200 All That Work for Nothing

This is the two-hundredth posting published on my blog.  I’ve actually posted 201 but I removed one of them after it had been here for more than three years.

I wrote the piece that was subsequently removed as a result of an uplifting experience I had while working two mornings a week as an unpaid classroom assistant in Savannah Primary School, Grand Cayman.  My responsibility was to help some of the less able children with their work. 

That was the plan but in reality, I spent most of my time dealing with Rozzard so that Ms Hunte, the class teacher, could concentrate on the educational advancement of the other 20 children who all actually wanted to learn – unlike Rozzard!

Mostly, I struggled to stop him from causing disruption and any learning that he achieved was a bonus.  But, as he demonstrated time and again, particularly in maths, Rozzard was very able.  (You can read about some of the things that Rozzard did in blogs 6, 12 and 23.) 

https://ramblingsandstories.blogspot.com/2010/02/sports-day.html  

https://ramblingsandstories.blogspot.com/2010/04/poetry-in-raw.html

https://ramblingsandstories.blogspot.com/2010/06/6h-and-fibonacci.html

One day, just before we left Cayman to return to the UK permanently in July 2010, Ms Hunte gave the class a homework assignment which was to set out the plot of a story they could possibly develop and write one day.  They didn’t have to write a story, just the outline of the plot.

The day when these plots were due in was one of my days in class.  Before she collected their exercise books, Ms Hunte asked if anyone would like to read theirs aloud to the class.

To my amazement, Rozzard’s hand shot up and even before he could be summoned, he had come to the front of the class and stood facing everyone, book in hand.  As soon as he was asked to proceed, Rozzard spoke to us all with a confidence and self-assurance that I could never have imagined he possessed.

The hero of Rozzard’s tale was of a dog named Walter and that dog had a problem: he farted a lot.  A sharp intake of breath could be heard from everyone as soon as that word was said.  Ms Hunte looked over to me enquiringly and I replied with a shrug and a nervous, half smile.  I don’t know if children in Cayman ever farted but I know that none of them would ever have talked about it.

Rozzard went on to tell us that Walter’s farts were magical in that whenever he farted, something good happened in as much as anything that was broken or needed fixing was repaired to be as good as new or something that was lost became found.  Rozzard told us that this gift first became when apparent when, still a very young puppy, Walter was aboard a cruise liner whose engine had broken down while moored off George Town, Cayman’s capital.  

It was going to take several days for the necessary spare parts to be delivered and Walter had gone out to the ship with his owner who was delivering necessary, emergency foodstuffs.  Almost immediately after he set paws on the ship, Walter farted and the engine was working again.

At first, Walter’s owner thought it was just coincidence but the next day, when a grandfather clock that hadn’t worked for 40 years started working immediately after another Walter fart, the penny dropped.  Throughout his entire life, a Walter-Fart brought good to the world.

I was gripped and wanted to hear more.  Ms Hunte led the rapturous applause and Rozzard revelled in it.  Rozzard had surprised and amazed us all.

I wrote about all of that in a post that I put up in July 2010.

About three years later, I decided that as he never would, I would write a children’s book based on Rozzard’s plot.  If it were ever published, I would try to contact Rozzard and share some of my earnings with him.  After all, I would never have thought about writing a book were it not for him.  He would deserve some reward.

My dog was called Rocky and mindful of prissy parents, it was his sneezes, not his farts that were charmed.  Whenever he sneezed, the magic happened and he sneezed straight after eating cheese.  Rocky loved cheese.

I had written about 40,000 words of this “delightful and charming story”, as I imagined the reviewers would be describing it, when Lucy, my daughter, rang me.

“You know that blog you wrote a few years ago about a dog that had magic farts?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that kid didn’t think up that story.  He got it from a book called ‘Walter the farting dog goes on a cruise’.  A friend told me about it.”

Crikey!  Had Rozzard divulged his plot to a writer or could he possibly have written he book himself?

“When was it published?”

“I don’t know.  Susan has just read it to her son.”

I googled “Walter the farting dog goes on a cruise”.

Published in 2006.

Rozzard, you monster.  You’ve caused me to waste weeks and weeks of my life.

134. Call me Turing

Now that I am retired, weekends don’t mean as much to me as they once did.  I don’t have good or bad weekends.  If I meet someone who asks, “Have a good weekend?” I have to pause, think what day it is and then work out how long ago the weekend was before giving an answer which is always, “Pretty good, thanks.”  I don’t have bad weekends - until last weekend.

Before I relate the horrors that made last Saturday so bad, it is important that you know a little about OFSTED school inspections.  When observing a lesson, an inspector has to be satisfied that the material is pitched at the right level.  Remember that.

At nine o’clock on Saturday morning, I opened this email from Dave Kerr.  Dave and I were at Durham University together and we’ve been friends for more than fifty years. 

Terry.

Perhaps you will be able to solve this for me.  It’s been given to my grandson as a homework task.

GRAMIL, GRAMIL, EDDCHA ALEHIG, CLITHO, PERMAN - who comes next?

I’ve no idea where to begin, or possibly, no inclination to do so.

Hope you are well,

Dave

I got a coffee and went to my thinking chair to do some serious thinking.

The letter ‘A’ appeared most often but just four times and there were only 17 different letters anyway.  So, it probably wasn’t a letter substitution puzzle.

Some features struck me:

1. “Who comes next?”  They were names and so I was searching for a name list. 

