my life – Page 8 – OZTHOUGHTS

My Time Working In A Sweet Factory

Many, many moons ago I worked for exactly one week in a sweet factory, and that one week has been a scar on my soul ever since.

It was one of those summer holiday jobs that all students in my day used to take on in order to get some money to have a decent break in the second half of the holiday, and I had managed to land a job as an unskilled worker at a large local sweet factory.

On my first day I was sent to help the guy who made chocolate. This was intriguing to begin with, as it seemed to entail him slinging apparently random quantities of milk, sugar and cacao powder into three large vats, each of which had three huge stone rollers rotating slowly in them.

This is roughly what they looked like.

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My Attempt To Be A Teacher – Not My Thing!

This posting will be an account of my experiences as a supply teacher! I know, its unbelievable, but it has happened!

While we were working at Luanda International School, it was understood that in need, I could be used as a supply teacher. Something that I had hoped would never occur, as I have never wanted to be a teacher, and looked upon the whole concept with considerable angst and fear.

However, one day the worst happened. I was walking through the school office whistling a happy tune, and I was grabbed by the principal as I passed, and told abruptly that I would be put into a class of kids for the first week of the next term as the normal class teacher was getting married and would thus return to school 5 days after the start of term.

After having been told that I would be teaching, I managed to find time in the last weeks of that term to spend a bit of time in the classroom I would be looking after, which if anything simply increased my apprehension, even though the kids couldn’t have been kinder to me.

When I arrived in the classroom at the beginning of the term, Richard, the fellow whose class I was to look after, had been kind enough to leave me a load of notes telling me what to do, and another colleague who teaches the same age group (the class is split into two groups) met with me the day before term began to also tell me what to do. So, well armed with a mass of photocopied tasks and a head full of “you could try doing this” stuff, I waited in the class room on the first morning, full of trepidation, for the kids to arrive.

This is the class I “Taught”

Which they duly did, to my disappointment, as I had been hoping for an earthquake or something to make the whole exercise unnecessary.

As it was a short week, starting on Wednesday, not all the kids had returned from their Christmas break, so I only had 10 kids – which felt more than enough for me!
At Luanda International School, they don’t teach with the kids at desks in rows, but rather with a number of tables scattered around the room, at which the kids sit, so there is no focus in the room, which meant that I had to sort of wander around like a lost sheep, attempting to keep things moving as they should.

The normal morning routine was that one of the kids took the register, while the others started on a series of maths games, working individually and (supposedly) in silence. To my amazement this went very well, they all knew the routine and simply got on with it. Made me feel more than a little redundant, but it was a relief!

The only problem then was that having completed the maths tests, I had to see if they had managed to answer the questions correctly… which entailed asking them to tell me the answer to each question (“hands up who knows the answer to number………”) Which I then had to write on the board. Two problems here… Firstly, I had to work out quickly in my head what the correct answers were…. What the hell is the “denominator?” and then, almost worse, write this on the board. Now, the teachers among you will find this normal and unremarkable, but my handwriting is lousy at the best of times, and writing on a board is a skill… Which I most decidedly do not have. I did my best to appear cool, calm and collected as I scrawled on the board, my writing getting bigger and smaller, line descending and mounting…. and then having to make the letters and numbers increasingly small to fit on the board. Oh misery!

We all survived this experience, and the kids seemed happy enough with my efforts (the policy in this school was to call teachers by their last name, preceded by Mr or Miss or Mrs, so I had to be addressed as Mr Cole…which the kids instantly changed to Mr Cool, rather to my pleasure)

We then moved on to “Language”, which involved the kids coming up with a lot of words to describe irritation, and having made these lists, write a short story using as many of these words as they could. On the face of it, a simple thing to do.. But a number of these kids hardly spoke English, so that was tricky too. But we all persevered, and most kids managed, with the help of dictionaries and a certain input from me to find a respectable number of words meaning irritation.

