Teaching school and tango

I taught tango in a nearby city between mid July and mid October of this year.  I wanted to hold a party, someone else found a venue and wanted to DJ.  That morphed in to being asked to co-teach tango and after that person returned to their country I continued for another month or so.

I quit actual teacher training (of secondary kids in schools) definitively last week.  I had been training to teach English up until February last year. It had felt like the last opportunity to get back to a "proper" job.

They asked if I wanted to go back next month.  I delayed responding but said no. In some ways it feels like a a shame  and a waste. I worked incredibly hard for seven months, my family, my parents everything took a back seat.  I got first class marks in the top level (Masters) in both my assignments.  The stalker put a categorical full stop to those ambitions.  After her last confrontation I ended up in hospital with what the doctor initially thought was a heart attack and then ended up a case of stress so severe I was incapacitated for months.

Teaching was fine. I loved the subject, learned a lot.  The kids were always interesting, sometimes challenging, often fun, even sweet. I had dreaded the first placement: a school in a deprived area, notorious for at least fifty years for social problems, but there was no issue.  I had great mentors on my first placement. Why didn't I go back? The family need me now more.  But also the sheer unkindness of the staff in the second placement, the shocking humiliation I witnessed of a student by someone in authority and the sheer, extraordinary nastiness and lack of professionalism suffered by  some other students and probationers, people in vulnerable positions who could do next to nothing about it, who only risked their prospects by speaking up. 

Besides that, the design and execution of the course was appalling.  It failed to prepare teachers for teaching in almost every way.  One or two lecturers made what looked like creepy attempts to blame families for institutional failures in education or for failing to conform to the governent's plucked out-of-the-air (SHANARRI) values - the way the government has decided children should grow up.  Our way or the highway is the government's approach to childhood in Scotland, at least since the SNP took over - with disastrous results, all too measurable. Certainly, the idea was to inculcate in students a distrust of parents and families or at the very least to insist on the upper hand when it comes to shaping young minds. Only a few weeks ago my approach to raising my kids was totally undermined by school, not for the first time, in what looks like a deliberate strategy after I raised an issue. That has sadly become a cultural norm in Scottish schools, certainly over at least the last ten or twelve years and it has been my repeated experience.  

Not only that - school is a place where kids are fundamentally not safe.  They can be bullied usually not only without remedy but with what one award-winning campaigner called the "deny and deflect" (blame the parent) approach. They can be inappropriately supervised and injured.  I can attest to both these things.  After witnessing, as a volunteer, the utter chaos of the local Duke of Edinburgh scheme I have no confidence they will keep my son safe.  Just the fact of planning to send total novices camping for two nights in early March in Scotland when temperatures can plunge far below zero is worrying in itself.  He is a good sportsman but last time they put novices in shorts on mountain bikes on gravel he fell, taking the skin off so severely his wounds took weeks to heal.  We were constantly fighting infection on what was supposed to be a holiday.  It was all avoidable with a little bit of professionalism and competence but they won't admit to mistakes.

On a wider scale and after writing dissertations on them, I don't believe either in the Scottish government's policies for education. Patently they haven't worked as testified by the long-term decline of Scotland in the international PISA tests, something not even acknowledged on the course.  Quite the contrary, there was an insistence that everyone was "Getting It Right For Every Child".  Despite the innocuous name, this is a fatally flawed, noli me tangere government "framework" that insinuates itself into educational policies.  Come to think of it, everything is unarguable when it comes to Scottish educational policy. They refuse to be mistaken.  It reminds me of the Reuters Axon story the other day. Confronted with damning evidence that the company had been spinning lies about its origins, Axon responded to one of the world's most respected news agencies with the kind of unprofessionalism and defensiveness reminiscent of corruption and cover-up scandals, local government denials and branches of the Scottish executive: Reuters’ questions are misguided and inaccurate and given the petty nature of their inquiries, they do not merit a response.

On the course there was extraordinary, blinkered ageism from student teachers still living with their parents:  Have you heard of TikTok? This was said with a combination of pity, contempt and dismissal.  The prejudice and naivety was blinding: student teachers saying that the number one quality in a good teacher was to be the pupils friend and that the advantage of their age was that they could bridge that gap, being in some cases less than five years older than those they were to teach. There was no awareness or interest in ageism from the course directors.  Age is a protected characteristic under the UK equality act, but despite affecting far more people it has received less attention than, for instance, transgender as a protected characteristic, which makes for bigger headlines, apart from which, that community is more strident than older people in their demands.

These things aside, the lack of basic grammar and spelling, an inability to use the language competently even among the trainee English teachers, floored me.  The intake was 80-90% primary teachers and their credulity, their seemingly limitless ability to lap up, to literally applaud and cheer everything they were told left me gasping. Even the tutors peddling some of the controversial and political views had to tell them to become a touch more critical in their thinking. It was plain that did not mean, by much. 

Above all, it was the tense culture in schools, a simmering of something troubling among staff.  I never quite put my finger on it and to guess at its elements: pressure of work, fear, stress, unhappiness and the need to hide all that sounds too much, perhaps, like a good description of my second placement to be reliable.  I enjoyed the first placement but even there I could still sense that culture, especially outside our department. It was more than just a need to hide what you felt, which was that there was something fundamentally wrong with the system of which one was part, there was simultaneously a sense of conviction about being right.  There was no questioning.  Perhaps you can't afford that if most of the hours of the day you are supposed to look like the expert and the rest of the time you are marking, planning, creating resources, recovering, rebuilding your defences.  Perhaps this is where the self-righteousness came from, the dogma so evident on the course.  Many teachers were not like this, had a sense of humour, had experience, but there was this undertow, this sense of everyone determined to stay on their feet, come what may. These things and the common poor treatment of  student teachers and probationers have put me off. 

And, I just don't believe in the efficacy of class teaching.

I have looked back to try to think if there was ever a class of any kind I really loved.  I enjoyed English at sixth form, and to an extent French but I think that was because we were quite boisterous, we didn't rule the classes but we certainly shaped them.  There was a lot of discussion, we were discussing things in French, in English, all the time, less so in history where the teacher just told us facts for an hour. I compare it with the sixth form equivalent at my boys school.  For a few weeks I sat in classes there, in Spanish, as an adult pupil.  They wear uniform.  They are silent unless spoken to.  It could not be more different. The only way you will get on like that is if you are motivated and work on your own or find your own guide which is ultimately what I did, what I have always done. 

I have been to woodwork class and discovered it was in reality geared to trainee joiners, with experience and I struggled. I have done various yoga classes.  You might as well learn from a Youtube video and save yourself the travel, cost and embarrassment. I have done upholstery and been so annoyed at being left, again, to struggle on my own that I walked out.  Ditto, sewing. I went to Spanish class when I was in sixth form and was bored.  I was bored, frustrated and uncomfortable in tango class.  

I was bored and frustrated most of the time through school. Italian, Spanish, tango, the French that has been most useful, fixing windows, laying floors, local history all these things I picked up on my own or through others of my choice. They were all adventures.  When you learn this away you keep discovering new possibilities.  You don't get bored and you do well.  

My kids like secondary school.  The oldest says he learns stuff.  I know they both do. The youngest likes seeing his friends. His teacher of  RMPS (Religious, Moral and Philosophical Studies) brings in hot chocolate on Fridays. Besides this, he seems to find the subject engaging.  The youngest hated primary school with a passion.  The first time we home-schooled was because the school was rubbish and dangerous.  The second  time, when they finally stabilised the revolving headships was just because he hated going.  He could read and they used to spend hours colouring in. But school maybe is more fun these days. Even I have more respect for the individual teachers than I do for the system they are in. 

- I know you learn, I said to the eldest.  But do you think most people do? 

- Yes.  If they are motivated.  You can't teach people who don't want to learn.

Everyone experiences learning a new skill in a different way. We all have different brains, bodies, characters, fears, enthusiasms and experiences. We have different levels of self-belief, of skill in adapting what we already know, or of knowing when to let that go. That we routinely deny or fail to give the fact that we are individuals when we learn enough weight, astonishes me.  

There is a big push in school now to see pupils as individuals and to some extent it works. But I saw a very bright child with initiative who could not read at all, with severe dyslexia being entirely left out.  - Don't bother, he can't read.

- What? At all?

- At all.

With remarkable fortitude, he told me later of worse experiences in other classes. I met a pupil with no English, again, totally left to sink or swim since "immersion" i.e. "spend no money" is the preferred strategy for students without English.  This pupil had remarkable creativity and insight that went totally unrecognised in the system.  They broke down in floods of tears, when they realised I could communicate with them in their language.  They were clearly traumatised by this immersion "method".  

These are only the extreme cases.  What I mean is that while there are now genuine efforts by some teachers to try to teach pupils as individuals, and indeed they are required to do so,  ultimately you have forty to fifty minutes with thirty kids.  At least ten, if not fifteen of those minutes is getting in, getting out, getting books, getting settled, getting focused, registration, recap, setting homework.  Part of that time is crowd control, getting boys and girls focused on work, not each other, halting dramas, disruption, interruptions and a good part of it is explaining the task.  You do what you can with the rest of the time - getting contributions or discussion, giving time to individuals one to one or within the group setting.  

