King of the bongo

I heard this story while at Eton from someone directly involved in it. I am giving my best account of it here, omitting names and positions.

Background: The picture you see above is the Language School at Eton, called Birley Schools (after an old Head Master, I am given to understand). The widely supported view is that this is an old, ugly, grim and generally badly-designed post-war brick building that should have never happened. Also, more and more boys are nowadays taking Modern Languages courses, and the old building is just not big enough to cope with the demand.

Given these facts, the powers that be have decided to throw down this building and build a new, bigger, better, uncut Language Schools. This is already under way as I am writing this, due to be completed in a couple of years.

Now the story is, it turns out that a certain person in Modern Languages is very friendly with the President of Gabon’s wife (one of the sons went to Eton or something). Having mentioned the situation with the language schools, she generously offered to donate a hefty sum to the College for this new building. As you know, Eton College is a public charity, and it frequently takes donations like this one.

The terms of the agreement were fairly generous: they gave the money, and Eton would have a yearly scholarship for one Gabonese boy, and of course, would name the building after whoever made the donation.

Unfortunately this is where the story ends, for the surname of the President of Gabon is… “Bongo”.

“Bongo Schools” is a name Eton is not yet ready for. Maybe good enough for the Music Schools.

*The present name of the project is “International Schools”.

The old school tie

I had chanced upon this expression a number of times, most importantly in Orwell’s writing. I knew it was one of those things to do with the British obsession with class, but I had no idea of how far it went. Boy, was I in for a treat.

As many others do, Toby Young (of How to lose friends and alienate people fame) came to Eton to give a talk, in which he read the “prologue” (The return of the Eton mob) of a book he has in the works. It was a fantastic reading, perfect pitch, intonation, everything. And with every sentence he read I heard a click; a piece of the puzzle fell into place.

I had been collecting these pieces for a long time but I had them in all the wrong order. Now they suddenly fit together and sense shone at the seams. Everything he spoke about, his time at Oxford, how he wasn’t accepted or successful there because his origins and manners and accent and whatnot where not quite posh enough; how Hugh Grant (who according to him comes from a similarly upper-middle-class non-public-school background) did make it big because he knew how to impersonate the persona; how modals and manners are just a charade played to the entertainment of a certain class; how his teachers told him he should never say “I went to a school called…” as if you were ashamed of your school not being one of the famous ones… it was all gospel to me. I learned so much right there and then that I can’t write it down without it becoming a book (yet another one). My first proper introduction to the British class system.

I loved it so much that after he finished I sidled up to talk to him. I was initially met with reasonable politeness, which metamorphosed into coldness and distance with amazing speed as soon as I had uttered 3 words of greeting. I made him visibly very uncomfortable (an effect I find I very often have on people around here). This man, who criticized and “exposed” the snobbishness of a class system that in his view ostracized him for not having the required “pedigree” was in fact so deeply a part of it that to him I was a very unsettling incongruence: What was I doing there? A scruffy looking foreigner attending his lecture to Eton boys? A darkie, as it were. Who did I think I was to approach him?

It was my final moment of revelation, of epiphany. Like Neo at the end of Matrix (one), like Alice at the end of herself in Wonderland, the world became lined with falling, fusing green characters, and the whole pack of cards rose up into the air. My eyes were open, I could now see.

For some reason, I didn’t quite seem to fit in here. Frequently I would open my mouth and it would seem I had just made a faux pas. Surely I have made a good number of them as usual, this I am aware of, but it was strange that I wouldn’t get it right once. I kept blaming myself and coming up with one thousand and one explanations of what exactly I was doing wrong, and kept finding faults in my demeanour, etiquette, attitude, manners, you name it. I knew I was doing something wrong but didn’t know what it was exactly. It turns out that what I definitely got wrong, my one massive mistake, was ever expecting to fit in.

One could say British society has moved on a great deal from classical Victorian times. Now it doesn’t seem to matter that much what your parents deal in or what colour you are. The one thing that matters and will always matter, the one thing everybody asks in these circles, is what school you went to. University is secondary. It always helps if it’s Oxbridge, but it could be any “red brick”* and it changes little if you are, say, an Old Etonian.

I already knew that dress code was… well, coded. I first discovered this when I was to attend an event that required “Black Tie”. I thought “oh fine, I just need to find a black tie”. And they said “no no no my frien, you no understan” (ok, those were the words of a Thai scooter-taxi driver, but this was an almost exact replica of that moment) -  Black Tie stands for black bowtie, which implies a silk-lapelled dinner jacket, silk-lined trousers, patent leather shoes, a white shirt with cufflinks and a bowtie which funnily enough can in fact be any colour of the rainbow.