So then on to writing the story with these words. My first serious problem. Most of them calmly got on with it and scribbled away happily enough, but two kids simply sat there and gazed at me. After a while I registered that these two hadn’t even started, so I went to one of them, an American kid and asked him why he wasn’t writing..to which he responded, looking me firmly in the eye that this was not Language, that it was vocabulary, and he saw no point in the entire exercise.

Hummmmm… Over to quiet, friendly explaining mode, I thought to myself, and began to explain to him that language was in fact made up of, among other things, vocabulary. He gazed at me as I went on about this, and when I had finished what I felt had been a masterly exposition of the benefit and point of having a good vocabulary, he simply gazed at me, and didn’t move. I suggested, quietly, that perhaps I would be a good plan for him to get his head down and do some work, to which, to my well concealed fury, he merely reiterated his point that it wasn’t language.

Hmmmm….. So, dumping all educational theories, I simply told him to get on with it or I would tear his legs off at the hip and beat him to death with them. I hasten to add that I said this with a friendly grin. To my surprise, this did the trick and he put his head down and got on with it. Ah what it is to be an educational pioneer, eh?

By this time, the second kid had started to work, so I regrouped and started to think what I would do with them as the following task.

Happily, at this point it was morning break, so they all dashed off and I sat down and wondered what I had let myself in for.

To my vast relief the rest of the morning was taken up by them going off to other, specialist teachers (Portuguese, computers and music) so I had the rest of the morning to prepare myself for the afternoon..and to rapidly seek advice from my other colleague.

The afternoon was also Language, but a different approach. Firstly I had to read to them for about 20 minutes (these kids are about 10, by the way) from an adventure book that they had been working with for a while during the last term. Having read to them, we then discussed what I had read, and this went very well…. They had listened well, and were obviously engaged by the story, and had a number of points to make about the section I had read to them… bliss… 45 minutes passed in a useful and pleasant fashion. After this, it was my honour and duty to introduce them to a New Concept In Language….

The Cliff Hanger.

To do this I had a whole set of photocopied material, consisting of an example of a cliff hanger, plus a number of “cliff hanging” ending sentences, and an explanation of what a cliff hanger was. All good stuff, and simple too. So we had fun with this concept for the better part of the afternoon, with the kids producing a lot of stories which tended to end with the word… “and suddenly….” But they had got the point, and even began to see that there were better ways of doing it than ending with that word. So I felt reasonably happy with my first days work.

I duly sent them off home, with their homework assignments, and then collapsed in a handy heap.

Teaching is bloody hard work! Continue reading “My Attempt To Be A Teacher – Not My Thing!”

Sports And Gymnastics – Not For Me!

A while ago I wrote a post on my attitude to sports, which seems to have struck a chord with some of you good folk out there. So I thought I would perhaps expand a wee bit on what I wrote, and in passing discuss my attitude to that highly refined form of torture known as gymnastics.

But to start with, to sort of set the mood as it were, I thought I would throw a couple of quotes at you that I have come across in a book I am currently dipping into at odd moments. It is called Frank Muir Goes Into, and reasonably enough, it is written by that superb English Script writer and humorist, Frank Muir.

It consists of all manner of jokes and quotes that he has collected on a whole slew of topics, one of which is the one that interests me at this point, which is sport.

So here are some of the apposite quotes that he collected on the subject of sport……

“The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much, and had nothing to think about. Athletics don’t make anybody either long-lived or useful”. George Santayana.

It is a general truth that those persons who are good at games are good at nothing else. Generally speaking, good players are but miserable and useless persons”. Thomas Tegg (1848)

“I do not play cricket, because it requires me to assume such indecent postures”

“Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys”

Both Oscar Wilde.

‘The football, as it is now commonly used, with thronging of a rude multitude, with bursting of shinnes, and beaking of legges, be neither civill, neither worthy of the name of any traine to health” Richard Melcaster – 1581

Anyhow, that gives you an idea of my feelings about organised sports. However I do draw a distinction between professional sports and amateur, not that I will ever take part in either, but I do faintly see that there can be an attraction in chasing a ball around a field with a bunch of friends on a Saturday afternoon – slumped in a chair gazing at a match on TV on the other hand fails to attract me to any degree. And the idea of actually going to one of those huge stadia where professional matches happen simply scares the hell out of me. For some years I lived near to one of the larger such stadia in London, and the animal roars that happened whenever games were played there was terrifying, and highly reminiscent of the sounds of a Nuremberg Rally.

