Get Real!

This is an interim blog, knocked out before I settle down to the mother of all blogs, being my heroic experience of being in the course of a hurricane before I got on a plane to considerable safety and comfort. Were I a CNN reporter, I’d be looking for a medal for my bravery at leaving it to the last minute before leaving the thousands of natives behind.

I digress and I haven’t even started. Impressive, huh?

The theme of today’s lesson, ladies and gentlemen, is the important difference between what is REAL and what is NOT REAL. I feel that there is ever a growing blur and it’s not a GOOD THING. For the benefit of people who have a difficulty separating the two things, I shall use block capitals. To start the illustration, I shall recognise that saying this is a lesson is NOT REAL. Saying it’s a rant is REAL.

Mika has a song in the UK charts at the moment called “Big girls, you are beautiful”. The video, as far as I can tell, includes a large number of “curvy” ladies gettin’ on down with the super-lithe Leb and them all having a good time. As far as I can tell, for I had to avert my gaze for fear of bringing back up the pie I’d just wolfed.

For the love of God. What would Mika know? He is somewhat flamboyant, light on his feet, etc? I just cannot wait for the Pet Shop Boys to release a sarcastic cover version of the song called Big girls, you are beautiful (but if you were thin, you’d be sexy). I’m no snake hipped wonder myself, but I know that. Because I can cope with what is REAL. Pretending to be sexy whilst excessively “curvy” (ie fat) is NOT REAL. Get REAL before the cakes destroy your lives, will ya? Lay off the pies, big girls, or there is a serious risk that you will enter your forties with an inadequate ration of lifelong sex, a house full of cats and toe nails painted blue, because you think it’s wacky. Save yourselves now by engaging in what is REAL and spurning all that is NOT REAL. It may be tougher in the short-term but the longer-term benefits can be considerable.

Clothes sizes are surely part of this. I take anything between a 32 and a 36 waist, depending on where I shop. Certain shops are known to be “generous” in their sizes, which means I guess I’m really buying a 38, masquerading as a 34; especially if I’m in America. This sort of nonsense wastes time as I have to try on multiple sizes that can wildly and depressingly wrong. Why don’t they just use REAL sizes? I’m convinced that NOT REAL clothes sizes are a contributor to the very REAL obesity epidemic.

Why do lifestyle magazines always release the August edition at the end of June? The REAL story is that it’s July’s edition but that’s not exciting, so they call July’s edition August, even though it is NOT REAL. I can hypothesise no reason for this at all. Any suggestions are warmly welcomed.

Mika, according to Wikipedia, is dyslexic. Dyslexia is REAL, although I very, very strongly suspect that for a lot of claimants, it is NOT REAL. I’m a bit of a rubbish reader myself, but being that I was brought up neither in the 21^st century nor amid the middle class, I was never labelled as such. I was just a bit crap at reading, in much the same way that I am crap at catching a ball or running. I learned to cope perfectly well with both impediments. Despite my possible dyslexia, I was never bullied at school; which I attribute to not claiming to be dyslexic. I believe the same is true of food allergies, with 90% of claimed food allergies being imagined but 90% of genuine sufferers being undiagnosed.

Next in the list is science fiction. Sorry folks, but jedis, the Force, the Lord of the Rings, second lifers and the whole plethora of related things are NOT REAL. Speaking to other weirdos in Klingon is not clever, it just makes you a knobhead. You could have spent that time learning Spanish, for Christ’s sake. Spanish is useful, because it is a REAL language used for conversation and commercial discourse by lots of REAL people to buy and sell REAL things in REAL places.

And to finish for today, let me, predictably, get onto A level grades. Fully more than a quarter of people who enter for exams get a grade A now. This has been achieved despite far more people staying on to do A levels than in the past, presumably meaning the population taking the exams are on average less academically inclined than a couple of decades ago. The only purpose of A levels is surely to filter out those who have a natural aptitude for the subject they’ve taken, heavily laced with a measure of who did their homework. In fact, I firmly believe that all exams are 80% the latter and 20% the former; in years of teaching I’ve known many dumb but studious people do well. They are thus intended to be a relative measure, which is useful in deciding who gets a place at Cambridge (I didn’t but fair enough as I was both insufficiently bright and insufficiently studious) and who gets to do media studies at a former polytechnic.

Every single year for 20 years or so, the number of people getting the higher grades has increased. Not one year has shown a backwards step. This purported improvement in standards is self-evidently NOT REAL because it’s simply not logical. Neither human evolution nor teaching can advance to the stage where an absolute increase in intelligence is possible in one generation. Neither can everybody be above average. “Average” has become a euphemism for below average in all sorts of things (gentlemen, a different issue I know but you know what I mean….) Claiming that this is an advance is NOT REAL. Recognising it to be what it is, inflation, is REAL. A grade A in history simply doesn’t have the same buying power in 2007 as it did in 1987. At GCSE, they’ve introduced A* above grade A, which is both illogical and similar to when the Bank of England at some point decided it was now necessary to drop 1/2p coins and print £50 notes. That’s inflation. No number of smug articles by “educationalists” in the Guardian can alter this self-evident fact. Each year, we observe people who can neither spell nor name the capital of Germany receive top grades. The rest of us, including some A level markers I happen to know, observe with disbelief at how this situation which is clearly NOT REAL can be seen as REAL by anybody with any REAL intelligence. This happens amid a festival of back slapping and self-congratulations from teachers, whose pay and budgets are often linked to grade performance. You might as well pay Robert Mugabe based on how many new bank notes he's ordered printed this month.

Let me say warm congratulations to people who recently got A level results they were happy with. Some of you have worked really hard and are very deserving. Unfortunately, I've no means of knowing who you are.

So all in all, I’d like to start a campaign to GET REAL. It may not always be the easiest or most comfortable route, but it’s better for us all in the end.

Anybody wishing to leave a comment that I'm a miserable, mean spirited bastard; may I please ask you to stand on some bathroom scales, check for blue toe nail paint and for the presence of more than one cat first?