Getting me through

I feel very guilty about talking up any stress or worries I am personally feeling over the last week.

We have had aftershocks and wobbles, but on the greater scale of things we have had precious little to cry about. It has been weird, living a country experiencing unprecedented trauma. As if the double-whammy would not have been hard enough to tackle, the relief effort has been castrated not just by the scale of the devastation, but by the terrifying prospects of just what could (still) go wrong at the nuclear plant(s) on the Fukushima coast.

I have been awed by the calm, rational reaction of our students and parents. I have not been so impressed with the sensational, irrational and outright inflammatory descriptions of events unfolding in Japan in some quarters of the media. I have stopped watching CNN. Some of the BBC's correspondents have also angered me. However, the scientific experts the BBC featured, especially mid-week, were extremely reassuring in their analysis and presentation of the facts. How has the Japanese media functioned? Pass. (Slowly? Spoonfed? Soporific?)

A week down the road since our own building wriggled, I was not looking forward to teaching my little tiddlers class. Don't get me wrong - lovely kids, and really warm mums. No, we would be in the same room, same kind of windy day...

The children jumped up the stairs to class and were giggling about their new word ("ji-shin" - earthquake) as they remembered where they were. They are five. They gabbled away in Japanese, not anxiously, just having a giggle. They talked about me holding their hands and how they had hidden under the table last time. I did not want to have any other reminders; my classroom has spooked me all week - rattly windows, doors banging,  pole outside swaying in the wind (is it the wind?). So, at a good volume we watched and sang along to a nice DVD, the Three Billy Goats from OUP. I had just about settled myself when my phone bleeped an earthquake warning. I leapt out of my skin. A quick check told me it was a M4.8 off the coast towards Hokkaido. But the timing was awful. I looked again at the happy faces engrossed in the DVD and thanked the stars they were all totally unharmed. The school is standing. My family are OK. We have food, we have warmth, we even have toilet paper. The sheer relief of a whole week and not being dead, I could not stop having a quick cry. Good job the DVD was on : )

(Because we were singing and dancing, we did not feel the two tremors during our lesson - so my planned worked doubly. We did spook mums downstairs though, with all the banging. Sorry about that)

Thank you girls. As long as I teach you though, I am going to be looking at you with an extra glint. You are too young to know, or care. You are going to be a weekly reminder, Friday afternoon, that I am very lucky indeed.

The Road Taken - Michael Buerk

I finished reading this book a while ago in the bath - my only reading spot since Ceilidh arrived - so apologies for not posting the report sooner.

A Christmas present from my dad 2008, you might assume I'm a slower reader than all of my students, right? Semi-true. My students get bullied to read (at first) and encouraged to keep it up - and final grades depend on reviews....

This is the auto-biography of a journalist, who spent most of his time with the BBC. For that reason I hadn't really picked it up 'first' (I have an extensive shelf of 'to read' books). I regret it. I totally loved the read. Journalists should never be the story, and this book was all about the stories, and how this ambitious reporter got the story out.

Michael Buerk is not famous. Well, maybe not famous. If you are my age you'd recognise his face (the young one, the foreign correspondent one, the older one). But one of his reports stopped the (western) world and especially stopped a scruffy Irish punk rocker from wanking himself blind (another awesome auto-biography, incidentally, "Is that it?"). (Saint) Bob Geldof got off his bum & put Live Aid together in July 1985, with his Ultravox mate Midge Ure (of "Vienna" fame).

I kind of missed all "that" in the summer of 1985: I was working in a Kosher kitchen at a children's summer camp in Hendersonville, North Carolina. The particular evening of Live Aid I had manged to sneak out of camp & hitch hike into town - Irish Bar of course - and been forced to watch some meaningless baseball game. It didn't matter that I and my Aussie pals Linton & Charlie were adamant the rest of the world was doing something shatteringly more important that night: 'play ball'. Bollocks. We never saw this until months later, I reckon the most iconic sound/image collage of my generation. Buerk made this story 'happen'.

So reading Michael Buerk's life actually filled in a lot of blanks for me. Pre-internet era, how do you keep up with news? A traveller's best bet was aerogrammes to PO Boxes Poste Restante, and hope you made it before they got 'returned to sender' - and that your correspondents included 'news'. It staggered me at the time how insulated most Americans were to the outside world - and how threatened they were to anything not American. Kids in the camp rioted when they woke up to find nations other than theirs' were celebrating Fergie's Royal Wedding with Andy. Not that we cared, but it was one hell of a good wind up, and very salutary. To this day, I respect my boss Rodger Popkin for the stance he took that day. Pity less sensible people run Israel.

I am delighted I still can't remember Michael Buerk's name; I'm serious, the book is next to me here. Otherwise I couldn't spell his last name (my brother is a 'Mike'), so I can manage Michael.

Buerk was there, persona non grata in apartheid South Africa trying to report. He was there when Flixborough had blown up (and my day heard it) & when Maggie had survived the Brighton bombings (and for the only time I had sympathy for a bunch of Tory tossers). He was Johnnie on the spot in Korem, October 1984 - the only journo to get into the most ravished part of Ethiopa. I swear, if a book has never moved you to tears, and this one doesn't...I don't want to know you. The Ethiopa story itself is gut-wrenching. His cameraman Mo losing his arm, his colleagues bleeding to death in Addis Adaba, or dying in that first You Tube plane wreck off the Maldives. I could care less for journalists, but this man's humanity and decency shines through.

A fabulous read. Totally loved this book, Non-fiction. Brilliantly written. A life well lived.