Planet Stanford

With a few hours to kill before my flight to London departed and not wanting to kick my heels around San Francisco airport I took the decision on the spur of the moment get off 101 and take a look at Stanford University.

I had heard rumours about an alternate, parallel world existing and wanted to see if they were actually true.

On planet Stanford apparently only the rich, beautiful and super smart are allowed in and I wanted to see it for myself.

Almost immediately after leaving the highway it was confirmed to me. I found myself driving up a tree lined road surrounded by manicured lawns and bubbling fountains. Ahead of me sat a low rise Spanish hacienda, squat, resplendent and seriously wealthy.

The Californian sun glinted through the leaves. The birds sang songs that only happy well fed and groomed birds can. Most birds sound desperate. Sodden Scottish crows are fucking miserable. 

A Stanford sparrow could lead a bel-canto opera.

I parked my car in a pristine carpark on campus and climbed out dressed appropriately for 15hours of travel; 7 year old shorts, t-shirt and flip flops.

On the greenest grass you have ever seen sturdy handsome young men threw small rugby balls between them. Studious pretty bespectacled young women sat cross legged under pine trees reading poetry and groups of teenagers quietly debated 17^th century Hungarian politics.

Even the air was cleaner. It was as if the dirt and grime of Highway 101 only a 5minute drive away couldn’t break through the invisible force field protecting the Stanford idyll.

I stood a safe distance away. I was still jet lagged, smoking and drinking polystyrene coffee.

I was hiding.

No one smokes on planet Stanford and the few who looked in my direction gave me the sort of look normally reserved for lepers with child fiddling tendencies.

I peered into their chino and polo shirt filled perfect lives. I was a voyeur and stayed only for the time it took to smoke one cigarette.  I felt so out of place it was unsettling.

Stomping out the cigarette on the pristine tarmac I climbed back into my budget hire car and re-joined the dust, dirt and strip malls of 101.

Planet Stanford offered me nothing other than confirming its existence and making me feel grubby, poor and unhealthy.

But I’m not that unhealthy or even that grubby. I might have been skint in comparison but really I’m just a normal person with pretty much average everything.

Looking back on that moment now I can see it for what it was.

Those twatty, cheesy, happy clappy, arm and hammer, cleverer than you will ever be kids were the freaks, not me. So there that’s that.

As I grew up everyone I knew, who happened to think they were in a position to give me advice, would tell me fitting in wasn’t the way to go.

Stand out from the crowd. 

Don’t be a sheep. 

Lemmings are the stupid ones.

If Colin jumped off the bridge would you do the same?

Well no. I wouldn’t jump off the bridge but I might laugh with him at a drawing he just did of a penis on Shirley’s school jotter.  

I couldn’t then, and still can’t for that matter see the parallel that was always drawn between me getting into trouble by joining in with someone else’s silly prank and jumping to a horrible icy watery death. But they were the grown ups so they must know best.

So the wise advice I received was to not follow the crowd and make my own, unique way in the world. 

Sage advice indeed but it never really took into account the most immediate real world issues which in doing so this would have presented me:

• People who stood out got punched, bullied and ended up with penises drawn on their school books.
• People who stood out generally had no friends.
• People who stood out generally were poor and had toast breath.

So I didn’t. I did my utmost to blend into the middle and kept saying no I wouldn’t jump off the bridge whilst staring at my shoes.

I hid behind the crowd clutching onto the median pole and watched from a safe distance as other less fortunate ones got wedgied. It was a survival technique which served me well.

But of course in the long run, the spekky kid with permanent marker water vole whiskers drawn onto his face ends up as David Bowie. The poor kid with a plastic Tesco’s school bag ends up as Morrissey or Jon Bon Jovi. 

They are the ones who end up with more girls and money than they can handle. And this is how it should be. The world is doing the right thing when this happens.

Its Karma working properly.

Getting lost in the crowd isn’t so bad either though. If I was an Impala sauntering through the savannah I would make sure I was in the middle. It’s a guarantee of safety. The odd weird one jumping around doing handstands to impress the girls on the periphery might look cooler. He might even get more interest from the girl Impalas (Impala-esses?)  but I guarantee I will be having the last laugh as a pride of lions chew on his ears.

In my world I know it means I will never be the first to find Eldorado but it does mean I will survive long enough to visit it some time later as a tourist. And with a handy audio guide rather than a nasty dose of malaria.

