EMDR

    Here we are in March then, after a weekend during which we had unseasonal snowfall over the British Isles, today had a real air of spring. I even saw some bees having a go at our winter blossom bush.

    I last wrote here in December, and that's an unusually long gap for me. It's not been an easy two months, and I've been firefighting to keep my work going. The last eight years have taken a significant psychological toll on me, and facing up to some past traumas from school and other moments in earlier life has come together with the huge stress of a complete loss of trust in the ever changing field of what is possible in my medical pathway to leave me in a bit of a state.

    I have a couple of things today I didn't have a couple of weeks ago though, first I have a proper undisputed referral for surgery, and second I've started therapy for all that trauma and psychological toll I was talking about. I'll believe the surgery is real when I wake up from the anaesthesia and they finally can't take it away from me, but the therapy has been a very tangible thing that has already had an effect.

    EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, is a technique for locking away trauma that works under the assumption that the things coming back to bother you haven't been processed by the brain in the way most memories are. As I understand it REM sleep allows us to put away the happenings of the day, into long-term storage if you will, and sometimes that process is not effective and these memories hang around to plague us. EMDR tries to replicate this eye movement while guiding you through some of the trauma, the idea being that it does the same filing task.

   Does it work? Far too early to tell. It's quite intense, and upsetting. I went to a school which I would not send my children too, but that some parents would sell Granny to get little Tarquin into. I didn't choose it, my mother pushed all of us into scholarships at academic hothouse schools, and I was the outsider at every point. Nobody gives a crap about the psychological scars of a shit time at one of the so-called best schools unless someone pulled their knob out at you, so the huge number of people like me with problems in later life that didn't involve anything like that are left hanging. There are support groups for people who went to boarding schools, but in my case I fall through the cracks as a day school pupil. As you can imagine, bringing all that kind of stuff up is ... difficult.

    You are warned that it'll affect you for a few days afterwards, and it's true. I've not been in a good place at all over the last few months, but the last few days since the therapy have been a bit grim. I know it would be a hell of a lot worse with testosterone, I have always said I hated the aggression that came with being a bloke.

    So there we are. Slow, tired, beset by trauma. It will get better, this is part of the therapy. As to the surgery, when that comes is anyone's guess. I've given up. Within the year seem likely though, and that can only be a good thing.

Expected to achieve

    I went to school with a few people who've done rather well for themselves. One or two household names, one of whom's known the world over. And a fair crop of the 1%, bond traders and people involved in other dubious financial endeavours. It was that kind of school.
    I also went to school with a fair number of people who've never really made much of themselves, that dread phrase "Never achieved their potential". I guess that group contains me. And one or two who just dropped off the edge, like the person who secured a place at an elite institution but who I last saw sometime in the early '90s as a very ill looking down-and-out begging at Oxford railway station.
    As I've mentioned before in these pages, my school was one of the more rarefied examples of what we Brits confusingly call a "public school" which to the rest of the world is a private school. In my case I went there because I passed an extra exam as an 11 year old blacksmith's kid from a small village primary school, and Margaret Thatcher picked up the tab as part of a bold experiment in social mobility called the Assisted Places Scheme.
    Public schools are an odd mirror of the Real World. One in which most of the people are not exceptionally talented, but are fortunate enough to have rich parents who pay for the privilege of having their offspring constantly told that they are. And in which the expectation is that all pupils are destined for great things by right not by achievement, because to people with such talent achievement is a right. Contempt for people of lesser talent - otherwise known as those in the state education sector - is an unwritten part of the curriculum based mostly on complete ignorance.
    The customer for public schools is the parent not the child, and the product is exam grades rather than well rounded young people.
    It's an odd thing, experiencing all that at school. Firstly because you pretty soon realise the world isn't like that if you go out into it without the cushion of an excessive parental fortune. Success in any field has infinitely more to do with luck than talent, whether that luck lies in being in the right place at the right time or in having the right doors opened for you by who you or your parents are.
    But secondly there's another much more insidious effect of that kind of education. Someone has been bred to achieve by right, yet by the time they've been out in the world for a while it just hasn't happened. They aren't rich, they don't manage an empire, and nobody knows their name. Even though their achievements are by any rational measure not half bad they feel as though they have failed. In our connected age this effect is amplified by the never ending barrage of friends and acquaintances puffing their smallest successes and glossing over their failures.
    This last is something I think ironically I was sheltered from by the great failure of my life. The dotcom crash ruined the careers of huge numbers of people just like it did mine, but such was the culture of tech startups that there was always the illusion of success in the next one to keep you going.
    It might seem odd to be spending a Saturday morning in such navel-gazing, but it's been on my mind this week because of yet another acquaintance catching the School Bug. No, not the runny nose all the people with kids get a week after the start of term, but the pushy parent bug of wanting to ensure that little Nathaniel and Penelope have what their parents consider to be the best possible education. And as is so often the case when the pushy parent moment arrives, they single out the One They Know who Went To Public School to help them justify their educational prejudices.
    What I try to tell them of course is that there is more to little P & N's futures than exam results and they might end up with children better able to cope with 21st century life if they sent them to the comprehensive instead. Which isn't what they want me to say, I'm supposed to reassure them that public school is the only choice for youngsters so obviously gifted, they'd only learn how to deal drugs if they went to school with the feral youth from the estates.
    I really hate the British obsession with education for all the wrong reasons.
    I should be painting a picture of Nathaniel & Penelope in a couple of decades time, living in shared houses and working in peanuts jobs for "good" employers while slowly realising that the success that should have been theirs by right isn't going to come, and that somebody else will always be there to rise on the back of their achievements. And unlike previous generations they probably won't be able to claim the person getting the breaks had more privilege than them.
    At the moment the prospect of having a family of my own is something I'm having to fight to maintain a hold on. I know I won't catch the Pushy Parent bug in quite the same way.
    I hope I'll manage to instill in my children the idea that they can succeed if they try and have a bit of luck, but also that lack of success and failure are not necessarily the same thing.

