Mouldy Moulton – Aristocrat Teacher

Cookridge County Primary’s strictest teacher was without doubt Mouldy Moulton.

A professional teacher of the old style she was tall (well tall to us anyway), slim, and invariably wore a skirt/jacket combination in tweed but cut in a very 1960s stylee, thinking back I suppose she could almost have been glamorous in the same way that Margeret Thatcher always seemed to attract male followers (there is simply no accounting for male idiocy sometimes), to us 10 and 11 year olds she was simply a harridan, an old bag, a witch, we hated her.

Cookridge County Primary School served your educational needs from the age of five to eleven, at which point you took the dreaded National Eleven-Plus Examination to decide your future, white collar or blue collar worker, success or failure in the 11-plus exam took you down two opposite forks in the road, one to the academic Grammar School and one to the place that did not care for academia and simply prepared young men for life in a factory – the Secondary School route.

It was Mouldy Moultons job as teacher of the 11 year olds to groom us for the 11-plus and ensure that the ones who would be forwarded to the Grammar School (her favourites) were fit for purpose, whilst the also-rans were left to their own devices for they were obviously going nowhere in life.

The International School Village comes to tea.

The day that the International School Village came to Cookridge County Primary was probably the first time that any of us had ever seen a foreign person.

The International School Village was an organisation that, once a year during the summer term organised a meeting of Primary School-age children from all over the world at the Carnegie Teachers Training College in Leeds, this was the 1960s, Europe had only just recovered from kicking the shit out of all its neighbours a mere twenty years earlier and the intention was that our generation would be the one to live in more harmonious circumstances, learn to appreciate our foreign neighbours, get along with them somewhat, and we’d do all this by meeting with them in Leeds , shaking their hands and shouting at them slowly in English so they’d understand, as all English people do with foreigners.

Our headteacher had managed a coup by inviting the entire International School Village to afternoon tea at Cookridge County Primary School, we would play games with our new foreign friends, maybe have a football match with them, they would attend some of our lessons, learn our ways, and we’d be best of friends by the time that the Headteacher invited us all into the dining hall for afternoon tea with cake and strawberries, as if that’s what we always did.

Pimple Head

Cookridge County Primary School had but one male teacher during the time that I was present behind its walls, his name was Pimple Head.

OK, so that wasn’t his real name, his real name was Mr Thirsk, but being almost completely bald with the addition of a large and permanent pimple on the top of your head tends to attract the attention of your ten year old pupils somewhat, Pimple Head is all he was called right throughout the school, I suspect the headteacher called him Pimple Head too.

His job was to step us up a gear from the basic reading and writing that we had been tutored in to that point, Pimple Head primed us for the ultimate in learning experiences that was to follow next year – Pimple Head set us up to face the dreaded Mouldy Moulton.

Pick-an-Mix Music

In yet another sure sign that the megalith music production companies do not actually understand the market that they trade in, EMI have made colossal losses of £1.5bn for the last trading year, blaming their customer base for “not liking albums”.

Well there’s a thing isn’t it.

You make the biggest losses in your company history and its all your client base fault for not buying the stuff that you produce, I can’t remember the last time I heard Kellogs slag off its customers for “not liking Corn Flakes”.

EMI state that music buyers do not like downloading albums, preferring instead to pick-an-mix individual tracks on (legitimate) download sites – well there’s another surprise then, customers voting with their feet (or typing fingers) and ignoring the album-filler dross that makes up many albums.

Like many people I have bought albums in the CD format (remember those) in the past after hearing just one track, only to get the album home and discover that the one track is the only song on the album that I like after the band and its producer made the radical decision not to try very hard with the rest of the music and instead churn something out quickly because they’d only booked the studio for ten minutes.

It used to be that a new band would turn up for the first session at their newly-signed mentor production company with a portfolio of music that they had written over the past couple of years, a first album would be issued to critical acclaim and six months later the band would be recalled to the studio for their second album and answer the question “So what have you got for us this time” with “Well actually we’ve been on the piss for six months and haven’t written anything at all, can we do some cover versions ?”

Today its likely that your average next-best-thing will have one or two good tunes in them plus some fillers and then fall-back to cover some old Motown tracks thinly disguised and sampled to sound unique to their target markets ears – when my own children were younger I lost count of the number of times that I put a CD on in the car to hear them declare that “its sounds like X or Y”, those moments would usually result in a lecture from me about how their pop idols were nothing but lazy idle bast’ads who had never written an original note of music in their lives and were destined for the scrap yard of young recording artists any time around now while the classic music of the 1960s would still be around when they were old and grey – it didn’t do any good though, what child wants to listen to that sort of diatribe from their father ?

And yet it has worked, my children are now young adults and while their music taste incorporates everything that is released under labels that I do not understand nor ever intend to understand, they also have snaffled several of my Rod Stewart CD’s for their listening pleasure (more fool them) and sing along to any random Motown track that you care to give airtime to – take heed you parents of currently young children, you owe it to the future of the world to educate your kinder in the ways of decent music, apart from you parents who’s formative music listening was done in the 1980s of course.

Video Saturday – The Beatles

A film produced by Ed Sullivan, “The Beatles at Shea Stadium”, shot in 1965.

It was shortly after this that George Harrison decided that he wasn’t going to do any more live tours if they couldn’t even hear themselves sing on stage let alone the audience – they cancelled a UK tour soon after this one.

The terrible social experiment

I am adamant that this actually happened although having searched the internet extensively I can find no trace of it ever occurring not any acknowledgement back from any of the affected parties that they were once the subject of a terrible social experiment that failed almost as quickly as it was created, however given the nature of the social experiment it is probably the case that they are still not capable of corresponding with the rest of the world even after almost fifty years.

