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Tag Archives: metaphor

Alea Iacta Est

18 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by Candia in Education, History, Humour, Literature, mythology, News, Politics, Psychology, Social Comment, Suttonford, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

alea iacta est, Antonine Wall, Clydeside, faggots, fasces, metaphor, Nero, Optimates, Rubicon, Suetonius, testudo, togas, Tribune of the Plebs, William Wallace

Augustus Snodbury prepared to deliver one of his most ancient and

oft-repeated lessons in the Classic Department.  However, he intended

to give it a topical spin.

He threw a die on the front desk and pronounced: Alea iacta est.  This was, for

him, an interactive lesson, utilising a learning aid.

What does this mean?

Before he could choose which hand to acknowledge, that Boothroyd-Smythe

boy had prematurely ejaculated:  The die is cast.

What?

Sir.  The die is cast, Sir.

Hmm, Snod harrumphed.  And how could this be applied to our times?

Not you, boy.  Someone else.

He must be getting past his sell-by date.  A few years ago he’d have had

that boy clapped in irons, or thrown to the lions for shouting out.  He

signalled to a quiet youth sitting on his own at the back.

The ginger-haired pupil ventured: Mr Cameron says there’s no going back for

the Scottish people.

Precisely, Snod rubber-stamped the response.  You can’t cross back over The

Rubicon. Boy!  Put that die down!

It wasn’t brought into this lesson for you to fiddle around with. Not even while

Rome burns!

Now, take this down... Snod loved dictation.  It was the best method of

control, even if it discouraged free thinking- especially as it discouraged

free thinking!

Once Caesar had crossed The Rubicon, there was no going back. 

Reinforcement.

He turned and wrote ‘Suetonius‘ on the board.  No one, least of all himself,

knew why, but, to a boy, they all wrote it down in their exercise books, some

putting out their tongues while they tried to get the letters in the right order.

The Rubicon, incidentally meaning The Red River, so having some associations

with Clydeside... this was for his own gratification, but there was much

scribbling, was in North Italy, but it does not preclude metaphorical references. 

What’s a metaphor for?  He suddenly sprang this on an unsuspecting child in

the second row, who slightly wet his shorts and broke his pencil point.

That’s where togas came in very handy, Snod observed to himself.

To make us think what it’s there for? quavered the child.

No, that’s a ‘therefore’, Snod barked. Pay attention!  And attention is what The

Romans should have paid to those beyond The Antonine Wall.  But that’s another

lesson.

You see, Caesar had entered into rebellion and the Senate had removed him

from his command. It started a long civil war.  Who were the two sides?

Silence.

He wrote Optimates: Traditional Majority on the white board with an

indelible marker.  Drat!

They wanted to limit the power of the Tribune of the Plebs.

A hand shot up!  B–S again.  Groan!

Wasn’t that what a politician called the police, sir?

Allegedly not.

The Optimates sought to preserve the ways of their forefathers..

Like William Wallace and..

Detention!

Boothroyd-Smythe in his eagerness had forgotten to raise his hand.  Twice

in one day.  His report card would have to be stamped.

The bell rang shrilly.

Get into your testudo formation, said Snod.  Okay,

Forward march!

Excuse me, sir.  Who were the other side?

Snod momentarily had forgotten.  He could smell the odour of his

favourite fasces, he meant faggots, emanating from the dining hall.

That’s your homework, he pronounced with imperatorial, nay,

gubernatorial authority. If you don’t know, find out for tomorrow.

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Smarter than Your Average Bear

17 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by Candia in Arts, Education, History, Humour, Literature, Music, Psychology, Religion, Romance, Social Comment, Suttonford, Theatre, Writing

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

assessment objectives, Bethesda, Bluebeard's Castle, Boo-Boo, chatelaine, Chicxulub, Clegg, cojones, Cro-Magnon, Esau and Jacob, faggots, flat, Flat Earth, Granny Smith, Harris tweed, herbivores and Carnivores, How weary, I Pagliacci, infinity pool, Knock! Knock! Who's There?, metaphor, Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, mitrochondrially, Munn and Dunning, my friend., Neanderthal, Orwell, Paglicci caves, patter songs, Permafrost, Rusalka, Send me roots rain, simile, Spotted Dick, stale, synapsid, taxonomy, teachers' planner, Those Were the Days, Vesti la Giubba, woolly mammoth, Yogi Bear

Augustus Snodbury, Senior Master at St Birinus’ Middle School, opened

the ring box in his filing cabinet and looked long and hard at the heart-

shaped diamond ring that had lain snugly in its hiding place for over thirty

years.  He placed it on the tip of his little finger. Its white gold band was

obviously for a digit much slimmer than his own- as slender as the chance

of it ever finding a female finger to ornament.

