Author: Benjamin Barnabas

Omaha Beach: Battlefield Forever?

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

It’s easy to ask yourself why you’re bunkered down in a hostel when you’re at the point on your life where you can afford a little comfort here and there. But I stand by my decision: hostels are a fantastic way to meet people from all walks of life. And that’s what travel is all about, right?

I got talking to Gavin from Utah last night – the first American from a state that isn’t Cali or Texas that I’ve met in a long time (those two states pump out travelers like there’s no tomorrow). To have an American perspective here in Normandy was more than I could have asked for, and Ana from Austria provided a Germanic point of view – so I really scored a hat trick here!

Over dinner last night the three of us decided to check out the landing beaches today. Gavin had already booked himself onto an organised tour, but I’m nothing if not stubborn when it comes to planning my own affairs, so Ana and I improvised our own plan of attack, starting at Pointe du Hoc.

Most of Omaha Beach – one of the main landing zones for US troops during the D-Day landings – has reverted to its pre-war status as a pleasure beach, so it’s important to visit a site like Pointe du Hoc to really get a feel for how things were. The promontory is strewn with craters caused by Allied shells, some so deep you can stand in the centre of them and still be more than a head below ground. It’s hard to take it all in at once: the scarred, lunar landscape overgrown with tall grass and summer flowers, with pipits and wagtails and warblers singing their hearts out. In a cavity in one of the old gun mounts, a blackbird stood washing itself, and away to the east the mournful cries of a large colony of kittiwakes. I wonder how much of this vanished when the clouds of earth came down here, all those years ago.

The bunkers are eerie. No other word for it. They’re cavernous on the inside, with a lot more rooms than you think at first. Some of them have marks in the rear wall that can only be from stray bullets fired directly through the opening. You try not to imagine how they got there. And then there’s the coils of barbed wire that ring the cliff edge, rusted from years of exposure to the salted wind. You can’t help but take your hat off to the US Rangers for not only coming ashore under heavy fire but scaling a vertical cliff-face before launching their assault.

From Pointe du Hoc we found a track along the cliffs to take us back to Omaha Beach. It’s completely invisible on Google Maps, but reason told me there would surely be such a path, and as luck would have it, there is: a relatively new cycle track that starts at the Pointe du Hoc car park and follows the coast all the way to the beach at Vierville-sur-Mer.

It’s clearly a popular route with the locals, and there were plenty of cyclists out and about, from hobbyist Dutchmen clad in Lycra to families of sporty-looking Germans – and, of course, your classic stately monsieur paying no heed to aerodynamics in his beige jacket and jeans. We passed him at least twice (did he lap us? I think he lapped us…).

Omaha Beach was pretty busy when we got there some two hours after leaving Pointe du Hoc. Paddle boarders, bathers and dogs plied the shallows between the beach and the sandbar. Children built sandcastles and dug bunkers of their own, while parents leafed through this or that summer book. If you squinted down the coast you could almost imagine the many thousands of troops who landed on this beach nearly eighty years ago, but I get the feeling that memory is fading further and further into the distance. The tour guides bussing up and down the coast road in WW2-era jeeps look more whimsical than reverential, like taking a ride in a sedan chair. Gavin said he thought it a shame that it hadn’t been preserved more like the battlefield that it was. I’m not so sure. I think the regeneration of a battlefield is part of the healing process. This is, also, France, and having borne the brunt of the fighting in not one but two world wars in the last century – not to mention their occupation by the Nazi regime – they may well want to move on.

In any event, I wasn’t averse to a swim in the bloody waters of Omaha, if only to say I’d done it. After a two-hour hike in the sun along the cliffs, it was definitely the right thing to do. The heatwave might be over, but it’s still hot enough to dry off in a matter of minutes, so I had no concerns about swimming out to the sandbar and beyond for a bit. I’m not the best swimmer, but God, I’ve missed being in the water. It’s a pain living so near the coast and yet so far.

I didn’t think about the history as I stepped into the water. The infamous opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan didn’t flash across my eyes. I just waded in up to my waist and kicked off into the murk. As the poppies that grow on the fields of the Somme have become a symbol of remembrance, I think it’s only fair that the spirits of Omaha are also allowed to depart in peace. Their heroic struggle will never be forgotten, but the land beneath our feet is not ours to sculpt, no matter how hard we try. It was here before us and will be here long after we’re gone. To see Omaha and to stand where they stood is enough, I think. And that’s my two cents on the matter. BB x

The Weatherman Cometh

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

It starts with an ominous grey sky to the west. The patchwork of fluffy summer clouds that have been insulating the leftover heat from three scorching days suddenly drops into a void the colour of slate, matching the roof of Bayeux’s cathedral almost exactly. A man in a beret watches the skies; a French family whose children seem to tan faster down the years savour their two-scoop ice creams; a boy and his mother walk their five beagles.

The first raindrop falls on the back of my neck like a kiss. Cool, swift, sweet. I’m sitting on a bollard, sketching. I wait for another. It lands on my arm. Almost instantly a third lands on my sketchbook, narrowly missing the moustachioed gentleman I’ve been sketching. I snap the book shut and watch the tourists scattering as the rain comes down: the French dignified beneath their umbrellas, the Dutch unflinching behind their cameras, the Americans in a mad dash. I think about taking a slow walk back to the hostel to savour the blessed rain after so many days of sun. I’m no further than a few feet around the corner of the cathedral when the heavens open.

I concede defeat to the tempest and join a small but growing crowd seeking shelter in the ancient stone doorway of Odo’s cathedral. The beagle-fanciers are here, along with a cross-section of Bayeux’s tourists. The rain comes down in sheets, hammering the cobblestones like a snare drum, and then a sudden flash and a rolling crash from the bass drum up in the sky. “On est bien dessous, hein?” remarks a Frenchwoman with short-cropped hair and round glasses. A boy with long eyelashes runs in and out of the rain in his yellow anorak, singing the chorus of the Wellerman shanty over and over.