I would have been in the last year at Junior school when it happened, 11 years old, 1967 then, and this terrible social experiment would have been carried out on the children in the first or second year of schooling so they would be five or six years old at the time, 48/49 years old now – if there is one of them in your town you’ll know him as “that strange illiterate bloke” who traverses his life in a constant state of confusion.

Working with lions

She brought a letter home from school, it read something on the lines that a careers advisor would be available in school on certain dates and if we and our child wished to meet with him then the school secretary would make an appointment.

Jodie does not have a life plan, she is like me, she awakes in the morning and whatever will be will be, I often drive her to college in a morning and every time I deliberately ask her what lessons she has on today just to see her shrug her shoulders and confirm “I don’t know”, I like her attitude to life.

Asking her at 14 years of age what she wanted to do with the rest of her life was as pointless as asking her what she was going to have for her lunch that day – it would just happen, thats all.

But I replied anyway and an appointment was made.

I can’t remember why but Suzanne was not able to make the all-important meeting, the meeting that was to decide Jodie’s future career choice and so I wandered into the school on my own, waited in reception for Jodie to be summoned from a class and was then allowed to pass through the security doors into the school – it wasn’t like that in my days, you could wander around schools at will looking for your child back then, I suppose its progress but I’ll take some convincing.

Once inside I asked Jodie where we were to go, she shrugged her shoulders in that familiar gesture and followed with “I don’t know”, I had to go back to the reception and ask the old bag behind the desk, she gave me a very annoyed look as she did with everyone, for someone who worked at a reception desk she sure got annoyed when people came to ask her stuff.

She directed us to a small office off the school library, we eventually found it after standing outside a different door for five minutes only to discover that it was a store cupboard, we’d only knocked on it a few times though.

The young man who sat at a desk professing to be a careers advisor looked like he’d only just begun his own career, I don’t know about you but I imagine that a careers advisor should be a person who has been around the block a few times, someone like my brother, someone who has been out of work dozens of times but on each occasion has spent on average around five minutes in finding another job, usually by virtue of his practice of walking into factories and using the phrase “Got any jobs mate ?”, our Ned would make a great careers advisor.

This young man went through all the usual questions, what was she studying, what subjects did she like, and then the killer, what would she like to do as a job ?

I was just about to answer “I don’t think she’s really thought about it yet” when Jodie told him that she’d like to work with animals.

His face lit up, here was something to persue, he pulled leaflets out of a bag appertaining to a veterinary career and thrust them in her direction rambling on about how difficult it was to qualify as a veterinary bu thow rewarding it could be etc etc etc

She looked at the leaflets without interest, “I’d like to work with wild animals” is all she said

The young careers advisor stammered a bit and then changed tack explaining that some veterinary’s did indeed treat animals in zoos but it was a speciality and maybe she could do some research of her own as to how to work with those particular practices ?

“No” she said “I want to work with wild animals – in Africa”

A silence pervaded the room.

He had no leaflets on how to get a job healing sick wild animals in Africa, if such a job even exists, I can’t imagine who you’d send the bill to after you’ve given a random lion its whooping cough vaccination for instance and neither could the careers advisor, he opened his office door and bade us goodbye with a very puzzled look on his face.

She’s currently studying fashion retail at college.

The Fatal Glass of Beer

Now tell me I’m wrong when I state without doubt or fear of contradiction that this is one of the funniest scenes you will ever see, in my life or yours ?

And can everyone see where Vic Reeves gets his material from now ?

If you want to see how the story goes…

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Fatal+Glass+of+Beer+2&search_type=&aq=f

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAKCwXkDl74&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAG9BL5mpPM&NR=1

A forthcoming disaster…

So I’ve committed myself to a weekend of golf at the end of this month, I have less than four weeks in which to learn how to play the game again, fortunately for me the people with whom I will be playing have a knowledge and skill level at the game on a par with mine (see what I did there)

It was a regular event on our team calendar back in the days when we all struggled to become proficient at the game, none of us succeeded by the way, to become proficient that is. But once a year at the end of February we would pack our clubs in the car and set the compass for Skegness, that awful holiday resort town of bygone years that lies festering  forgotten and forlorn in February became our home for two days and one night and the excellent North Shore Golf Club was our host for that time.

There was one person of course who was proficient at the game, in fact he was very proficient at the game, in fact he was so proficient at the game that he held membership at one of the most prestigious golf clubs in North Leeds, and believe me there are many prestigious golf clubs in North Leeds – the one that Chris was a member of only accepted you if you could already play a bit and it is of no surprise to the rest of us that Chris never bothered to invite us to a round at his club – Andys brown corduroy pants would not have gone down well in the lounge bar, nor would Kevs unique approach to golfing attire.

The incredible sponsored forced march

We’d only been there six months, some us weren’t even twelve yet, the day when Cheesy Holland stood up on the stage at assembly and announced that we were all to be flogged to death in order to raise much needed funds for the newly desired language laboratory.

He tried to give a persuasive argument, told us how we’d all benefit by this new fangled language laboratory, told us how we’d all be able to learn from pre-recorded tapes in what was a glorified recording studio with thirty tape booths in it, told us how we’d be fluent within weeks, gave us a load of old flannel about how just jolly spiffing it would all be and we’d have lots of fun and all would be good in the world…

But whichever way he tried to dress it up, no matter how hard he tried to force a smile to those thin, tightly pressed lips of his it still equated to all of us, from first year to sixth form, all of us, every single boy in the school, without fear or favour, no excuses, no notes from Mater, we’d all be force-marched for twenty five miles on a Saturday, not even a bloody school day, a Saturday – for sponsorship.