Reaction to the Elections

So, we've had the latest round of European and local elections, and I thought I'd post my initial reactions having had chance to take in the European results this morning.

 

The BBC have been very keen to push how well UKIP did in the council votes, despite the Greens being better represented in local government. In reality, Labour saw the most gains nationally, with the Tories and the Lib Dems taking big hits. The Greens faired well, and UKIP ended up with a similar number of councillors but with far less influence overall, though, in terms of council control. I cannot pretend I'm happy about seeing an odious party such as UKIP doing as well as they did, but it's hardly the earthquake the BBC seem so keen to make it out to be. Moreover, it seems their new councillors are already showing their true colours, so one does wonder how long many of them will last...

 

I must admit that I find the whole Europe affair depressing to say the least. We've seen far right parties, who make UKIP seem nice and fluffy, win in France, Denmark and Austria, and a far left party win in Greece, as well as strong votes for other obnoxious groups such as Golden Dawn in Greece and a neo-Nazi group in Germany. In Poland, there was a sexist and racist anti-democracy nutter whose party managed to get four MEPs elected. For a breakdown of results by nation, check out this useful Guardian summary page. It seems that Europe, with some exceptions like Germany which was still dominated by the mainstream parties, and Italy where the governing centre-left party triumphed in style, is lurching to the extremes, in particular towards far-right, anti-immigration, anti-Europe parties.

 

Predictably, there have been calls for Labour to focus more on issues such as immigration in order to try, once again, to out-UKIP Farage's party and get the votes of those who voted for him. I hope that Ed Miliband has the courage to resist the pressure and not join a rush to hammer a group (immigrants) that are already seen as an easy target for politicians wanting to appear 'tough', though sadly I think I may be somewhat optimistic. It seems that, of the five main parties who now make up our domestic political landscape, it's only the Green Party who're offering an alternative perspective on things. It presents a challenge in particular to Christians: what can we offer in these debates about the direction of our country that offers hope to people, rather than rushing to take everything down to the lowest common denominator?

 

When preparing to preach yesterday, in a Methodist church in the one part of Milton Keynes that returned a UKIP councillor, I was originally going to talk about how we in the church can engage effectively with contemporary culture. However, the more I looked one of the lectionary readings, and having come across a story of a UKIP council candidate in Croydon saying she'd joined them because she felt they are the only party standing up for Christianity (presumably by opposing equal marriage), I was prompted to think about what does actually form an appropriate response (note, I'm not claiming to be making the appropriate response!) to the kind of politics of fear we've seen being pushed in these elections. The result is the sermon I've reproduced below, which I think annoyed some in the congregation (one woman in particular seemed furious!) but after seeing the European results and the rise of the far right needs to be said. All feedback is welcome!
 

This isn’t the sermon I intended to preach today! You see, when I started out preparing at the beginning of the week – and looked at the lectionary readings – I decided that I was going to talk about how we engage effectively with modern culture. I’d finished drafting my order of service by Monday evening, and as the passages were very familiar to me, I figured I wouldn’t need to spend too much time delving into commentaries and studying them, in order to prepare my sermon. I was, therefore, quite convinced I was in for a nice, easy week. However, the more I looked at the readings I’d originally chosen, the more convinced I became that God was asking me to take a different tack, and wrestle with something all together harder. Thus, Paul preaching in Athens became the famous passage from Micah, a few tweaks were made to the order of service, and off I went reading up on 1 Peter, a text which poses a very difficult question: what does it mean to be willing to suffer for doing right?

As I guess it doesn’t take too much effort to imagine, I’m quite an opinionated person and a bit mouthy on occasion. I’m willing to write to my MP or other public officials if something’s annoyed me, or to pull apart someone’s argument on my blog if I think it deserves it. As well as writing, I’ve occasionally been known to pipe up in discussions and meetings, saying what I think needs to be said, even if I know it’ll annoy people. So far, so good, perhaps; yet, to tell the truth, I’m a bit of a wimp at heart. I don’t like physical pain of any sort, I’m not too keen on standing out from the crowd unless I really have no choice, and actually, if I’m honest, I quite want people to like me. Thus, studying our passage from 1 Peter proved hard going, as the author talks about being willing to suffer for doing right, just as Christ suffered to free us from sin. I have to admit that it made me feel uneasy, yet that’s the challenge that both readings pose to us.