Continue reading “Sports And Gymnastics – Not For Me!”

Me And Sports – No Way!!

As a child I was occasionally forced to take part in various forms of sport or gymnastics, something which I found both pointless and painful.

My first encounter with sport took place in Tasmania, where I attended a small school in the town of Burnie, which gloried in the name of Upper Federal Street State School. Actually its name was almost bigger than the school itself, as it consisted of only two classrooms.

AFL….. Refined Street Fighting

Anyhow, the sports of choice there were cricket and a weird game that only Australians could have invented – Australian Rules Football, or AFL. This is a serious contact sport that is a sort of amalgam of football, rugby and American football (without the armour) and street fighting, and in those days seemed to me to be a matter of rendering as many of the opposing team unconscious as possible by whatever means you could think of… So punching, kicking, hair pulling and so on were all standard techniques.

Well I played this abomination once, saw it for what it is, a free card for bullies and not an activity which any sane person would voluntarily take part in, and resolved never to be trapped into playing it ever again.. a vow I stuck to through thick and thin.. Refusing to even go anywhere near the field where this “game” was “played”.

Anyone for cricket??

After this, I was then introduced to the weird game known as cricket. Boredom refined to a high degree, interspersed with moments of real pain. To explain this a bit… Most of the time in cricket (I gathered) one stands at some distance from the three people who are actually playing it, i.e the bowler, and the two batsmen. The former is responsible for throwing the ball at the batsman, and the batsmen are expected to hit that ball far enough away so as to allow them to run madly back and forth between the working position of the bowler and the set of wooden posts known as the wicket, where the guy who hits the ball stands waiting for it to come his way.

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More Colonial Life – Singapore Again

As a number of you guys seemed to find my other post about my life in Singapore way back in the middle of the last century entertaining, I thought I would add another to the collection for your amusement.

When we moved to Singapore we found ourselves in a very odd situation, in so far as my Mother was to the extreme left politically, and my father was an Australian dentist, not much given to enjoying the drearily “correct” attitudes that were considered essential for the whites who ruled that place back then.

No schools for English kids over 8 years old.

So socially we had one or two problems, and one of the major problems was to find a school for me to go to. The normal practice for the ruling Brits was to send their kids off to boarding school in England as soon as they were 8 years old, and keep that up until their entire education had been achieved (or not). The result of this was that there were no English schools in Singapore or Malaya for English speaking kids over the age of 8. Nor any kids of my age for me to play with either of course, as all of them were languishing in one or other expensive English boarding school.

Since my parents found the idea of sending their kids off to school on the other side of the world totally repugnant we had a problem.

Happily for me, rather than simply giving in and sending me off into exile in the UK, my parents decided that it was more important for me to be part of the family than to have an English education, so it was off to a Chinese school for me, as it was felt that given the choice between an Indian, a Chinese or a Malay school, I would probably do best and get the most out of a Chinese one.

And in fact I did get a lot out of my Chinese school, and loved it.

It was a huge school as I recall, catering for all ages from kindergarden to the then equivalent of Grade 12, and I was the only non-Chinese kid in the entire place!

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My Pig – Humber Armoured Personnel Carrier

Many, many years ago I was the proud owner of a 7 ton chunk of armour plate, affectionately known in the British Army as a Pig, or more formally as Humber Armoured Personnel Carrier.

This splendid vehicle boasted a completely waterproofed 4.75 Rolls Royce petrol engine (and by waterproof, I mean the entire engine was encased in a sealed steel box, with the various lines (fuel, air and exhaust) passing out through one way valves. So when one opened the bonnet, a tricky job in itself as it was made of thick bullet proof steel, one was confronted with a large, rounded pale green steel box, and no engine to be seen…

0ea4c-pig-05

Curiously enough, it only had one set of gear ratios, no low gearing as one would expect to find on any vehicle that was designed to go off-road, but the engine was so powerful, and 1st gear so low, and as it was always in 4 wheel drive, it went perfectly happily over mud, small rivers and so on on its enormous “run-flat” tires.