The future not just of healthcare, but of education is personalised. The classes in school I saw where most work seemed to be going on, certainly where students were focused on doing work were the difficult ones where experienced teachers set up individual learning programmes for each student and went round helping them.  I was amazed to find such quiet among notoriously difficult students.

Millenials have told me that when their parents aren't available, they learn from the internet. AI is an obvious next step in personalising education.  At present it is often wrong but anyone with half a mind is more than capable of checking facts elsewhere. Perplexity  already references its sources whereas ChatGPT, though with a nicer manner, is more likely to make things up.

There were many reasons why I stopping teaching tango in the city.  It felt like a relief, but this problem of class teaching was the most fundamental reason.  People turn up expecting a one size fits all approach, without realising that they are all different and all need different things - essentially one to one time.  We have a culture that has so little practice in questioning that people rarely consider what actually works best or what, with only a smidgen of thought, is clearly not going to work so well. Like those credulous student teachers we just buy into the status quo every time. It is the easy option. There is a related problem: I belong to a local Facebook group for women with thousands of members, for recommendations and so on.  The number of people who want the simplest of products and solutions off the peg or done for them rather than trying to do it themselves, is astonishing.

I wish I had had more methods like Cacu's to try with the class but there were other reasons it was difficult to do that. 

He did not exactly teach.  He proposed an activity and let people explore and then brought people back for discussion.  I wish too, that I could have seen how he taught a tango class rather than a tango-contact class. When I see teachers look at students and try to tell them what - in their opinion -  is wrong without actually feeling how they dance, I know this cannot help. This is something else I never saw Cacu do.

That is why teaching steps or technique is such easy money.  You don't have to think or care about the student at all.  It is so easy to design a six or ten week class. That is to say, it is easy, convenient for the teacher.  It might go something like this

1 - Open hold, connection, changing weight, ronda, salida, compás, walk
2 - Staying connected, posture, stillness, common problems in the walk.
3 - Dancing the phrase
4 - Personalising dance: pauses, rebotes, double time
5 - Walking outside the line of dance. The cross
6 - The ocho cortado
7 - Forward ocho
8 - Back ocho
9 - The giro
10 - Sacada

At our school Christmas concert this year, there was an interesting reminder how just how teacher centric teachers can be, rather than focusing on the people they are supposed to be helping or guiding. It is easy for this to become the school culture, especially when espoused by the head themselves.  Our local head is obsessed with uniform.  A people subjugated by e.g. a uniform is easier to control. He has a missionary zeal for it and his letters regularly have some semi-veiled but nevertheless offensive criticism of parents, how they are failing the school for not making their kids toe the uniform line.  Of all the things he could choose to focus on: service, kindness, broadening achievement, the environment, even litter - his star is that everyone must look the same, presumably because in his eyes that must cure all other evils.  Now this man, in his infinite wisdom, in a cathedral that is used every year by the school, presumably because he was so wrapped up in himself and what he had to say, rather than on who he was saying it to, totally failed to realise that if he didn't use the excellent public address system of that building, he would not be heard by a good half of the congregation.  Right at the back, none of us could hear a word he said so the hard of hearing grandparents didn't stand a chance.

The schedule I listed is not one I used but I might. Personally, I think the giro is much easier and more useful to start with, but most people insist you need to know ochos to do giros.  So this is a teacher-centric schedule: easy to deliver.

Imbibing that class schedule, the student goes away thinking what a lot they've learned and that tango is hard, which it is, if you learn this way. Actually, a lot of teachers might condense points 1-4 into one or two lessons. Many don't actually bother with listening to the music at all. 

The "best" bit of all this for the teacher : the student doesn't even realise they are being told what is easiest for the teacher, not actually how to learn.  They copy what they're told and think they've learned something. But it's mechanics, a mechanics they try to repeat even when touching another living, breathing human being, which, when it doesn't work, becomes force. 

I experienced a recent instance of this when I introduced a guy to dance this year.  He came to a special event because it was close to his home.  He had a sense of music, he had an embrace.  He was doing OK.  But he had to do it his way so he couldn't dance the other role much. There were cultural reasons. He tried, but psychologically, emotionally I could feel he had to be in charge. This was the main block to improving his dancing but given the stress of trying to navigate a ronda, the sheer strangeness of the idea that actually, you don't need steps to dance, I thought it might iron itself out in time.  

