Thursday

16 February 2017

— Happy # 64 NBP!

Good Morning All,

I have invited friends down for Sunday lunch after which we shall go to a jazz trio concert at the art museum in Sorø. John started teaching French at C.I.S. in 1982, the same year I started teaching English and EFL (English as a Fantastic Language.) He is a card-carrying curmudgeon who has a distaste for all things American with the exception of jazz. He would rather pun than eat. (No, don’t worry, John is not a receiver of the Day Book. Says it clogs up his e-mail too much. Shocking.)

His wife Lissi is a retired music teacher who taught in Roskilde, the small cathedral city where they live. Like most music teachers, there is something that is simply especially warm and good-hearted about her, and she is still as nuts about John as when I first met her these decades ago.

Back in our school’s glory days in the late ‘80s, back before we took ourselves too seriously, we held a January Activity Week when we suspended regular classes, the better to pursue other interests such as cooking, bookbinding, fashion design, staging and filming a one-act play, a backgammon tournament, basic photography, and anything else where a teacher had the talent/experience to run things. 

During the morning sessions, the art teacher and I usually ran an Artathon, which would—among other things--take us to a Copenhagen museum where she would lead them in sketching, and I would instruct them to sit in front of a painting for half an hour, not taking their eyes off the painting for one second, saying not a word, in fact, not even thinking in words, after which they were to write a poem inspired in one way or another by the painting. 

In the afternoons, John and I took twenty or so kids to his tennis club in Roskilde for a week-long doubles tournament, John and I being one of the teams. Over the years, there were more than a few excellent players, kids way better than we were in our prime, let alone in our forties. Not that we ever lost, mind you, but that was thanks mostly to John’s teaching me how to let our opponents defeat themselves

Anyway, students from those years returning to school for a visit would count Activity Week as one of the absolute highlights of their high school years. They all agreed it was the break they needed from the rigors of the International Baccalaureate curriculum, so that they could get back to it afresh.

Alas, after our headmaster went back to just teaching math, morons took over the administration of the school, and they decided such frivolities had to be dispensed with.

Okay, now how did I get here? … Oh, yeah, John and Lissi will be my first official visitors to our new house. So I am now in a steep panic I shan’t be close to ready by Sunday. To that end, between Monday afternoon and yesterday afternoon, I emptied twenty-two moving boxes and found places for everything Now there are only 23 such boxes left on the ground floor, and only a dozen or so book boxes waiting in the basement. So, I have a shot at semi-readiness, so long as I do not go out to the garage and peek through the door.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron