See my articles at new film review site www.filmies.co.uk

Latest essay:  Please Sir, Why are State Schools so Inaccurately Portrayed in British TV Drama?

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LATEST ESSAY:

Please Sir, Why are State Schools so Inaccurately Portrayed in British TV drama?

'Mr Barlow, are you the only teacher in this school?'

That was a question never asked of our venerable soap Chips during his seventy-eight years at the chalk face pre- and post-retirement, but maybe it should have been.

 Along with:

'Sir, have you always taught every single one of your neighbours' children?'
'Do you arrange it with the head to have like really small inner city classes of ten clever kids, innit?'

The 'Big Thre'e public services portrayed down the years in British TV drama are hospitals, the police and schools. Of these state education has been done a disservice in the area of broadcasting accuracy that the other two have to a much larger extent escaped (caveats are many of course, to include: mass murder suspect interviews minus solicitors, too many public wards with only two beds—the other bed always holding a grizzled but wise ancient with early onset dementia, and legions of garrulous maverick DCIs with drink problems and cast iron gut feelings. Indeed any nurse, doctor or police officer who is foolish enough to be reading this will be spitting exasperated opprobrium at the author and scribbling vehement lists).

In short, the commissioning TV companies clearly push at least some resources in the direction of research when they knock out their various dramatic crime/medical offerings. The audience is becoming more demanding in this regard. We know more and we are prepared to assert this.

Schools? They clearly never give it a second thought. The feeling appears to be, We all went to school, everybody knows what it's like, so let's just lob Barlow in the classroom with those six kids from Italia Conti and get them to rile the old buzzard for a few minutes in bad Mancunian/cod-street London/Italia Conti accents until they all leg it on the bell when he's half way through his poetry pentameter thingy. The fact that most of the viewers' children will be taught in classes of thirty and old Barlow won't live even remotely close to any of them because of the not inconsiderable fear of 'Teacher in Jeans with Wife and Unrestrained Pupils on Lager on Bikes' incidents never seems to cross anybody's mind. Furthermore that even the most frayed and frankly useless teacher has at least the tacit procedural support of the institution he works in to be able to dismiss his class on his own instruction is an artistic consideration too far for Auntie Beeb and the independent chaps on the other channels.

 And I know this how?

Well, twenty-five years at the chalk face, is how. A whole career living the dream that is teaching the teenagers of Britain.

And so I see, and shudder at: secondary school deputies suddenly become primary school heads (won't happen, not ever; that's like a horse turning into a squirrel); members of the public wandering onto school grounds to tap on classroom windows when security in British schools is akin now to the regimes variously established at places like Treblinka and Fort Knox in the past; concerned teachers visiting pupils' houses at night to voice their concerns about behaviour/progress/drugs habits/prostitution rings/messiah syndromes to blissfully unaware parents, where in fact you would attempt this on the average South London or inner Liverpool estate and risk a) being reported and sacked, or b) hung from a balcony and beaten with sticks.

School trips are supervised by a lone junior teacher with no first aider, and kids get drunk on the coach, and are rude to old ladies, and are noisy in the museum, and are inevitably lost and late and kleptomaniac and disinterested in the focus of their day. This is unfair, condescending bullshit if you really want to know—child-hating Blighty coming out in us like a rash. And why have a school tie and then fail to have kids with knots as big as your fist hanging ten inches below their chins, and tattoos of monkeys on their faces? After all, no teacher will ever notice, and fewer will do anything about it. Or hey, let's not have a uniform at all, like when we were at school in the Seventies!

Bad Kid always turns up for his detention, albeit reluctantly. In reality, bad kid never turns up for his detention and goes into the exclusion unit the next day for it. Fifteen-year-olds tell their mums they've got a free lesson, and just nipped the two miles home from school. Their next un-free lesson therefore started ten minutes ago. Scriptwriters, please listen: NO FREE LESSONS, NOT EVER! Smoking and fighting and flirting proliferate on the school playing fields Mr Gove has sold to Mr Barratt and Mr Bellway and their friends. Oh, and bike sheds! About 0.5% of children cycle to school these days, so forget your bike sheds and all that may go on behind them.