He continued coming out to the milongas, picking up experience that way. We danced there eac time. Initially, he loved the no-teach way. But eventually he said he was going to classes.  I didn't see him for a few months.  When we caught up again in the milonga he said yes, classes were going well.  His dance, for me, had not changed one jot except that he tried to make me do ochos, which were not well executed, were uncomfortable and would have risked my knee, so I just didn't do them.  He got genuinely annoyed.  "You aren't following" he said.  "There is no collaboration".  I have enough experience to find this kind of thing funny. I think I just said "Well, if you knew how to execute them, I might do them".  This did not improve matters, but there comes a point where you need to stop taking shit. The only reason I didn't walk off the floor was the memory of the friendship, of his initiation into dance. 

A class schedule is not personalised because of course if you want personalised dance you pay for private lessons! The problem there is that if you think dancing tango is made up of music and feeling between two people, how do you teach that? I have always been an "extremist" on this point, out on a limb compared to most people's views.  I felt that paying for private lessons was not unlike prostitution.  But I am not so sure now.  It is something to do with experience.  I've danced now with so many new people for so long, getting them started in the milonga.  I can't find much good dancing in the milongas although I did find an extraordinary number of good new dancers when I was "teaching" tango and that was fun.  

But you give and give and give and sometimes just end up feeling empty, vacia, triste y vacia.

Vamonos pa'l monte.

Christmas 2023

When I began to write this, on Christmas Eve morning, I should have been glueing a gingerbread house together with icing, a present for my nieces, but I am not too coherent after rising and my good-temper and good manners extends as far as refraining from speech.  My husband is up around five, bright, optimistic, productive. I am so far from being able to empathise with this that I consider such people almost another species. Some two or three hours later he regularly tries to present some issue on which he wants agreement or clarification, despite knowing from long experience he will rarely obtain it before I have had a cup of green tea followed by the delicious, creamy, properly caffeinated hit of coffee. Sometimes he just says, "Ah, you haven't had your coffee yet". Usually though, at this point I am in the throes of making teen porridge and hot packed lunches a feat, including driving them to school, I manage sometimes with no caffeine at all, though never borne of choice, only necessity. 

Writing is the one thing that will wake me up and doesn’t involve anything cold or windy in the Scottish winter. At this time of year, if it's sunny it's cold and it's only ever sunny between nine and three at most. When the temperature rises to the point where you can conceivably do something outside, it is invariably wet. One might think the siege-like cold of this single glazed old house would cause anyone to be instantly alert but rather it makes you want to burrow under the flannel bedlinen until…April? That is after all, when people don't endure the winter here come to Scotland.

I wrestle annually with Christmas, usually and, generally successfully, in the direction of downsizing although there is not much more to downsize at our end. We still have a convincing tree, though since nobody seems that bothered nowadays, it is fraudulently plastic and decorated with things the children made over the years or that we were given. I have sometimes walked the dog in those sterile Christmas tree plantations and am glad we have renounced that absurd industry.  My youngest, now 14, had his last stocking two years ago.  The boys get money for Christmas, nothing extravagant. I bought chocolate Connect 4 (what genius, M&S - with refills) to play on Christmas day morning, in lieu of stockings. I am utterly without strategy and lost four out of five times to the fourteen year old. In a fit of extravagance I bought a card game, Debatable, with an eye on upcoming exams. Christmas used to be so much more of everything: presents, food, decorations, cards, commitments. I did it all and it was exhausting.

Whenever I dropped in to pick up the odd item, the shops were insane . Although we did not host The Meal for 10 (I offered), I did the pud, Christmas Eve lunch and another meal, though I offered more.  I said however, if we did The Meal it would not be turkey. It would have been something in the slow cooker - probably lamb shanks by my husband although I would never buy the poor dead things myself. The reason we have The Meal is because my brother is profoundly, irrationally wedded to Tradition - and food. So he does it before collapsing with great huffing sighs in bed until, well, long after we have gone.

I do the washing up and escape outside which means I take the dog out, always, until this year, alone. This year my husband took the twins who took the dog and I took mum. My boys demonstrated the training that has cost me slices of my soul and my sanity and played a blinder on the washing up. I don't know what it is that eventually gets teenage boys to help out: reason, maternal anguish, routine? If I had to choose, I would say routine. If you are wondering about your failure as a mother, stick with it. I remember the lovely lady in a local shop who eventually could manage life no more say that boys come out OK at the end of it. She did not. She did a lot of caring. One of my sons has never really refused to help and the other used to as test of my mental or emotional strength or an act of rebellion perhaps. I could not quite believe it yesterday when I found he had not only done the washing up, but was doing part of his brother's job of wiping the surfaces and with a vigour the kitchen sees only in my darkest moments.