It’s generally accepted that 1 Peter was written from Rome to a scattered group of churches, containing both Jewish and Gentile Christians, who were having a hard time for refusing to go along with aspects of local culture, such as attending sacrifices. It was probably carried along the route through Asia Minor – modern-day Turkey – suggested by its opening verses, and it seems that Silas, who also accompanied Paul on some of his missionary adventures, might’ve been the messenger. There’s some debate as to whether Peter’s the author, or whether it was written by early Christians influenced by him; using prominent people’s names pseudonymously was pretty common at the time. Either way, images of God’s rescue of Israel from exile in Egypt are used throughout, reminding people of God’s care for them, and a key theme in the text is how Christ’s death and resurrection have fundamentally changed the world, and so are worth suffering for.

When we pick up the argument, the author’s been using examples from everyday domestic life to offer advice on how people should conduct themselves in a hostile environment. In verses eight and nine, they’re encouraged to love and respect one another, being willing to do what’s right even if it’s costly. In a reminder of Jesus’ teaching on loving enemies in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:10), the people are told not to repay evil with evil, but instead to respond by blessing those who’ve wronged them. The quote in the middle of the passage is from Psalm 34:13 – 17, and again it focuses on God’s call to live righteously, to seek and pursue peace. The final section of the text argues that even in the face of misunderstanding of their Christian faith, and aggression brought on by fear, the churches shouldn’t be intimidated or respond in kind. Instead, they must be ready to explain why they have the hope they do, gently and with respect. Verses seventeen and eighteen capture what the basis, the foundation, of that hope is: that Christ suffered and died to free us from sin, and was raised from the dead by the power of God, made alive in the Spirit.

The more I think about the latter verses in particular, the more this seems like a very timely reading to have, in the aftermath of the recent local and European elections. Whatever our political allegiances, we need to be wary of attempts to use fear and scaremongering to seduce us into voting one way or another. I don’t know if anyone saw the UKIP poster that had a National Lottery-style finger pointing outwards and suggested that millions of EU migrants are coming here seeking to take British workers’ jobs. It’s part of a very worrying trend, as these sorts of campaigning methods work by tapping into people’s insecurities during difficult economic times. Just as the early Christian recipients of 1 Peter were feared because they were different from those around them, the temptation is to scapegoat, to lash out at others, rather than to stick together and do the right thing by our fellow human beings. How we respond to scaremongering, and whether we have the courage to seek peace and pursue it, as Psalm 34 puts it, is a test of our discipleship.

Being willing to go against the grain and challenge popularist thinking isn’t an easy business, yet as Christians we’ve got a vision of hope to proclaim to the world, which has its foundation in the fact that there’s no such thing as a person that doesn’t matter, because there’s nobody who isn’t made in the image of God, and nobody that Jesus didn’t die for. Fundamental to John Wesley’s understanding of his faith, which he proclaimed up and down the country and even in places like my home town of Preston, where he got a good pelting with stones for his trouble, was that all can be saved; in other words, there’s no-one outside the scope of the love of God. If that’s really true, then it has major implications for how we live and act in the world, and in particular how we engage politically. If we have the same hope within us as Wesley did, we too need to be ready to give an account of it when called upon, which includes when we see people pushing prejudice, and to do so with gentleness and respect even if we’re met with ridicule, hostility or violence.

Our Old Testament reading concerns a community who were meant to live in hope and to be a light to the nations, but instead had turned away from God. Micah’s confronting a divided Israel and Judah, whose society and values embodied inequality and injustice, and showed a failing to follow through God’s command to care for the foreigner, the orphan and the widow. The same people believed this fundamentally didn’t matter as long as they kept their worship going and offered the prescribed sacrifices to God. In the first part of chapter six, God acts as judge of the people through Micah and reminds them of how he saved them from oppression in Egypt. It then moves into our reading, which asks about the heart of what God requires from his people. It’s not burnt offerings, even of the best possible produce in huge volumes, nor is it to go along with the practises of other nations and indulge in child sacrifices, but instead it’s to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God. As much as anything else, this means the care for the vulnerable and outsiders that shines through in the Law, and was later to be embodied by Jesus.