How all this is linked to the beautiful freakish people of Stanford I honestly don’t know. On one hand I was trying to make them out to be the oddballs and on the other they seem to be the epitome of what is considered in khaki wearing American wholesome and good looking.

I guess it’s all relative, in Stanford I stood out. I was the odd one out just waiting to have my head shoved down a toilet. In another environment I am as invisible as they come.

So my advice for what it’s worth is to blend in.

Only stand out if you are absolutely firmly 100% confident of your ground. Be bloody sure there are no lions around before you start your front leg hopping show. Make sure you can actually sing before climbing on the x-factor stage and be really sure of your peeing ability before challenging John ‘Pneumatic’ McPhee to a highest up the wall competition.

Be quiet, keep your head down and don’t shout a lot.

You might not get groupies, drugs or the attention of a bunch of in-season Impalas but that’s ok, you will also survive. Leave the rest to the Sid Viciouses, Jim Morrisons, Kurt Cobains or Indiana Joneses of this world.

They are better at it, much better looking and you can always watch them on telly or read about them in the newspaper from the safety of a warm comfortable magnolia life.

Or, ignore everything I have just said. Stand out, be seriously cool and have a lot of fun.

Just don’t do a header off a bridge because Colin did. 

That would be stupid.

Neeps & Tatties

October is nearly gone.

The weather is fast turning dreich. Snow is visible on some of the lower alpine peaks. Winter tires are being fitted, skis are being cleaned of dead spider’s webs and the whole countryside around me is peppered with large piles of dirty looking root vegetables.

Everywhere I look they are there. Sitting quietly and unobtrusively beside a road. A muddy war zone behind them which was until very recently a pretty field sits testament to uprooting horror they have endured over the last few weeks.

I for one look forward to lathering salty butter on some freshly harvested baked spuds but if October is the time for the potato harvest then how can I still eat chips, wedges, mash or roasters in July?

If I buy a bag from the local supermarket, within a week or so they either start getting soft and squishy or start growing creepy green tentacled feet. Is there a potato preserving trick I am missing or are there other secret things going on behind the scenes which facilitates this modern miracle?

Are they flown in from some poor southern hemisphere third world country leaving the locals to starve? Is there some fiendish scientific group from Belgium creating non October sourced tatties with chemicals and tested on Beagles drugs?

I honestly don’t know the answer to this, and given the answer is most likely out there very easy to find Google, I also clearly don’t care too much about it.

I get my creamy mash every month of the year if I want so why should I care where it comes from or if its loaded with chemicals or other such preservatives?

I don’t but the other common thing about October is the amount of children wrapped up and playing in the streets. October brings with it the October holidays. It seems only a few sleeps since the Summer holidays drew to a close and I’m pretty sure only the blink of an eye before they are breaking for Christmas, then half term, then Easter and I think you get my point. 

All in, by my rough and ready reckoning, it tots up to 13 weeks off school.

As a child, I would long for the moment the school bell would ring and the long endless summer would begin. We would run out throwing books in the air and start a spontaneous song and dance routine just to show how gleefully happy we were. The teachers would stand and watch, shaking their heads, smoking and planning a summer of hippy gatherings or union mischievousness.

I could be wrong but I understood that the October holidays were specifically there to help with the aforementioned root vegetable harvest. I'm so old that I actually picked potatoes during the October holidays. This was in the dim and distant past before they invented a machine to do it.

When most countries were agricultural societies the extra labour from school kids was required to deal with the peak harvest times and thus, October holidays and Summer holidays were invented. The other holidays – Christmas, Easter, are obviously there for other reasons. I have no idea at all about half term.

So if my chips are able to reach my plate without the assistance of child labour then why do we still maintain an agricultural cadence for our school holidays?

The vast majority of working parents don’t work in agriculture. 

The vast majority of working parents don’t get 13 weeks holiday a year so there appears to be a huge gulf between society and the current schooling system.

This issue exists in most countries. The UK and Switzerland are not alone with this and I don’t understand why.

Michael Gove, the current Education secretary for the UK, proposed earlier this year to try to take some steps towards fixing this and was torn to shreds by the National Union of Teachers. The basic thrust of his argument was that the agricultural based holiday schedule had no place in a modern Britain and he wanted to change it.

From what I managed to pick out from the hefty smelly lumps of vitriol thrown back at him is that the agricultural link has been debunked. One argument I saw on a teachers website told me that the longer holidays were a reflection of the standing of teachers in society – i.e. a reward for being a professional. 