A solitary American standing nearby stares at his phone in disbelief and growls. It sounds like he’s frustrated at a video game, but as he starts to verbalise his frustration it’s obvious he’s checking a weather app. “You’re kidding me, I’ve got to wait half an hour? God, you’ve got to be kidding me. Come on!”. He growls again. And again, louder this time. Some of the other tourists back away. “Hrrrrrnnnn!” The grunts and growls sound uncannily like a bull, giving fair warning before a charge. “END! NOW!!!” A couple of startled jumps from the crowd. By the looks on their faces, they’re weighing up whether to tell him it’s futile to attempt to command the skies, or whether it’s more futile still to reason with a man so blatantly trying to do just that. As a result, nobody intervenes, and Yankee Canute continues to defy the elements, bellowing at the clouds with increasing fury. “Hmmmmmhnnn, CAHM AAAAHN. When’s it gonna EHYAAND? GAAHD, I don’t have TAAM for this SHIIYET”.

The growling and grumbling is briefly cancelled out by another clash of thunder. “Hurry up, END, NOW! Cahm aaahhn, pleeez, end now! Why does it have to do this during the day, it should do this at night!” – (a fair point here, it was unbearably hot last night) – “Gahd, I don’t have time for this shit!”.

I slip inside the cathedral to escape the verbal artillery for just a moment. Bayeux’s cathedral survived intact the last time it came under fire from an American battery, so I figure it’s a safe bet. The muted thunder beyond the stone walls sounds strangely beautiful, and the grey skies filter through the stained glass in hopeful technicolour. The aisles are packed with a colourful array of tourists waiting out the storm; a phoney faithful glued to their phones, waiting to proceed on their pilgrimage to the crêperies outside – a combination of American flags and English spoken here signs were drawing in the crowds earlier. Staring down at the sightseers, a gargoyle pulls his mouth into a sneer, tongue out, deriding a thousand years of peasants, pilgrims and pensioners.

Outside, the rest of the gargoyles are doing their job, spewing rainwater from their mouths onto the streets below. For the first time they look complete, as though the gaping mouths were merely voids waiting to be turned into channels. A father points them out to his daughter, one hand gesturing, the other on her ear as our frustrated Yankee Canute swears blue murder at the sky.

The streets of Bayeux shine under the whitening sky. Umbrellas and ponchos have been magicked out of the air (and some straight out of souvenir shops). The Wednesday market is being dismantled. The fishmonger reclaims the last two skate wings and a Norman bookseller voices a quiet complaint to the heavens as he stacks his pulped collection of second-hand books: “aujourd’hui, précisement?”.

The storm has passed and the sun has returned with a milder temperament, his midsummer fury sated at last. I think I’ll take the rest of the day off. Find a park, do some reading, and clue up on the bus times for tomorrow’s expedition to the coast. A bientot! BB x

William the Conqueror’s Invincible Thigh

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I woke up on a boat this morning. That happened. Originally I was inclined to arrive later today and save on the expense of booking a cabin on the overnight ferry, but how often do you get to sleep on a boat? I’m glad I did – the long faces on most of the other foot passengers spoke volumes of a long, sleepless night on deck. I just caught the sunrise as I went up on deck, by which point we had almost arrived. No dolphins or whales on this journey – maybe next time!

Attention, mes amis! The ferry serves Caen, but it docks in at Ouistreham, a small village some 17km north of Caen. The shuttle bus into Caen was a little deceptive, since despite saying CAEN in block capitals it only went as far as passport control. The real bus stop for Caen (Ouistreham Port) is a few minutes’ walk into Ouistreham from the port. Easy enough to find but worth knowing. The price is (at the time of writing) 1.80€ for a one-way trip. It’s also completely incompatible with the early ferry, arriving some twenty minutes after it departs, so I guess I’ll have to shell out for a taxi on Friday.

Check-in at my hostel in Bayeux wasn’t open until 4 in the afternoon, so with that early start I had quite a few hours to kill – on what was gearing up to be the hottest day, not just of the year, but in living memory. It was already pushing thirty by 10 o’clock. I took refuge in the shadow of Caen’s Abbaye aux Hommes, where William the Conqueror was laid to rest a little under nine hundred years ago. I thought I’d picked a good spot, and I pretty much had the shade to myself for the best part of an hour until a window cleaner turned up in a monstrous contraption spitting and whirring and grinding and clunking. It took him and his two companions all of five minutes to calibrate the machine into the right spot so he could start cleaning, by which point all the office workers within had long since pulled down the blinds. Why a ladder couldn’t get the job done beats me.

William wasn’t in the Abbaye itself. The 5€ entry fee through the Hotel de Ville revealed a beautiful cloister and an interesting exhibition on the Allied liberation of Caen (after nearly levelling the place first), but no William. A mini-map within showed he was in the adjacent cathedral (go figure), which is free to enter.

But, as it turns out, he wasn’t there either. Well – not all of him. During the French Wars of Religion in the 1560s, the abbey was sacked and William’s bones were exhumed and scattered. Only his thigh bone remains, and that in itself a miracle: less than two hundred years after his tomb was restored, it was sacked again by the unscrupulous revolutionaries. Napoleon’s generation certainly didn’t seem to hold heritage in high regard: you may have heard of Bonaparte’s foiled attempt to blow up the Pyramids, but he also ordered the demolition of various ancient wonders in Spain, including the Alhambra. Even the mighty CID’s tomb was ransacked by Napoleon’s men, and though more of his bones ultimately came home than poor William, some of them traveled a very long way. One apparently ended up in Russia, where it must have been carried as a trophy of war by a soldier with an eye for relics…!

William’s tombstone reads ‘here lies the Invincible William the Conqueror’. Somewhere under that slab is an invincible thigh bone. It’s definitely more invincible than my thighs, which are feeling very vincible in this heat… if that’s even a word.

Outside, it’s sweltering. It felt like walking into a wall of heat. By the time I reached Bayeux around midday I didn’t have the energy to anything beyond finding a shaded spot and collapsing. Fortunately Bayeux was spared the inferno enveloping most of Europe, and a nearby nature reserve afforded both shade, a cooling river and a bird-hide to lay down in relative comfort. I must have passed out several times, I think.

*Alternative* sleeping arrangements

Thank God the worst of it is over. Rain is forecast for tomorrow. It couldn’t be more welcome. BB x

For Whom the Bell Tolls

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

My provisional license arrived in the post yesterday. My second, I should say, since after a very thorough summer holiday shakedown of the flat I’m convinced I must have accidentally thrown my first one out with the trash months ago. It’s put a major stopper on the whole learning-to-drive this summer by holding up the theory stage, but now that it’s here I’ve got no excuses. I should get booking.