0835c-pig-04

Inside it was remarkably spartan, no unnecessary comfort for driver or passengers, and of course, being military, no seat belts to be seen.

Anyhow, you can find the specs for this small monster easily enough on line, so I shall stop going on about that side of the thing, and talk about what it was like to own and drive around in such a vehicle. It was in effect my car, as I had no other vehicle at the time, so I used it to drive to work every day, and to drive around at the weekends too. As one would in a normal car.

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Angola Minefields – Look Innocent, But Will Bite You!

While we were working in Angola a few years ago, we had friends who worked with the Halo Trust clearing landmines all over Angola. At that time (2006) there were estimated to be about 17 million of the horrible things lurking in the ground.

We were invited to visit them at their upcountry headquarters in a small town called Huambo, which had suffered very badly during the civil war, so was full of shot up buildings, burnt out tanks in back yards and all the remains of a vicious war, which after a bit of time in Angola, we were becoming all too familiar with sadly.

They decided to first take us to a large minefield that they were busy clearing on the edge of a small village nearby, so off we went to see our first minefield in the flesh as it were. When we got there we were taken to the edge of the village, where the local school had its playground and the guy in charge pointed to the grass field beside the kid’s playground and told us matter of factly that that was the minefield. Simply a large area of grass beside the beaten earth of the playground… No form of separation, walls, fences, ditches.. nothing, simply an innocent looking grassy area.

This was when we understood that actually a minefield is simply a chunk of land which happens to have landmines buried in it…. In no way special or dangerous looking. As a friend from the Halo Trust put it, a landmine is the Beast that doesn’t bark – but sure as hell can and does bite!

The thing that got me at that moment was the realisation that the kids at the school played football and ran around as kids do, right on the edge of a minefield, with no form of barrier to prevent them running into the minefield.

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WE VISIT THE FIRST OIL FIELD IN ANGOLA

Some years ago, Lotty and I worked in Angola, arriving about three months after the 30 year civil war had ended, and found ourselves in a ruined country, in which travel was tricky to put it mildly. However, we were invited one day to go and look at the very first oil source in Angola.

This trip was organised by a couple who had been in Angola for a very long time, and both of whom worked in the oil industry there, as do almost all non-Portuguese expats.

Four of us from the International School of Luanda (where we worked) went on this trip, which meant leaving the school at 6:15 am! After recovering from this early start, we rumbled through a surprisingly active Luanda (This was a Sunday morning, by the way) to a section of Luanda called Mirimar, which I have never visited before, and appears to be the part where the rich and Embassies have their being… streets of very expensive looking houses, and the sure sign of wealthy people, lots of broken car window glass along the pavements (the Break the Window of the BMW and Steal Everything from Inside it syndrome). From here, we had a superb view of the port of Luanda, but we were warned not to take any photos of it, as it is considered to be a security risk if someone such as I should happen to have any snap shots of mountains of containers and lots of rusty ships… oh well……

Anyhow, there were about 50 of us, spread over some 25 huge 4×4’s, and after a short lecture beside the road about what we were going to see…… Off we headed, in a most imposing convoy.

It would have made the Mayor of London happy to have seen us, all those 2 ton SUV’s roaring along a perfectly good road. Oh well, you are nothing around here if you don’t have a monstrous 4×4.

We were heading north of Luanda, to a part of Angola that neither Lotty or I have yet seen, so we were very curious about what it would look like. It turned out to be flat….extremely flat, which is one reason there is oil to be found there… the land there is made up of sedimentary rocks, which are soft, and thus weather easily, unlike the granite which makes up about 90% of Africa (We were told all of this by the guy organising the trip).

