Hidden Manchester

I watched a short program on the BBC last week. "Inside Out" is a magazine programme done by BBC North West and usually features bits and bobs about the North West. Usually I avoid it like the plague. Last week I spotted this little piece about Underground Manchester - so I recorded it on Sky+.

I have known about the Secret Telephone Exchange under Piccadilly Gardens for doneys years, but this piece on Hidden Manchester really amazed me. The best bit was about a place called "Victoria Arches" which must be around Victoria Station. Apparently it was build in the 1830's to support a new road into Manchester. So underground is this unbelievably huge open space, but you cannot get into it. They didn't show any external shots of entrances, presumably to keep the hoi polloi out.

During World War II Victoria Arches was used as a major Air Raid Shelter for Manchester. They showed one of the Gents Toilets. Huge. But after the war it must have been closed up again. It's silly really, it could be a real tourist attraction if only someone in Manchester had the foresight. I've been to Stockport's Air Raid Shelters with the kids today, and they attract a lot of visitors. So why shouldn't something similar in Manchester do the same.

Anyway, now, thanks to my friend Dianne, you can have a look as well. I mentioned, on facebook, that Pat and I are going into Manchester tomorrow to see the new Anthony Gormley statue in the Museum. He's the bloke who did the standing statues on Crosby Beach. This looks positively amazing on the tele. Diane replied with a message about the Underground Manchester exhibition at Urbis. She gave me the web address so I'll share it with you - Have a look at this:

http://www.urbis.org.uk/page.asp?id=3282

My comment to Diane was "These are exceptional aren't they. There was a 10 minute piece about these piccies on "Inside Out" on the Beeb, just over a week ago. I watched it. This bloke, Andrew Paul Brooks, took the photos by wandering about these hidden spaces with a flash gun. By triggering the camera remotely he built up hundreds of photos and then overlayed them over each other using something like Photoshop. Some of these photos are phenomenal. I might try to coax Pat to go to Urbis as well tomorrow morning to see this exhibition.

Just as an experiment, I've put the address of this blog onto my Facebook Page, so it will be interesting to see if anyone from Facebook has a look at the blog. I'm fed up of the idea of writing a blog that is only for me and Danielle to read. We shall see.

OMG

OMG

I discovered from one of my friends on Facebook that this means "Oh My God" which I should have worked out on my own. Thatnks DMG if you should ever happen to read this. maybe I should put the address of this blog on facebook and let the cognoscienti read it. Now there is a thought!

I didn't think it was so long since I last wrote on this, but then It is. Oh dear. I'm just not doing any of the things that I really like doing at the moment, so I'd better get my act together again, hadn't I.

Today. Today we had a presentation from the new Principal of the new Academy that our school is going to turn into at the end of Summer. Our new Principal is an interesting bloke, who looks deeply scary at the moment. He looks several things as well as scary, but I have a feeling that he might actually be good for the school, in a scary sort of way.

The bad new is that his Curriculum Plan for the Academy does not appear to have any room for History in it, though I am prepared to wait and see. maybe when he gets a chance to explain things we might discover that History is still there, but disguised. I don't really see why I am so upset as I won't be there for very much longer really, at fifty seven (soon to be eight) I am within leaping distance of retirement. Who knows.

I discovered, a few years ago, that there are just two countries in Europe where History is not a required subject in some form for all students up to 16. The two countries where it isn't required are Albania and the good old United Kingdom. Sob, it makes me so proud to belong to a plonking country that wants to forget its heritage.

Anyway, we shall see as we go along what the future brings.

I'll be sure to keep you up to date.

Let me just try something. Just put this in here like this, and put that in there .....

I was reading this thing the other day. It was in a magazine (at this time of the year I don't seem to have enough time to read ..... no that's a lie ..... I'll come back to that.)

I was reading a piece in a Magazine and it mentioned that in some blogging systems you can send things to the blog by email.

So I got out my copy of the Blogger engine and read the instructions .... and lo and behold, it appears that you can do just that.

This may be the answer to a prayer. I've not been adding to the blog for a good month now, but if I can send a post to the blog as easily as I can send an email to somebody. 