In the same way, the last event before Long Leave was to be “Suit and tie”. You might think this straightforward enough. I know I did. Now this turned out to be coded as well. The suit is a normal suit, any suit, yes, but the tie, ah the tie!, the tie is you old school tie, the tie you wore at school, because of course you went to a school where you had to wear a uniform which included a tie. Who doesn’t?

And why is this? It is so that Old Etonians, Old Harrovians and such ilk can recognize each other and say “Ah, you!, you sir are one of mine!, you and I play in the same league old chap!”, knowing themselves above all the scum with less-pedigreed stripes on the pieces of cloth hanging from their necks, so that everyone can spot his own among the strangers.

So this is the world I have been thrust into. Very interesting as a sociological study, yes, but now I see this demeaning, debasing, small-minded world for what it is I would never want to be a part of it, even if I could ever fit in. I’ve decided I’d much rather keep my Tesco Value tie and my humanity.

* Recently established UK universities of lesser prestige.

Common Lane

See that house? This is where I live, 2 Common Lane.

Google Streetview never made it here, so I have to grace you with some of my own pictures. I share quite a big house with other teachers, all of them fantastically awesome chummy chums. (They might read this, so some ass-kissing is inevitable, but the truth is they are all actually really cool)

My bedroom

My bed

View from my window

We each have two rooms in it, a bedroom upstairs and a study downstairs, apparently for tax reasons – our study counts as our workplace. In my case, it really is, for this is where I do all the teaching. I have to say it’s really handy.

We have an amazing garden at the back with lawn of perfect radioactive green and a huge weeping willow and a bit of jungle around the corner. I can only wish the right weather will one day come to make proper use of it!

As for the location, the house is perfectly situated some 100m from the main "attractions": the main college building, the library, the gym and pool. I wish it was also 100m away from the railway (aka the Portal to London), but alas, that’s a 15min walk.

Update: Slideshow!

Burgled

It is 7:32 am. Sam knows this because it says so on his computer screen. At this time someone opens his studio door, pokes his head in and says “oh… is this Tom’s room?”. Reply: “No, who are you?”. He mumbles something about repairs and the front door being unlocked and goes away. Sam ponders the logic statement “Entity: (probably) Burglar –> Action: Hit with golf club”. But this straightforward approach is thwarted by the thought “What a racist I am! Just because he’s black!”.

So Sam thinks no more about this and goes to have breakfast. When he’s back, his laptop, wallet and phone have sublimated, as has his bike (borrowed, not even his), and another 3 laptops, 1 wallet, 1 iPod, check books and other easy-to-sell stuff from around the house. Sam concludes: “Gosh, I wish I was more racist!”.

That’s the story as Sam tells it anyway.

More details emerged later: The guy tried to get into other houses and failed so he finally forced one of our windows open with a plank he broke from the wooden table in our garden, came into Tom’s studio, trashed it and took everything he thought valuable and small, including his wallet which explains how he knew his name. He walked right past a £500 mike, which is both lucky and tells us he knows nothing about music or the modern hardware used for it (clue number two). After meeting Sam he probably hid somewhere else in the house until he left, then proceeded to plunder the rest at leisure.

I was the lucky one of the bunch, he took nothing of mine. Also, it might have helped that I don’t leave anything of value in my studio (much less my wallet) and always lock my bedroom. The one thing he could have taken from me is my Eton laptop, which must have had 10 previous owners, one of them in all likelihood Fred Flintstone. I so wish he had taken it, so I could get a new one.

So yes, interesting things can happen around here. It’s bad enough that it happened but perhaps the worst of it is, when you think about it, that we were burgled by the shittiest burglar in all of Slough, probably shortlisted for shittiest in Berkshire. He tries to get into houses at random, doesn’t even bring his own crowbar and, to add insult to injury, makes off on the bike he steals.

It is not the first time this happens, and I bet it won’t be the last. Slough is just too close. Maybe they’ll take my rubbish laptop next time, fingers crossed.

Chambers

I am in a big room that predates me by over 500 years, lined up with busts of Eton’s most illustrious sons, on the wooden panels on its walls thousands of names proudly carved in heavy Latin script.

I am in the midst of a gathering of a hundred and fifty men (and some 10 women) wearing penguin suits and bowties and harrypotteresque gowns over that, who are all stamping their feet (the accepted form of applause at Eton) and the floor is shaking, in spite of the padded carpet preemptively in place. The Head Master is masterfully delivering one of his encouraging “well done” speeches, which I always enjoy listening to but the point of which I invariably forget the instant he is done. After his final and dismissive "thank you”, the volume in the room rises up from complete silence to a “fahfahfahfahfohfoh” crescendo like there was someone slowly turning a knob.