Teachers are either simpering posh girls/young fellows with hearts of gold and mildly condescending approaches, or ancient retainers well past their sell-by date, or rhino-skinned Neanderthals out of the Kes era, or bedraggled head teachers with lots and lots of pot plants in their offices and a villainous penchant for permanent exclusion for incidents such as paper aeroplane construction and excessive chewing gum use (do any of these types exist? Well yes, but so do TV executives and artistic directors who do not live in Islington).

And finally the pupils of TV High remain solidly the same old stereotypes trotted out in Grange Hill when Steven Poliakoff was a lad. These are: Vulnerable Thick Bully, Vulnerable but Nowhere Near as Thick Victim, Strange Kid with Artistic Powers Beyond the Imagining of the Frankly Stupid Teacher, Spiteful but Actually Vulnerable Tormentor Girl, Sporty Lad with blond hair, Stutterer, Smelly Girl, Fat Lad.

So who are the main culprits? Coronation Street and EastEnders (the latter merely reporting nonsense situations at Walford High but never setting scenes there) bestride this issue like two colossi—decade after decade of utter nonsense--but at least have the excuse that they deal with a lot of other stuff beyond the school gates. Waterloo Road is in this respect an abomination therefore, a dramatic construct out of the fifth circle of hell—an accuracy void filled instead with putrid caricatures and obtuse rankness, episode on episode, an affront to anybody that ever worked in a school or studied in a school, which means absolutely all of us. Skins simply redefines the teenage years as a Bacchanalian feast had by twenty-three year-olds, and is practically irrelevant in this regard but no less inaccurate. And the much loved and lost Teachers, which pretended to be a bit of a comedy but dressed itself in the clothes of noir C4 realism: it too must hold its hand out for six of the best. I do not include sitcoms for their comedic obviousness precludes any call for accuracy, indeed warrants anti-accuracy, so stay in your seats Bad Education, Please Sir, The Grimleys, and The Inbetweeners (I taught at James Buckley's secondary school, and a cocky little thespian poppet he was, too).

There are more offenders, but we have summoned and caned the ringleaders.

But how can we account for this complacency? Why so bad? Easy: public schools and the wrong idea of audience.

Having alluded to the intrinsic nationwide knowledge of the state education system I find myself having to apologise for a distortion, for only a minority of those commissioning editors, directors and scriptwriters mentioned have been within a single metric mile of a British comp in their entire lives, and only then to shudder a little as they pass on the way to a dinner party at Kit and Tessa's in Canonbury (they're doing a bouillabaisse and there will be Montrachet). In other words the very people putting the shows together have at best a vague notion of what state schooling is like, and at worst a contempt for the need for the accuracy that would be demanded by people just like them when 'doing public school', and a contempt for any corresponding desire for authenticity among a vast state-educated audience.

Snobbery then and laziness.

Well, not entirely. Ann McManus is the principle creator of Waterloo Road, along with her Shed TV chums. She was educated far from the dreaming spires and, moreover, taught English in an inner city Glasgow school. She therefore knows so, so much better. Her treachery is a simple and timeless one: she sold any good early intentions to the cheapening devil of popular prime-time broadcasting, got rich, moved to Islington. And who can blame her? She now allows others to re-imagine her teaching days with crass inaccuracy, plus monkey tattoos, defending the silly excesses her show depicts by asserting that everything Waterloo Road trots out has happened at some point in time at a school somewhere in Britain.

Drama as collage then, as anthology or tick list. Shakespeare missed a chance, and we another master work: his Royal Englishmen Summer Revue, in which Richard III appeals in vain for the same horse injured Prince Hal rides from Shrewsbury on his way to victory at Agincourt on the 'morrow, is lost to us forever.