How much do you need to know?

    There was a teacher at my secondary school who was - presumably still is - a deeply unpleasant man. His speciality was punishment, and he seemed to derive a vicious pleasure from punishing young teenage boys. We were fortunate not to have been his pupils in the era when teachers used canes. In his case the playground view was that he took just a little too much interest in this aspect of his work, and in the way of young boys of course this took on an angle involving rumours of gay sex. Did any of us have any real knowledge on the subject? I certainly didn't, he never tried anything like that on me, I was bigger than him. And I never walked in on him in the book cupboard with a third-former among the history books or anything like that. But the fact is he was abusing his position and damaging young lives, I still have nightmares about school today because of people like him, and I know I'm not alone in that.
    Could I go to the police? Of course not, much as I wish I could send him into the nastiest jail imaginable. I'm guessing that however much damage he did, he wasn't breaking any laws in what I saw him do, and I can't do so on the basis of playground rumour.
     If you're British, you'll probably have guessed why my teacher is on my mind this morning. The story of the moment is that the late 1960s and 70s TV personality and sanctified charity fundraiser Jimmy Savile has turned out to have had a penchant for sexually assaulting young teenage girls.
     The shock comes of course because it's not really a shock. I first heard rumours about Savile about twenty years ago when I was working at the wilder edge of the media industry. They sounded like idle tittle-tattle, but we're told for those close to the epicentre it was more than just common knowledge. Others have done plenty of outrage at this both faux and otherwise, where I find the worry is at a more personal level. How much do you have to know before you go to the police?
    So in an odd way I understand why Savile survived in a culture of rumours. The people with real evidence - those who walked into the dressing room and found him with a 13-year-old - are unforgivable, but for those who didn't I can see why it would have been very difficult for them to do anything about it. Like my teacher, he was in too unassailable a position.
    I wonder how guilty I'll feel though if an ex-classmate of mine ever comes forward with a more serious tale about our teacher.

I went to private school, where's my gold medal then?

    There's something of a fuss in the news this morning. It seems that rather a lot of British Olympic medalists received their education in the private sector rather than in state schools. In a country obsessed with both education and social class envy this is a big story. And rightly so, forgetting national willy-waving over medal tables for a moment and descending to a personal level a talented athlete should have the same opportunities wherever they are born.

    Unfortunately though as is so often the case, the baying mobs have missed the target. It's a case of the statistical trope at work: correlation does not prove causation. This graph is a famous example produced in support of the Flying Spaghetti Monster religious satire, purporting to show that global warming is the result of the decline in Caribbean piracy since the early 19th century. It's absolute rubbish of course, but demonstrates the point very nicely.
    The real reason that our Olympic athletes are disproportionately likely to have attended a private school has little to do with the sporting ability of private schools and everything to do with the fact that private school pupils tend to have rich parents who can ferry them to competitions, buy them expensive kit, pay entry fees, and perform all the other expensive functions of a professional sporting team without bankrupting themselves. My cousin's son - state educated - played his sport at a national level when he was a teenager and I saw the struggles she and her husband went through in his support. Would he have become a household name had they been millionaires? Who knows, but it's certain his path would have been significantly eased if they were.
    So what of the schools themselves? It's a frequent cry, that private schools have better facilities than state schools, and it's not without truth. But it's worth examining the business model of a typical private school.
    The customers of a private school are not the pupils, but the parents. They sign the cheques, they call the shots. And they send their sons and daughters away not with a view of Olympic gold in their minds but of graduation day in Oxford or Cambridge, of My Son The Doctor or My Daughter The Lawyer. They are willing to pay for a bit of sport, perhaps rugby, cricket, or hockey (never football, far too proletarian!), but not at the expense of career ambitions for their offspring. If a child at a private school shows sporting promise their school certainly won't hinder them but support as they progress is strictly extra-curricular. Which is where the rich parents come in.
    Long-term readers of this blog will know I attended a private school. My parents don't have much money, Maggie paid my fees. And as I have expounded at length before, the experience was not a good one. But it does mean I saw the ethos of private schooling at first hand. I thus would agree with anyone decrying the dominance of rugby or cricket by the privately educated, but I can't see it in the wider sporting field. If our sporting overlords really want to increase the numbers of state educated athletes they should concentrate not on the schools but on the extra-curricular support for promising candidates without the benefit of rich parents. The schools' job is education, not elite sporting training.