This meeting is supposed to serve a double purpose: both to hear important announcements by the Head Master and Lower Master and to conduct official school business with other beaks in the few minutes before and after that. Tradition dictates that if you want to speak to someone you have to hold on to his gown (which is why everybody has to wear one*). This is recursive; if someone else wants to speak to that person he (very occasionally she) will then have to hold on to your gown and so on. It is quite common to have chains of 3 or 4 people holding on to each other’s gown.

The meeting finished, everybody rushes off to their divs, some stopping by School Office to check their pigeon holes. Outside the main building, boys are waiting to try and get hold of beaks, most often because they have been told by those masters to “see me after Chambers”. They might have misbehaved or want a quiet word about something.  

It is an interesting experience, bizarre and slightly surreal like everything else around here, but once the novelty fades it becomes just a right pain in the arse. This happens every morning, 11:20 to 11:40, Monday to Saturday, and it is compulsory to attend. Us Language Assistants don’t have to be there on a Saturday, but it still means Mon-Fri I have to jump out of bed into a suit just to go loaf around for 20 minutes (bonus picture: me in a suit) and all I can think is: there go 20 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Of course nowadays most school business is carried over email, which is quicker and better no matter how you look at it. So why Chambers then? Just for an extra bit of social atmosphere? Why compulsive Chapel for boys at 8:35am? Why the penguin suits and the black shoes? Why the gown-pulling and the foot stamping? Why beaks? Why the Wall Game**? 

There’s a saying around here, it goes:

“Ask not why, ask since when.”

 

* Except us Assistants, nobody wants to speak to us.
** Quidditch

Eton College

Slough is rumoured to be rough, and this year I am working at a public charity for boys just outside of Slough.

Technically, this is all true, as Slough “has a relatively high crime rate, with figures for all crime statistic categories above the English average and figures for several categories more than double the English average” and Eton College "is one of the original nine English public schools as defined by the Public Schools Act 1868”, Wikipedia dixit. However, it is also true that Windsor Castle (one of the Queen’s residences) is a 10-min walk away, that Windsor is a tourist wonderland and that Eton is commonly perceived to be the cream of the crop amongst the most exclusive schools for boys in the world.

Only boys study here, so a boy is a pupil/student. Yet a beak is a teacher, the headmaster is the Head Master, a class is a div, boys in the same year are a block, a term is a half (Michaelmas, Lent and Summer, so 3 halves), lessons in the morning are scheduled as schools (1st School 9:00-9:40, 2nd School 9:50-10:30 and so on to 5th) and those after lunch as After Four (4:30-5:10), After Five (5:20-6:00) and After Six (6:15-7:15). After lessons and in between them, much sport is done, and a number of games unique to Eton are played here, like Eton Fives and The Wall Game.

So what am I doing here? I am not a boy, not yet a beak, but I am the Spanish Assistant at Eton College for 2010/2011 – though I prefer the rather pompous term Lector, fahfahfah. I am here to teach the boys and help them with their oral Spanish (however that may sound). There is a new Lector every year, all of them from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, so here is another reason to consider myself lucky to have studied there. This is for me an amazing opportunity to get to know the Tradition that inspired Harry Potter from the inside and to teach in possibly the best environment one could hope for.

For Eton is… special. It is special in so many ways that it will take me many, many posts to point it out. So as this new journey of discovery and understanding I am embarked on progresses I will endeavour to share my discoveries. You’re welcome to tag along!

Delayed

For the first time ever, I was able to sleep before a flight. I even slept well. I woke up in time, did the last things I had to do, left early but in no hurry. It was a nice clear summer night outside. The moon was pretty, the crickets were singing. The bus came on time. The driver was nice to me. The next bus came on time. People were nice to me and smiled. When I arrived at the terminal at the exact time I expected to I knew something wasn't right. This can't be happening, I told myself. No last-minute rushes, no running down aisles loaded with bulky items, shouting at morons and jumping queues, no sweating, no panting, no stress, no panic. Too good to be true. Too perfect.

A perfectly engineered plan working out just fine. I started to panic. Something's wrong, I kept telling myself.

I started going over my to-do list and my to-take list. Surely I had forgotten my ID? No such luck. Mobile phone charger? Securely in my backpack. Maybe I left the oven on at home? Nope. Left the lights on? Not at all.