That's a laugh. I don't even get around to sending emails to people who I really ought to send them to. I must write to Howard. He will think that I really am a total plonker. Saw him this Summer, had a really good couple of hours over a pint, then I've just never written back. So I must write to Howard very soon.

When I said I hadn't been reading much I forgot that I'm halfway through a really good SF novel, or series I suppose. One that I'm really enjoying. More of that another time. This really was just a trial, to see if the old email thingy really works. Oh please, I do hope that it does!

Love you and leave you for now.

OfSTED

So here I am again. I just read the last bit over and I stopped mid post to go and watch TV. Never came back up that evening and carried on with another full week. The following Thursday evening, it would be October 16th, we got the news that we were having a new style OfSTED inspection. OfSTED is the Office for Standards in Education and is the Government Agency in the UK that inspects Schools. As is now normal we were given about 5 days notice that they were coming in.

They will jus wander into classrooms to observe lessons as the mood takes them. So everyone has to plan detailed lesson plans for every lesson in those two days. I was convinced that they would see me this time as the last time we were inspected nobody came to see me. The GCSE exam results for my calss were not too good last year so I was convinced they would come to see me. 

I had good lessons planned. They went well. The students were attentive. Nobody came near. Not into one lesson on those two days.

It left me feeling really down, despite various people saying, "But it is random" "Not seeing you implies nothing." But I really did feel down when I was not inspected. As is normal with me I got really grouchy about it. I'm really not a very nice person I guess. 

Anyway, the school was declared to be good. Which I could have told you before, but they have to check it out for themselves. But it still feels vaguely that it isn't me who was declared to be good, or even OK. Ho Hum.

And so we visited Chatsworth again.....

We went to Chatsworth about two or three weeks ago. I think I mentioned in the Blog that we had Moses, our Parish Worker, from Church, for Dinner and we took him to Chatsworth.

They had an exhibition of Sculptures on show, part of a Sotheby's Exhibition, but I didn't have my camera. Moses had his phone and he let me have two or three photos, but I wanted more. So we have been saying that we would return to Chatsworth ever since. However, to do that you have to have a day free, and you had to have decent weather.

The weather forecast on Thursday suggested that the weekend was going to be nice, so we decided to go, as long as the weather stayed nice, on Saturday, because we were both free of commitments on that day.

Saturday dawned grey, iron clad, but the weather forecast suggested that it would be okay. So we decided to go for it. Chatsworth is about an hour's drive away, so we set off at just before 11 am and got there after a very pleasant drive, just before noon. I must admit that, having decided not to shell out for the visit to the House again, I was just a bit amazed to be charged thirteen pounds to go into the gardens, but it was well worth it.

The picture above shows my favourite sculpture. It is not part of the Sothebys exhibition. I assume that it belongs to the Chatsworth estate and for me it shows remarkably good taste. I love it. I call it the Dancing Hare, though I have no idea what it is called.

If you want to have a look at my photographs, you can find them in my online photo- album which is on Picasa. Just follow the link below. It currently features a rather snazzy piece which is supposed to look like Mao Tse Tung (Or is it Zedong nowadays) Jacket, but made out of rusty steel for some reason. I may try to change to picture for another one that works a bit better, but we'll see how we get on first.

Chatsworth on 11th October 2008

I have to admit that I was very taken by some of these artworks, while others left me rather cold. I think my favourite of the Sothebys pieces is the one called "Le Tres Grand Ours", or to put it in English "The Bloody Big Teddy Bear". Now just let me see if I can include a picture of Theodore Bear in this blog at this point. How do we do this....... You know, looking at this I don't think that looks too bad. The thing that you cannot see from these photographs, is the way that these pieces fit their suuroundings so very well. The Big Bear, for example, is the highest up the slope of any of the pieces. So you walk up this quite steep hill and you come out at the top by the side of a mirror pool. You'll see that in some of the photographs. It has a pagoda style building overlooking it. At the right hand end of the mirror pool is a stand of evergreen trees, and the bear is standing right in the middle of them. He looks so very much at home. I must admit that I sent an email to Chatsworth suggesting that they keep Big Ted because he looks perfect in place.