In terms of getting the boys to sit down together at table, it is still a struggle. For this, you need unity and if you and your mate enjoy personal space on the scale of the steppe or the marriage of of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson with their separate apartments at Sissinghurst, it can come as no surprise if your offspring then choose to put this into practice at mealtimes. Put another way, they only converse at table, in company and then rarely. They will talk, not just in imperatives or accusatory interrogations but in ordinary, conversational terms outside of meal times - usually afterwards. I asked the younger one why this couldn't happen at mealtimes. He grunted.

- Is it because it's contrived?, I asked.

- Yes.

- Do you know what 'contrived' means?

He did, apparently.

Perhaps it is a matter of catching the right moment with teenagers. A woman I met on a train told me having their friends over for pizza works. But I think they're worried in case I mention the B word.

If I eat carbs it is usually barley. Occasionally I inflict this on my family. I tried giving it to my 83 year old type 2 diabetic father recently. It won't spike his blood sugar in the way more simple carbohydrates will do. He cares for mum and he has just been told his brain tumour has returned.

The first thing dad said to me on Christmas Day was that I was not to tell him what he could or could not eat or drink. Dad has spend his life in obesity. He has recovered from bowel cancer, prostate cancer, and his brain tumour is back for the third time. He has started limping because he loses feeling in one leg. Dad has a strength of will and stoicism reminiscent of another time. Indeed, he comes from a different time, shown by this film of Christmas Day 1949. This will fails him, however when it comes to food and drink. Perhaps there's hope because he kicked a serious cigarette and then cigar habit over 30 years ago. I can only think it was his upbringing or something genetic we don't yet know. He insists the diabetes is under control. I didn't say it would be under control when he was no longer diabetic. I didn't mention that the chocolate mousse was made with avocados and agave which has a lower GI than other forms of sugar. I had made delicious nut clusters with superberries and 100% cacao a few days before, infinitely tastier than the sugar-packed, store-bought, crowd-pleasing carrot cake my husband had presented for dessert. I waived the cake to accompany dad in the clusters. He looked so woebegone I shaved him a sliver of cake but even when my brother pronounced the nuts better, he still sulked.

If barley wasn't good for you, I am sure the family wouldn't complain so much. It's chewy, nutty, healthy, local. Undaunted, I have thought often of a new Christmas tradition: Scotch broth.  This is the traditional soup of this country, which, before the advent of tourism and the discovery of oil, was not wealthy, despite the transformational effects of the Enlightenment on Edinburgh. That city has long been and remains a place apart. What London is to England, Edinburgh is to Scotland - another world. go to Edinburgh and you will be as far from discovering Scotland as believing the City is England. 

Scotch broth is made from the humblest ingredients.  You can get a swede which we call a neep here, and I have just learned that some elsewhere call rutabaga, for 15p at the moment in the shops, literally pennies. It's the cheapest I have ever seen it but then it's spread across fields just now, as sheep food.  It is a more nutritious and more complex carbohydrate than potato and much less starchy than a parsnip.  Besides neep, you add onion, carrots and barley, all traditional local staples.  Barley is also a complex carbohydrate and packed with fibre, thus a significantly healthier alternative to rice and without the arsenic and food miles.  Contribute a leek, some dried peas and kale or cabbage if you can.  To this, add stock and some meat if you like, mutton traditionally but you can't come by mutton these days - even Scotch pies are no longer made with it. To stall teenage complaints I add a little good quality chicken - from which I make more stock. On a lean or busy day I add a grating of hard cheese instead.  The broth takes maybe 30 minutes to make from start to finish. 

The point of this as an alternative Christmas meal is its simplicity.  I imagine eating it, perhaps by candlelight. I can't get enough of candles in winter.

What is the point of soup and the candles? Primarily, it's calming, it's simple, it's also symbolic I suppose, a deliberate rejection of being caught up in the commercial madness of Christmas and of focusing on things that matter more, our connections as people and on the history and heritage of this country rather than on imported or invented shallow values to serve the capitalist machine. 

But the males in my family are food-focused and despite the huge stress of this traditional, complicated meal, the bro insists on turkey. And yet we all eat well,  the rest of the year.  My kids get three home-cooked meals a day if they want it and they often do. We eat weekly, with my parents, the only time in the week when the teens will agree to sit as a family at a table. Christmas lunch is a big deal if you didn't eat well most of the rest of the time. I nearly said "in the past" but this country is now one of "two halves" says a report this month by the Centre for Social Justice. Britain is "at risk of sliding into the two nations of the Victorian era".