He sighed, put it back in place, covering it with a pile of obsolete worksheets

and locked the drawers, rattling his key-ring which contained

as wide a selection of redundant keys as the chatelaine of Bluebeard’s

Castle had carried about her waist on a- well- chatelaine.

The bell was late.  Post-prandial indigestion had struck. He opened his

Teachers’ Planner wearily.  Gone were the days when one simply scribbled a

vague lesson plan on the back of an envelope. Then spiral-bound aide-

memoires had been unnecessary and the lack thereof led to spontaneous

combustions, Krakatoa-like performances on the apron stage of the classroom

crucible of learning.  These were fervent, tangential and memorable

expositions on (say) the metaphor:

What’s a metaphor for, Boothroyd-Smythe?.

How do you spell ‘simile’? (covering orthography as well as figurative language)

What’s the ‘therefore’ there for?

Such probing, intellectual dissection was eternally branded on impressionable

minds, on students– daft word (at their age they were pupils)- such as

Boothroyd-Smythe, who would thereafter reflect on such ingested material for

the rest of his proverbial.  Such acolytes would ever after be able to decline

Latin verbs and translate useful phrases such as ‘the farmers will have prepared

tables for the soldiers’. Such was the efficacy of the time-worn, but

time-tested approach and the analogies were more time-resistant than the

concepts they were endeavouring to illustrate.

But now tailoring the module content to individual needs and ticking off

assessment objectives was the order of the day.

No longer were masters to be found puffing away in faded chintzy staff rooms

with saggy seating- and that not restricted to their shiny trousers.  No longer

did they exchange information on crossword clues, cricket scores, nor barter

seedlings for their allotments.

No longer was a knock at the staffroom door considered  a vile intrusion

and an impertinent interruption worthy of some kind of suspension from

school, not literal, one hoped.

Shakespeare summed it up as usual:

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world..

Snod looked at the planner again.  Five hours to go- in theory.  Monday. 

Another four whole days-28 hours for the sake of argument. Saturday morning

coaching: three at least.  Sunday- supervising the junior forms on their way to

Mattins.  Call it another three. Was that 41 hours?   Multiply by how many

weeks in the term?  How many sessions till pensionable retirement?  I didn’t

factor in marking and preparation.  Not that I do much of the latter

nowadays.

Red pen or not?  Out of ten, or A-C?  Add stars, pluses and minuses or not? 

Give bribes, or not?  Take bribes, or not? Efficacy of lines? A learning

experience?  Well, they learn that if they waste my time, I will waste

theirs. Corporal punishment?  ‘Best not to go there’, as the wet-behind-

the-ears brigade would say.

Classroom management?  Tables of six, pairs, rows?  Have the blighters run

all over open plan space with clipboards?  No fear.  Blow that for a game of

tin soldiers! Free expression?  Hold your tongue, you scallywag!

So, retrospectively-speaking, had he wasted his life?

He had counted out his days in coffee spoons.  He was as good as

anaesthetised upon a table.  And what about the mermaids?  Yes,

what about them?  He hadn’t heard so much as a police siren for

decades.

Here he hummed a few bars from Rusalka’s Song to the Moon.  No time

even for his beloved opera.

Waterhouse a mermaid.jpg

As for a peach!  It wasn’t that he didn’t dare to eat one; it was just that

the staffroom bowl never contained anything other than blackening bananas

and tasteless Granny Smiths.  (The latter also being the moniker of an elderly

French teacher, coincidentally.)

How was it all going to end?   Not with a bang, that was for sure.  More with

a whimper.

O Lord, send my roots rain! he implored.

What did you say, Sir?  A member of staff passed the open door and stuck his

head into the room.

It was that effervescent and intensely annoying Milford-Haven, the Junior

Master. A stirrer of the pool, if ever there was one.  And not necessarily an

angelic one at that.  What he failed to recognise was that Senior Masters,

such as Snod, who had paralytically lain for years by the Bethesda pool of the

staff study, had no desire to be moved out of their comfort zones, by helpful

jejeunes into a maelstrom of extra-curricular activity.

Cricket was one thing, but wading out of one’s depth and abandoning the gentle

eddies and zephyrs of poolside life for the spas, jacuzzis and whirlpools of

‘extras‘ would be merely a revelation of one’s misunderstanding of the

etymology of the abstract noun: ‘revolution.‘  It only required a cursory

knowledge of Orwell- ‘George’? they would ask- to enlighten them to

the ultimate futility of trying to successfully introduce anything, novel,

or to channel anything educationally on trend.

