A personal psycho-geography

I'm fascinated to look back and compare those subjects in which I did well at school, with those which I failed with varying degrees of being utterly hopeless. I excelled at music and maths, although the latter I struggle to recall or understand today. Any of it other than basic arithmetic. I believe I just memorised complex algebraic formulae, parrot fashion, without the faintest insight. Music is still hugely important to me, but having long accepted I was never good enough for any aspect of serious instrumental performance, I now delight in listening insightfully to a broad range of genres, with the amp turned up to 11, be it Bach, Bartok, Messiaen, Tango Nuevo, Operatic Death Metal or Mongolian Throat Rock.

I did poorly, or failed miserably, at French, Latin, Russian, History and Geography. Paradoxically these are within the social science/arts arena which holds my greatest attention now. Learning Cymraeg for the last ten years may have played a part. The learning process has not just involved new words, but influenced a different way of thinking, that included the social, cultural and political history of people that have long been cast as foreigners in their own land (likewise the names Wales, Welsh, Valais/Wallis, Walloon, Gaulish, Galician). Between English and Cymraeg, many translations are mere approximations for the idiomatic grammars, idiomatic phrases and thus idiomatic thinking. It has raised my awareness of, and interest in, other so-called "minority languages" across the World. In this insular corner I can understand much of Kernewek/Cernyweg/Cornish if I hear it spoken on the radio, but the closely related Breizh/Llydaweg/Breton is lost on me.

So, seeking Internationalist perspectives without leaving home (sustainable "virtual" travel) I return to some early memories of "foreign parts". We never went abroad as a family, and my parents never drove. Holidays by train to Cumbria and Cymru were memorably and sufficiently "exotic". The night-sleeper from Euston held all the frisson of an espionage film. Travel abroad was for me in books and television. Then as now, aside from a lot of overseas travel in the years in between, and pre-COVID. A travel book given by a grandmother highlighted stunning sepia photos of the jagged peaks of the Lofoten islands, Norway. The images stay with me, and today look like they could have been created by an AI bot, rather than of course by one Slartibartfast (*).

On early 60s television, while Austrian divers Hans and Lotte Hass explored the murky depths of the Red Sea (filmed in the 50s), and Jacques Cousteau made vital contributions to underwater conservation, Belgians Armand and Michaela Denis presented condescendingly racist documentaries of parts of Africa and Asia. Supposedly natural history films, they encountered various scantily clad "tribes" as they went, as if those were part of the "wildlife". It never felt appropriate to me even then.

At around the same time, I was equally captivated by the Franco-German dramatisation of Robinson Crusoe (1965), with the empty beaches (really?) of Gran Canaria standing in for whichever island it was supposed to have been off the coasts of Venezuela or Chile. It resonates with themes explored in The Prisoner (1967) too. The accompanying music, rewritten for the English version, still lives on in my head, almost every note, and evokes those open spaces and big skies which draw me to so many places "on the edge".

All this leaves me wondering about the value of formal education. All I can remember from Geography lessons are isolated words and phrases that seem like buzzwords. "The ameliorating effect of the sea" (on climate) is pertinent to where I now live. "Guano" I recall, and its usefulness to the farmers of Peru. Maybe its time has come, in removing the need for chemical fertilisers from petroleum bi-products.

Is it all a load of guano, or as my father used to say, "It's all part of the great kidology son"? I hope not.

LINKS

Treachery of the Blue Books - Wikipedia

I will probably never visit Tasmania (cambriancrumbs.blogspot.com)

Robinson Crusoe : Opening Credits and Complete Theme Music : 1960's TV Series - YouTube

(*)Slartibartfast - Wikipedia