A Good Apprentice

Finding my Voice - May 2022

For the last six or seven weeks I've been doing a short online course at Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) called Writing and Blogging for Online Audiences. And I'm absolutely delighted to say that I have successfully completed the course. And yes I know it was only a short, online course without entry requirements and no final exam, but even so, on one level just being enrolled at Cambridge University felt like an achievement. I'm extremely grateful to ICE for their award of a bursary and to David Henderson, my line manager at SECTT, for his support in obtaining it.

Writing and Blogging for Online Audiences isn't a course about writing blog posts, well, it is a bit, sort of, but it's really more about becoming a good writer of good blog posts. That's both a slightly different thing, and a fundamentally different thing. I worked bloody hard, and I'm not the writer that I was at the start of the course. That matters!

So, even though it was "only" a seven-week, online course without entry requirements and no exams I am more proud of this achievement than I am of many of the "higher" courses that I've completed. I've gained more than I imagined. I found a voice. My voice. Daisy May Johnson is a fantastic tutor. It's not just that the feedback is constructive and inspiring and encouraging; and her feedback is all that; but it's more than too. Daisy has an exceptional knack of signposting what matters, and I wouldn't have found what matters to me without her.

At the start of the course we had to post a link to a website that mattered to us. I chose Scrutopia; the home of all things to do with the English philosopher, Roger Scruton. So, at the end of this course I'm going to take Sir Roger's advice, and I'm going to 'think in draughts'!!!

Cheers!

cambridge university mug-nyetimber-scruton on wine

Hinc lucem et pocula sacra

I'm on the penultimate week of an online course that I've been doing at Cambridge University called Writing and Blogging for Online Audiences. For anyone thinking of writing seriously online I heartily recommend it.

The theme of the week has been "sustainability". Looking at the trend of the word’s usage on the Collins Online Dictionary it’s a word whose time has clearly come (“Sustainability Definition and Meaning” 2022)

In its current sense we've come to associate the idea of sustainability with "the new" whether it be new environmental technologies, new economic models or new social practices. But what's odd about these new sustainable practices is that they are, in effect, a return to how things were done in the past. And when we look backwards, we occasionally find that some things used to be done much better. So writes the journalist Tim Stanley, (Stanley 2021). Tradition is the ultimate in sustainability.

The task for this week was:-

to write a post which reflects on where you want to be in a year's time. What do you want to have achieved in twelve months time? Where do you want to be with your writing? Do you want to have learnt how to programme? Do Web-design? Or Code? Do you want an agent? A publishing deal? A steady income? An established reputation? Engaged readers?

This is the first thing written on this blog.

There's a straightforward answer to those questions. I want people to read my writing, to enjoy it, be interested and come back and read more. I would like them to engage with the topics by commenting and sharing, and not to feel that they've wasted their precious time in doing those things. I want my writing to be good enough that the whole thing is as meaningful to them as it is for me. That’s the straightforward answer.

There are three strands to the more complex, reflective answer. The first is to do with the framework of the present, everyday reality; the second concerns the past, the third finally gets to the point and answers the tutor's question about the future.

Edmund Burke (1730-1797) is described, by his biographer Jesse Norman, as the greatest political thinker of the last 300 years. What remains particularly relevant about Burke is that he offers a compelling critique of what has become known as liberal individualism, and the idea that human well-being is just a matter of satisfying individual wants, (Norman 2014). Society is not, Burke argues, a social contract between the living, but an association between the dead, the living and the unborn, (Scruton 2017), and it is in and through the practices and rituals of tradition that a continuous connection of obligation that we can connect our past with our future, (Scruton 2019). When George Ritchie MBE wanted to give something back he took on an apprentice. Giving something back is simultaneously a way of giving something forward.

So how does a blog that's (almost) named after an Iris Murdoch novel fit into all that?

Jordan Peterson has pointed out that the infrastructure that makes the frame of the present, everyday reality is built and maintained by people who deserve far more gratitude than they get, (Peterson 2022). That there is a reliable stream of clean drinking water available to fill the kettle, a constant and steady voltage at the socket outlet ready to heat that water, and a sewerage system ready to flush away the waste goes largely unnoticed by those of us fortunate enough to live in the west, though not by people who want to live here, (Stanley 2021; Murray 2022). To us it's as if these services become invisible because of their reliability. That invisibility is a testament to the competence of the (mostly) men who work themselves, sometimes literally, into the ground). Their competence renders their hard work invisible, and by doing so it renders themselves invisible.

It's nearly forty years since I started my electrical apprenticeship with Glasgow District Council. I did the sums: that's over seventy percent of my time on this earth. That seems to be quite a bit of my time. The industry has been good to me. I've never seriously been at threat of going without; I've been supported and helped in ways that I didn't fully appreciate; and, in truth, at times I've been put up with when perhaps I shouldn't have been. Only a devil would be unwilling to show some gratitude for all that, (Dostoyevsky [1880] 2003).

I'm now thinking of early retirement and reducing the number of days at work each week. I’m thinking of doing my doctorate. I suspect a year from now I will still be thinking about it; we’ll see. Human beings are uniquely able to conceptualize the future. And our conceptualisation is so sophisticated that we are able to defer gratification in the present for a better future. (The biblical pun was deliberate. I also sought to pun on Cain but there are no words in my dictionary beginning with that arrangement of letters. I hadn't realized that before. It's as if language itself shuns Cain's name).

Anyway, back to the eh future… subject in hand. Why bother thinking about the future, let alone sacrificing the now for it? Why not just do what’s expedient? (Peterson 2018) Why not turn up at work and take the money? I'm nearing an early retirement so why not choose the quiet life? Why bother writing this or a doctorate at this stage?

Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.

The late, great Roger Scruton died a month after writing those words. They are the last words in his final book, (Scruton 2022). I'm not knowingly at that point and with the grace of God I won't be there for a wee while yet (hence the obsession with mortality, according to Tom Stoppard in The Telegraph, (Lawrence 2022). But thinking about retirement and not being in the trade has made me think about what I owe for all that was given to me by tradesmen whose names are now largely forgotten by the industry, and which aren't recorded anywhere in particular.

So a year from now I want this blog to attest to my gratitude to the industry and the tradesmen who taught me. I want this blog to attest that the time and effort they generously gave wasn't wasted. And, if I can encourage others to publicly write seriously about our trade, that would be good too.