Understanding and interpretation and a bit of humanity.

Yesterday I went to the dentist again, to let the dentist finish off work on a crown. Very efficiently done.

We have been going to this dentist for years and years. Now he is winding down, reducing the number of days he works, with a view to eventual retirement. His two daughters work in the practice so I assume they will take on more work. But what will we do? We’ll have to adjust to a stranger poking around in our mouths.

All of us resist change.

Our dentist is Asian. He told me a tale yesterday about how he had told one of his staff that he came to the UK in a boat. Where did you land? she asked him. Near the white cliffs of Dover, he told her. It was all a big wind-up and the receptionist concerned was a bit gullible. Yes, he did arrive in a boat and, yes, he did “land” near the white cliffs of Dover.

 His family were Kenyan Asians with British passports who left Kenya in the late 1960s or early 1970s, forced out by regime changes. So his family flew to Belgium and then did indeed take a boat, from Ostend to Dover.

Many Kenyan Asians moved on to Canada, he told us, but he was grateful that his family opted for the UK, where he received a good education, free of charge.

And now he is concerned about the UK and Brexit, as many of his dental supplies come from Germany. We were both a used that he was able to give me a paper guaranteeing that my new crown was made in Britain! I wonder what stories the people in the caravan making its way to, and now in many cases camping at, the Mexican border with the USA will have to tell in the future.

Here’s a segment of something a friend of mine posted today:-

“27 nov

Deplorable: Fox News host Tomi Lahren reports that watching migrant children being hit with tear gas was “the highlight” of her Thanksgiving weekend. In a mean-spirited tweet Trump-loving white supremacist and Fox News host Tomi Lahren celebrated the tear gassing of migrant children over the holiday weekend.

Responding to a tweet from actor and activist Alyssa Milano pointing out that the Trump administration was using tear gas against women and children seeking asylum at the border, Lahren declared that seeing women and children being tear gassed was the highlight of her Thanksgiving weekend:

“Bum-rushing the border is a CHOICE and has consequences. Watching the USA FINALLY defend our borders was the HIGHLIGHT of my Thanksgiving weekend.”

Lahren, a major proponent of Trump and his strict immigration policies, was praising the work of U.S. border agents on Sunday when they fired tear gas at migrants protesting at the border in Tijuana…

The gas reportedly affected some women and children and led to outrage over the Trump administration’s handling of the Central American migrants hoping to seek asylum in the U.S.”

No matter what you feel about immigration, surely firing teargas at families is not the answer. And delighting in it is unforgivable really.  

Thinking of children and how they are treated, the writer Michael Rosen often publishes open letters to Damien Hinds, Education Secretary, protesting about this and that. A recent one concerns poetry and begins like this:-

“Do you like poetry? I do. It’s an art form that can entertain, provoke, console, reflect, observe and much more. A breakthrough for me was at primary school when Mrs MacNab got us to perform poems as if we were a choir. “Choral speaking”, it was called, so there were solos, duets, sections where we said a whole line together, there were moments when we divided into “parts” and other moments where we created the rhythm with words or sounds. One I enjoyed a lot was Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop.

We didn’t have to explain under test conditions what it meant. We got the meaning through the way we interpreted the poem in building up our performance.

I’ve discovered that there are great efforts going on to wreck poetry for children in key stage 2 – seven- to 11-year-olds. I looked at last summer’s Sats paper for reading, sat by every 10- or 11-year-old child in England, which included the poem Grannie, by the late Vernon Scannell.”

The gist of his comments on what he discovered comes down to the fact children are being asked questions about poetry, question with multiple-choice answers, implying that there is only ever one correct answer. I am reminded of the Head of English at a secondary school where I worked in the early 1970s. He entered the staffroom one day in high dudgeon because one member of his sixth form English Literature class had dared to question his interpretation of a piece of literature. How daring! To believe at the age if 17 or 18 that you could have valid opinions!

 If you want absolute right or wrong answers, maybe you should stick to the realm of pure arithmetic. Literature and politics are open to differences of opinion and interpretation.