Dinner And A Website

Dinner Conversation
 Daniel had a friend visiting him this week, “Nemo”, a teacher, and they came round to eat this evening. The chat ranged from politics to teaching and managed to set several of the bees in my bonnet buzzing.

 For some reason that wasn't clear the topics focussed on wars and teaching. They reminded me of a cynical joke I was once told. Make love not war; or, you can do both: get married. Nemo seemed preoccupied by trying to understand how a country such as Germany (he teaches German) could have come to elect Hitler as Chancellor. He was inclined to think that the majority of Germans must have been against the war, which I'm sure would have been true with hindsight, but doesn't explain how it happened. I suggested that the circumstances leading up to that could still occur in Europe, if significant levels of unemployment became chronic. One of the inherent weaknesses of democracy, I believe, is that its demise can be democratically be voted for. However, both Daniel and his friend discounted that possibility.

We got on to the end of the war and Daniel's friend made the point that America had profited considerably from it and he regarded the dropping of the atomic bombs as an atrocity. On the former point I had to agree with him, though I don't think that is to deny the sacrifices the Americans also made. On the latter I have to disagree. For many years I too regarded the dropping of the atomic bombs as atrocities; more recently, with what I think is a better understanding of the situation, particularly with regard to what happened in Okinawa, I think that those bombs indirectly saved probably thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of Japanese (as well as American) lives. I suggested that that leaves us with a question that is still pertinent today: how do we combat fanaticism effectively? But neither Daniel nor Nemo was interested in pursuing that.

 Next, we got on to teaching and both Daniel and his friend related finding difficulty in evaluating students in the recent climate of “grammar free” assessment. I've commented before on this. I think knowledge of grammar (and spelling) is essential. In the past, the rules have been regarded as sacrosanct and to be observed by everyone, except for a few wayward geniuses who were only awarded that accolade retrospectively. That has been the problem. The rules aren't sacrosanct; the point is to know when and why you break them, in order to communicate something: a fact, an idea, a feeling or whatever.  Communication is all; why else do we speak or write? It would not be unfair to say that a lot of my life has been spent trying to find the right words to put in the right sequences at the right time.

Website
I've now almost completed the text for the website that I want to create on Mollans. I've also determined that WordPress is the software I shall use. There remains a need for some photos, some of which I already have and some of which I shall have to take. That is trivial. So also, at the moment, seems to be the question of a web address. I've written the text in English and will have that checked by friends such as Steve. Claudine Cellier has already agreed to do the French translation. I could attempt that myself but would never publish it without passing it through a native French speaker. So I'm getting tantalisingly close to my long-held goal of a decent website for Mollans. When it's done, I shall offer it gratis to the village. And then I will find out what the political obstacles are. Close as I seem to be, I suspect I'm still a few months away from finding that out.