A sense of impending doom started crawling up my spine. My plane's gonna blow up, I thought. Or worse, instead of London I'll end up in Liverpool. I must have cancer. And swine flu. And AIDS. I'm about to be robbed, then murdered. No, murdered first. My eyes kept darting side to side, expecting the unexpected any instant.

When I arrived at the check-in desk, the relief was tangible, warm and wet. My flight was delayed 4 hours. "Oh, so that was it!", I cried and started dancing around, kissing babies and hugging old ladies.

Flashback

It often happens that while I'm busy doing something of any interest, I can't find the time to tell the world: Hey, look at me, look at what I'm doing!

After I finish doing that thing I want to tell the world about, I often find I can't be bothered any more. When this does not happen, and the motivation lives on, it may then happen that I don't find the time or the inspiration.

Furthermore, it may happen that while I wait for the time or the inspiration, some new thing I want to tell the world about comes along and previous one gets discarded and buried in the scrapyard of ideas. The circle is complete.

In other words, I'm rubbish as a reporter.

This is why I have decided to stop apologizing about late updates to this blog and write. But the only way I can do that is by breaking its linear structure. Thank Hollywood for flashbacks. From now on, don't expect posts to appear in any order, be it thematic, chronological, or just logical. I will write about whatever I feel like, when I feel like, and try to cover everything I want to shout out to the big wide world. Hey! Look at me! Look at what I'm doing!

Tschörmany, also

Continuing my Ryanair-sponsored getaway-spree through Europe, I landed in the heart of Bremen.

Bremen strikes me as the greenest city I've ever been in. Polysemic greenness. They're big on trams. They're huge on bikes. They're monumental on parks. I've never seen so much greenness together. The Bürgerpark is perhaps the prettiest and greenest area I've seen in any city so far. It's so green it upsets your colour balance. You walk out of it and everything looks red and blue in comparison.


There is one thing people go to Bremen for: to take their picture with the statue of the musicians (though in the story they never actually make it to the city). I did that too. On a very different note, there's some important aviation/aerospace industry around the city, clustered around the airport and the university. Bremen is also home to the beer I most hate in the world: Becks.



I don't have that much more to comment on the places, but travelling is always full of anecdotes, so I'll give you a few of them.

Here's one: while enjoying an idyllic afternoon in one of the endless parks in Bremen, listening to an old accordion played by an old man, I saw a rape scene. Three males run after a female. They grab her by the back of her head and all together they pin her to the ground. They jump on her and penetrate her one by one, fighting over supremacy. It's ducks I'm talking about.

The female has 4 baby ducklings of most terminal cuteness, who run around clumsily, bobbing and clustering, not knowing what to do. Their mother runs away, and so they find a foster mother in a doormat-dog on a leash. They all run after it and cluster around it and chirp their filial love. The poor dog is utterly confused by this and doesn't know what to do. At this point the people passing by decide to intervene, and like an organized team they chase away the 3 rapist ducks, pick up the ducklings and take them to their mother. Everybody feels good and useful, and there is some heart-warming bonding between absolute strangers. The female duck swims with her ducklings to the other side of the lake, where, upon arrival, she gets raped again.

Here's another: the very kind lady who housed me in Bremerhaven (Tobias' aunt) was determined to put an extra 5 kg on my frame before I left. Though my German is rubbish, I could quite get what she was saying, as the word "essen" (food/to eat) featured predominantly in most of her sentences.

"Blah blah essen blah blah essen blah essen. Blah blah essen?"
"Oh no, I'm full, thank you very much"
"Blah blah essen essen essen blah!"

We cycled in Bremerhaven on borrowed bikes. If they're free, they're good. I, as per use, got a contraption of exotic wobbliness and exquisite rustiness. It was, ahem, wobblier by the time I gave it back. I also got a bit of a suntan and sharp pain all over my body. Great fun.



I went to Hamburg for a day and a bit. I took the only existing coach service between these two neighbouring cities: the Ryanair bus2fly (don't get me started on coach travel in Germany and railway fares, I feel foam coming out of my mouth already). The driver was an old man with a white shoe-brush moustache, who appeared to be in his 9th month of pregnancy. I asked him if I could get on. He didn't answer. I got on and handed him my ticket. He took it, sat there looking through it for a full minute, then all of a sudden banged his fist on the steering wheel and yelled "Scheiße!!!" (shit!). He handed me my ticket back. I asked, "everything ok?". He seemed to suddenly realize I was there, looked at me in surprise and nodded. Tic-tic-tic, ils sont fous, ces Goths.