But first, I’m getting out of here for a few days. I’m done with scrolling, hoping for contact from the outside world and turning off the WiFi for a bit of enforced internet downtime. Summer holidays just drag on and on when you have nothing to do, so I’ve decided to get out there and do something.

So here I am in the ferry terminal in Portsmouth, waiting for the 22.45 to Caen. The overhead telescreens keep alternating between the blue departures board and the vivid blue and yellow banner of Ukraine. The BBC News app remains focused on the heatwave, though the magic number 40 has disappeared from the headlines – “temperature tops 38C and likely to rise”. Five stories down, Tugendhat is eliminated from the running for Tory leader.

It certainly was hot today, but it didn’t feel much like that blisteringly hot summer holiday in Jerez almost twenty years ago. Despite the threat of 40°C heat, the breeze rolling in across the Weald kept the school grounds pleasantly cool. Even so, the signs that this has been an unseasonably hot few days are clear. When I went out to do a little reading in the morning, the summer soundscape was there: the echoing whack of a tennis racket, the ceaseless chatter of the house martins, grasshoppers chirping lazily in the meadow. A few hours later, the whole place was silent. Only a lone crow broke the stillness, and that was just the once.

I thought the train journey would be problematic due to the hysteria in the news, but despite the grovelling apologies over the Southern Rail tannoy, the train was only ten minutes late pulling into Portsmouth – which is remarkable, given how prone to delays they can be outside of a national crisis.

It’s a beautiful train ride, the route from Crawley to Portsmouth – one of those British rail journeys you should tick off the list, like the one from Darlington to Edinburgh. I never get tired of passing Arundel Castle and the fens at its feet. A childhood spent in and out of various salt-marshes around Kent has left me rather fond of their bleak serenity. Herons stalking the water’s edge. Egrets bedecking the bushes like so many plastic bags snagged on the branches.

Suddenly, an intensive greenhouse-farm appears, concealed from the outside by a thick growth of trees. A ravenous human hand clawing the depths of the earth to satisfy a hungry world. And then it’s gone, the train is hurtling forwards and I’m back in the marshes. I could be looking into the past or the future. I remember the fate of El Acebuche, its silent reeds swaying in the wind, and I’m not sure I want to.

The French family in the seats behind me must be headed for the ferry port, too. At least, I guess they are – I’ve caught the word “bateau” often enough. The children swap in and out of French and English without much of an accent overlay in either. The father speaks only on French, until he stops the ticket inspector to ask if she can turn off the air conditioning. “Don’t you think it’s rather nice, as it’s so hot out there?” – “For five minutes is nice, but it’s freezing.” – “If I were you I’d enjoy it.” At the next stop, the father gets out to soak up the sun. His daughter only just coaxes him back on as the doors close. Before he returns to his seat, he steps into the next carriage, remarks that it’s warmer, and moves. Within minutes the rest of his children have followed suit. It seems petty, but they have a point – the air con was turned up so high I had goose-flesh for half the journey.

I haven’t been to Portsmouth before. The last time I caught a ferry in this neck of the woods was from Southampton, but that was many years ago and we didn’t stop. I had four hours to kill and not a lot to do, so I picked a spot in Victoria Park and watched the world go by. The bells of St John’s sounded for seven. They sounded strangely mournful, but though I hummed the melody back a couple of times, I couldn’t work out why. Two handsome women wander by, their accent West African and intensely musical. Three kids hurtle past, one on a scooter, two on skateboards. One wears a red-and-black chequered shirt tied around his waist (did everybody own one of those shirts at some point?). A family of cockatiels screeched from an aviary in the centre of the park, stolen away from their home far beyond the sea to entertain the fancy of the British public. An ancient Chinese bell stands nearby and seems to serve a similar function, pilfered – it says so in almost as many words on the plinth – during a campaign in Taku. A cryptically-worded message daubed above reads “Perpetual Felicity Achieved” in austere capitals. A breeze blows and the bell moves a little, but it makes no noise. Some cage birds stop singing after a while, too.

As the sun sets, I head to the port. The heat and the hysteria have driven everyone indoors. The high street is virtually empty. Just a couple of kids with drinks they’re nowhere near old enough to drink and a level of delirium to match, and a weatherbeaten gentleman sleeping in the shadow entrance to an Ann Summers store. A grey mannequin in turquoise lingerie poses suggestively through the window at him, blowing a kiss. He wipes his nose, shakes his head violently and turns the page in the book he’s reading.

There’s plenty of folk driving here and there, but nobody on foot. For several minutes I feel like the only human in the city. A couple of Deliveroo me go by on their bikes. A bearded man in a red-and-black chequered shirt worn over his t-shirt, bent over almost double. I pass an outpost of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in a backstreet, and later, the house where Charles Dickens was born. Everything is shut. The high rasp of a motorbike going by, the evening heat and the strangeness of a new place… It almost feels like I’m abroad already.

But no. I’m still here in the terminal. Boarding starts in ten minutes, so I suppose I’d better close there. A demain, mes amis. France is calling! BB x

Heatwaves and Boogie Nights

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

“It was a good year for the vultures. The sun, unfettered by even the promise of cloud, laid waste to the land with biblical fury. Men cowered in the shadows of their houses, praying to a younger god for salvation, while their sheep and cattle died by the thousand. Crops perished, forests blazed in the night and rivers that had once thundered through the mountains ran dry. Only the Tagus, the mightiest of these, stayed its course through the parched land, though it too had suffered, to which the broad halo of white mud that lined its banks from east to west stood as a grim testament. The vast plains south of the great river, once several shades of green, lay barren and brown under the white sky, scarred with huge marble wounds that ran like veins across the earth. In the heat of the afternoon even the mountains seemed to melt, shimmering somewhere beyond the cloudless ether; and it was from these mountains that they came, in ones, twos and hundreds, scouring the world below for the dead and dying.”

I wrote that old opening paragraph to my novel a few years ago during the sweltering Covid summer, when temperatures soared before the school term was quite finished. Half the trouble with writing a book set in Spain is that it was an awful lot easier to write convincingly about the place when I was living out there – since moving back to this rock, my wellspring has dried up somewhat. In truth, I’ve only ever experienced a Spanish summer twice – despite spending almost three years living out there, I’ve always managed to avoid the tres meses de infierno – but the current flick of the claw from Thumberg’s nemesis is giving me a pretty good idea of what it might feel like.

