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Oh! Blimey! The things I do get myself into!
You see Rowie, my youngest, is spending a long and not particularly hot summer in England with her Grandparents, and to help all concerned survive until I come to collect her at the end of the summer, I got her to attend Sir John Leman High School in Beccles for what turned out to be over six weeks--and before you ask why I would subject the poor child to an extra six weeks of school after letting her momentarily taste the joys of school-less summery freedom, remember John Dilliger’s response to being asked
“Why do you rob banks?”
“That’s where the money is.”
--and in similar vein my response to
“Why would you make Rowie suffer extra weeks at school?”
“That’s where the kids are!”
And that’s where for several hours a day she can be kept out of trouble and my parents hair! The only down side being of course that she’s making friends though I hope to God that she’s not influencing people too much.
Anyway the day she started I visited the place with her and somehow, accidentally, left them with the impression that I might make a suitable speaker for a Year-Nine celebration evening, at the end of the school year, for Rowie’s fellow 13- and 14-year-olds (and this was even after members of the staff had had fairly long conversations with me).
And, to my horror, I promptly jumped at the chance, even though I had the quite adequate excuse that I would be back in Texas and four thousand miles away by the time of the event.
Now I really should have thought this through, because apart from the mere technological challenges implicit in chatting to kids who are four thousand miles away---well any kids really, but especially those a quarter of a world away---and apart from the how and the why, was the big problem; the insurmountable problem; the problem that has had me waking in the night to whimper for a bit before hiding under the bedclothes. You see what little I know of such events, I mean the whole award-iness of it all, suggests to me one thing, and one thing only: that any address to the kids (not to even mention their parents) should be of an uplifting nature! An improving nature!!---And, as those of you who regularly listen to my broadcast essays will tell absolutely anyone they can still get to listen, (probably with much shaking of the head and sighing) I just don’t do uplifting---nor improving. I mean with a bit of effort I could probably do them a very nice discursion on despair, or the essentially randomly stinky nature of life, but how on earth could I, of all people, give the young people of Beccles something that would broaden their horizons; drive them to gaze with  steely eyes towards the future like figures in a Soviet poster of the early fifties; give them the urge to travel, to strive and perhaps to succeed?
Oh no, my fare is so much more lenten. The absolute best I could manage if I put all my effort into it and slaved over the thing for months; honing my rhetoric, polishing it, refining it, sweating the blood of the creative martyr; might be to encourage them to enter the minor clergy or the lower echelons of organised crime.
But then I thought “Hey! You’re going to be back in Texas and four thousand miles away by the time of the event, so what are they going to do! Nip over on a jet to jeer or to throw tomatoes? So I wrote them eight and a half minutes of my usual small beer, and for the best part of a week I worked (off and on) with Mrs Plumb the Head of Year-Nine South and Mr Taylor the Assistant Headteacher and Matt Dyer who was their Boffin (that really was the word they used) and Network Manager; and, last Tuesday, they set up a computer and four big speakers and a projection system in their auditorium and I set up my computer and an iSight camera and my good condenser mic in my front room and we did it---in front of three or four hundred people and to my complete surprise it actually seemed to work and to my verging on shock they even seemed happy with the whole thing and so far no lynching parties or tomato-hurling parties have charged over the ridge from Beccles.
Isn’t technology ... not too bad
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
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