Anyhow, we rumbled along happily in our convoy, causing people in the various villages and small towns we went through to wonder what the hell was going on, reasonably enough…. we were the event of the day for a lot of them, I reckon.

After a while, we stopped at a bridge over one of the regions main rivers to admire the view across the flat country to the mountains in the distance, but were warned not to stray too far from the cars, owing to the recently discovered presence of landmines all around this bridge (I was worried about how they had discovered them!) We sort of stood nervously around, taking photos of each other for a while, whilst the leader of our intrepid group told us a wee bit of war history, relating to this bridge and road. It seems that owing to the marshy quality of the land in this part of Angola, the only way for tanks to get across it was via this road and bridge. As the enemy (FNLA) neared this bridge, the gallant defenders of Luanda (MPLA) had posted a whole group of Stalin Organs (Multiple rocket launchers mounted on trucks) on top of a nearby ridge with the intention of blowing the FLNA tanks and soldiers to hell and back as they neared this bridge along the road. However, there was one problem… No one had a clue how to use the things!

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Woodford Folk Festival – I Clean Lavatories

A couple of weeks ago Lotty and I spent a strange week working as volunteers at the Woodford Folk Festival, the largest such festival in Australia. We were two vollies (as they are called here in Australia), among about 3000 others all of whom work their little butts off to make this festival happen.

To be honest, neither Lotty nor I have any great interest in folk music, but many of our friends have worked in this festival for years and had told us it was great fun, and anyhow, it seemed to us to be an essential part of our education in living in Oz, so we signed up as soon as it was possible – about 6 months before the actual festival occurs.

One signs on via the web, and all manner of information is required from prospective vollies, among which is the burning question of what sort of work does one wish to do in the festival. This is accompanied by an imposing list of possible areas of work – publicity, stage hand, selling stuff and so on – we had no idea what we might best do, so we simply selected the “do anything” button, and sat back to wait and see what would happen next.

What happened next was an extremely enthusiastic email from a bloke called Alan who would be our chief for the festival, as we had been placed in one of his teams and would be glorying in the title of S-Bend Warriors. This meant that we would be one of many teams of Inter-galactic S-Bend Warriors who would be charged with cleaning and provisioning a load of showers/lavatories in one of the many camping areas in the festival.

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Life On The Rock And Roll Road – Part 2

On another occasion, also on the Traffic tour, but down in the south of Italy we ran into another curious phenomena of those days for the first time, the Rioting Maoists of Italy

In general Italy is a country that I am rather fond of, but as place for us to work it was really scary at that time. The Mafia controlled all pop concerts in Italy back then – and perhaps still do for all I know, and there were a large number of young people, who described themselves as Maoists (Not sure why), who felt that all such concerts should be free.. Certain lack of understanding of economics there I felt, but that is what they felt strongly about.

Anyway, this manifested itself in a sort of pre-arranged and orchestrated riot at all pop concerts in Italy at that time. So we would turn up at the venue, and the Italian Riot Police would already be there with their riot gear, armoured cars, water cannon and so on, and would be busy setting up huge fences around the venue. In due time the “Maoists” would start to gather, with their face masks, helmets and banners….

Mostly the riots took place outside the venue, as the cops managed to keep the kids away more or less. But in Naples it really got out of hand, and as the concert was moving nicely along, suddenly tear gas grenades started bursting in the hall, and as one, the entire audience whipped out gas masks, put them on and sat back to enjoy the rest of the concert. We on the other hand were not so well prepared, and had to carry on with streaming eyes and noses as the place filled up with tear gas.

Not easy.

After a bit there were a couple of huge explosions outside, shortly followed by a number of rioters rushing onto the stage, closely followed by riot cops armed with short rifles, who proceeded to beat the hell out of the kids with their rifle butts, right beside poor Stevie Winwood who was attempting to sing….

The unconscious kids were dragged off by the cops and we simply carried on….. Had no choice really.

We later discovered that the explosions were two car bombs the rioters let off outside….

Life on the road for a roadie was never dull.

Share with us:

Do you have any such road stories you would like to share with us here? Do write about them and send it to me,and I shall post it.