The UK is on red alert. Heck, the radio even said this morning that there was to be a Cobra meeting about the high temperature crisis (things really have reached that kind of an extreme, it seems). It’s a balmy 26 degrees out there right now as I write, and the happy-clappy Christian camp have long since retreated indoors, taking their frisbees and their babies with them. All the forecasters are pointing to a record-breaking 40 degree high on Monday. The current record was set two years ago, with a garden in Cambridge registering 38.7 degrees. That seems absurd, but that’s where we are. The last time I was caught in temperatures that high I was living in Jordan, on the edge of the Syrian Desert, where one expects that kind of celestial fury in the summer months. Not here. Not in West Sussex.

Scorching afternoons aside, I’m enjoying my current routine. I’m up on my feet almost as soon as I’m awake, which is usually around six thirty (yes, even in the holidays – I’m a creature of habit). I’m up earlier (and faster) if I find myself on the sofa. That thing is a death trap – I don’t know what enchantment was cast upon it by its previous owners, but it lulls whoever sits on it to sleep in a matter of minutes. If I don’t have to make the shopping trek (an hour into town and another one back on foot), I get an hour and a half in the sun with a book on the ha-ha. I’m currently working through Hernan Diaz’ In the Distance. When I return, I’ll make myself some lunch and kill the hottest part of the day with a round of Age of Empires II (if I’m feeling uncaringly unproductive), which usually knocks out a couple of hours – especially if I do a little follow-up historical reading afterwards, as I often do. By four o’clock the sun is no longer dead overhead so I pick a different spot on the ha-ha facing the South Downs and get another hour of reading in. I usually get distracted in that spot and end up watching the world. The presence of a summer school right behind me doesn’t bother me overmuch. It’s very easy to forget they’re there when you’re engrossed in a good book, or a panorama as beautiful as the one I have on my doorstep. Sometimes there’s a red kite or two riding the thermals over the Weald and I lose myself in the moment. Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I’m somewhere else, like the shade of that special oak tree beyond the Puente del Ajoli on the Raya Real. And sometimes I just count the contrails. It’s a peaceful life. I’m grateful, really.

At the end of the day, after dinner, I retreat to the living room, put on some Soul, Funk or R’n’B and jam, with or without my liquid red bass guitar. I spent a good hour with my bass yesterday, to which the bandage on my thumb and the blister underneath will testify. I’m not much good at the bass, but I find it next to impossible not to get involved when I hear music I love, and I’m slowly starting to get the hang of my favourite bass riffs by ear. Always by ear. It’s the only way I know.

Last night I managed to get to grips with two of my all-time favourite basslines: I Need Your Lovin’ by Teena Marie and Till You Surrender by Rainbow Brown. I improvised around The Cardigans’ My Favourite Game and had an honest go at Billy Ocean’s Stay the Night. One day, hopefully, I’ll be good enough to nail the incredible slap bass in Ain’t We Funkin’ Now by The Brothers Johnson.

I can’t share my love for all things Soul and Funk with my students anymore on account of the colour of my skin. They say it’s not my place. But it remains my favourite music genre by far, and they can’t stop me listening to the music I love. It’s just a shame I have to be so selfish with something that really should be shared, not least of all on account of the power within.

Marvin. Tina. Stevie. Lou and Luther, Sam and Dave, and Aretha, Minnie and Michael. They’re in my ears most nights. But nothing and nobody can lift me out of a dark spot like the hardest working man in showbusiness, the Godfather of Soul, soul brother number one, Mister James Brown. If only I could have seen him live…! James was a living legend, and one of the few artists I know whose recorded work pales in comparison to his live shows. Any try-hard can stand in front of a microphone with a guitar and croon. James could move like lightning and his band hung on his every movement for their cues. I reminded myself of his mastery the other day by watching his performance at the T.A.M.I. Show back in ’63, when, in a fit of pique over being snubbed as the closing act in favour of the Rolling Stones, he and his Famous Flames blew the opposition out of the water with an up-tempo run of Out of Sight. That and his legendary mike-drop in Montreux almost twenty years later (check it out at the 4 minute mark).

The Trinity in the Mega Drawing (2017)

Forgive the fanboying. There are few things I love more in this world. I’d like to think that the sheer amount of time and love I’ve invested in my passion for Soul and Funk and its history over the years renders my taste in music sincerely reverential rather than appropriative. The way I see it, it’s steered me through the darkest waters in my life and always brought me back to the light, and I owe it to my old bandmaster Mr D who introduced me to that world. If I can share that light with somebody, even just one other person, I’ll have passed on the torch. Nothing so powerful and so precious should be preserved for enjoyment in private. That’s definitely not what James would have wanted.

Well, it looks like the sun is slowly starting to sink at last. Time to pick up where I left Håkan on the trail. Though the world is already blazing hot out there, keep the funk alive, y’all. BB x

Summer Ramble on a Ha-Ha

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Bastille Day. The temperatures hit 26 degrees Celsius this afternoon. The BBC Weather app is predicting a high of 34 on Tuesday. The folks on the radio are starting to use the words ‘ration’ and ‘hosepipe ban’. I sat outside on the south-facing ha-ha and stared out across the Weald towards the South Downs for about an hour. I brought a few books to read – four more than I actually needed, as is my habit – and spent about ten minutes “reading” the mega-drawing, reliving the memories recorded on that gargantuan scroll.

I saw a monk in the quiet garden sitting in silent contemplation and reminded myself how lucky I am to live and work where I do. Isolation does no wonders for the human condition, but there’s a reason enlightenment is rarely sought in the cities. Sometimes the key to more positive thinking is just to get outside for an hour or two, even if there is no destination in mind. I certainly feel a lot happier for it.

Over the forest to the south, I saw a pair of hobbies displaying. I haven’t seen such a thing in a long, long time. I’d forgotten what masters of the air they are. Little wonder they’re among the few predators capable of catching a swallow on the swing. They cut through the air like feathered lightning, making the hovering kestrel nearby look like one of Da Vinci’s clumsy flying machines by comparison.

