Leake Street

A rock and a hard place

These days, before you're allowed within three football pitch lengths of a UK school, you've got to go through a CRB check. This involves a laboriously thorough and thoroughly laborious paper-chase through the annals of your life, to be followed by the very same by the authorities through their digitized version.

Some bright spark at Whitehall even decreed that the result of the process is non-transferrable. This means: all of those part-time staff working with catering companies, any supply teachers ready to fill in any absence of regular staff, or in fact any professional teacher who has been teaching for it-matters-not-how-long, must undergo these routine checks every time they find themselves working for a new school. Before they find themselves working for a new school.

Wiki has the words 'institutionalized', 'protectionism', 'regulatory policies (...social or other) and 'damaging state meddling' for the entry of, 'nanny state'. You don't necessarily need the last quote to understand the ills of such a characteristic of the modern British way of life. Just cut, paste and put the others in any order you choose, and add filler.

I spent three years working in schools in Japan. Unfortunately, this experience is also non-transferrable. Fair enough. A Japanese school is a completely different environment than an English school. I'll have to have a CRB check. No escaping that one, Guy!

I do some research.

Maybe my former supervisor at the Board of Education in Yamagata can help? This can't be such an unusual request. There must be lots of ex-JETs (the programme I initially went to Japan with) with aspirations to teach back in their home country.

My ex supervisor calls the police in Japan - the logical starting point for a police certificate. They tell her tell me to ask the Embassy of Japan.

I send an e-mail winging it's way into one of those dark little crevices tucked out of sight and everywhere on the walls of the great black cave of the Internet I peer into on a daily basis. No reply from the Embassy of Japan.

I call. The lady explains that in order to obtain the form it is actually the same process as I had read of that morning (yesterday morning) with a crumpled frown on my face. Collect a form from the Embassy of Japan, take it to a police station, have my fingerprints taken, return the form to Japan, and wait for 2 to 3 months.

Fingerprints?

2 to..?

I feel stuck in between good old modern British state protectionist meddlesomeness, and that quintessentially Japanese penchant for administrative knot-balls.

Advice for writers not bloggers

From The Guardian, 10 Rules for writing fiction, Andrew Motion rule no. 7:

Let your work stand before deciding whether or not to serve.

Zurich

Wednesday afternoon at around lunch time I'm told I'm off to Zurich on the 6am flight with Marie and Tony the cameraman to film a Swiss magician. So this is TV.

The man lived in a cube shaped concrete block with air humidifiers and orchids scattered all over the 6th floor and on the 2nd floor a 99 seat theatre with industrial hydraulics equipment hidden away back-stage down. I guess that's how he flies.




We filmed him there and then we filmed him in a beauty salon in Zurich city centre, managed by Melanie, a Swiss French girl who instantly offered me a seat, a glass of wine and an invitation to join her and friends later that night. I couldn't refuse the first 2 and had to go back to work before I could cement the third.

It took a few takes to get the magic trick on film properly. Like maybe a dozen or 15 takes or so... He waves his hand over the hand of a girl (an extra, or what's known as a 'stooge' in the magic business), and the colour of her nails magically changes from natural to bright red or blue or whatever. Quite a trick, until you know how it's done. Then it's not so impressive.

From Guardian Soul Mates

"First of all, I am entirely not fussed about gender, age, race or anything like that. I'm truly, truly bisexual, and I really do believe that there's no way of knowing if someone's your type or not until you've had a proper converdation."

The first post from my iPhone

This is it.

Nothing more to see here.

A clumsy metaphor for the way life turns out sometimes

In the East:

I missed Portabello mushrooms.

In the West:

I miss Eringi mushrooms.


You can't have it all at once.

Imoto Ayako, Filming outside the wolf enclosure, Shaun Ellis and Dollar Bear

Objects

I got a mail from a friend about a new podcast - 'A History of the World in 100 Objects', and about a week later, I was sitting in a car waiting when I heard it live on BBC Radio 4. The next day I was talking to my colleague about the TV tie-in episodes and today I visited the British Museum to see the first few objects of the 100. I've fallen in love in a really geeky way with stuff, hundreds and thousands and millions of years-old stuff.

Part of the romance is this way the BBC and the British Museum have approached the project, through every available modern media. If you missed the radio broadcast, you can download the podcast. If you can't go to the museum, you can see the objects online. Or if you can't be bothered to listen and visit and click, you can just push one button and watch it all on the box.

Britain was once a colonial power and stole a lot of swag from a lot of different places. I believe the correct word is 'plunder'. There's a big moral ? hovering over a lot of the stuff in the museum: should we really house Egyptian mummies and a statue from Easter Island in London?

I suppose it's a perennial question for British Museum Director and big brain behind the 100 project, Neil MacGregor, but he seems to have squared it off with his conscience. 'Let's face it', he quips, 'Bloomsbury might have been a bit of a disappointment to him', speaking of Mummy Hornedjitef's final internment in a glass cabinet in room 62, 3F (British) of the museum. 'Where do things from the past belong now?' he continues. He speaks of a 'common heritage' and says that he has increasingly come to think of the history of the world as one, shared story. I like that idea, but I'm not sure I buy it yet. He promised to come back to these questions and I look forward to hearing more.

So after Object [1] in room 62 it was back down to room 2 for Objects [2] and [3]. It was fun, a big kid treasure hunt around a museum I can't remember visiting before, but that I'd already started making plans to come back to for objects [4] - [100].

Done with hand axes, I wandered into the Paul Hamlyn library, just next to room 2. Right there on display were a half dozen or so books on Native Americans. I've been thinking about writing something about the Yurok (a Californian tribe of Native Americans) and a fellow called Demartin for a short story class I'm taking, so I was interested to see the books. I sat down with my bag still slung over my shoulder and read about basketry. But then suddenly it was closing time at the museum and I had to leave the library. I asked if the books would be in the same place for a while - I was feeling lazy and didn't really want to hunt to find them again next time. It's a tie-in with the Native American display upstairs the librarian said and of course it is, I thought, and why wouldn't the British Museum have a cache of Native American art and objects too?