One exception though, and I do mean just the one. In 1995 C4 put out Hearts and Minds, a Jimmy McGovern piece that featured Christopher Eccleston as a young teacher fighting his corner in a 'troubled' Liverpool comprehensive. The research was clearly done well (McGovern himself had taught). There appeared, for example, a scene about the marking of exercise books ('All they want is a big tick!'), so precise in its delivery and so peculiar to the profession that the stamp of authenticity lay all over it. Who knows, they may have even consulted a teacher at some stage who was still working within the profession. I urge you to see what's left of this piece if at all you can.

Our cinema has fared somewhat better in all of this over several decades, at least in its high points. Kes particularly, and Rita, Sue and Bob Too and Notes on a Scandal have much to recommend them, notwithstanding Judy Dench's frankly ludicrous lesbian spinster hell hound in the last of these. Across the pond, our American cousins, though not blameless (Glee!) extend a general instinct for veracity to this problematic medium, with Friday Night Lights and The Wire, among others, shining a direct and mainly honest light into the mysterious, fraught landscape of the classroom.

On our side: Barlow, itching powder, and an audience treated worse than sickly playground truants—with lazy condescension and a TV centre sneer.

William Ruby

LATEST LIST: 

Greatest TV Drama Series

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NYPD Blue
Six Feet Under
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Our Friends in the North
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Latest Essay   Sheer Lunacy: A Brief History of the Naming of Jack the Ripper Suspects

Latest List:  The World's Most Prolific Serial Killers (no, they're not all American!)

Sheer Lunacy: a Brief History of the Naming of Jack the Ripper Suspects

Goulston Street's putative Cockney double negative graffito 'The Juwes are the Men that will not be Blamed for Nothing', erroneously erased before it could be photographed by the aristocrat idiot Sir Charles Warren—at that time Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and fully twelve years before his crass and catastrophic battle command at Spionkop in the Boer campaign (a massacre of expeditionary troops as singularly dreadful and complete as any in British military history, involving a bullet to the throat for my Lancashire Fusilier great grandfather, his reputed hilltop evacuation by Mahatma Ghandi, and the subsequent terminal tuberculosis that he passed to most of his large, poor family)—should maybe better read today 'The romantic poets, eminent doctors, second heirs to the throne of England and the British Empire, castratos, Satanist pamphleteers, internationally renowned artists, elderly men and young women are the men that shall not be Blamed for Nothing', so fraught with self-perpetuating bullshit has the naming of Jack the Ripper suspects become.

My favoured suspects? It's got to be Eddy, effeminate eldest son of the Prince of Wales, teaming up with supreme late Victorian artist Walter Sickert as the front and back end respectively of a deranged pantomime horse, galloping loose through the mean streets of Whitechapel and bent on terrible harm. Just think how easily it would have been for them to evade detection during their wicked autumn spree?

Ripperologists are of course completely bonkers, pushing their theories built on sand, seen through the dense smoke and fog of one hundred and twenty six years. Several have been as certifiable as their dotty suspects. And I must admit here and now that I am indeed of their kind. Yes, I am also a Ripperologist! I thrill to that particular chase. Indeed I even have my own suspect, although more of him later; who knows, I may even convince you. Oh, I'll never prove anything—that's the point of all of this nonsense; the sum total of zero forensic evidence will ever be brought forward in support of a single theory or suspicion. And what a crestfallen and bedraggled crew the Ripper community would become no sooner had irrefutable proof been wheeled out to the light of day. Book deals: cancelled. Walking Tours: nobody turns up. Mystique: evaporates.

And so while we cast our eyes along the police line-up of the so-far named, let us not forget the FBI's highly respected and generally widely accepted sexual serial killer 'attributes' that would pertain to these particular crimes. As a clearly frenzied or 'disorganised' murderer of strangers in public places Jack was very highly likely to have:

• Lived and worked in that particular part of the East End
• Been working-class and to have held down menial or low-paid work
• Shown outwardly 'normal' or at least unremarkable behaviour but been somewhat socially inadequate
• Have been of fairly limited IQ
• Been between the ages of 25 and 40
• Exhibited regular nocturnal habits

Now then, to some of the 'prime' suspects. I will deal with them as one solid crass block, with nonsense piled on top of risibility:

Montague J. Druitt: educated at Winchester and New College Oxford, teacher, excellent cricketer, almost certainly homosexual and possibly implicated in certain 'shenanigans' at his school, never lived in the East End, found drowned in the Thames Christmas 1888, NOT JACK THE RIPPER. James Maybrick: erroneously suggested as the author of the infamous forged 'Diary Of Jack the Ripper', wealthy Liverpool shipping merchant, never lived remotely near the East End, 50 years-old, murdered by his wife in 1889 in Liverpool, NOT JACK THE RIPPER. Michael Ostrog: Oxford educated petty criminal, possibly qualified as a doctor, 55 years-old, never fully resident in the East End, remarkable resemblance to double-taking James Finlayson from the Laurel and Hardy films, NOT JACK THE RIPPER. Sir William Gull (and Masonic Friends): Queen Victoria's personal physician, Governor of Guy's Hospital, an ancient 72 years-old, never resident even remotely near to the East End (unless you count Mayfair), NOT JACK THE RIPPER. Aaron Kosminski: Polish Jew occasionally working as a barber in the East End, 23 years-old, perpetually confused with other named suspects like Nathan Kaminsky, some other bloke called Kosminsky, and David Cohen, all of whom were variously insane and institutionalised at one time or another, a much better suspect than the fellows already listed but apparently so gaga and dribbling that women would cross the street and yell on spotting him rather than engage the guy in banter or negotiations of a sexual nature, so NOT JACK THE RIPPER. George Chapman: 22 years-old at the time, Polish by birth and a conman by proclivity, later murdered three women by poisoning, so modus operandi-discrete and therefore NOT JACK THE RIPPER. Francis Tumblety: 55 year-old Irish-born mountebank who earned a small fortune posing as an "Indian Herb" doctor throughout the United States and Canada, identified living just about everywhere other than London's East End, definitely NOT JACK THE RIPPER. J. K Stephen: Cousin of Virgina Wolf, Old Etonian, poet, tutor to the aforementioned Prince Eddy, the right sort of age at 28...................can we stop now?

 Do you see the problem? It goes on and on. And yet rather than simply dismissing all this as either authorial license gone mad or a pressing need to sell books in an era of celebrity, we really should address it for what it is: intelligent (in the main) men (in the main) ignoring all the tested and established tenets of police investigation and scientific criminology in order to add gloss to a series of murders that although horrendous in nature, were limited in number and historically mundane. Stood alongside Sutcliffe's paralysing six-year hold over whole swathes of northern England or the deadly and incomprehensible machinations of Doctor Harold Shipman, the Jack the Ripper murders start to look like rather small beer.

Of far greater significance was the effect of the 1888 Autumn of Terror on urban social policy and the plight of impoverished women; the Salvation Army and common and garden charity itself, philanthropic and state-sponsored housing and slum clearance, enhanced workers' rights, the Suffragette movement, and maybe even eventually the National Health Service and the Welfare State owe at least a small nod of begrudging recognition to the Cockney madman and his knife.

A light got shone at last where Saucy Jack did play.

William Ruby

Appendix

And my man?

Of the local working-class men identified at any stage as suspects only Kosminski and Joe Barnett (final victim Mary Kelly's estranged boyfriend) have been given anywhere near the sort of retrospective scrutiny afforded the motley crew of posh blokes and weirdoes listed above. Barnett's candidacy does not garner too much support: rather he appears to be simply a daft local lad (think Ricky from EastEnders, with Mary as Bianca) caught up in dreadful events. And yet one young local bloke has been seriously overlooked, not least because he was neither glamorous nor particularly notorious during his own lifetime.

