Birth of a Blog (by email)

(Me) ‘I need to write a Blog for the next Newsletter but I haven’t been provoked into purple prose by student decisions this week. So over the weekend, maybe something about gardening as a metaphor for tending children.’

(Editor of Newsletter) ‘There’s a great extended metaphor in ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Othello’ about gardening. Doesn’t Iago tell us if we plant weeds, we will reap weeds or something? It will be a great topic for a Blog.’

‘Yes and Ophelia witters on in her scary, pastoral way about, ‘There's rosemary, that's for remembrance…and there is pansies, that's for thoughts.’

‘Drippy Ophelia goes to DEFCON 5 when Hamlet has a little joke with her about a nunnery. The fact that she gets upset with loser Hamlet enough to drown herself tells you something about her inherent lack of nous.’

‘IMHO, some Shakespearean heroines just have no sense of humour – they go all feminist on you just when you are deciding on important male things like whether to kill your Royal Scottish Banker, burn the Turkish fleet, perform invasive surgery to reclaim 0.453592 kilos of flesh or divide your kingdom into three Kantons. But as Shakespeare could only write about flowers, toads and weeds and not, say, about garden strimmers going melt down I might have a small advantage.’

‘Contemplating strimmers is far more exciting than contemplating life and death.’

Ok, I’ll start with something like…
Cutting the grass was a job I had put off because it was so hot, around 34 degrees C at about 5.30 in the afternoon and it now seemed almost knee high to my English ‘lawn-as-liquid-emerald’ eye. I started to strim an area somehow full of ‘noisome weeds…things rank and gross in nature’ (but here young Will was, I’m afraid, talking about Denmark) ‘…which without profit suck The soil's fertility from wholesome flowers.’ Until, that is, I noticed that the strimmer I had bought last year to suck the noisome weeds from our soil's fertility, on the advice of a professional I might add, had become totally ineffective. It was getting meltdown hot. It was starting to make odd noises. And it was issuing acrid, dark grey smoke. Like me last week in class. Let me explain…

An assessed assignment was due in to me at the start of class after a two week lead-in, and so, again, the owners of a chorus of waving hands (and some not bothering to do that traditional classroom semiotic cue) told me, with authoritative finality, that they couldn’t hand it in ‘because the school printer has jammed’/ ‘our printer ran out of ink’/ ‘the school’s email system bounces my mail’/ ‘the disc got wiped’/ ‘I can’t access my account’/ ‘there wasn’t a free computer at break time’/ ‘my computer crashed’/ ‘the document’s been corrupted’/ ‘it’s here on my memory stick’/ it's the browser'/'there’s a fault with Windows 7’ - all ending with ‘ok?’ stated not really as a question but a fact to be accepted, ok?

‘No!’ I replied. ‘It is not ‘ok’! It is definitely not ‘OK’! NOT!!! ... OK?!?? The IB, the ICS, I, the known universe, simply do not accept lame IT malfunction statements as excuses for failing to…etc.’’ Pretty loud this, odd noises crescendo con brio growing to fortississimo grandioso. And then melt down with acrid, dark grey smoke …’