Quite Interesting Things about ... owls John Lloyd

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Wicked war against classic books

The Cupcakes and Classics group gathers one lunchtime a week, overseen by my head of department and me. We read classics, old and new, with clever children.

They are mostly girls, although a couple of boys have infiltrated. One is only 12, with a humorous, clever face. The other is one of my Year 11s, who plays an imaginary piano on his desk instead of concentrating on Macbeth and is enthralled by the Shakespeare authorship question.

It’s all very cosy and keeps us all happy. Until, one day, the head of department had to miss the session. She had been summoned for a meeting with one of the deputy heads. She came back tight-lipped until she could vent her fury.

She had been told there was a problem with the group. It wasn’t inclusive enough. At first, she thought he meant it was the group that was not inclusive, and reassured him that we had children of various ethnic and religious backgrounds. Most of the children were on free school meals. We even had a couple of boys attending.

But that wasn’t the issue. The books we were reading were not ‘inclusive’ enough. Where were the Black books? The LGBTQ+ books? Why weren’t we reading books from what (he gravely informed her) was the most underrepresented literature in the world – the literature of South East Asia?

The group has the word ‘classics’ in its title. Wasn’t it glorious that, of the books we have read so far, half were by women? Apparently not.

And so we obediently racked our brains. Without boasting, I am pretty well read. But I have to admit I found it very hard to come up with a list that would work. I read Wild Swans – or began it. It’s one of the few books I have given up on. I couldn’t think of another Chinese book – so maybe he had a point.

I’m better on Black American literature, and even some African literature.

He had actually suggested we read a book about gender dysmorphia. The only one I could think of was Jan Morris’s Conundrum, detailing her 1964 sex change. It’s informative and well written. But, first, it isn’t fiction and secondly we should spend less, not more, time encouraging children to wonder about their gender.

So where does that leave us? Tipping the Velvet (Victorian lesbians) is too close to pornographic – and imagine the parents’ complaints. If you google ‘great gay literature’, everything talks about ‘erotic charge’ – these children are only 15, for heaven’s sake, except for the humorous-faced small boy who is 12.

We will have to do something, because we have to do what we are told. I’m gunning for Small Island. But I am not going to go quietly. Picasso and Henry Moore learned to draw before they developed their own styles. These children need to read the classics before they start on Fifty Shades of Grey.

Quite Interesting Things about … owls

Most owls have a right ear larger than their left. Owls can hear their prey under the earth. If you look into an owl’s ear, you can see the back of its eye. Unlike most birds’ eyes, an owl’s are on the front of its face, rather than at the sides. Owls’ eyes are tubular and cannot move in their sockets. To make up for this, owls can turn their heads through 270° and nearly upside down without moving their body. Owls have 14 cervical vertebrae, twice as many as humans and all other mammals except sloths and manatees. Owls have specialised wings and feathers that allow them to fly in almost total silence. An owl can fly within inches of its prey without being detected. The main predators of owls are other species of owl. Pygmy owls and Northern Hawk owls have patches on the back of their heads that look like eyes, to convince other birds they are being watched at all times. The northern hawk owl can detect a vole up to half a mile away. The largest species of owl is a hundred times the size of the smallest. Eagle owls can carry off and eat a small deer. The greater sooty owl’s call sounds like a falling bomb. The ancient Greek for owl is tuto and is onomatopoeic, rather as if we called owls ‘tuwit-tuwoos’.

Barn owls swallow their prey whole and eat up to 1,000 mice each year. A pair of barn owls and their offspring consume 4,000 rodents a year. In French, the common barn owl is l’effraie des clochers, ‘the fright of the bell towers’.

JOHN LLOYD

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