Taken together, then, our readings challenge us not to get sucked into a way of being that responds to legitimate worries when money is tight and jobs scarce by giving into fear and resentment of others, or simply burying our heads in the sand and retreating into a church-shaped bubble. Negative campaigning relies on being able to stir up fear and suspicion of ‘the other’, whether that’s immigrants, or asylum seekers, or disabled people, or the unemployed, or the working poor, or Food Bank users, or single mothers, or teenagers, or gay people, or transgender people, or Muslims, or black people, or Romanians and Bulgarians, or whoever the latest fashionable victims are. Our hope as Christians, by contrast, centres on the love of God being universal, meaning there’s no such thing as a person that doesn’t matter. Giving an account of this hope to those who demand it may well prove costly as it was for the readers of 1 Peter, but the challenge cuts to the core of our faith.

After all, Jesus wasn’t crucified for preaching motherhood-and-apple-pie, or for being a nice guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. We follow a crucified God who challenged religious and secular authorities alike when they sought to exclude the poor, the vulnerable, the broken and those whose lives didn’t fit the social and moral expectations of the day. We follow a crucified God who embodied a radical love that welcomes all. The challenge, then, is to be willing to do the right thing, and stand up to the politics of fear and exclusion. It’s to do justice and love mercy as we walk humbly with the same crucified God who, as 1 Peter tells us, was raised from the dead and is alive through the Spirit. 

On Hormone Blockers and the Daily Mail

In the Mail on Sunday, there was an article which made the front page of the paper version expressing outrage at the expansion of the prescription of hormone blockers to young people from nine years old onwards, following a successful clinical trial conducted by Dr Polly Carmichael at the Tavistock Clinic in north London. I came across this by chance having glanced at the headlines in the shopping centre, and while I'm not the first person to deconstruct their latest rant, I think I can add a useful perspective to the discussion.

 

Firstly, a bit of background. Hormone blockers can be given to young people who experience gender confusion to delay the onset of the changes that take place in puberty. This gives the young person time to work out if the confusion they've experienced is something permanent, perhaps related to other things like coming to terms with sexual orientation, or simply something that passes as they get older. The effect of these drugs is reversible if the person decides they wish to continue to live as the gender assigned to them at birth, and if they wish to transition, the hormones of the preferred gender can be administered instead. If you want to learn more from someone who has worked with trans young people for many years, check out this TED talk by Norman Spack.

 

I cannot state categorically enough what difference hormone blockers would have made to me as a teenager. I hit puberty at age twelve, and before that point I could pass/be read as male quite easily if I wanted to and was in a context where people didn't know me already. After that, it became impossible to do so, as I went from being flat-chested to having DD breasts in all of a year, a fact that caused me enormous distress because it felt every day like my body was moving further away from reflecting the person I really am (I find the 'trapped in the wrong body' language the Mail uses problematic, for theological reasons as much as anything else - I'm not a disembodied soul dwelling in a temporary vessel, but a fully embodied person!). Added to that, monthly periods were not just painful and unpleasant, but a further reminder of what was wrong with my body that made me feel dirty and incredibly miserable. While there were other things going on and my gender dysphoria was far from the only reason, it played a big role in me being suicidal during my last couple of years at school.

 

If I had been able to do something to stop this happening and delay the onset of female puberty, I would not now be faced with having to undergo major surgery to flatten my chest, and I'm certain I would not have spent so many years feeling deeply uncomfortable in my own skin and distressed every time I looked in the mirror. For those who knew me before transition, the reason I hid under hoodies and baggy t-shirts was to try to be as invisible as possible. It was awful when well-meaning friends tried to encourage me to be more feminine, as it was the last thing I wanted! Given that surveys suggest around 75% of trans people while consider suicide at some point, and the actual suicide rate is many multiples of the national average, I can't be the only person who could've benefitted from this treatment to prevent this divergence of body and identity being so acute.

 

The Mail quotes Andrew Percy, a Tory MP, as saying that hormone blockers will prevent 'natural' development. Let's pause here and think about what's being said. Firstly, like many trans people, I became aware something wasn't right at a very young age, in my case I was four years old when I realised that my body (biological) didn't reflect my inner sense of being male (ontological), and thus people didn't treat me as a boy (social). For someone with gender dysphoria, the ontological (the person's sense of their gender) is not reflected by the biological (both the primary sex characteristics - read genitals - used to assign sex at birth or the secondary sex characteristics - voice, build, facial hair, etc. that emerge later), and because people apply a shedload of presumptions and cultural baggage based on the biological and the binary idea of gender most people work with (social), the person's sense of themselves is also not reflected in interactions with others. Thus, there is nothing 'natural' to someone like me about allowing puberty to progress, only a deepening sense of unhappiness at a body that doesn't reflect the reality of things.