2. GRAMIL appeared twice at the start. 

3. EDDCHA CLITHO was not separated by a comma and so it was possibly someone’s first and last name, or two people who are always said together and would be familiar to children, like Ant and Dec.

4. Each group was six letters but it was very unlikely that five different names are all exactly six letters long.

It was a puzzle for young children and so Caroline suggested I tried to think like a 10-year-old.  She told me I was good at that. 

I sent the puzzle to my daughter, Lucy, who is the mother of William, my 8-year-old grandson.  Maybe he could do it.

Monarchs?  Perhaps it had been asked by a history teacher and they are a list of regnal names.  Maybe EDDCHA ALEHIG was “William and Mary”.  If they were preceded by two monarchs with the same name like ‘George’ or ‘Henry’, I would have cracked it.   I went to Google. They weren’t.

Nursery rhymes?  Maybe GRAMIL, GRAMIL was “Baa, baa” and EDDCHA ALEHIG is “black-sheep” but that meant that the unknown word in the sequence was “any”.  How would I code “any” into six letters and anyway, I was looking for a name.

If it were “twinkle, twinkle little-star”. The missing word is ‘wonder’ but it can’t be.  Come on Terry!  Think like a ten-year-old.

I put ‘GRAMIL’ into Google.  It is Spanish for “gauge” but none of the other words produced anything.

Then, I thought I had it:  PUGH, PUGH, BARNEY McGREW, CUTHBERT, DIBBLE ….  GRUB.  It had to be the roll call of the firemen in Trumpton.

It must be, but how do I put GRUB into a six-letter code format?  Now that I was sure I had the answer, I spent most of the afternoon trying to work that out. 

Caroline tried to throw a spanner in the works.  “How would a ten-year-old kid in 2017 know about Trumpton, a programme that was shown 50 years ago?”

I rang William to test that by asking him to complete the sequence. 

“Grub,” he said without hesitation.

“How do you know that?” I asked, astonished.

“You gave me the Trumpton DVD for my birthday.”

“Yes, of course we did.  I remember now,” I lied.

Lucy took the phone.  “Could ‘GRA’ be Graham?” she asked me.  

“I doubt it,” I said, realising that she was probably on to something.

When I was at school, one of the teachers always called me “Terton” which was the first three letters of my first name and the last three letters of my surname.

Could it be ‘Graham Emil’ or ‘Graham Tamil' perhaps?  Unlikely.

But if ‘MIL’ were the first three letters of the surname, there were many possibilities: Milner, Miller, Milburn, Miles etc.

How about the others?  ALE could be the start of ‘Alec’, ‘Alexander’, 'Aled' or ‘Alexis’.  Then, at last it became clear - ALEHIG was Alex Higgins, the snooker player.  CLIFTHO was Cliff Thorburn another snooker player and I soon had them all - except for GRAMIL.

I put ‘Graham Miller’ into Google.  Please let him be a snooker player.  He wasn’t but Graham Miles was.  Cracked it!

So, the sequence was: Graham Miles, Graham Miles, Eddie Charlton, Alex Higgins, Cliff Thorburn, Perrie Mans.  But who comes next? 

The fact that Graham Miles appeared twice at the start should have helped but didn’t.  The only thing I could find that Graham Miles had done twice, was to win the television programme “Pot Black” two years running in 1974 and ’75.  In 1976 it was won by John Spencer and so it was not a sequence of those winners.

Eventually, thanks again to Google, I found the answer to the sequence: these snooker players were the runners-up (not even the winners) in the Snooker World Championship from 1974 until 1978.  The runner-up in 1979 was Denis Taylor and so the next name in the list in DENTAY.

Dave’s grandson and his classmates will have had the same chance of getting the answer to that question as I and other colleagues had of working out the answer in a game of Botticelli some forty years ago.

In Botticelli, one person thinks of a famous character (real or fictional) and then answers up to 20 yes/no questions to allow the other players to guess the identity.

There were about twenty of us - ten teachers and partners.  It was the turn of Boring Carol’s boyfriend to think of a character (She was known as Boring Carol to distinguish her from another Carol on the staff who was certainly not boring.)

After five questions, we had established that the character was a footballer.  After 10 questions, we knew he played for a club outside and south of London.

After 20 questions, BC’s boyfriend had won a point for his team and he had to tell us the answer:  Jim Someone Or Other, Exeter City’s reserve goalkeeper!  I haven’t played Botticelli since.

The more I think about Dave’s question, the angrier I become with the absolute twat who gave it to a group of primary school children.

To solve it, certain steps had to be taken:

1. To understand the format of the code - first three letters of the first name followed by the first three letters of the last name.

2. To identify at least two of the names correctly.

3. To appreciate the link between those names.

3. To identify the other names.

4. To isolate a unique connection between those names in the order they appear.

5. To discover the next name in the sequence.

6. To transform that name into the code.

How ridiculous was it to give this puzzle to schoolchildren today?  Those snooker players were all in their prime more than forty years ago and three of the five in the list are dead.  The teacher is a twat.

Unless I am very wrong (which I never am), the question was mistakenly composed and set out: 

1. Why GRAMIL, GRAMIL at the start when Graham Miles only lost in the final once.

2. Why no comma after EDDCHA?  For about four hours I was looking for a two-word name, hence, "PUGH, PUGH, BARNEY MCGREW ….

I suspect that this question originated in a pub quiz in about 1980 as a specialist round on “Snooker” and then some idiot has given it to a group of kids in 2017.

In the opinion of One Who Knows, that teacher is an ABSOLUTE TWAT.