Ghastly phrase!  He hadn’t out-lived Munn and Dunning to get on that

creaking theoretical treadmill.

No, let them slip over the edge of their infinity pools of educational

speculation.

He was no believer in a Flat Earth; he did acknowledge far horizons and

boundaries, but, more often than not, what went around had an unerring

habit of veering back and slamming you on the back of the head when you

were least expecting it.

That’s why he had never, in his entire career, fully turned his back on a class,

having mastered the art of writing on a blackboard in a somewhat oblique

fashion.

But, just look at Milford-Haven! He walks the walk and wears the Harris tweed,

but he will never fit in.  He is a Neanderthal among Cro-Magnons.  The hand

may be Esau’s, but the voice is Jacob’s, he inwardly articulated. (Snod had

been teaching RS before lunch.)

Personally, he felt that he, himself, was Cro-Magnon, mitrochondrially.

He had a nice, solid body and wasn’t a chinless wonder like that

nincompoop of a Junior Master.  He had what Miriam Gonzalez Durantez,

Clegg’s other half, called cojones. He enjoyed learning new vocabulary,

especially from the Romance languages, as he was sure Nick did too.

He felt himself smarter than your average bear.  More like Yogi than

squeaky clean Boo-Boo.

Yogi Bear Yogi Bear.png

It would explain why he liked I Pagliacci.  Cro-Magnons were associated with

the Paglicci Caves and he assumed there was a link.  He knew some of the

staff thought he was a bit of a clown, but they recognised his talents in

renditions of opera buffa patter songs in the school concerts, so there!

He really must ‘go‘ before the bell.  His prostate was not what it used to be.

Vesti la giubba was ringing in his ears, as he reached for his academic gown

from the hook on the door.

But, if the previous anthropological metaphor could be extended without mixing,

or diversified without confusion, he considered that he might be a woolly

mammoth, frozen for aeons in permafrost, but only recently thawing out, owing

to that debatable global warming the kids were all obsessed with, or with which

they were all obsessed. (The pedant in him was still very much alive.)
No, the Chicxulub impact that killed off the dinosaurs had somehow passed over

him, like an Angel of Death and, as in some unusual space collisions, his biological

components had been miraculously preserved, as had his cojones.

He could predict that those at the forefront of research would be mesmerised by

his exotic vulnerability and rarity.

By Jove!  Scientists would probably stuff him and analyse the contents of

his stomach. And what would they find?

His digestive processes reminded him.  Faggots and Spotted Dick.

His favourites.

No lunchtime coaching was going to deprive him of those. That was why he

had substituted an after-school detention for Boothroyd-Smythe.  He would

waste his time.

And if he, personally, was a woolly mammoth, what was Milford-Haven?

A Synapsid.  The answer came easily.  He had read something even that

day about juvenile transitions from carnivore to herbivore, and, judging by

the tong-fuls of greenery Milford-Haven heaped on his plate, Snod could

easily slot the Junior Master into the taxonomy.

He hated self-service.  Oh, for the days of yore when Mrs Stevens served

you and remembered that you liked seconds.  There was a song about it:

And they called it cupboard love..

Even the music has degenerated, he thought.  Those were the days, my

friend, lalalalalala.  But have I lived the life I chose?

Knock! Knock!

Who’s there?

Can this be Love that’s calling?

Eurovision Song Contest 1970 - Mary Hopkin 1.jpg

No, it was Milford-Haven.

Sir, the bell’s not went.  It’s Period Seven.

‘Gone’, you imbecile, he muttered to himself.

And through the door he took his solitary way.

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My name is Candia. Its initial consonant alliterates with “cow” and there are connotations with the adjective “candid.” I started writing this blog in the summer of 2012 and focused on satire at the start.

Interspersed was ironic news comment, reviews and poetry.

Over the years I have won some international poetry competitions and have published in reputable small presses, as well as reviewing and reading alongside well- established poets. I wrote under my own name then, but Candia has taken me over as an online persona. Having brought out a serious anthology last year called 'Its Own Place' which features poetry of an epiphanal nature, I was able to take part in an Arts and Spirituality series of lectures in Winchester in 2016.

Lately I have been experimenting with boussekusekeika, sestinas, rhyme royale, villanelles and other forms. I am exploring Japanese themes at the moment, my interest having been re-ignited by the recent re-evaluations of Hokusai.

Thank you to all my committed followers whose loyalty has encouraged me to keep writing. It has been exciting to meet some of you in the flesh- in venues as far flung as Melbourne and Sydney!

Copyright Notice

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012-2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Candia Dixon Stuart and candiacomesclean.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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