 

Secondly, allowing puberty to progress and forcing people to seek treatment in later life makes it a lot harder, particularly for trans women, to undo the damage. A lot of changes happen by sixteen that can cause immense distress. For example, once someone's voice has broken, that's it, so trans women can be stuck with a voice that sounds male no matter how many hormones they take. Moreover, it means corrective surgery can be much more involved and necessitates dealing with a greater level of risk than if puberty hadn't been allowed to progress. There is nothing 'natural' about forcing people into this position if it can be stopped.Yes, there are risks involved in using blockers, the Mail is right (show me a medicine with no risks at all!), but there are far greater risks involved in having more extensive surgery! Dare I also mention it's by far the least cost-effective solution to have people go under the knife more often than would have been necessary if hormone blockers had been prescribed?

 

Thirdly, Percy and others are working on the presumption that children are way too young to be able to make informed decisions, without understanding that hormone blockers are useful precisely because they do give time, breathing space, for the young person to mature and to be sure they wish to continue with gender affirmation treatment. Moreover, as I've already said, many trans people become aware that something's not right at a very young age, and to treat children as incapable of any self-awareness is not only dangerous but undermines their sense of selfhood. It is very telling that the Mail were forced to rely on a pro-life campaigner (it's funny how people like that are often so keen to stop abortion but seemingly don't care about suffering after birth... ) rather than a medical expert to put their counter-case and spearhead their moral panic, exactly because a thoroughly conducted clinical trail does not support their narrow beliefs about what is 'normal'.

 

Last week, I was privileged to take part in a gathering of local schools, churches, LGBT youth and many others under the auspices of Citizens:MK, a community organisation working for a better city. One of the campaigns we were working on was related to protecting funding for an LGBT youth group, and two of their members stood up and shared their experiences; one was a trans person and the other a young lesbian. Both were incredibly moving, as they talked openly of bullying, suicide attempts and feeling worthless. This kind of journalism, seeking I can only assume to stir up outrage and put pressure on the NHS not to treat trans people (the Mail call the gender clinics, which help hundreds of people like me every year to finally be themselves, a "largely taxpayer-funded industry"), makes life harder for trans people and adds to the pressure many of us experience to justify our existence on a regular basis.

 

The hormone treatment I've finally been able to undergo as a thirty year old guy has already made a massive difference to my self-confidence, not least because my voice has now broken and so I get mis-gendered a whole lot less. I am also very grateful that I don't have to find thousands of pounds to pay for the chest surgery that will finally mean I can look at myself in the mirror and feel good about my body. I feel very lucky to be in a country with a health service that makes this possible, and also seeks to help young people avoid some of the misery my generation have experienced by offering hormone blockers. The Mail has, once again, got it very wrong indeed.

 

 

 

Book Launch 1 - Three Men on a Pilgrimage

Today, I’m going to be helping with a book launch at my church: a member of one of the Sunday morning congregations has written a novel, and a friend of one of the ministers has penned an apologetics text. As the Chair of the Fundraising Group, I’ve been asked to interview the two authors and have conversations with them about their books. Having never done anything like this before, I’m rather nervous, but decided that as preparation is no doubt the key, reviewing the books would help me focus my thoughts and formulate some interesting questions. Here goes, then!

The first of the two books is Three Men on a Pilgrimage: A Comical Progress by Thomas Jones, and is the story of three men, simply known as J., G., and B., who decide to go on a short pilgrimage-come-walking-holiday to Canterbury, after the former becomes convinced of his own sinfulness. After reading a pamphlet given to him by two suited-and-booted door-knocking Christians, J. decides he’s guilty of avarice (it’s a vey good job his parents didn’t buy him that toy castle!), as well as gluttony, lust (since the age of thirteen), jealously and wrath (especially when low on sleep). Hence, he suggests to G. and B. that they need to do something good for their souls, and so they decide to walk to Canterbury Cathedral via numerous pubs and accompanied by G.’s dog, Monty. What follows is a series of comical encounters with an assortment of weird and wonderful characters that raise various questions about Christian faith.

