The School of Life

Cathy Haynes on the Fear of the Amateur

I’ve just chanced across a copy of The 1951 Gadgets Annual. It gives five hundred useful and ‘ingenious hobby ideas’. They include how to build a ukulele, turn an old felt hat into a shoe-sock, pose live fish for photographs, ‘titivate’ a bath mat and draw a silhouette portrait of the wife (‘… pose the wife between a sheet of paper and a strong light … Draw round the outline of this shadow, and let the wife relax …’).

 

Gadgets, with its mania for the homespun and its assumption that it’s not talking to the wife, is fascinating. But, as I flick through its pages, I am distracted by an unexpected sense of disquiet over its espousal of all things amateur. True, I’m suspicious of its invitation to ‘Be Your Own Electrician’ and chemical engineer – I think there are laws against that now. But something else is troubling me. Who, I ask myself, would dare make a wedding present of a papier-maché fruit display? Who would sport a miniature homemade flower vase on their lapel? Who would try to bamboozle their guests with ‘The Puzzling Bran-Canister’ trick? Not me! For I am suffering from a form of cultural cringe, a symptom of a contemporary collective embarrassment toward handicraft and hobbies. 

Nowadays we believe we can buy much better things than we could produce ourselves, and getting what we want requires no more effort than a barely prehensile prod at a keypad. We have become consummate consumers, gourmets of culture, super-spectators, and our sophistication as audience-critics has out-stripped our making and performing skills. But the old hobbies, games and handicrafts haven’t disappeared. Instead they’ve changed from something we do into something we watch. TV programmes on DIY themes from cooking to home makeovers to ballroom dancing have professionalised the amateur: the old parlour games are played by professional entertainers, while amateur performers compete for the affirmation of fame and a professional contract. And so, whether we judge ourselves lacking the wit of TV quiz panellists at one extreme or gawk at the humiliation of talent show competitors at the other, most of us daren’t risk it ourselves.

 

We fear the amateur in case it causes us to loose face and look uncool. But at the root of the word amateur is the Latin amare, to love. An amateur pursuit is something we have genuine passion for, regardless of how we look to the outside world. By abandoning it, we lose the pleasure of doing something that is playful, creative, absorbing, and solely for itself.

 

So – for reasons of professional experiment, you understand – I’m going to try out some of those Gadgets ideas. And secretly I hope the process will release some of that joy of manual craft and ingenuity that I most fully felt in childhood. Who cares if my efforts are a bit shoddy? Only I’m going to see them. Oh, and my loved ones. Brace yourselves, family of mine, if you’re reading. If you play your cards right, you might get a lapel vase for a present.

 

Cathy Haynes teaches the Play course at The School of Life.

Places are still available on our six week Play course commencing on 10 November - 15 December, please go to our website for more details and to book.

 

 

 

Cathy Haynes on the fun to be had lying about books

A recent Mori report revealed that 40% of us resort to lying about having read certain books just so we can join in with a conversation. My cynical side seizes on this as dismal evidence that we’re buckling with indignity under the weight of “must-reads” the media piles upon us daily. But my upbeat, airy self wonders if the statisticians have stumbled upon and misinterpreted a fantastic party game being played all over the land where everyone is re-imagining the content of books in a splendid frenzy of creativity.

I would never condone this misrepresentation of an important work; the urgent content of some books is vital for us to encounter critically and debate collectively. But perhaps there is a playful liberation in the 40%’s fraudulent resistance to the tyranny of booklists. What’s more, that we’re able to bluff a conversation about a book we’ve never read suggests at least 40% of us are much better at creative storytelling than we might have expected.

In The School of Life’s Play course we experiment with an old parlour game. It’s the one where you choose three obscure books, read their covers aloud and ask players to write what they think is the first line. An umpire then reads out the results with the real first line of the book buried somewhere among them, and asks the group to choose which is the real one. I’m prepared to bet as much as a fiver that no matter how many times we play this game, the group will always mistakenly identify one of their own lines as the real thing. But perhaps 40% of us already knew that, and are busy playing the game up and down the land.

Cathy Haynes is part of The School of Life's faculty. To find out more about the Play course click HERE. Photo by Jeff Mermelstein.