But if you are fortunate enough to already eat sufficient and well, how much more must you do? We are caught in a time-trap of traditions no longer relevant and of obliviousness towards others.

Why this mad rush to travel on overpacked roads for one day of the year? Far better if each family, with a little more imagination and individuality, created its own few days of festivities at times that suited them through the winter.  I would delay Christmas altogether and celebrate Hogmanay instead, as was traditional here.  My grandmother used to open her shop on Christmas Day.  Within living memory, Christmas was not a big deal in Scotland, though Hogmanay was. Comic and historian, Bruce Fummey told me the other evening that his was the first generation to get presents on Christmas Day.  

My brother has seven year old twin girls and replicating, for your own children, what you enjoyed as a child is hard to resist. I know this from the absurd tyranny of stockings. You can now see on TikTok children opening broccoli or bananas on Christmas Day and being utterly delighted. I salute those parents. According to Visual Capitalist, Americans could spend $967 billion dollars this Christmas or $866 per person.

My boys, at fourteen and sixteen, both nearly six foot, agreed that turkey was the best part of Christmas - after being with family, one of them said, flashing a grin. He said it the same way he will say "Cheers" for "thank you". They know perfectly well "cheers" is for toasts.

If I practised what I preach I wouldn't present children with a candy house that would turn an adult diabetic just by looking at it. Of course, they don't have to eat it, but that's like saying, you can go to a party but you mustn't dance.

The truth is, once you have tried things better for your body you have little appetite for what is not good for it. If you bring kids up on spaghetti hoops and fish fingers as if it were still the Seventies, then what opportunity will they have to eat a healthier option? Few children will refuse healthy food when hungry enough. A gingerbread house is a one-off I tell myself, so it doesn't count.... Only Turkey and Malta has more obesity than the UK. As Ben Coates pointed out in Why the Dutch are Different - and as my Catalan friend never fails to repeat - Britain is a country where sweets are everywhere and snacking is normal.

In a superb and funny speech given a few months before his death in 2016, the food critic and writer AA Gill talked about how to avoid obesity, not by focusing on what we eat, but rather on how we eat. Here are the the last few minutes on It's all manners.

And after Christmas? 2012, the year I started dancing, I think I went to Eton after Christmas. Certainly I was in TangoMagia, Amsterdam in 2013.  Since then I have travelled I think most years to dance tango in the holiday period.  There is a festival in Barcelona, there are 10 no-book milongas that are always busy, in Old Windsor, near London. So one must usually travel to dance, to Edinburgh, to near London, abroad. I considered it and cannot summon the will. Disappointment is misplaced hope. Hope is undiscovered disappointment. I came across this sobering idea the other day and wondered if it was a sign.  But that is why for years I have gone to the milongas for reasons other than, principally, dancing: a break from family, to socialise, otherwise, you can end up fulfilling that aphorism. 

I think it is time to break from the tradition of going away. The folks need help. My kids need to study for exams and to practice mountain walks for the Duke of Edinburgh. The house needs attention. If I'm going to go out, it's going to have to be local, it may be music not dance and it won't often be tango.

Musical journeys

The link above is, to share with those interested, a haunting, elemental introduction to the caja.  Even in the first few seconds, the mountain landscape, the wind, the sparse vegetation, the sky, and the sound of the caja evoke so much about this music that is such a part of that paisaje.  

I have had occasional, wonderful dances in milongas but more enduringly, tango led me to try to understand its lyrics. I stepped further into Spanish because the vocabulary in the tangos is largely circumscribed by anguish and loss.  From there I moved to salsa in Dundee and  - virtually - Colombia.  There were a series of coincidences, if that's how you see them.  I wanted to dance more locally and knew there was salsa in that nearby city.  I didn't want to go alone and I didn't want to go to classes.  It turned out a local friend could dance.  For the few months that it lasted, before it was contaminated by that harm that seemed to spread out from that city like a poisonous oil slick, it was great.  

At that time I had an online Spanish conversation exchange partner whose father, it turned out, was a famous writer, journalist and broadcaster about predominantly salsa but also other genres like bolero.  He had had a club that just about any salsa aficionado in Bogotá has heard of or had been to.  I have stumbled across it, completely randomly, in books about Colombia.  Anyone I talked to who had been there spoke of it with great affection. El Goce Pagano seems to be something of an institution.  So we chatted, all too briefly, about salsa. 