As such, the author addresses, through the use of these short tales, a range of issues from the necessity of suffering and the nature of hell, to the problems with atheism born of ignorance and the irrationality of the universe. Jones is the son of a Methodist minister who studied creative writing at the University of Wales in Lampeter, and in the Acknowledgements section, he suggests that a lot of the ideas for the topics covered, and indeed the arguments offered, came about through engaging in philosophical and theological debates down the pub as a student. This comes through in the book, which has a chatty and relaxed style while making some serious points along the way. I therefore found myself being made both to think and laugh as I worked my way through the book, as well as being pulled up short a couple of times.

To give you a flavour of the story, along the way the three men and their dog encounter what looks like evidence of a dinosaur on the loose in a quiet village (is there something in people’s varied experiences of God?), a man who claims to love chicken stew but always removes all the contents before drinking the residue (there’s only so much content you can remove from Christianity before you’re left with nothing), a crowd who are furiously angry about people who sleep with their feet touching the headboards (a parody of some attitudes towards homosexuality in the church), a surprisingly theological young supermarket worker who gets besieged by old people looking for discounts (and who recognises that begging for more blessings and being a fair-weather friend is what he does to God), and a manic on a mobility scooter (on how science may have removed the need for hell), which brought back some fond memories of my own exploits on such machines…

Some memorable recurring characters also appear from time to time, such as a mysterious millionaire who gives out large sums of free money to people. One of them is an elderly woman called Elsa who in return takes part in a weekly ‘reverse lottery’, trying to guess the numbers that led to her ‘winning’ fifty million pounds (as a way of exploring the relationship between justification and sanctification). Another is a homeless chap who uses the money to buy himself an ever-increasingly large house, and who gets defensive when asked why he doesn’t give some of the money to the struggling homeless shelter he once depended upon. We’re told the man, that nobody’s ever seen properly, has a big house in Canterbury … and it seems God crops up in various guises throughout the book.

Without wanting to spoil the end of the story, when the three finally make it to Canterbury Cathedral, they find they’ve no money to get into the building (don’t get me started on having to pay to go into a church!) or even to get the train home, and find themselves needing to accept charity from a Big Issue seller they’d refused to give change to only a short while earlier. It’s then they realise that there’s something familiar about all these people they keep encountering, and how much they still have to learn about the grace of God.

The new atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are very effectively parodied along the way as well, respectively as Dick Dorkins, who doesn’t believe in atoms yet is blissfully ignorant of what he’s dismissing, and Kit Kitchens, a blind man who doesn’t believe in clouds as he’s never seen them. I think these will make good sermon illustrations, and I may well pinch them at some point!

There are forty chapters altogether and so plenty of material to get stuck into, but two particular episodes in the book that stuck in my mind for very different reasons are that of J. finding three hundred pounds in a pub toilet, and the three men encountering a woman who’s been beaten by her husband but refuses to leave him. In the first story, J. finds the cash and having not spotted anyone else in the pub, determines immediately to hand it over to the landlord. When the owner of the cash returns to the toilets, he instead hands him the money back to them, again without hesitation. So far, so good; however, when he finds himself boasting to G. and B. about what a good person he is, J. realises he may need to add pride to his list of sins after all! It’s a very good illustration of how morality is a complicated business, and how muddled our motivations can be.

By contrast, the story of the woman who decides to go back to her violent husband and love him until he changes made me angry. While I can see that God’s love is such that he does stick with us even though he reject him, often violently, time and again, we should no more encourage someone to stay in an abusive relationship in the hope the violent partner will change than assume, as J., G. and B. do, that women (or indeed men) in that situation aren’t capable of exercising agency. It’s rare I find myself wanting to say ‘check your privilege’, but this story brought out the need to be very careful in how far we seek to push analogies, and to think through the pastoral implications of what we’re saying. It was the one really problematic passage in an otherwise very well-written and thought-provoking novel.

Overall, I very much enjoyed and recommend Three Men on a Pilgrimage, and am looking forward to reading it again at a more leisurely pace.