 

Cathy Haynes on upbeat culture

A friend – a singer – recently told me that in her experience it is much harder to compose in the major key than the minor. The minor harmonies are the tear-jerkers and the hair-raisers. Bang out a few of those with panache, she said, and you can pack a compelling emotional punch. To create convincing emotional content in the major key is more creatively challenging, she concluded. I asked her for a powerful work in a major key. She obliged by singing Holiday by Madonna. Surely, I complained, there’s a better one out there. She winked at me silently with a sage-like smile as if to say, go seek. So I knocked on the doors of two authors I know. They commiserated with my quest and described how difficult they have both found it to write a novel on happiness, let alone find a publisher. And we took a moment to think of a truly joyful, uplifting novel that doesn’t seem too thin, insincere or politically insidious. About all we could muster is HE Bates’ Darling Buds of May series. It appears it’s hard to find fine novels untrammelled by the darker stuff. And yet, sometimes more than anything, we need the genuinely uplifting, inspiring and hopeful. As a small part of the exploration of our potential for creativity and enjoyment on The School of Life's Play course, this is one of the questions we consider: where can we seek our sheer enjoyment -- as well as fascination, empathy, inspiration and solace -- in culture of all kinds.

Cathy Haynes will be teaching the next Play course at The School of Life starting on 21st April. Come with a friend and you'll both get £50 off the ticket price. Find out more here.

Picture shows a recent installation by artist Olafur Eliasson.

Guy Browning on how to live

Guy Browning publishes a regular How To column in the Guardian Saturday magazine. We particularly loved last week's entry:

People who are about to die generally don't regret the parachute jumps they haven't made (unless they're falling from an aircraft without one). Instead, they regret the love they haven't given or haven't expressed. Generally, the reason they haven't done this is because they've been too full of hate, too in love with themselves or simply too crushed by the business of survival.

The universe is in balance. If it wasn't, it wouldn't exist. Every constituent part of the universe is also in balance, including us. Life, therefore, is a question of balance. On the tightrope of life, the pole we have to balance with always has two sides: light and dark, male and female, good and bad. Acknowledging and understanding both sides is the only way of keeping upright and moving forward.

To get through life requires effort and luck. Generally, the harder you try, the luckier you get - but not always. Sometimes superhuman effort fails and, at other times, absolutely minimal effort succeeds spectacularly. That said, try trying first. Everyone has free will in life, but what happens to you is largely out of your control. We're like a flea on the head of an ox: we may be jumping around merrily, but the overall direction of travel is not really in our hands.

The secret of life is a combination of the combined wisdom of the great thinkers down the ages and the Cub Scout law: be nice to other people and do your best. It doesn't sound very inspiring but, on balance, it's probably right. Remember, too, that there's a reason that the universe is in balance. We don't know what it is, but it's likely to be a lot more impressive than we are.

Richard Reynolds on his stuggle to fill the world with flowers

I began guerrilla gardening four years ago. These strikes were solo nocturnal missions. My aim was to make myself a garden from the miserable and neglected flowerbeds abandoned by Southwark Council's horticultural contractors. In parallel, little did I know, but thousands of others were doing the same, taking land that was not theirs and cultivating it, for flowers and food, alone and in groups, in cities and in country lanes. 

A lot has happened since I began guerrilla gardening and it's all because I blogged about it. So here I am blogging some more to tell you about The School of Life's wonderful Guerrilla Gardening gift box (seen here), which contains all you need for a night out transforming some orphaned land into a little garden.

It also contains a copy of my recent book, ON GUERRILLA GARDENING, which BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time picked as one of their Top 5 gardening books for Christmas: "I'd go as far as to say it's one of the most unusual gardening books of 2008, well written, well researched, very inspiring". Unfortunately praise for guerrilla gardening is not universal and the fight continues on the doorstep... my local council (Southwark) have just pressed the big red nuclear button and declared war on my oldest guerrilla garden. The bombshell arrived in the form of an invoice to me and my 89 neighbours for gardening they have not been doing. Last year they refunded their fraudulent charge for three years of 'grounds maintenance' after admitting the work had been done by guerrilla gardeners. But now they have reinstated the charge without explanation. Read more about this farcical saga at www.guerrillagardening.org.

Richard takes participants on The School of Life’s PLAY course out for a beginners’ guerrilla gardening lesson. Book now for the course starting on 2 February.

He is also leading an Urban Gardening Holiday for The School of Life in collaboration with Emma Townshend in April 2009. Find out more or book a place HERE.

To order The Guerrilla Gardening Christmas Gift Box for £35 plus post and packaging, click HERE.

Paul Elliman's Alphabet

No words are necessary - we just love it.