Spotify told me that this year the place where people most listen to what I listen to is Cali.  That Colombian city is known as the salsa capital of the world - their festival is on right now. Later, I found myself listening to the roots of salsa which transported me, still virtually, to Cuba and Puerto Rico and into folk and indigenous music of South America.  This took me back to Argentina, to music by Atahualpa Yupanqui, Jorge Cafrune, Facundo Cabral, Alberto Merlo, Mercedes Sosa and to less well known inheritors of a certain part of that folk tradition that appeals to me: Orlando Vera Cruz, Hector del Valle, Omar Moreno Palacios and, to some extent, Raul Barboza.  Later it took me to more modern interpreters like Soledad, Chango Spasiuk, who directed a documentary I referenced recently, on the coplas, and more recently, Milena Salamanca.  

The extraordinary music diversity just within the folk tradition of this huge country began to dawn on me.  I had begun by assuming that the chacarera we sometimes see in the milongas was Argentina's folk dance, before realising that it has siblings like zamba, chamamé, gato, payada and many more. If anything, zamba is the more emblematic of Argentina's music and dance. Much Argentinian music features the guitar and so that country has a plethora of accomplished guitarists / composers like Roberto Grela, Juanjo Dominguez, Victor Velazquez, Carlos Martínez, Carlos Moscardini, Cacho Tirao, Lucio Yanel, Jose Luis Merlin, Argentino Luna. 

Actually, there is huge diversity within folk music in just one part of Argentina.  There is such variety because of the country's size, the many different geographies and cultures within it and because, until the age of recording and radio, nearly all music was folk music. I was listening today to a past episode of Argentina Canta Así, by Gonzalo Guzman, broadcast by Radio Salta.  He could fill two hours on music from the region just in homage to the moon and related interviews.  

Musically, Argentina's northwest fascinates me most, just now.  In 2016, with next to no Spanish, I tried to avoid taking the bus in Buenos Aires, in case I got lost. A trip on two or three buses out to a milonga on the ring road was a nerve-wracking expedition.  The idea of taking the ferry to Montevideo was beyond me.  Tigre, beloved of many tourists, I now know to be a mere 30km away.  At the time, it could have been in the Brazilian Amazon so exotic and dangerous did it seem, or perhaps I meant my fear of trying to get there. Decidedly, the downtown milongas were as much of a challenge as I could manage. I had no concept of the extent nor the variety of Argentina's geography, not even that it reached Chile.

Now, through music, I am a little more familiar with it, so that words like Catamarca no longer just mean great danceable tangos by Di Sarli and Lomuto but a place of plains and mountains bordered by Tucumán, so beloved by Atahualpa, and bordered by its neighbours Santiago del Estero and Salta. I wonder if I will be able to visit and I am sure this would be a journey of music and connection and of inevitably the places these are tied to.  This is the land of the caja and the copla where music seems more essential, more sacred, of a different order. It is music preserved, outside the lived tradition of singing it, most famously in recordings by Leda Valladares and her collaborators.  

I invite you to listen to the contemporary bagualero Marcos Arjona.  He says the copla is not like the zamba or other folk forms in that it doesn't have an author, it comes from the pueblo, the people.  He says it is passed on from one generation to another although now, few sing the coplas. When asked if it can be learned by someone who was not born in to the tradition, gracefully he says querer es poder - where there's a will there's a way and that you just need to learn the coplas.  Yet it is clear a voice like his and the power behind it is one with the landscape he has grown up with, his feeling for that and for his heritage, for all that he sings of.  The songs are pure feeling he says and that I think is what exerts their spell.  There is nothing trite, nothing affected, nothing fawning or prostrated about them. And yet they can be funny too.  Here, I think he is singing about not wanting to get married when everyone is telling him he should.

At this point, the music seems less associated with a country, and more with a geography. This music of course predated the lines that were later drawn on maps so it is no surprise that this tradition is found in the Andean regions of Chile, Bolivia, Peru.  Aca Seca, an Argentinian trio plays and sings music like the vidala Canto en la Rama.  This song is also associated with the northwest.  Songs like these have themes related to nature, spirituality, and the daily life of indigenous communities.  These are songs of ritual or ceremony, commonly with improvisation and community participation. The opening lines of another documentary El origen de las especies: canto con caja restate this:

El canto con caja es una especia folclórica de nuestro país pero es sobre todo un elemento esencial en los ritos sagrados y festivos de los comunidades andines. 