And back in 1863 this was considered a valid argument.

I have seen nothing which discusses the effect of longer or shorter time in school on children. What I would like to know is if we reduced the school holidays to say, 25 days a year, would a child’s brain explode from all that extra learning. Would familial structures as we know it melt away? Would we create a generation of geniuses or just dull boring people? Would crime go down? Or up?

And would teachers be dropping from exhaustion having to work the same amount of time as the rest of the population?

What would really happen? 

That is aside from allowing working parents to not have to scrabble around finding childcare to cover the weeks when they still have to work.

I would contend nothing. 

Well nothing apart from a Thatcher-esq confrontation with the NUT that is.

I get 25 days holiday a year.

I work from about 8.30am till whenever I decide to stop in the evening. Sometimes whole weekends are lost. I am not complaining. This is my choice. I could simply choose to not do this and I am fairly compensated for the intrusive nature of my work. Most professional people I know work in a fairly similar way.

I don’t know any teachers though.

In the run up to the 2013 summer holidays my older son told me he wasn’t bothering to go to school for the last week of term. This was because they just sat in class playing games or watching films. When I questioned this with his step-father and mother they essentially confirmed this telling me his time would be better served helping out at home. I couldn’t agree more if this is what happens in school as they ramp down after the three weeks of hard study since Easter but I cant say I’m not concerned.

Surprisingly I have a great deal of respect for teachers. They do a job I couldn’t. The thought of trying to educate a room full of sulky shoe gazing smelly teenagers is one of my many versions of hell. My latter years in the British school system were harpooned by the long lasting and bitter teachers strikes and I know this has slanted my view on the role unions play in general. Since then I have had many interactions with unions through my day job and the view formed 28 years ago hasn’t changed much over the years.

I still have a great deal of respect for the job teachers do though.

What I have serious issues with is the militant unhelpful lazy arsed unionistic blocking of anything which might somewhat resemble change. And the bloody complaining.

So here is the Mike Shanks 3 point plan to change this immediately;

1. Stop complaining about any out of hours work required. Everyone else does it.

2. Burn your union membership card.

3. Cut the school holidays in half.

The benefits would be multiple:

1. People would stop moaning about teachers. Myself included.
2. You could quite justifiably ask for more money.
3. The extra time could be used to teach children other less academic stuff like sports or culture.
4. There could be classes on how work in the real world really is (note; probably best to get outside help in for this one)
5. There would be significant savings for working families on childcare.
6. Families could all take holidays at the same time.
7. Crime would drop. Probably.
8. Children would most likely leave school with a much higher standard of education. 

I can’t think of anyone who would lose out in this alternate crazy world.

Its a win, win, win solution and should be implemented immediately.

And as an added bonus it will have no impact whatsoever on the all year round supply of genetically modified mashed tatties or neeps from Bora Bora.

So there.

Choose wisely Agnieska

I consider myself Scottish and that’s because I am Scottish.

I was born there and so was my dad which in most person’s books, including my own, is the measure of nationality. 

I can thus justifiably wear the kilt, enjoy haggis, drink more than is considered sensible, eat seriously unhealthy food and take the average European life expectancy, subtract ten years, before applying it to myself.

Yes I’m a proper Scotsman and think everyone would agree with this.

My mother is English though.

Proper English that is. Not a soft southern Oxbridge version, no the Barnsley, pit-mining, mushy pea eating Yorkshire English.

And this has always presented me with a small problem. Scotsmen are supposed to dislike the English, it’s in our DNA. So logically if I am to be a true Scotsman I should dislike my mum.

But of course I don’t dislike my mum, that would be stupid. Disliking her would have meant I would have missed out on all sorts of good stuff growing up, not least Yorkshire puddings and Rhubarb crumble. I like my mum a lot and so I also like the English.

There I have said it.

I also like Germans, Swedish, Italians and the Spanish. The French are another matter altogether but I don’t need to explain why.

Most of the time my collaboration with our southern girly soft neighbours isn’t a problem. I can keep it firmly in the closet. Football matches can sometimes presents a small issue though i.e. what do I do when 40,000 men are urging me to ‘stand up if you hate the English’?  I normally just stay seated and hope it quickly moves on to singing about the referee’s mothers penchant for goat sex.