On Being Seduced by George Osborne

George Osborne is trying to seduce me, or rather, people like me. According to the Guardian, the Chancellor has hit upon the idea of paying new maths and physics PhD graduates £40000 a year to go straight onto a 'Teach First' type scheme whereby they will complete a PGCE on the job, maintain a research profile and get their students work placements at the sponsoring employers, which include GlaxoSmithKline and Nationwide. These new super-teachers, or 'chairs' as they will apparently be known, will also be expected to run master classes and build links with universities. Many have already commented on this idea, but as both a recent maths PhD recipient and the spouse of a teacher, I think I can helpfully add to the debate.

 

Back in the mists of time, I went to an undergraduate open day at Cambridge University, and listened to three lectures by, we were told, some of the leading researchers in the maths department. One was a dull pure maths talk by a man who shouted a lot, and another a statistics lecture from a man who mubbled all the way through. The applied maths talk, on why ducks leave ripples spanning a certain angle in their wake as they swim along, was the only engaging and well-presented talk. That day sticks in my mind, as I'd expected to enjoy myself and ended up being largely disappointed. It's evidence that backs up my biggest worry about the government's plans: great researchers do not necessarily make good teachers.

 

The fact is that being an able researcher takes a set of skills that don't necessarily overlap with being a good teacher, as anyone who's sat through excruciatingly dull university lectures can testify. The Big Bang Theory is obviously a spoof version of life in a physics department, but for a long time I couldn't see what was funny as it was too true to real life! While not all mathematicians are like Sheldon and many are perfectly capable of handling social interactions and relating to young people, I worry about letting some of the people I studied with loose on prospective postgraduates, never mind school children! Moreover, teaching a room full of undergraduate students who are paying exorbitant fees to be there, meaning one would hope they have at least a passing interest in their subjects and a certain level of background knowledge, is a very different kettle of fish from dealing with thirty reluctant learners who don't want to know and are brimming with teenage hormones!

 

I worry about the expectation that these chairs will be able to juggle maintaining a research profile (a full-time job in its own right) with study for a PGCE or similar qualification, coping with the demands of teaching and not going insane. University lecturers often struggle to get the balance right between research, undergraduate teaching and supervision of PhD students, administration and being an ambassador for their institution, without the pastoral demands of teaching in a school or college, the hell of OFSTED inspections and dealing with difficulties with irate and/or aggressive parents. My wife works incredibly hard as an FE lecturer and I'd like to think I occasionally worked hard when doing my postgraduate study. I'm quite convinced trying to do both simultaneously would be a recipe for burnout. £40K a year cannot, alas, buy more time.

You see, having watched my wife over the past couple of years, it seems to me that teachers have to be not just knowledgeable and passionate about their subjects but also diplomats, social workers, marking machines, skilled presenters, able administrators, willing to keep abreast of modern technology and committed to working insanely long hours to get things done for their students and cope with all the demands of the job. While sustaining a prolonged research project does equip one to some extent to cope with these demands, it certainly doesn't cover everything, and my experience is that it doesn't even necessarily mean one can explain complex ideas in a clear and engaging way. It also doesn't mean one will have the necessary pastoral skills to nurture young people at a highly formative stage of their lives.

I think the government, and Michael Gove in particular, are tied up with two profoundly unhelpful ideologies: that the purpose of an education system is to churn out workers capable of adding to the bottom line of UK plc. through either innovation or wage slavery depending on IQ and background,  and that in a modern, fast-moving knowledge-based economy, the achievement of the former (innovation) can somehow be managed by moving away from project work and critical thinking and back towards rote learning and memory tests as a measure of academic achievement. I don't see how this can be the case, and to my mind, any government serious about encouraging the next generations of researchers, inventors, visionaries and entrepreneurs needs to ensure that the curriculum allows room for creativity, critical reasoning and the joy of learning for its own sake.

An emphasis on yet more testing and rote learning both ignores the reality that Google places the raw facts at our fingertips and encourages students to become so focused on what's likely to be on the exam that no amount of enthusiasm from the person at the front, whether a Doctor of Philosophy or not, can encourage them to look beyond the textbook. It was bad enough when I was at school, and my wife's experience is that this is only getting worse. Moreover, even undergraduate maths courses are assessed largely by regurgitation of lecture notes - or at least mine certainly was - which is hardly the basis for original thinking and groundbreaking research.