A few minutes later, the white buzzard flapped into view. It wasn’t around for more than half a minute, before two crows sent it back the way it had come, back into the wooded dark of the Weald. A hat-trick of British birds of prey in as little as five minutes. Reminded me of a sunny June afternoon when I was a kid, when to my disbelief I clocked no fewer than six raptor species circling above the house at once: kestrel, buzzard, sparrowhawk, hobby, two red kites and a peregrine. To this day I have no idea how they all came to be in the same place at the same time. In Gibraltar, maybe, but not in Kent.

The race for Boris’ replacement is picking up momentum. My parents were quick to bat aside my guess that Sunak would take the throne, but the odds seem to be in his favour at the moment. I’m no political pundit, but I feel it’s worth recording these things from time to time. Since reading Philipp Blom’s Nature’s Mutiny last year (a collection of anecdotes documenting the Little Ice Age), I’m all the more convinced it’s important that those of us who spend our free moments writing make a point of logging the everyday. Who knows what it might tell future generations about the way we lived?

I’m getting itchy feet again. I think I might go on just the one *little* adventure before the summer is over, and I’m thinking it ought to be France – not least of all because of the relative ease of getting there by boat. It sounds like nothing less than chaos surrounding airlines at the moment, which are struggling to meet the logjam of two years’ worth of cancelled summer holidays when they haven’t yet recovered from the post-COVID staff shortages. I don’t plan on going far, but I have always wanted to see the Bayeux Tapestry, and one of the better things to come out of 2021/22 has been a rediscovery of my love for French, thanks to an especially heartwarming Year 7 class I had the pleasure to teach this year. I confess I wasn’t overly enthusiastic about going back to teaching two languages at the start of the year (after my experience teaching lower set Year 9 in my PGCE year), but these kids really turned it all around. So… Normandy? I’d better do some research, but… I’ve got to say, the opportunity to spend even a couple of days in a place of such historical importance… It’s dangerously tempting! BB x

For the Glory of Jellyfish

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Tuesday 12th July, 11.13am
Hassocks Station

I needed to get out. While it was ultimately my decision to come back south to my flat and cut myself off once again – and I stand by that decision – it’s all too easy to go stir crazy in here on my own. I was angling on getting out and seeing friends for a couple of days, but as my plans fell apart, I’ve had to take the reins myself. So I decided to strike out for the coast. Brighton always makes for good writing, that perfectly bizarre city.

It’s clearly a school trip day today. The train south from Three Bridges was absolutely rammed with saaf Landan kids in high-vis jackets, their beleaguered teachers sitting close at hand, identifiable for the throbbing veins in their temples if not by their lanyards. Standing room only. It’s kind of noisy in the gangway, so I pop my headphones on. The Spinners’ Rubberband Man cancels out some of the angrier verses the kids are throwing around from their phones. I don’t understand the unbridled rage in that kind of music, much less its magnetic appeal to kids. Give me the laidback fun of the seventies any day.

12.40pm
Brighton Palace Pier

Somehow it took me all of an hour to get from the station to the pier. Time slips through my fingers in a bookshop. It’s as though Waterstones operates in its own dimension. That could well be because I’ve become a lot more tactical when it comes to book-buying, taking the time to really get a flavour for a book before deciding to add it to my collection. As a general rule, any and all books on Spain (pre-20th century) go straight into the basket, but I’ve genuinely reached the stage now where if I don’t have it, it’s not worth having. There’s still a wealth of material out there in Spain in Spanish, but with Spain’s ludicrous stance on FBP, shopping for books over there is simply not economically viable. At the moment I’m trying to pick up my European reading challenge where I left off a few years ago, so I sought out a Ukrainian book to add to the collection today. I thought I was onto a winner with Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman – the forefather of Fiddler on the Roof – only it turns out, predictably, my mother already bought the book years ago. Still, no matter. That’s one more book I can feel better about giving away someday.

1.27pm
Brighton SeaLife Centre

Yes, I visited the aquarium. Don’t judge! When I was a kid I used to love going to aquariums – or the more ecologically-sound sealife centres, as they are so often called these days. Nausicaa across the Channel in Boulogne was a personal favourite, but Hastings’ SeaLife Centre came a very close second.

It was pretty much deserted. A large primary school group came in after me, but they never made it any further than the cafe housed in the original Victorian aquarium. I felt like a kid again and challenged myself to name the fish whose names I’d furiously memorised more than twenty years ago. For some crazy reason it’s all still there. From loach, tench and trout (easy mode), to snakelocks anemones, garden eels and corkwing, rainbow and cuckoo wrasse (standard) and on to pacu, Bloody Henrys and discus fish (hard mode). It’s a safe bet that the reason I had such a hard time learning anything in science class was because that part of my brain was stuffed full of animal trivia. If only biology had been about animals and not plant cell structure…! Who knows, I might have gone on to study it. As it is, I was bored stiff and let it go as soon as I could.

I stood and watched the turtles for quite a while. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a live sea turtle before. My god, they’re huge. Nature found a perfect recipe over 100 million years ago and decided ‘yep, that doesn’t need any more work’. Like sharks, turtles have been around for millions of years. Watch a turtle fly through the water and you’re reminded of how pathetically short our time on this planet has been by comparison. Only, these turtles looked a little stereotypic. One bit the other on one pass. Creatures can develop odd behaviours when they’re cooped up in small quarters. Maybe that’s a window into what’s happened to me in my flat this summer!

On to the jellies. I could have come here for the jellyfish alone. They’re absolutely mesmerising to watch in flight, pulsing slowly through the water, their hair-like tentacles trailing behind them. Another perfect life form that has seen millions of years of evolution come and go. Almost all sci-fi flicks imagine aliens from other planets as bipedal if not all-but human in appearance (Doctor Who and Star Wars are the prime examples), but if I were a betting man, I’d stake a fair amount on extra-terrestrials looking more like jellyfish than man. Isn’t it rather selfish of us to assume that ours is the perfect life form when turtles, sharks and jellyfish – hell, even cockroaches – have outlived us by millions of years? And on that note, I’d better clear out of here before I sell out mankind to the invading jellies faster than Kent Brockman.