Jacob Levy simply hid in plain sight. He is by far the most likely Ripper, but Ripperologists think him simply too boring and obvious to be true. Here goes:

• 32 years-old
• local butcher
• nocturnal (both through work and habit)
• previous low-key criminal activity: some aggression and anti-social behaviour
• lived all his life in the Aldgate area of the East End
• lived/raised on dividing line between Met and City police areas (see Double Event if bothered to investigate the significance of this: I won't bore you)
• anatomical knowledge gained through work consistent with very quick removal of 'trophy' body parts from victims in poor light in early mornings
• able to be bloodied and carrying knives without alerting too much attention
• killings Friday/Saturday morning/Bank Holiday; as a Jew, Levy observed the Sabbath and had more freedom from work at these times
• worked on Butcher's Row on Aldgate High Street as a 'jobbing butcher' (having apparently lost his own family business), directly opposite St Botolph Church where the prostitutes of the area used to parade, in sight of his family house on Middlesex Street, and two minutes walk from Mitre Square where Cath Eddowes was murdered on the night of the Double Event
• Syphilitic. Likely to have contracted the disease from a local working girl. Did this give him his motive?
• Cutting off tips of noses of victims consistent with revenge disfigurement: syphilis often takes the nose first.
• Graffito and piece of Eddowes apron found in building where Levy's brother lived at the time, and consistent with a man wanting to get home to safety but not wanting to go straight home and be observed doing so. Did he beg his brother for help that night?
• Family grew increasingly concerned about his aggression, nocturnal wanderings and unaccountable absences
• Committed to an asylum eighteen months after the final murder (of Kelly)
• Possibly physically incapable of murder in that final eighteen months due to the syphilis, so no more killings
• The Hyam Levy eye-witness account near Mitre Square. Hyam distantly related to Jacob and also worked in the local Jewish butchery trade. Said victim was three inches shorter than the man who almost certainly became her killer. Eddowes was 5 foot, Levy a titchy 5 foot 3 inches. Police sources continued to suggest for some years that the Ripper was positively identified by a 'relative' who would not give evidence against one of his 'own kind'.
• The witness who saw Kelly take her final client into Miller's Court on the night she died described him as a short Jewish-looking individual. The same witness told police he saw the same man a few days later.....on Middlesex Street!
• Widely suggested recently that the killer may have strangled and incapacitated his prostitute victims as they knelt to perform fellatio. As a very short man, was this Levy's essential advantage?
• Mary Kelly was by all accounts a 'big girl'. As the only victim with her own private room and bed, did this give little Jacob all the physical advantage he needed? Many Ripperologists believe Mary was attacked as she dozed after sex.
• Geographic profiling. Levy could appear to be circling his lower Middlesex Street home, choosing women whose locations were convenient but on each occasion some distance from his most recent attack but, as he became more reckless and 'disorganised', closer and closer to that home?

But hey, we will never know, will we? For a start, Levy was married (albeit unhappily), and the FBI chaps say that 'disorganized' killers like Jack the Ripper are usually unmarried loners. No theory ever snuggly fits into the hole you have created for it.

As I used to walk from Aldgate East tube station to Fenchurch Street each dark autumn morning, passing the southern end of Middlesex Street, the old Hoop and Grapes pub, the run of shops that was once Butcher's Row, then St Botolph's mournful tower and the troubling space that is Mitre Square, it was a brisk, small, angry presence that I occasionally felt darting along beside me, and not a languid septuagenarian old Etonian in a top hat. Particularly one loquaciously reciting romantic poetry as he went, and with tickets to a Buckingham Palace garden party nestling in an inside pocket.

Latest List: 

The World's Most Prolific Serial Killers (no, they're not all American!)

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Pedro Lopez    Colombia
Daniel Camargo   Equador
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Andrei Chikatilo   Russia
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Gary Ridgeway   USA
Alex Pichushkin   Russia
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Latest Essay:  Things Not to Do in Life

Latest List:  My Troublesome Words


LATEST ESSAY:

Things Not to Do in Life

Boys and girls, you really should consider not: 

Buying a house on a flood plain. Going to Harrods. Dating people who you work with. Preferring deep pan pizzas. Getting very tattooed. Betting on Newcastle to win the F.A Cup. Going for one promotion too far. Having a weekend in Blackpool. Wearing grey cotton in warm weather. Using your smart phone on the street in Newham. Paying for expensive gym membership in early January. 

