First Day at School
21 September

Come the autumnal equinox, come my first day in school.

But before I discourse about that, there's a few other bits and pieces to catch up on.

On Saturday afternoon, Roland and I took a trip into Liverpool city centre to attend a couple of art shows and to sup a pleasant pint of Cains bitter at Dr Duncan's.

Our first stop was the Conservation Museum where there was an exhibition of photographs by Stephen Shakeshaft, former picture editor and chief photographer of the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, entitled Liverpool People. There were many striking images of Liverpool life here. I've told my parents about it as I think that they would relate to many of the images. It was a good show.

What I found shocking was one photograph of a young couple with an infant in arms taken in the front room of their terrace house in the Everton area of the city. The decoration and furnishings were meager. However, they had no inside toilet, no bath and no electricity. The photograph was taken in the early 1980s.

It's all very well to say that there more of a sense of community in the good old days. And, in some respects, life was simpler because the affordable choices were far fewer. But it has to be right that we have moved away from that type of endemic and systematic poverty. And nothing that anyone can say to me will convince me that that aspect of the old days was good.

Back in July, I enthused about the exhibition that Ross and I had been to at the Walker Art Gallery entitled New Radicals: From Sickert to Freud. One of the things that I got so excited about was the fact that all of the works came out of the Walker's permanent collection and I determined to get Roland to go.

Well, I've achieved that goal and I'm happy to say that he was as energised as I was by the whole experience. He, like me, was astonished by the quality of the lesser known works and wondered why they were not better known and not on regular display. Here are a couple more but I have to tell you that most of the best ones are not in the general digital catalogue. I still think that the show rates an excellent four stars.

On Sunday morning, I trecked up to Southport for a Quaker meeting with a difference. We held a bring and buy Harvest Festival to raise funds for a Quaker Social Work project. The regular members provided what was for sale and the young people set up the stalls and did the selling. We raised some £80 for the cause. And afterwards, we had a shared lunch. I'd like to show you some of the photographs of the event and the young people but these days I'm afraid that showing images of young persons on a website without the parents' consent is not good practice.

And the great news is that the internal-powers-that-be have actually found someone to take over from me as Convener of the Children's Group. This should mean that the group does actually survive.

Back in January, Ross and I went to see Prince Caspian and the star, Ben Barnes, was at that point being promoted as the new Dorian Gray. Well, the film is finally out and, on Sunday afternoon, Ross and I took a trip to Switch Island to see it. It is not half bad. The attention to period detail is good and the decision to spread the timescale of the film over some twenty-five to thirty years makes the point about Dorian's agelessness against the changing features of the rest of the cast with vivid pictorial detail.

Ben Barnes is good in the title rôle. Colin Firth is even better as Lord Henry Wotton. I also liked Fiona Shaw's Lady Agatha and Ben Chaplin's Basil Hallward.

However, I regretted the decision to take out all of Lord Henry's best (and most celebrated) lines. As a result, he comes across as sarcastically grumpy rather than dismissively witty. And I suppose it was a modern idea that Dorian had to be given a back history of childhood abuse to explain why he would want to go to the dark side. Still it was good and the final scenes of the destruction of the portrait were appropriately gruesome.

It might have been even better if Ben Barnes could have been allowed to spend more time parading his body. Although all sorts of hanky panky was tangentially alluded to, the depiction was too coy for words. I didn't necessarily want in your face voyeurism but a touch more frankness would not have gone amiss. The film had been rated 15 after all.

I warned you about Trinity a little while ago. Well, the series began on Sunday night and Christian Cooke's character is, would you believe it, called Dorian. Verdict. Dreadful show; lovely arse. Luckily I shan't have to watch the whole thing as the Bulletin Boards will keep me appraised of the salient features.

That section, by the way, was specifically for Denise who, when we met up last weekend, said of this Journal that it contained an awful lot about buttocks and opera. Well, there's no opera in this post I'm afraid.

On television, Ross and I have also been catching up with Last Chance to See in which Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine traverse the world in search of severely endangered species. In episode one, we travelled to the Amazons basin and got to see Pink River Dolphins and the fabulous Manatee, the sea cow and stuff of legend. Good Sunday night viewing.

So, Monday dawned and I trotted off to a local primary school to begin some voluntary work which will either see me confirmed in my choice of career change or running away from the idea with alacrity. All I can say after one day is that the first impressions were not horribly negative.

By 10:10am, I was showing a young girl how to use a counting stick. By 10:30am, I was telling another young girl that she had been very clever to work out which number came between 12 and 16. By 11:05am, I was pronouncing the phoneme oo. By 11:15am, I was squatting on the floor with three six year olds helping them to complete a jigsaw which had letters and words and pictures on it for every letter of the alphabet in turn.

By 2:10pm, I was tickling my ribs and revolving my pelvis to show where they were with a group of four year olds. By 2:45pm, I was helping two four years olds to cut out pieces of white drinking straw and paste them down on black paper to create a simple skeleton shape. By 3:30pm, I was home tired, slightly emotional and very exhilarated.

Is this going to be the life for me?

I really don't know. I'm too good at getting drawn into new things because they are new. Let's see where I am in a few months time and how I feel about things then. But for the moment, I had a really great time and I'm going to do it all again next week.