2.58pm
Artists’ Beach

After nearly betraying humanity over a jellyfish and admiring the beautiful world beneath the waves for an hour, I promptly went outside, climbed the steps up to the palace pier and ate a battered fish with chips and vinegar. The irony was fortunately lost on the hoarse chippie vendor, who barely got the order numbers out in a grating voice. A group of girls next to me got their orders in after me, but somehow got their orders out first. £8.20 for fishcakes and chips seemed a bit steep compared to the £5.40 deal just 200 metres from the pier, but it was good quality, and since I barely managed to finish it, I didn’t have to wash it down with a tot of buyer’s remorse.

Brighton was packed with graduands this afternoon, red-faced and sweating in their full academic dress for the 28°C degree heat. If they opted for modesty, the other beach goers didn’t get the memo. British flesh on florid display, ranging from lobster-red to milk-white. A few lucky sightseers with bronze skin seemed to walk a little taller, but they were definitely in the minority. Lifeguards, street vendors and tramps made up the rest. Folk who have little choice but to soak up the sun.

Freeze frame. I pop the chip-box in the bin and look around – and really look. Yuppies in “gap-yah” pants and strappy tops. A lady in a wheelchair, and two women at the traffic lights who get to discussing behind their hands how she might have ended up there (the kind of curiosity my generation loves to hound out as aggression). Goth-types with nose rings, vape-sticks protruding from their fingers. On that note, cryptic vape ads everywhere (what on earth is the appeal?). A squadron of Korean cyclists suiting up on the sidewalk. A cormorant flying east along the coast. The indefatigable enthusiasm of the man selling rides on the motionless merry-go-round. A boy with what looks like rickets going by. The blonde girl in her thirties singing her heart out to a crowd of beachgoers enjoying a late lunch. Nobody is looking up at her.

3.35pm
Preston Park Station

The train home is much emptier, but I still walk the length of the train to find a carriage to myself. I pop the headphones back on as the train begins to pull away and Manu Dibango comes on. Sax City, Africadelic and Soul Makossa. Dibango was one of the victims of COVID two years ago. Like Marvin, James and Luther, that’s one more of my favourite artists who I’ll never get the chance to see live (or alive, for that matter).

During the Gospel Choir debacle, I spoke to a colleague and asked for their thoughts. They said they had thought a lot about the issue of music in a post-BLM world, and questioned even having been to a soul music gig as a white person. That messed with my head for months. It’s not that I don’t rate musicians who look like me, but give me a choice between Ed Sheeran and Fela and it’s Fela every time. Pop is catchy, but disco is eternal – it just keeps on giving, fifty years later. Folk is clever but Soul finds notes that folk just can’t. And highlife is surely a candidate for the most feel-good music genre on the planet. How can you deny yourself the chance to listen to such wonders on account of a feeling of awkwardness?

I’m all for better representation in the music industry. It needs it. I just hope we don’t end up carving ourselves up into islands where we can only listen to people who look like us, think like us, talk like us. And I mean that literally as well as musically. Social media is doing that already. It’s a dangerous path we’re treading, and I hope we can weather the storm that’s coming.

Would you look at that. I’m back to sermonising. I think I was doing better with committing acts of high treason for the conquering jellyfish. Time to go. Blppp blppp blpppp. BB x

That Smell

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Mum and Dad are away on holiday so I’ve gone up north to look after the house while they’re away. Living as far out as they do, I had to catch the bus this time, as the nearest train station is easily a few hours away on foot (with feet being the only reliable form of transport since neither my brother or I can drive).

Arriving in Lincolnshire sometimes feels like stepping back in time. It’s doubly noticeable coming up from Croydon, watching the diversity metronome swing violently to one side. When you live and work in such a cosmopolitan environment, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there are still great parts of this island that are – to take Wilfred Owen out of context – forever England. I think we all need reminding of that from time to time. A lot of us Southerners fall into the trap of thinking the rest of the country thinks like us. I still believe that’s how Brexit caught so many of us off-guard. We weren’t looking or listening hard enough to the folks north of the M25.

It’s been a while since I caught a Stagecoach bus. I used to ride them all the time when I was a teenager; but then, both my parents had full-time jobs, and Kent is pretty self-contained. So it was a trip down memory lane – sort of.

The guy sitting next to me falls asleep in seconds. He’s smartly dressed but his body odour is quite overpowering. Between his sweaty cologne and the leather-clad goth girl puffing sickeningly sweet clouds of vape smoke overhead in the seat in front, I’m reminded my sense of smell isn’t as awful as I always say it is.

Three lads sit with their feet up across one extra seat each at the back of the bus. There must be an unwritten rule that stakes out the rear of any vehicle as the sole dominion of teenage boys, because I’ve never seen any other setup on my travels. One of them is pissed about how there’s nothing to do where he lives, and how he knows nobody, and how not being able to drive doesn’t help. He could be voicing my own concerns, if I were really that bothered about settling for my own company. His mates tell him to come along on a night out, and if he doesn’t have friends out there, “fuckin’ make friends, mate”. A wingman’s life was never easier.

A man gets on at the prison gates just outside the city in matching grey trackies and a baseball hat that’s too small for his head. His eyes are large, dark and staring – it takes me too long to realise it’s his dilated pupils that give him that intense look. A blunt tucked behind his ear smoulders ever so slightly. Now the smell of wet grass (or fox, as I always assumed) mingles with the BO and the indiscernible fruit-something of the vape clouds. He cracks open a lager and the bus driver stops by a bin and tells him his booze needs to go in that bin, mate. You what, he says. That bin. Can’t drink on here. Roll-Up Man gets up – alright, jes gimme a minute – wanders over to the door and necks the entire can. A lady near the front applauds. He ain’t wastin’ that can! Roll-Up Man returns with hands up in mock surrender, or it could be triumph. It’s hard to tell.

Lord Vaper continues to drag on her death stick. Given that she’s the third passenger on the bus to ignore the no smoking sign, I wonder whether anyone can read, or whether they just don’t care.

The Marvel run continues tonight with Doctor Strange. Watched Civil War for the first time last night and actually really enjoyed it. Yeah, I know, I missed the hype of watching them as they came out, but the MCU truly belongs to the generation just after mine, I think. I grew up with Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and that remains the gold standard as far as superhero movies go. Perhaps I’ll have changed my tune by the time I get to Endgame. Somehow I doubt it. Like the Joker, I guess I just can’t let go of Batsy. BB x

P.S. I wanted to give the title of this post the full nod to Sonallah Ibrahim’s seminal 1966 novella, That Smell and Notes from Prison, but some references are just far too pretentious to shoehorn in – especially when it’s about a bus ride out of Lincoln City.