The Daily Aphorism - a new website from The School of Life

We need good ideas today more than ever, to give us the courage and humour to get through these uncertain times. So today we’ve launched The Daily Aphorism, a new website that distributes a short and pithy piece of wisdom every morning. Sign up now to receive a beautifully typeset aphorism in your inbox every day for a month.

www.thedailyaphorism.com

But what exactly is an aphorism? An ‘itch of wisdom’, ’the world in a phrase’, or for the more prosaically minded, ‘an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and easily memorable form’. Anyone can write one, though it takes some skill to do it well. Famous aphorists have included Blaise Pascal, William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Winston Churchill, Jenny Holzer and Woody Allen, many of whom are featured on The Daily Aphorism website.

As part of the campaign, we are also inviting you to compose their own contemporary aphorisms. Here is some advice from aphorism expert James Geary about how to compose a winning entry: 

There is good news and bad news. The bad news is: 'How to write an aphorism' is something that can't be taught. The good news is: It is something that can be learned.

There are three basic methods of composition. There is the 'spontaneous combustion' method, in which the aphorism flares out fully formed at unexpected moments, sending the writer scrabbling for napkins, envelopes or any other scrap of paper on which to write it down. Stanislaw Jerzy Lec was a great practitioner of this method: "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."

Then there is the 'deliberate composition' method as practiced by the likes of La Rochefoucauld. He would attend a swanky salon, discuss all manner of subjects, such as love and friendship, then retire for hours to his room where he would produce several sheets of prose, all of which he would eventually distill down to one or two sharp, shining sentences: "In the adversity of even our best friends we always find something not wholly displeasing."

And then there are the 'accidental aphorists,' those writers who never intend to compose aphorisms but just can't help themselves—aphorisms occur naturally within longer stretches of text, such as essays, novels, or poems. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a classic accidental aphorist: "What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered."

So, it's really a matter of finding out which kind of aphorist you are. Then I find it helpful to apply these handy laws—keep it short (after all, only a fool gives a speech in a burning house), definitive (no ifs, ands, or buts), philosophical (it should make you think), and give it a twist. It's also useful to keep in mind what Gabriel Laub said about aphorisms: "Aphorisms are so popular because, among other reasons, they contain half-truths, and that is an unusually high percentage."

Entries should be submitted via The Daily Aphorism website before 31st December. The competition will be judged by James Geary, philosopher Alain de Botton and Director of The School of Life Sophie Howarth. The winning aphorism will be the main feature in The School of Life’s window in the New Year and the winner will also be offered a free place on one of The School of Life’s courses.

The Daily Aphorism has been produced in collaboration with St. Luke’s. The aphorisms have been typeset by Susanna Edwards and Joseph Harries and posters are available from The School of Life's shop.

 

Mark Crick offers DIY lessons at The School of Life

Times are lean and the spirit of make do and mend is setting in. So we've asked literary ventriloquist Mark Crick to run a series of essential DIY lessons at The School of Life next week.

The series marks the publication of Mark's new book Sartre’s Sink which seeks to remedy the neglect that the DIY genre has suffered for so long at the hands of the literary establishment. This essential household manual provides clear instruction about how to replace a window pane, bleed a radiator, put up a garden fence and replace a light switch. The book has received unduly critical comments this week from Milan Kundera who declared it 'unbearably light', Jean Paul Sartre who found it 'naeseating' and Samuel Beckett who argued it was 'not worth the wait'. We couldn't agree less and are confident next week's lessons will change the tone of the book's reception.

The lessons are free and begin at 6.15pm sharp every night.
No booking is necessary but our shop is small so turn up early if you can.

Monday 27th October
Learn to hang wallpaper in the style of Ernest Hemingway

Tuesday 28th October
Be commanded by Julius Caesar on how to put up a shelf

Wednesday 29th October
Let Anaїs Nin seduce you into painting a door

Thursday 30th October
Apply sealant round a bath following the diary of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Friday 31st October
Board up an attic with directions from Edgar Allan Poe

Sophie Howarth on David Spero's Churches

David Spero's new book Churches is my favourite photography book of the year. It documents an array of buildings currently used as churches, none of which was built for the purpose. Often temporary, semi-permanent or unconsecrated, the buildings are located where we would least expect to find them, in industrial estates, shopping parades, houses, garages, cinemas, above pubs and commercial properties. Spero finds a spirit (whether Holy or not is up to us) in the most unlikely places and even for a non-believer like me, there is something very moving about the places in which people can manage to find meaning. What really comes across is a sense of striving for spaces of community and support in the face of the displacements caused by modern urban existence. We're stocking the book in The School of Life on on our shelf 'for those with a God-shaped hole'.

Sophie is Director of The School of Life