If me admitting to having a fondness for the auld enemy wasn’t enough how about the fact that I am happy to support England during any major football tournament where Scotland isn’t present. Which as we know is all of them.

I also vote conservative.

Still consider me Scottish?

As a side note on my father’s side my grandmother comes from Bettyhill along the northern coast of Scotland. Her side of the family are dark skinned, Latino types. My father is, my sister is and I am to a slightly lessor degree.

Apart from being a very pretty village in the middle of nowhere legend has it that Bettyhill is also where some of the survivors of the Spanish armada made it ashore back in 1588. I therefore like to believe in some tight trousered romantic fantasy with my very distant ancestors being Spanish conquistadores. In this fantasy my great, great, great, great, great, great granddad rode his horse bolt upright. He wore a colourful feathered hat and had a beef burrito shoved down his painfully tight trousers as he galloped through South America slaughtering natives and stealing their gold.

But regardless of my ancestry, in terms of next year’s referendum on independence I am not considered Scottish.

I don’t live there so am not eligible to vote no matter how much tartan I wear or shortbread I eat. I sort of understand this. I have just outlined the case for me being Scottish but this is only my definition. It’s how I feel but where do you draw the line? If it was everyone who thinks of themselves as Scottish got the vote, there would be a lot of rotund Americans queuing up at the polling stations along with myself. 

So I get it.

The whole UK is a country of mongrels anyway if you go far enough back.

I can’t vote but if I was Agnieska from Poland enjoying her gap year working in a bar in Edinburgh how would I vote?

What’s out there to help me decide on what is probably one of the most important votes in the countries history?

And this is the whole point of the blog, there is nothing or at least nothing I have seen.

Well that’s not true, I will rephrase that, there is nothing of any substance to befit such an important decision. All I see is scaremongering on both sides.

Hastily thrown together you tube quality videos either backed by doom and gloom music (the no campaign) or stirring Braveheart type music (the yes campaign). Each are very high on rhetoric and imagery but anorexically thin when it comes to real hard facts. It seems as if both sides have decided the electorate are not capable of understanding the fiscal, administrative or other dull real world implications of such a divorce.

This is either horribly patronising or more worrying, both parties actually don’t know the real implications.

On the flip side of the discussion are my good buddies the English. Given the breakup of the United Kingdom has as much implications on them as it has on the Scottish surely they should have a say in it and a vote?

The counter argument here is that if one side of a marriage wants a divorce then it really doesn’t matter if the other doesn’t does it?

I don’t think this argument is true though. Given the amount of Scottish living in England and non-Scottish in Scotland surely it should be the decision of the majority of the whole country. Country in this case being the United Kingdom?

Anyhow regardless of the defined electorate the debate needs to start. Now and properly. We need to have a sober, factual debate. We need the soap boxes to be dusted off and we need independently funded and conducted research. We need decisions to be made and explained on fiscal policy, currency, interest rates, infrastructure, country/offshore boundaries, trident and a long list of other dull but very important things.

Without it the decision will be taken on a whipped up to a frenzy fear of the unknown or worse still some stupid romantic notion of a Scotland which hasn’t existed since Mel Gibson or a short gay Italian was running around the hills in a dress and make up.

For what it’s worth, my opinion is that I don’t want to have to apply for a Scottish passport and I’m not sure even if I would get one.

I also don’t understand how independence can be truly had if the currency is pegged to another country’s. I don’t know how defence would work. I don’t know how realistically we can rid our country of those nasty nuclear subs without giving England a serious headache. Do we really want to piss off England for that matter? Probably not. I don’t know how much the infrastructure of running a country would cost and I am not even sure if the offshore boundaries have been agreed. Who really owns the North Sea and its oil? What about the Queen? And the list goes on.

I sincerely hope before next September the list of unknown elements is reduced to a very small list. If not the arguments will be based on nothing more than the unfounded opinions of a few politicians. And I for one don’t want the future of my country (yes I still consider it my country) to be decided on the emotionally charged rhetoric from a cohort of individuals who have not really excelled in the trustworthy stakes in recent times. This applies to all colours of the political spectrum.

Get rid of the music, the bagpipes, the 1966/football based silly vitriol. Get rid of the comparisons with Norway, the voice overs by Sean Connery and the shots of Andy Murray holding a trophy above his head.  

Get rid of it all and get a proper debate going. Get lots of them going. Truly understand the real implications and then and only then can Agnieska take an informed decision.

But not me - cos I’m not Scottish enough.