Sh!tsh@w: A Recovery Plan for a Rough Year

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Sunday 26th June, 12:47pm.
The Flat.

We’ve made it. Blimey, but I thought that year would never end. School years come and go in cycles, and I consider myself an extremely patient man, but this one has been particularly trying. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve come close to questioning my career on more than one occasion, and every time I’ve been pulled back up to the light by the trinity: the kids, the music and the torchlight of my ancestors. I’ve never been overly fond of the yawning hole in the year that is the summer holidays – I have a desperate need to be busy that two months puts a serious strain upon – but I did breathe an almighty sigh of relief when the clock struck twelve on Friday night. It’s just been one of those years.

When I look back, I can’t help but label my third year as a teacher as the year when everything went wrong. The year when all my endeavours came to ruin. Consequently, it’s also the year when hope has been even more important than ever – and hope, shapeless and mysterious, has ever been my polestar.

This year my Gospel Choir was disbanded, cancelled on the grounds that I, as a white man, was not the appropriate choice to run such a group. I conceded without a fight. It hurt, it hurt right down to the core of my soul to be told so openly that my efforts – and even my taste in music – were so wholly inappropriate. It wasn’t an attack on me by any standards, but my word, did I take the issue home! My head was spinning for weeks and I took some time out in Spain with my cousins to heal. What had happened flew in the face of everything I’d been taught by my various Gospel mentors over the years, and everybody I spoke to seemed baffled. For my career’s sake I briefly considered abandoning my attempts to dabble in music absolutely, and would have gone ahead were it not for the discovery that my great-grandparents were both musicians. I cannot let them down. It wouldn’t be right. I also owe it to the kids under my aegis to find a way, so that the last three years of hard work will not be in vain.

Rising from the ashes, my new a cappella group has been fun, and I hope the kids have enjoyed it, even if we’ve never been concert ready when the time came. The simple truth is that Gospel music, as well as being eye-opening and soul-enriching, is easy to learn. It’s meant to be, because it was never written with trained musicians in mind. By contrast, a cappella arrangements are impressive when done right, but hard to pull off, even when you have a group of semi-professionals. It pains me that my efforts to instil a genuine love of performing have yet to bear fruit with my current cohort, but the kids rock up each week with big smiles and they enjoy the music, and I guess that’s good enough for now.

December hit me with a one-two punch that nearly knocked me out cold. I wandered out of a five-year relationship and within twenty-four hours I had a head-cold that left me half-deaf – and later, more excruciatingly, under the maddening influence of diplacusis dysharmonica. The timing could hardly have been worse: first the Gospel fiasco left me questioning almost all my choices in music, and then the mother of all earaches made it physically impossible to listen to any kind of music whatsoever for all of two months. It felt like the world was conspiring to bring me down.

I wasn’t especially keen to admit it, but I’ve been in orbit ever since. I tried a couple of times to kindle the sparks of a relationship with somebody new, but my attempts sputtered and died like the fireworks in the rain, and I confess I’ve probably been too proud to bend the knee in full to the world of online dating purely on principle. So I’ve been a family man to my kids more than ever this year, giving them as much of my time as I can muster of an evening and finding opportunities to praise and guide wherever I can. They give me hope and I try to do the same for them. I’m convinced teaching is the best job in the world.

I’ve tried to be more supportive of my brother this year. He hasn’t chosen the easiest path, and there are few people in the world I look up to more. I’ve also kept up with my youngest cousin through our English classes every week, or at least the weeks where he doesn’t have an exam to revise for. Family means a lot to me, squaring well with my dreams of being the best dad ever someday, which is partly why being out of a relationship has been so disorienting. At least if there’s been one success this year, it’s been a closer connection to my kin. Maybe rediscovering the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness earlier in the year helped.

Finally, I know I can be a better teacher. I’ve done well by my kids this year, but I can improve. I know I can. I think all the knocks I took this year left me on one knee, still standing though not as strong as before. I reckon it’s about time I got up on two feet again.

So it’s time to plan ahead and set things in order. Two months of summer stretch ahead, and I’ve got plenty of things to do, starting today.

I’m going to get fit.
Fitness has never really interested me, but a healthier body can only prop up a healthier state of mind.

I’m going to cook for myself again.
I’ve taken advantage of being fed at school for too long. I used to love cooking when I lived for myself. It’s time to rediscover that joy.

I’m going to learn to drive. Finally.
It’s a milestone that I can’t ignore anymore, and I’m finally at the stage in my life where absolute freedom of mobility is starting to interest me. Even if I don’t pass my test this year, I need to make a start. Starting is always the hardest part.

I’m going to read more. And I mean read, not just say it and buy more books.
I’ve set myself a target of a chapter a day, whatever the book, in addition to at least one article.

I’m going to plan ahead.
I want my teaching to get better and better, so I’m going to dedicate some serious time to planning some fantastic teaching methods this summer.

I’m going to write again. Not just on here, but the book.
My journals have been with me to almost every lesson and on every school outing, but I’ve made little progress on the novel since the real teaching life began. And that’s criminal.

Last but not least, I’m going to get out and see the world.
Not traveling – I can’t justify having more than one holiday per year anymore, and I had my holiday at Easter. But I need to widen my circle of trust. I need to allow myself to meet others, and if I’m guarded about making that connection online, the only way to do it is to get out and about.

I’m no fan of coming up with action plans at work, but my future is counting on me to make this choice now. Melodrama aside, I could do with some change in my life. And that change starts today! BB x

COVID & The Classroom: Two Years Later

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

No two days are the same when you’re a teacher. It’s hackneyed, but it’s true: children are infinitely more changeable than tired and heavily programmed adults, whose desire to rebel and create has usually been all but eroded by the necessities of everyday life. That being said, I guess I expected at least a modicum of routine when I answered the call to become a teacher. How wrong I was… and what a couple of years it’s been!

Two years and two months ago (almost to the day) I remember sitting in my living room with my housemate with the radio on, listening to the Prime Minister’s national briefing. Perhaps you remember it – it was the one where he officially announced a national lockdown in the wake of a sudden surge of COVID-related deaths.

