• Ross TomlinsonMy Godson, Ross Tomlinson, has just been on the telly. I spotted him in a trailer and watched Doctors on BBC1 to make sure it was really him. The photo is from his website and shows Ross as I remember him last, a dear, sweet boy.

    But now I think about it, when I saw him last he had just acquired a passion for Stephen King novels. And he has grown quite a bit too. Maybe time for a new photo? I just looked through my photos, but he was way auditioning when I last took photos of the family.

    All that horror has paid off as he was playing against type in Doctors today, as the school bully, and pretty nasty he got. The nice Doctor made his character see sense and he and the target, a weedy violinist, became friends. But you could see it in Ross’s eyes, he didn’t believe in the wimpy plot – Ross is ready for far more sinister roles.

    Oh where is that sweet, young boy I remember?

  • We didn’t have photocopies to colour-in when I was a lad. The teacher would draw diagrams on the blackboard and we would copy them or we would trace maps from books and draw them in or exercise books. Some smart kids had plastic templates in the shape of Great Britain and several other useful countries. I remember drawing around them when they lent them to me and I remember tracing the shape of the UK on hard toilet paper and rubbing it down onto the alternate blank pages of my geography exercise book – alternate lined and blank, that is.

    Miss Sherbourne used to make amazing multicolour chalk drawings on the blackboard that we would copy. We would try and keep the drawing un-erased for as long as possible – maths lessons would be written around the drawings of red squirrels.

    The act of drawing the outline so many times has built neural pathways in my brain such that I can do a pretty good map from memory, freehand. If you have only ever coloured-in worksheets and have never drawn the map from scratch, you will never be able to do this.

    The act of drawing creates neural pathways along which extra data about the subject is scattered, so, as you draw the map, you recall where the towns are and the names of the rivers. The act of drawing reinforces the lesson learned and helps to recall the information later. Remember – a picture tells a thousand words. Then why do we not teach drawing and include it as a major part of literacy? Why spend so much time analysing a piece of text that can be explained in a simple drawing? Why, when literacy has been top of the list of education, has the major language of literacy, i.e. drawing, been downgraded or even abandoned?

    Photocopiers and worksheets are at the root of the problem. If you don’t like drawing or, have been told you are rubbish at drawing at Education College, it is so much easier to find a worksheet, photocopy it out and get the kids to colour it in. Colouring in makes it pretty. It does not create neural pathways.

    Now the blackboard has gone – replaced with the smart board. The board may be smart, but is is smart to use it? There should still be a white or blackboard alongside – as large and as prominent.

    Colouring-in is a past time. If you want to learn – don’t color-in anything you have not drawn yourself.

  • I never really got the Commies – they seemed to want to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator with, what were once, very good intentions. The milder form, Socialism, seems to be mostly about spite. Capitalism seems to be the obvious way that humans work together and it pretty much delivers what most people seem to want.

    When the Berlin Wall came down twenty years ago, the cry went up, “Capitalism has won!” And indeed, it seemed as if it had. Only militant Islam has risen against it since. Capitalism has run amok, given free rein ever since, and we are now facing the consequences.

    But I think that this recession is just a warning sign. Capitalism works on the basis of the free-flow of capital. Capital is what pays our pensions. Once, the banks were there to facilitate Capitalism, to help cash move more freely, and to lend and invest in projects that will make a profit, provide work and put food onto the workers tables. Capitalism relies on a free market to work smoothly.

    But the basic flaw of capitalism is human nature. There have never been free markets and there never will be. The person in charge of the market is always going to skew it in favour of his pals for the sake of a quick bung.

    Since Big Bang, when the markets went electronic, the profit has been in playing the casino, not in owning it. The casino players, (traders) have the technology to know the numbers before the market (the casino owner) can read the cards. You set your computer up to do battle with another computer to see who can trade the fastest. Today, milli-microseconds give the advantage. Trades are done so quickly that as you, a mere mortal, place an order, computers analyse your order, buy stock low and sell it to you high before you have even received acknowledgment of your order. You never get the chance to buy at a fair market price. Penny by penny, they leach your profits away.

    When you see bankers getting fantasy bonuses, way beyond any real measure of compensation, you have to ask yourself, “where is all that money coming from?” The answer is simple, from your pension fund! Bank bonuses are slowly leaching out the money from pension funds that are supposed to pay the pensions in the future.

    Whereever there is a pot of gold (and that is how a trader sees a pension fund) someone will be planning to steal it. Once, those funds were put into solid company shares. The companies were expected to grow and provide profits. Shares are now meaningless. They are divorced from what they represent – they are traded within the blink of an eye, with no care about what that company or it’s workers mean. Now, a public company has one duty, to make as high a quarterly return as possible. No thought for the future. No thought for sustainability, employment or solid, long-term growth.

    Capitalism is eating itself from the inside. When it reaches the outside it will reveal itself as the hollow shell it has become. What can take its place? Don’t ask me – I’m just predicting the cataclysm to come, but be prepared for the new dark ages – your Porsche wont help you then!