Pig Sty Avenue

Photo24_21A , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

make a blog of it, day 2, 30th October 2012 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

At last! Touching wood, inshallah, and all that stuff, we should be moved to Glasgow in the next month or so. The bloody wait is almost over. And we go there with a bit of a swagger, we lived in Red Road for a year in 2002/3, so we know the score. And now Red Road flats are being demolished, and we'll be in Dennistoun this time. We've got Matthias Pintscher and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra to thank for this move, by the way. I went with Boy to see a free gig at the City Halls in the spring of 2010. It was Pintscher's first as Artist-in-Association with the orchestra. (God knows why I didn't blog about it at the time, very strange). I was very impressed: listening to a symphony orchestra, and the first performance of one of the conductor's own works (a flute concerto), for FREE, ffs... The shine was taken off the evening somewhat by the train full of drunks back to Saltcoats. Wouldn't it be splendid if we lived a short taxi ride from the Cit...

Still busy, but hang on a minute. During my working-from-home lunchbreak, I was noodling around the BBC iPlayer, and came across episode 1 of  Speaking Our Language .  It only lasted 20 minutes, so I thought I'd give it a go. It's always instructive to encounter language learning - good, bad or indifferent - from the other side of the teacher's desk.  It wasn't bad at all, methodologically speaking, though a bit too much L1, maybe, and it was clearly low-budget and not on its first run.  I'll watch episode 2, anyways. I'm road testing an iPad for work, so I had a quick shufty at BBC Alba's learning links, and found Learn Gaelic, with lots of links for beginners .  There's also BBC Alba , of course. And Radio Nan Gaidheal , which kills two birds with one stone: I like a bit of radio when I'm working, but Radcliffe and Maconie's banter, for example, can be distracting, and working with Radio 4 on is out of the question.  Radio in Gaelic means I...

Photo21_21 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

No trialing ?  That, in the world of Assessment, is a jaw dropper.  A national exam, on the results of which the lives of all its candidates may be shaped, in an advanced democracy with centuries of educational and assessment experience.  AND THEY'RE NOT GOING TO TRIAL IT.  I've heard it all, now.

I read this with interest .  A Libyan film would be something to see.  I remember seeing films on TV there, I would guess Egyptian and from the early 50s, with production values on a par with anything from Hollywood at that time.  But the thing that article brought most to mind was one day whilst staying at the laughingly named "Holiday Village" near Janzur, I came out from the usual late lunch en route to the daily siesta, and just outside the dining room say two men and a woman holding sheafs of paper. The first thing I noticed was that the woman's head was uncovered and she was wearing jeans...  This was a rare sight indeed in Libya.  And as I walked by them I realized that they were rehearsing or learning lines from a play or a film script, in Arabic.  It was jaw-droppingly surreal, then, the sort of thing, you'd wake up after the siesta and think, "Did I dream that?"   Maybe I did, I never saw those three again.