by James Gault
Teaching Tania
(Love is all you need???)
by
James Gault
Copyright 2008 James Gault
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Chapter 1 Discursive Essays
Dear Tania,
Let me congratulate on your excellent first attempt at a discursive essay. I am pleased to note that you seem to have recovered from your experiences with the Mafia and your homework was up to your customary standard. Your spelling and grammar were, as usual, impeccable but I was also impressed by the well thought out structure, the excellent use of paragraphs, the logical flow of your argument and the persuasive ending. It seems a little mean of me to say this, and I do apologise, but I have one tiny criticism that I feel I must make. It’s always much better in this sort of thing if your ideas are, well, your own. For example, in your homework I counted five ‘according to Honza’s, four ‘in Honza’s opinion’s and one ‘in the words of the great Honza’.
Yes, I did tell you that the judicious use of quotations and citations lends a bit of gravity and credibility to essays of this nature. But I thought you would have realised that such quotations should come from those enjoying a modicum of respect in the literary or academic world. In particular, I should counsel you that the appellation ‘in the words of the great’ can only safely be used in the context of a quote from our famous Mr. Shakespeare, whose talent is recognised throughout the whole world. It is dangerous, for example, to use such terms even when speaking of the works of the American poet Mr. T.S. Eliot, whom you may remember I have already mentioned in our correspondence. In spite of his eminently sensible defection from the land of his birth, there are still some English teachers or exam markers who do not consider him among the greats, and who regard him with scorn, satisfying no doubt some deeply hidden and latent xenophobic sentiments. And for exactly the same reasons I must warn you to show some restraint when making quotes from your own admirable Messrs Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Checkov and Pushkin.
The ‘Honza-isation’ of your homework raises another concern. Is it your intention that the said ‘Honza’ will replace cats as an object of your affections? If so, I fear your mother will be less than pleased, especially if you’re thinking of bringing him home as a pet. There’s nothing more off-putting than falling over a wicker basket full of Honza every time you’re making a cup of tea in the kitchen. And your Mum will worry about you suffering from ‘puppy love’. Such first loves are normally of short duration so no doubt Honza will soon suffer the same fate as a discarded Christmas pet, and you will be on the manhunt again. When this happens, I think you should give some thought to your Mum’s feelings before plunging into an unwise choice.
There are three basic strategies a daughter can employ when choosing a new partner.
You can deliberately choose someone of whom you are sure your mother will approve. This might be marvellous for your relationship with your Mum, but could be potentially disastrous for your relationship with the chosen partner. And it is not so easy to go down this route as you would think. You think you really know your mother quite well but do you know what kind of boyfriend would really please her? Such knowledge requires a very careful investigation of her tastes and desires. Don’t, for example, think that if you choose someone exactly like your father that this will do the trick! Your Mum, like all married women of a certain age, will have by now discovered every little inadequacy of her spouse, she will be kicking herself for not having made a better choice, and is almost certainly grimly determined that her daughter will do better than she did.
You could of course take the iconoclastic path and choose someone your mother will absolutely hate. This is the fashionable choice, usually associated with the nose-ring, multi-coloured hair and gratuitous mutilation of the body, and to be honest it doesn’t seem like your style at all. There is another problem anyway. Many Mums are, deep down, really quite sensible and the chances are that if you find a boy that your Mum will hate, you will probably start to hate him yourself after five minutes.
The other option is to pick someone who suits your fancy and to hell with what your Mum thinks. This sounds easy but it too is more difficult than you think. It’s all very well to abandon all parental influences but if you don’t have your Mum for a role model, who will you turn to? Your probably thinking of some teenager’s or women’s magazine, but you would be in danger of abandoning your inner soul to a faceless organization whose sole interest is commercial exploitation. I’m not saying mothers are totally devoid of self-interest in relation to their children, but you can rely on at least a certain level of affection. In my experience, women journalists would kill their granny for a cup of tea, although, I admit I might be stereotyping here.
But all these difficult choices are for the future. For the present, I assume you have taken up with Honza for the simple reason that you LIKE him, and this is a perfectly good reason for a schoolgirl infatuation. Personally, I have only two concerns.
Firstly, I wouldn’t like this latest adventure to interfere with your considerable progress in the English language, and I want you to absolutely promise me that you will devote at least fifty percent of your time together speaking English. That way your skills will at least be maintained and Honza’s will certainly improve.