In other words, to get the benefits Liz Truss, the Schools Minister, hopes to see requires both an ideological shift and serious investment over time, neither of which seems about to happen. Moreover, removing second chances (fees for 19+year olds in FE and loans for access courses to give but two examples) really doesn't help! I'm all for having well-qualified teachers with enthusiasm and a deep and broad knowledge of their subjects. I'm all for making the latest research findings accessible to students in schools and colleges. I'm keen to see a recognition of the skills acquired from studying for a PhD. I'm not convinced that Osborne's proposal achieves any of these things...

Exploring Madrid

Occasionally, my job allows for a spot of foreign travel, and last week I got to spend a few days in Madrid, where Santander has its global headquarters. Said HQ is a few miles out of the city, in an area without a great deal else there, and so everything one could need is onsite, from a range of restaurants to a laundry to a sports centre. It does feel a bit like Fort Knox, in that access into and out of the site is monitored carefully and on arrival I had to go through a mini passport control. Getting food requires an 'invitation' and even buying a coffee requires possession of the right bit of paper - money doesn't work!

 

Anyway, on my second night there, I decided to escape for a few hours and go into Madrid. After a thirty minute tram ride into town and a quick change onto the underground metro system, I ended up at a station called Principe Pio, with a nice shopping centre where I could get an early dinner (my digestive system struggled to cope with long lunches at 2pm and then having dinner as late as 10pm) and was able to see a beautiful archway that I captured as the sun was setting...

Puerta de Principe Pio

I decided I'd walk from there to take a look at the Royal Palace and the Almudena Cathedral, via the Sabatini Gardens. The Palacio Real de Madrid is the official residence of King Juan Carlos, but he and his family don't live there; it's more used for ceremonials these days. Apparently the palace is on the site of a ninth century fortress, but today's building was constructed between 1738 and 1755. With it being the evening, I didn't a chance to go inside but the views of the huge façade and the next door gardens are simply stunning, and I was one of many tourists seeking to grab a picture. I was struck by the sheer size of the building, and the view out over the city as the sun set was breath-taking:

Royal Palace, Madrid

Sabatini Gardens, Madrid

From there, I decided to walk along the Calle Balien and to take a detour via the Plaza de Oriente, which features some cool statues among the kissing couples.

Statue in the Plaza de Oriente, Madrid

Along the way, I came across a very nice café where I stopped for a drink and listened to the piano music courtesy of the house maestro. It all felt very civilised and relaxed. Continuing to wander brought me to the Cathedral, the Santa María la Real de La Almudena. The square between the Cathedral and the Palace is huge and affords magnificent views out over the city, of the front of said Cathedral and the back of the Palace. I can imagine that it gets very full during the day but there were only a view folks about when I was there, so I could get some good pictures. Wikipedia tells me that the Cathedral is actually very new; building was started in 1879 and was temporarily abandoned during the Spanish civil war. It was finally finished and consecrated by Pope John Paul II in 1993. Again, the façade is stunningly beautiful and it was warm enough (around twenty degrees) to allow me to sit a while and just take in the view (excuse the police car in the shot!):

Almudena Cathedral, Madrid

Later, I went for a walk in the old town and nabbed a late supper in a paella bar near the Cathedral as I made my way back to the metro and the Santander (prison) complex. I had fun and games getting past security on the way in as the guard's lack of English and my lack of Spanish made it difficult to communicate that he needed to see my passport, an incident that has inspired me to try to learn some Spanish so when I go back I don't come across quite so much as an ignorant Englishman!

 

My trip was great fun and it was eye-opening to see some of the differences in culture between Britain and Spain. The most notable thing was the mealtimes, as breakfast was early if bothered with at all, lunch was mid-afternoon and dinner was after nine in the evening, which took some getting used to initially. I noticed that I got mis-gendered far more often than generally happens in the UK these days, now I've been taking testosterone for a few months, which makes me wonder what cues some of the Spanish men (it was always men!) I spoke to picked up on that their English counterparts are not doing! One other interesting thing emerged when chatting to some of my colleagues over coffee about visiting cathedrals. It seems that this generation of young educated Spaniards are just as secular as we are, which I wasn't expecting as I suppose I think of Spain as quite a traditional and very Catholic country.

 

Overall, I had a great time and can't wait to go back. I'm not looking forward to the heat of their summers, but there's so much to see and do that it'll be worth it!