Attending rock concerts in Hyde Park. Avoiding spending time with your parents. Expecting England to go beyond the quarter finals this time. Reading Harry Potter if you’re more than thirteen. Watching any Hollywood film released in the summer. Relying on black Lycra. Discussing immigration in a Dagenham pub. Believing your bum is too big….it never will be. Drinking red wine and strong lager in the same evening.  

Voting Tory because they’re better at the economy. Telling new friends that you are good at a sport until you have confirmation that they are not. Letting the waiter bully you into having bottled water. Letting the waiter keep pouring your wine. Driving in Essex. Exaggerating your salary. Contemplating a threesome. Camping in woodland in Scotland in the summer. Telling your boyfriend that a former relationship was no good because it was only about the sex. Putting travel off. 

Keeping goldfish. Wearing too much make-up. Wearing make-up every day. Wasting precious time on the Premiership. Expecting Australia to be as good as they say it is. Using the post office on Thursday morning. Watching any drama on ITV starting at 9 p.m. Failing to respond to any stranger suggesting you ‘cheer up’ by informing them that your sister has just been murdered in Detroit. Voting on X Factor but not voting in elections. Jogging any distance in boxer shorts. Not having as much sex as possible. 

Displaying your own photos as art. Getting a night bus when sober. Working somewhere because your friends do. Tasting wine you've ordered rather than just smelling it. Going to Robbie Williams concerts and doing his singing for him. Cooking vegetables without salt. Reading autobiographies of celebrities who are not yet at least fifty. Being over-familiar with the boss. Drinking weak coffee. Adding too much ketchup. Avoiding anchovies.  

Overestimating the warmth between female friends. Underestimating the warmth between male friends. Denying the allure of schadenfreude. Expecting empathy to last. Undervaluing your grandparents’ experiences. Dismissing live theatre. Wet shaving without hot water.

Living above a chicken shop. Gambling in Vegas. Neglecting foreign languages. Being too keen at the beginning of a relationship. Being too cool at the beginning of a relationship. Worrying too much about body hair. Always getting to the pub first. Cycling in London. Going for a curry on Brick Lane. Getting rid of old leather jackets. Hating Shakespeare.

Wearing denim with denim. Growing a goatee when overweight. Dismissing the benefits of flossing. Believing all Americans are like Texans. Investing in friends’ businesses. Visiting Slough. Hiring a car in Kenya. Buying frozen roast potatoes. Going to the cinema when people under 21 may also be there and expecting to listen to the film. Going for messed-up girls because they’re bound to be better in bed. Thinking you can change a bad boy because you’re special. Putting the chip pan on after coming home from the pub. Playing golf with people who have handicaps and swing coaches. Skiing with people who have skied since they were four.  

Flying Aeroflot on a foggy day. Agreeing to talk to Christ Scientists on Tottenham Court Road. Rushing a good lunch. Discussing ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ as literature. Choosing a north-facing balcony. Taking your socks off after your trousers in front of a beautiful woman. Grabbing a thistle when slipping over in a meadow. Showing off by eating all the lime pickle. Picking a fight in South Auckland. Wearing red trousers unless you’re an actor. Telling a New Yorker to get over 9/11. 

Saving for a rainy day. Thinking it can’t happen to you. Expecting something to turn up.

Failing to live all you can. 

William Ruby


LATEST LIST:     My Troublesome Words

             augur

             bouillabaisse

             Caesarean

             coliseum or Coloseum

             flammable or inflammable

             Neandertal

             pizzeria

             prophecy or prophesy

             restaurateur

             supersede

Latest Essay: The Pig

Latest List: Significant Persons Who Worked as Teachers

The Pig

Long ago the pig farmer’s job was a simple one: he fattened the pig and he sold it to market. He fed the pig, and he cared for the pig in all the ways he had been taught, and he watched it put on weight. He was left alone to feed the pig as he wished……he had done this same thing for a long time and knew a little something about what was required. He weighed it only when the time was right; he was trusted to get on with his job.

Asked, he would offer up the age-old wisdom: feed the pig, and it will grow.

But the farmer awoke one day to discover that much had changed.