By the way the mad dancing hare is at the opposite end of the mirror pool to Big Ted. I wonder what they get up to at night.

What else did I like. I loved the Horse, but I'm not really sure that my photos of the Horse do him justice because he is bang in the middle of a path running through the wood and it was quite dark there. I did my best. I'm not going to put a picture of Horse in here, you'll have to go to the gallery to see him.

At this point I shall stop and go and watch the results show of Strictly Come Dancing.

So, till I get back to the blog, here is something to be going on with.

The Week in View

I don't need to worry about not writing things in here for a week at a time. Unless there is a tool that I have not found, I have no evidence that anyone at all is reading this, aside from D who sends me a regular email, and my dear wife who reads it when she thinks about it. So I can treat this as an entirely private diary that I can write in once a week and be fairly certain that no one else in the world gives a damn.

So this week. Well, the high point has to be going to see Nurse Pippa for my blood test results on Tuesday to discover that everything that can be high is above what it should possibly be. So I was immediately signed up for more blood tests to see what is going wrong. I could have told them that. I am very, very, very obese, grossly fat and slovenly. I am greedy and lazy. So what am I going to do about it.

I AM GOING TO LOSE WEIGHT, THAT's A PROMISE. Well, it's lose weight or die and I have no intention of dying just yet.

Thursday Night should have been a night out with the boys, but some stupid person had chopped through the gas pipe so we had no heat and no food which meant that our meeting was cut down to just 40 minutes and then we all went home. British Gas we love you.

Friday was a training day when we looked at something called the "PEEL" chain. I'm not sure I understand it, and I doubt if it would interest you the none existent reader, so I will ignore it. But it was the first training day for a long time where I really felt that we got something useful out of the training.

I also went to the School Gym after the day ended to be inducted onto the Gym Machines. They are marvellous, better than I expected, really professional machines. So it's just getting up the enthusiasm to start using them after school. Remember, Kevin, you have promised to do something about that vast bulk you call a body, so get going.

On Saturday I spent 2 hours cleaning out the detritus in the old 17th Century Hearse House at Church. What I was cleaning out was mostly bits of rock and dust from the last repointing. Still. I had fun, and I do mean that.

Then we went book shopping at the big Borders Store in Stockport. Between us, the apple of my eye and me spent £80 on books. Got some nice ones. I bought a SciFi book I enjoyed years ago and lost, a new SciFi book that sounded as if it had some mileage and the book I really went for.

Henry Allingham is now 112 years old and is one of the last survivors of World War I. He has written, with help, his autobiography, called The Last of Kitchener's Volunteers. I shall save it for half term as I want to be able to get my head into that book properly.

Today is Sunday, I spent most of the afternoon marking and planning.

Tomorrow Evening is Monday and I must spend most of that evening planning one lesson. Our Executive Head is coming to watch me teach on Wednesday and I must be ready for him.

I shall let you know how I get on. Love for now.

Oh yes, by the way, an old student told me, this week, that lol means Laugh Out Loud. Oh well.

See you all soon, all NONE of you.

Lots of love!

Azincourt

Speaking of Books.

In Zermo's Blog recently, D wrote a review of Bernard Cornwell's "The Lords of the North" and I wondered if, having read "LotN" D had read the two books in the Saxon Series that came before it.

I agree with everything that D says about Cornwell's books, but she says it better, so I won't say anything here. However, if you read "Lords of the North" it makes more sense if you have already read "The Last Kingdom" and "Pale Rider"

Anyway, as it does, that led me to go skating on the Internet where I discovered that Cornwell's next book, which is out in England in October is called "Azincourt" (or, in the American edition, Agincourt") and tells the story of the events leading up to that seminal battle from the point of view of an English Archer.

I'm looking forward to it already. I'm salivating.

You might also try Cornwell's Grail Quest Trilogy, "Harlequin", "Vagabond" and "Heretic" which also tell the story of an English Archer loose in France during the Hundred Years War.

The may not be "nice and accurate" but they are a damned good read.