But I’m also a bit concerned about your Mum’s health, or, more precisely, for her continuing state of relative sanity, so could you please, for once, follow my advice carefully? First of all, refrain from mentioning Honza by name. If you really must narrate his exploits at the dinner table, refer to him as some boy in my class who sits near me – but not too near – certainly not within touching distance. And, finally, whatever you do, don’t ever, in any circumstances, let your Mum catch you talking to him,
So always keep a good lookout,
Your teacher,
J.
Chapter 2. Panic Stations!!
You have 1 SMS messages.
You have 1 SMS messages unread.
Tania, check your e-mails. Urgent. J.
To : [email protected]
From : [email protected]
Subject : VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE
Tania (the ‘dear’ is inappropriate in the current circumstances),
Why do you never do what I tell you? I have just had your Mum on the phone and I can safely say she is not pleased, I could even go as far as calling her angry, and, to be honest, I could mention the word ‘furious’ without fear of being accused of exaggeration. It appears that she SAW you with YOU KNOW WHO and you were holding hands again. This was bad enough, but what apparently brought on the dizzy turn and the fits of trembling was the dream-like gazing into each other’s eyes. How could you be so stupid? Everyone knows love is blind but could you perhaps arrange for your version to be blind in only one eye, leaving the other free to keep a look-out for distraught mums hiding behind lampposts and spying on their amorous offspring.
I was a bit unfortunate to get her phone call. First of all, she tried to call your Dad but he was in a meeting so naturally she decided to pick on me instead.
She started off by telling me that in her opinion it was totally inappropriate for eleven-year-olds to harbour romantic notions.
I pointed out that you were both very precocious children, that Honza was already twelve, and that you would be twelve yourself in couple of weeks. This didn’t appease her at all. So I suggested she was probably over reacting, and that what she saw was probably no more than an innocent discussion about homework, but she wanted to know why you would need to hold hands to discuss homework. I muttered something about an experiment in the chemistry of human body contact but for some reason this idea just seemed to get her even more upset. Then she demanded an explanation of the puppy dog looks you were giving each other. By this time she was screaming and crying, and I have to admit that I was under lot of pressure so maybe my answers lacked their usual panache and credibility. My suggestion that you were perhaps reading each other’s thoughts only brought the rather cynical comment that she could well imagine what these thoughts were.
In an attempt to take the heat out of the conversation, I said I was glad she had chosen to phone me, as your Dad had already received more than his fair share of pain as a result of her anger. This didn’t go down too well either, for she screamed something like “Don’t you worry about him! I know whose fault all of this is. You don’t imagine Tania got these bad genes from my side of the family. He’s for it when he gets home from work, I promise you!” and she hung up. So I immediately phoned your Dad and told him to find some work to keep him very late in the office, and not to go home until he was absolutely certain that his wife was safely in bed, sound asleep and unarmed.
The reason for this e-mail is to warn you to be prepared when your Mum gets home. You are in deep trouble, so deep that you will need more than a ruse to get out of it, and if I were you I wouldn’t be embarrassed about resorting to a blatant lie.
You probably won’t get away with invoking her unstable psychological condition and claiming she imagined the whole thing. If you want to save your skin you’ll need to be a bit more inventive than that.
You could begin by admitting that she did see you with one of your classmates of the male species, but he was there in the role of your bodyguard. Your teacher, having been to the cinema last night for yet another screening of ‘The Godfather’, was suddenly afraid that you could still be in danger from the Mafia and had asked one of the boys in your class – chosen at random and not one you particularly liked, by the way – to escort you home safely.
Or perhaps you could say that it wasn’t Honza she saw you with, and it wasn’t even a boy. You had been having a dress rehearsal in the drama class and one of the girls who has a cross-gender role in the next pantomime had decided to go home still wearing her make-up and costume. You just have to hope your mother doesn’t get even more upset because you were holding hands with a girl.
Or, instead of saying it wasn’t Honza, why don’t you say it wasn’t you? There is a certain clique in your class who is still annoyed at you because their mothers are now so friendly with the teacher that they can get away with nothing these days. So, to get their revenge, one of them disguised herself as you and then deliberately arranged things so that your Mum would see her in the company of one of the boys, being all lovey-dovey. Frankly, you’re surprised that your normally astute and intelligent mother would fall for such an obvious trick, and you’re a little disappointed that she doesn’t have more faith in her daughter’s good judgement.
This last one is not such a bad excuse, but it is unfortunately exactly the type of short-sighted, temporary solution so loved by politicians and businessmen, which explains why the world totters from war to war, and from financial crisis to financial crisis. You, I and perhaps we could also include Honza, are really too clever to fall into the trap of expediency and make such a stupid mistake.