He was told now that the pig should now have a target weight to aim for. This target weight would be based solely on what the pig had weighed as a piglet at its previous farm. In protesting that the weight suggested was far too heavy for the pig and therefore could never be reached, he was informed that the very process of aiming for a weight would be good for the pig in the long term. In suggesting that the pig may have been stressed by its journey to the new farm, or suffered disease as it grew, or escaped from its pen and not been available for its feed on many occasions, the farmer was warned to stop making weak excuses.

When the farmer asked what would happen when the pig inevitably failed to reach its target weight, he was told to work harder and stop avoiding blame for his skinny pig. The pig deserved better than he was giving it. If he was not careful, he could lose his job, or at least get no small pay rise each year like he used to for working so hard for so long at a job that few other people wanted to do.

Late one night, unable to sleep for worrying about all of this, the farmer crept down to the pig shed and did what he never imagined he would ever do: he tinkered with the weighing machine so that the pig would appear heavier in the morning. He was ashamed of his actions of course, but with a wife and small children to feed and bills to pay, the farmer felt he had no choice.

Time went by; life continued. New targets would come in and the farmer would make sure the pig made its weight. However, people started to notice that the pig was beginning to look a little thinner than it used to. The meat didn’t seem to them to be as good as it used to be either….not as tasty, or as lean, or as rich in fat as people preferred.

They were told that they were mistaken. The meat was as good as ever…in fact it was better.

Men came to the farm to inspect the farmer’s work. When the farmer…proud of his farm….tried to show the men all that he had achieved they were not interested; instead they stood watching him feeding the pig for a very small portion of time and then went away again. Before leaving one of the men walked towards him and stamped something on the farmer’s forehead. Alarmed, he rushed to the mirror and found that the stamp read: REQUIRES IMPROVEMENT. The farmer had changed only what these men had wanted him to change, and now they were telling him that his farm…his life’s work…was simply not good enough.

A letter arrived some days later. It read:

TO THE PIG FARMER WHO REQUIRES IMPROVEMENT

IMPROVEMENT REQUIRED:

STOP FEEDING THE PIG SO MUCH…..ALLOW PIG TO FEED ITSELF…..WEIGH PIG FAR MORE OFTEN……MAKE SURE PIG KNOWS HOW TO WEIGH ITSELF….

Later, he discovered that two of the three men who visited his farm not been pig farmers themselves for many, many years, and the third man had never been a pig farmer at all.

This is what the pig farm is like today:

The farmer has not had a pay rise for years. He is told that he may never get another. The small pot of money he was saving for his days after feeding the pig has been raided by men in suits in town who say he was being far too well treated in the first place. They are all in it together. The men’s suits seem to get nicer every time the farmer sees them.

Every few years, the same men in suits tell him to change the feed.

The farm is full of people who do not feed pigs. There is a person who checks that the pig is in its stall, for example; a person to assess the pig’s mental state; a person to reward the pig for putting on weight; a person to tell the farmer off for the pig not putting on weight, and to remind him that there are many other people out there who would like his job.

But the farmer is not so sure about that. He remembers when his job was a good one. He remembers when people used to tip their caps at him when he passed them on the street. Now it seems that he has fallen low in peoples’ eyes. The pig is a scrawny beast indeed, and the people must have somebody to blame.

And the pig?

Why, he was seen in his stall only yesterday. He was eating, as ever…when would he not be?...and rolling around in his own muck as nature has intended, but the more observant may have detected a strange look in his bright piggy eye. It is the look a skinny pig gets when it spies other pigs growing fat on new farms nearby. There is frustration there….at the lies it has been told and all the weighing that has been done to no great purpose because nobody seems to want the meat it has to offer, and there is definitely some envy.

It is an angry pig in fact, and it will escape from its pen very soon.

And we may be sorry.

William Ruby


Latest List:

Significant Persons Who Worked as Teachers

                      John Adams

               Robert Frost

               Lyndon B Johnson

               D H Lawrence

               Mussolini

               Thomas Paine

               Alexander Graham Bell

               Clara Barton

               George Orwell