement has been a top-down homogenisation of classroom practice, removing the possibility of imagination, creativity, autonomy or intelligence in the delivery of lessons. Apparently now these are seen as negative qualities in the recruitment of new teachers: intelligent people are likely to be ‘awkward’ and adopt a critical view of the institutional ‘vision’. Yesterday I noticed again that bus stop advert enticing people into the profession with a picture of a teacher and a student, one saying ‘I’m making a difference’ and the other saying ‘I’m making progress’. Such is the binary process we are now led to believe drives forward learning. I would like to have an optimistic view of the future of the profession in England and Wales, but I’ve seen too many people psychologically mangled and shat out by it to have anything approaching that optimism.

So, all said, I’m out, but I’m out with an optimistic view of my own future and some good memories of pushing forward the frontiers of surreal and humour and sharing the undermining of the status quo in many classrooms over many years, with hundreds of teenagers. Young people will always for me have the clearest view of what it is to be alive. I remain a teenager mentally. Responsibility is overrated. Somehow I was never given my own classroom, always remaining peripatetic. Perhaps an appropriate metaphor: someone who was not considered mature enough to manage his own domain. Set up your stall, talk some shit, move on to the next venue and see who else might be prepared to listen.

Subject knowledge has to be the most highly prized of a teacher’s capabilities. And we should apply this in equal measure to reception teachers and Emeritus professors. It worked from Aristotle’s time until Ofsted trampled across the educational landscape in the mid nineties, since when the notion of capability in the teaching profession in England and Wales has been securely broken. Capability has become routinely judged according to the ability to perform a series of classroom tricks. The inventory of tricks changes at least every couple of years, and the package containing the inventory is given a new name with the same regularity. But someone who does not have your subject expertise can still sit in the corner of your classroom with a clipboard, determining your future based on how effectively the balls bounce from the nose of one seal to another. ‘Even better if’ that girl in the corner hadn’t been staring out of the window momentarily as the beach ball bounced off the back of her head, and ‘more stretch and challenge’ if all the students had known where they were on their individual ‘flight plan’. It looked like a few of them were more focused on the duty free shop. If Dylan Wiliam were dead he’d be spinning in his grave at 4000 rpm.

Someone recently commented to me that having an observer in a lesson changes the whole existential reality of the occasion. Observations were not the norm until twenty years ago, and I can hear people objecting that there is no other way of ensuring quality control and accountability. So maybe before then the profession was not properly monitored and teachers got away with being crap. Or maybe they were trusted based on qualifications and their experience. Maybe the emphasis was more on career development than keeping your career on the rails by performing externally imposed tricks. Maybe you were not only as good as your last observation. Maybe introverted students could stay silent if that’s what they wanted to do, without affecting their flight plan. Perhaps they could even land at a remote airport for couple of terms and not do very much except recharge their batteries. Not measurable, I know. Peaceful though. It’s the norm now to talk of a department and a school or college as having a ‘vision’ which must be evident when the men from the ministry descend (they’re still mostly men). Maybe what vision we have left is better spent learning more about the subject we trained in, though. Back to that existential reality. I’ve been in the profession for twenty-seven years and I can confidently say that no adult has ever seen what my lessons are really like. The second another adult enters the room I stiffen up and become largely too self-conscious to pull off the intentionally crap jokes and intentionally surreal take on stuff. I’m guessing it will always be that way now. The few adults who have glimpsed the irreverent departure from reality that I pedal in the classroom, haven’t liked it very much, wincing as they place crosses on their observation proformas, and sometimes commenting that a complex sense of humour excludes some of the students. But then so does making them hang their thoughts from washing lines or bear their soul to a post-it which you subsequently put in the bin. Will I let up on the crap jokes or take things more seriously? Very unlikely. To adapt a quote from David Banner, you wouldn’t like me when I’m serious. Run for your mortgages. The men from the ministry are coming.

There has been a lot of coverage recently of issues surrounding artificial intelligence and whether one day intelligent machines might one day pose a threat to humans. Let’s be clear. The grandchildren of everyone reading this will be long dead before that’s even a remote possibility. Software is premised on our understanding of computers, not on our understanding of the human brain: that understanding is still primitive at best. We really don’t know why it does what it does. In the meantime, software falls into two categories: performing tricks or getting work done. Educational fashion seems currently to be getting these two categories mixed up. An augmented reality app that turns a wall display into a talking head doesn’t necessarily teach anybody anything: it just looks good. And database apps (applications FFS) are becoming increasingly less popular, and difficult to find on ‘app stores’, but they still run the world, including your bank account and your mortgage. Problem is, they look shit and don’t perform graphically. No brainer.

When your phone or your desktop computer or your laptop or your tablet or your games console or your smart TV or your Sky box or your car tell you that they they’re having a ‘blob day’ and that they’ll probably be OK tomorrow, or when they go offline for several hours and get the fridge to cover for them while they make you a birthday card, then we’re in trouble. Perhaps. In the meantime I’m happy to write reality. That’s what we’re good at.

You see someone in the street whose hair, clothes and gait put you in mind of someone you had contact with until recently. I often see from behind a figure that resembles my mother in later life. Diminutive stature, neck length grey hair and a determination to continue. This one has in the early morning a distracted gaze that suggests I’m mistaken. She was all about focus, which is likely why the filament expired so suddenly. Reaching into the drawer to discover that you’ve used the last spare bulb, you remark through your last mouthful of pizza that you meant to get more.

Contact is now more possible than at any time in the history of the planet, and yet somehow more difficult too. A lonely shroud hides your face and body from the person next to you in the food queue that you debated benefit culture and socialism with the night before. You lean past them awkwardly and your pulse quickens ever so slightly as you head for separate tables.

Since my last post, all of two years ago, study is back on the agenda after an absence of thirty years. Back through the turnstiles of a university library. The opportunity to look again at text analysis came fittingly enough in my mum’s garden last summer, to an email address I was about to bin off as it had turned into a spam repository. All in the timing. Or something. Teaching continues, to pay bills and keep me in contact with the passing on of subject knowledge that I still say is my only motivation for being in the profession. Over the last three decades that motivation has slipped steadily down the totem pole in the thinking of the management machine. If thinking it can be called.

Conventional wisdom and the Protestant work ethic have it that compartmentalisation is the template for success. Allow your empathy and your insecurities to bleed all over the compartments and flood them if you like, but don’t expect to accomplish very much. Fuck that though. Let’s not worry and let’s just see what remains. When I was down in London a few months ago I noticed the way that tree roots were bulging the perimeter wall and pavement in Tavistock Square, pushing at the lead-filled holes that held pre-war railings now rusting in the Serpentine. All propaganda, apparently. Not suitable for either munitions or aircraft production. Time runs at different speeds, according to calibration.

The severed head and shoulders of Virginia Woolf look out on the square, rain running down her face, down the faces of the freshers streaming past the windows of a neglected bar conscious of its business plan, down the window where Mum once had her morning caffeine in the context of the sea, dripping off those sycamore leaves that flicker above an old bath tub in her garden. Virginia’s head remembers the weight of those stones in her pocket and exhorts us to stay together for as long as we can.

OK. Drop me your CV if you want.