The problem is that, if your relationship is going to last more than a few minutes, your Mum is bound to catch you in H’s presence again. What you need to devise, therefore, is a solid, legitimate, long-term, water-tight excuse for having regular encounters with the object of your infatuation, such as a big school homework project. The details of such an elaborate lie can be your next English homework,
Best of luck,
Your teacher,
J.
Chapter 3. Well done, Tania
Dear Tania,
Congratulations! I saw your Dad this morning and he was in perfect health with no sign of broken bones or any other injuries. I don’t of course know exactly what you said to your mother but it obviously worked a treat. It is very pleasing to note that not only does your English vocabulary, spelling and grammar come on by leaps and bounds, but you are at last beginning to show some signs of real low cunning. Have you ever thought of a career as a diplomat?
You may be surprised to learn that I am a secret admirer of diplomats. Indeed, knowing that I consider politicians to be about as useful as head lice, you are probably even taken aback by this news.
But, you see, politicians have complete freedom to create their very own lies, something which they do very, very badly. Diplomats, on the other hand, are saddled with the lies of others, but they communicate them with all the poise and panache of a cat refusing to drink your offer of milk until your back is turned.
“Hello, Mr. Foreign Minister, the Ambassador here! As you know, we elected a new president yesterday, so I’m just phoning to bring you up-to-date on the revised official line from the White House. Apparently, your head of state is now a worn-out old despot, aid to your country ceased as from yesterday, and our army is massing on your border ready to keep the peace if there’s even a hint of anything remotely harmful to our national interests. Now, we are so looking forward to seeing you and your lady wife at the embassy tonight for the big ball. There will be an orchestra from Vienna and one of our third secretaries has managed to lay his hands on a couple of cases of Chateau Lafitte ’86 so it should be a spiffing do.”
Ah, what style!
Of course, I cannot say that I admire all members of the diplomatic service. Find someone with the intelligence of a Czech policeman and the tolerance of an Islamic fundamentalist or a leader of the Klu-Klux-Klan, and you have exactly what it takes to make a perfect Immigration Officer.
With your superior intelligence and linguistic skills, it is highly likely that in adult life you will travel abroad extensively, and it is as well to warn you now that this will be a traumatic experience. I am not talking here about the journeys themselves. In spite of plane delays, hijacks and air disasters, these will be as nothing compared to the hassle of applying for visas.
The first problem you will meet in the visa application process will be finding out where to go. Don’t imagine you can walk through the welcoming front door of the embassy or consulate, throw up your arms joyfully, and shout
“I’m here for my visa!”
The main door will be locked, and there will be a small sign, written in a language they hope no-one will understand, directing you on a tour of the city and leading you to a dirty back entrance.
There you will find another sign, half obscured by dirt and neglect, informing you that visas are issued between 10.00 and 10.05 am on the third Thursday of every month with an ‘A’ in it. As they don’t specify the language to be used for spelling the month, you will have no choice but to turn up at the appointed hour every month until you get lucky.
When you get there, some two hours early to get to the front of the queue, you will find about a hundred people have arrived before you. You will wait, probably in the rain, until the doors open, some two hours late. Then you will be ushered, in small groups, into a dirty back courtyard, with no shelter from the driving snow or blazing sun, according to the season.
Finally you will be admitted, after an intensive body search, into a small room guarded by two enormous soldiers with machine guns. There you will be asked to complete a form written in unintelligible English (or the language of your intended destination) , and be made t
o hand over a large non-refundable sum of money for what will almost certainly be the privilege of being told you are an unwanted alien.
Up to this point; I’m sure a tenacious girl like you won’t be put off, but you still have to meet the dreaded Immigration Officers.
The interview will take place in a drab room with a minimum of furniture. There will be no chair for you to ensure that you don’t get too comfortable. The two spotlights shining into your eyes won’t help either. The Immigration Officers will ask their questions in the violently aggressive manner of someone who really wanted to be in the secret service, managing to look bored and at the same time completely distrustful of anything you say.
At the end of the interview, they will go behind a thin wall to discuss your case in loud voices so that you are sure to overhear their humiliating comments.
“What do you think, Peregrine, should we give it to her?”
“Looks a bit shifty to me, Lionel. I don’t trust women, even young ones..”
“You’re quite right!.”
“And would you take a look at this passport? It doesn’t even have proper writing. Just funny shapes. Foreigners, huh!”
“But at least she’s not one of those creatures whose suntan lasts right through the winter.”
“There is that, certainly. But where exactly is she from?”
“Russia.”