It’s eerie to think how little attention we paid to the scourge of the decade back then. You could certainly argue that when Trump called it the Chinese virus he was only echoing what a great many people were thinking at the time. When I left for my placement school in late February COVID was little more than a minor article concerning the city of Wuhan. When I came back to work three weeks later I had to reprimand a student for refusing to sit near a Chinese classmate. If you want to get a feel for how it felt back then, read John Christopher’s 1956 apocalyptic novella The Death of Grass. Without giving away too much of the plot, it centres around a disease which originates in China (where it may or may not have been engineered) which leads to the starvation and death of thousands of Asians, but does not cause any genuine panic in the West until it arrives on their doorstep a few months later. The parallels are more than a little alarming.

Then came Boris’ address to the nation and the closure of schools – more than a week after other businesses had been ordered to shut up shop. Our kids had already been sent home a few days prior, so I suppose it wasn’t entirely unexpected, yet all the same, I remember thinking we might just make it to the end of the week and the Easter holidays before the portcullis came down.

I was wrong.

For the rest of the summer, I taught my lessons online. Those of us who had been reluctant to shift our practice into the virtual world were given a violent kick into the future. Google Classrooms replaced real classrooms as we moved everything online: first to Google Hangouts, then to Google Meet. The constant low hubbub of the classroom vanished, to be replaced with the two-tone jingle of Google Meet’s “hand raise” feature.

Some students – perhaps at their parents’ request – kept their cameras on at all times, but most disappeared behind their initials or a selected profile picture of this or that image lifted from Google. I caught myself consciously staring out the window and trying to focus on objects in the middle distance as my eyes began to ache from the strain of staring at a screen all day. Exams that might have taken an hour to mark took all afternoon. I tried to keep an eye on all twenty-odd tabs I had open so I could monitor my students’ work, knowing full well that even in a real classroom I couldn’t possibly expect to teach a lesson whilst eyeballing every workbook simultaneously. Saturday school was cancelled, but by the time Saturday came around I only really had the energy to collapse.

As the summer drew to a close and some staff and students returned to the site for a phased return, I remained at my post on the other side of the south, giving mum moral support as she fought to keep her school alive and counting down the days until I could unplug from Google for good.

When we returned in September, it was to a school that had to learn to live with COVID. Social distancing put a definitive end to any interaction between year groups – and, by definition, sporting events and music (singing was outlawed anyway). Lessons were necessarily cut short because of the need to wipe desks down between classes. Students kept to their zones and teachers moved from place to place, as though we’d given the finger to Brexit and decided to follow the European model. The whiteboards were often unusable due to the constant application of hand sanitiser, and more than ever, I was teaching through PowerPoints and digital workbooks – and falling increasingly out of love with both as a teaching method.

Most of my friends who weren’t in teaching were either working from home or operating in new, post-Covid systems that had them in the office three days out of five. We didn’t see changes that drastic in teaching, to be honest, with most families calling for a return to normality for the sake of their children’s mental wellbeing. Be tolerant. Be understanding. So we plodded along, tolerant and understanding. Some people followed the rules about social distancing to the letter. Some didn’t. Invariably, where they didn’t, outbreaks followed.

And while we dealt with the outbreaks as they came – usually by sending classes or year groups home one at a time – we had to deal with an increase in power outages, too. For whatever reason, we were hit by a real spate of them as we hurtled into the second lockdown (and in a genuinely absurd divine prank, one has literally just hit as I was writing this… never mind hindsight, this is just plain spooky). Power cuts meant no internet, and no internet meant no lessons (or email, for that matter). So while “snow days” were forever killed off by the invention of remote learning, the common power cut took its place.

The second lockdown was more tedious than the first: stripped of its novelty, most of us were just waiting for the all-clear. And when we did return, there were so many things to keep an eye on. Which students were on RPDs (Remote Pupil Device) this week? Which ones weren’t (they needed work sent to them instead)? How did you balance your teaching to make sure the ones on the screen were getting your full attention, when the other twenty-odd sitting in the classroom also required the same?

Boarding was even more complicated. Over the course of the year I played teacher, counsellor, test-and-tracer, secretary, waiter, cook and delivery boy. I donned plastic gloves, apron and a face shield and took temperatures with a gun-shaped thermal detector. I took my isolators for walks – codenamed “fresh air” – after putting the others to bed, so there was no risk of them contaminating others. More than once I wondered what this boarding school malarkey would be like without all the myriad responsibilities that living with Covid thrust upon us all.

September 2022 began on a much more hopeful footing. Many of the previous year’s trials remained, such as the boarders’ test-to-fly hurdles and the itinerant disappearance of this or that student from the classroom (for a period of no fewer than 14 days – then 9, then 3). However, as winter turned to spring and a third national lockdown looked about as likely as a white Christmas, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. The jabs had done their job – or rather, the moral panic had abated with the knowledge that more than half the nation was now triple-vaccinated against the menace. Covid became a cold: more of a nuisance than a threat.

If truth be told, I’ve probably forgotten many of the day-to-day details. Things have changed so much over the last two years. With school exams now back in full swing, I’d even go so far as to say that it’s only in the last three weeks or so that things have finally returned to normal – whatever that was.

Over the last week I’ve been asked to support no fewer than three overseas school trips planned for the next academic year. This week alone we bring the summer half term to a close with a practice expedition for the Duke of Edinburgh students, a summer concert in the Abbey, our first Sports Day in three years and a Speech Day that we’ll be able to attend in person, rather than in tutor groups via a Google Meet link. It’s taken a long time, but in the grand scheme of viruses and plagues and diseases, we’ve bounced back incredibly quickly.

I had a great time today standing in as a very willing target in the “Throw a Sponge at the Teacher” stall at the Sixth Form dog show, but more than anything else, I was over the moon to see so many students, staff and parents back on site, mask-free, mingling as though the last two years never happened. Fear did not get the better of us, and we have come out the other end smiling.

I’d still recommend John Christopher’s novel for a dose of reality, if only to cancel out the hubris high I’m feeling right now – because his message is no less relevant now than it was over sixty years ago – or even two years ago:

The scientists have never failed us yet. We shall never really believe they will until they do.

John Christopher, The Death of Grass