Shepherds' Hall

Today I got up and recorded the radio show for tomorrow night* before picking up Hannah and driving her down to her flat in Manchester, which in itself made me feel that Christmas was inexorably winding down and that the new year was underway.

After that I went up to Chorley where I met with my chum Dom, who recently posted a blog about his 'Year of trying', which I found inspirational and which also served as a timely reminder that I need to get on with stuff. I was looking forward to chatting with him. And I wasn't disappointed. 

It's always a joy to talk to someone who's smart and aware, and who thinks about things but with Dom I particularly find he has interesting things to say about creativity and the creative process. We chatted about all the things he did last year, things that he didn't necessarily want to do but things he felt he needed to do to take his writing forward. And as he writes for children, we talked a bit about schools and how children are taught and I was able to air a couple of my educational hobby horses.

One of those is around physics, which right now I think is the most exciting of topics. It has far more mystery and magic to it than the wildest of RE lessons, it ties in with maths, chemistry, and biology, sure, but also philosophy and, frankly, if you teach physics and you don't have students who are regularly excited and stunned into disbelief then you're missing an opportunity.

We should be teaching kids about ideas and how to learn and, in these web-enabled days, about how to access and evaluate information, which is pretty much the opposite of our government's educational policy, which seems to think that grammar schools represent the golden days of teaching. (I was at one: they were great if - and only if - you were academic, which, luckily for me, I was.)

ANYWAY, we were then joined by the Minx for further drinks and conversation before we headed 'round to The Nile for a kebab. Hooray! (And that was when I grabbed this quick shot of the council's ferris wheel, lit up against the night sky. But really, I wish I could have had a selfie of me and Dom in the corner of the Shepherd's Hall, which is a cracking little pub.)

*The show is in two parts and you can here the podcasts here: part 1 and part 2.