Customary Ambivalence

I’ve been away for a few days, oop north in the U.K. – which explains the absence of a weekend post, for which, gentle followers, I crave your pardon.

I’ve come back, pursued across the Channel by grey skies and gripped by the ambivalence that gets me every time I leave these shores. Even in four days, you see enough to underline the best and the worst of what your English brethren have to offer.

The stylish old airport doesn't need a strapline

I flew from Limoges to Liverpool: John Lennon airport. ‘Above us only sky,’ its ridiculous strapline boasts for the sake of… what exactly? In the old days it was plain old unpretentious Liverpool Speke. You can’t imagine it proclaiming something like, ‘Welcoming back the Beatles since 1962’. Anyway, unaccustomed as I now am to public servants and the like putting themselves out to be friendly and helpful, I was immediately struck by the bonhomie of uniformed officials at the airport, on the bus and at the railway station. ‘Oh, it’s good to be home,’ I thought.

On Sunday morning, I arrived at Sheffield station too early for the sliding doors to separate and admit me to the forecourt. So I had to wait outside with a gaggle of legless football supporters. Judging by the state of them, they had stayed on after the match for a night on the town. No doubt bottles and even bus shelters had been smashed during the course of their carousal, but they were now so incapacitated that I didn’t feel threatened. Rather, wrapped up warm against the cold, I marvelled to watch them trying to place one foot in front of another, as if auditioning for a zombie film, dressed only in trainers, jeans and T-shirts.

The train took me across the Peak District and some of the most stunning scenery in England – rendered yet more sublime by the ominous rain clouds that were probably heading like me for Manchester. I had to change trains at Manchester Piccadilly, which has never been one of my favourite spots. An hour-long wait meant forking out 30p for the public toilet. While dutifully washing my hands, two beastly oiks burst in, mouthing a mantra of ‘shut yer fookin’ mouth’. I wasn’t sure whether they were addressing each other or the hapless attendant by the turnstile. I didn’t hang around to find out.

The incident triggered a kind of flow chart in my mind’s eye, which directed me to the classrooms they’ve disrupted and the teachers they’ve brought to their knees and then on to the loveless squalid homes where the cycle of abuse and violence is perpetuated. It’s not encouraging to hear that Mr. Cameron’s vision of a Big Society involves cutting funding to all those valiant groups and organisations that try to tackle the problem.

So it was good to get back to Limoges. Good to get back home. Everyone knows that the French are some of the least popular people on the planet, but at least you know what to expect from them. (Exasperation.) You may not get the highs from them, but you don’t tend to get such lows. There is a kind of median social decorum that governs society here, which means that it’s very rare to witness the kind of nasty, menacing behaviour you see depressingly often in the U.K.

The rigid education system here does at least instil in pupils from an early age a sense of social responsibility. The Daughter is looking forward to breaking out of it in 18 months time. This morning, I drove her to Brive, so she could sit her mock-Bac French exam. A four-hour ordeal involving two in-depth analyses of literary texts. In my day, you knew where you were with an exam: it was a test of memory and a validation of the hours of revision you were prepared to put in. Since I was a swot with a particularly retentive memory, I was extremely exam-adept.

So I did the paternal thing and passed on the benefit of my great wisdom and wealth of experience in the car. We got onto the subject of structuring an essay and I explained the basic scheme of introduction, main body and conclusion, which has served me well for so long. That wouldn’t do, The Daughter explained. She proceeded to elaborate on an incredibly complex scheme involving all kinds of arcane rules from Socrates’ School of Rhetoric. Surely, I proposed, that was just a suggested outline. ‘No dad, this is France. You have to stick to it to the letter, or you get marked down.’

No wonder she’s looking forward to going to a Scottish art school or a university that will have her – and pay her fees. I tried to impress upon her that fear of doing the wrong thing shouldn’t hamper her self-expression, that teachers are more interested in her ideas than a simple regurgitation of their own. She wasn’t convinced.

Watching her heading off to face her fate in the examination room, I wondered whether the sense of liberation she might find back home will be adequate compensation for her inevitable discovery of sordid reality