There are some cute sights to see in Bremen & Bremerhaven, but after one day their touristic appeal is utterly dead. They look like nice quiet places to live, but boring as hell. Even the Universität Bremen seemed to elicit as much fun as an empty packet of crisps. Except for the tower. The tower can be had fun with:


Hamburg, on the other hand, though I couldn't see much of it, did tickle my curiosity enough to make me want to visit again. Big & bustling, night-life, ferries up and down the river. My kind of place. Darn, I wish I'd had time to visit the red light district...

Both in Bremerhaven and Hamburg I spent an impossibly long time watching enormous cargo ships docking, undocking and going through locks, loading and unloading containers. Not exactly your standard tourist attraction, I'll grant you, but I myself found entertainment aplenty in watching containers being loaded and unloaded. The novelty of it somehow made it very appealing.

Seventeen days, one hellish essay, one visit to Spain and many beers later, two Ryanair one-pounders took me all the way to Frankfurt. Well, not really. Not all the way. More like all the way to fuck-knows-where, smack in the middle of a beautiful nowhere, an area of amazing lush greenness, smooth hills, canopied riverbeds, fields of radioactive yellow and cute small towns. Frankfurt-Hahn airport, that is. It happens to be much closer to Luxembourg.




For the "financial capital" you expect, Frankfurt is remarkably cute and a surprisingly interesting place to visit, even if just for the day and to take in the architecture and go up a skyscraper for some sights. Who would've thought?


I got the sights, the photos, the beers and definitely the sausages. This wraps it up for Tschörmany for now. But I vill be bakkh, also.

A penny's worth

I love flying. It makes me think. I can't stop marvelling at the miracles of technology that I see all around me. A flying machine is roaring 30000 feet above the ground, and it's taking me in its bosom above the clouds, over the mountains and seas at 500 miles an hour. I keep smiling a silly smile and silently giggling in amazement. I look around me, trying to read in someone else's face similar signs of an inner epiphany. Am I the only one?


Maybe I'm weird, or maybe I'm still a child inside. I can't help it. I keep marvelling and wondering. I think of all the manpower, the knowledge and ability and effort and resources necessary to keep this steel bird flying. I think of all the engineers and technicians and their teachers and of the pilots and their instructors. I think of the fuel and the oil, of the middle eastern country it most likely comes from and of the rigs and tankers and pipelines and the occupying armies.

But I think back before the aircraft was even built, of the miners and machines that extracted the aluminium and iron and copper and titanium. I think of the traders and stock brokers who bought it and sold it and made it move around the world. I think of the rubber from Brazil and oil from Malaysia and cotton from the US that became the tyres and window frames and seat covers. I think of the kilometres of wiring snaking through its skin and I think of the thousands of kilometres those materials travelled, to be processed and then travel again to be reprocessed somewhere else. I think of the foundries and factories and warehouses, of all the farmers and truck drivers and grunts and foremen and factory workers.

But I think back before it was even in production, of the research and design teams that worked on each individual component. I think of the hundreds of companies involved, big and small, of their executives and secretaries and administrators and investors and receptionists and cleaners. I think of the market analysts and product design specialists who decided what the characteristics of that model of aircraft should be. I think of the state of technology at the time, what improvements were available that could make the final aircraft faster and cheaper to build, more secure and lighter, easier to fly and repair.

And I think of the cycle of industrial production, and I think of that cycle several thousands of iterations back, through the days of propellers and then through many, many wars, hot and cold, worldly and otherwise, and how without them technology would have never advanced at the pace it did. I think of politicians and businessmen and investment bankers and military strategists and international organizations and territory and resources. I think of how the use of planes for reconnaissance missions and for bombing troops and cities and shooting down other pilots put the focus on improving aircraft technology. I think of radar and radio and jet engines and pressurized compartments and computers and composite materials and navigation systems.

I think of all the pilots who were shot down and all the men and women and children who died in bombing raids. I think of all that had to be bombed, razed, burnt, of all the death and destruction. I also think of all the talent and genius and creativity and energy and chest-filling euphoria of those who made it all possible, one little step at a time, a small improvement here, suddenly a whole new idea there. And I think of the sweat and effort of those who worked hard to make it a reality, and of those who are still doing so right now.


And then I zap back to the now, and I see how it is all interconnected, and how every piece of the puzzle was necessary to get me where I am now, in this situation. Every invention, every breakthrough, every invasion, every takeover, every merger, every bead of sweat and droplet of blood and drop of oil were essential in allowing me to fly now in comfort and safety over thousands of kilometres. The whole world has come together with one aim: to give me the power to fly for the Ryanair price of £0.01, one penny sterling.

My eyes are sparkling. I can't help it.