I don't recall that I spoke with my compañero much about folk music.  We never really got round to that.  We did talk about salsa, which is also a modern music of the people, of many peoples.  Those from his country or from Venezuela have told me that they listen to salsa from infancy.  They learn to dance it in the family, they have danced it desde siempre, todo la vida.  The importance of this Argentinian music to community rememinded me of something similar he said about salsa:  a great portion of salsa music, if not all, is intended for people who dance, chiefly as an expression of community life and the joy of seeing and meeting people, spending time together, and sharing common spaces and traditions.

Aca Seca's Pobre mi negra is another vidala.  Both remind me simultaneously of the raw power of this music from Argentina's northwest and at the same time of music from the early Western sacred tradition. 

Not all music of this area is so serious or so spiritual.  This music is part of festivities and social times.  Salta's peñas are the folk equivalent of the milongas. The author of that piece was struck by the same idea I wrote about recently. In her words:  the peñas in Argentina’s north feel like an integral part of life, not just an entertaining performance.  Banning Eyre's writes a light-hearted take on a trip to discover this music.  He talks of a coplero who had those attuned to the language in stitches.  His account came out subsequently in a BBC World Routes musical version.

Though I have barely scratched the surface I know more about Argentina's folk music than I do about the Scottish folk tradition. As a result of these explorations and since good tango dancing is hard to find, requires travel, and even good non-dancing social times at the milongas can be sparse, I have been out to only two milongas since Barcelona. But life with music and dance is infinitely better and since there is, apparently, plenty of traditional Scottish music on the doorstep perhaps that is where to go next. I heard an Argentinian once say that tango is like a mirror.  Perhaps tango ultimately is leading me back to the music where I live.

Strangeness and awe

I am not sure what it is about the copla that exerts such a pull.  It may be something to do with the authenticity and democracy of the form. I was listening to a podcast  about the baguala. Leda Valladares spent much of her life gathering and singing Argentinian folk songs including this form. In a 1961 article on Argentinian folk music, composer Jaime Dávalos says,

La baguala es por excelencia el canto libre, sin ley, sin cánones, sin pauta. 

The baguala is free song par excellence, without law, without canon, without guidelines.

This, for me, is what tango is, stripped of all its urban trappings, its affectation and arrogance - free improvisation, without rules, the creative expression of the self, a profound connection with other people through music. It is emotion in music and movement and it is original, unique to each couple and different each time. This doesn't mean you happen to execute different moves in different orders. It is more than that, a different register altogether. I don't usually find what I mean in professional couples, whose bread and butter is selling moves. But this couple do show the dance and the connection in a simpler, elegant form with much respect for the music.

To a friend: Esta música [la copla] tiene un atractivo especial,  está lejos de la música occidental. Aunque la llamamos “música” como formas más populares, es más elemental.  A menudo pensamos en la música como entretenimiento, pero esto parece más fundamental, una necesidad, un acompañamiento para la vida.

This music [the copla] has a special something; it is nothing like Western music. Although we call it "music" like more popular forms, it is more elemental. We often think of music as entertainment, but this seems more fundamental, a necessity, an accompaniment to life.

And it is. The copleros and copleras speak of singing their vivencias, their lived experience. Sometimes we sing with pain, sometimes with hope. In  La Baguala: El canto de los Andes Gabriel, aged twelve, is asking his grandmother, the bagualera Estanislada Alarcón  about the coplas. She tells him he will need them.

Si una mujer esta enamorada de vos, te agarra y te echa la copla, y vos tenés que saber contestar la copla.

If a woman is in love with you, she grabs you and sings you a copla, you have to know how to reply to that copla.

Therefore, she continues, you have to study the coplas to know how to reply.

Hay coplas que se dice cuando vos estás conquistando a la chica.

There are coplas for when you are "conquering the woman". It is common to say that and not just in Argentina: old, young, everyone in between says it. I balk every time.

It is a profoundly different way of life: a boy takes love advice from his grandmother about how to act in song. And he says usted to her, addressing her with respect, as many people in the Americas do, depending on the person and the context. We have lost that blend of close formality too, if indeed we ever had it.

This is music that accompanies life and it is simultaneously funny and poetic. Gabriel asks his grandmother to say a copla so he can copy it down:

Vidita te estoy queriendo,

Lastima que tu dueno está viendo

Échale un puñado de sueños

Que se divierta durmiendo.

Light of my life, I love you

Too bad that your keeper is watching

Throw her a handful of dreams

That she may be have fun dreaming.

Gabriela's grandmother tells him:

Hay coplas para enamorar, para pelear...

There are coplas for falling in love, for fighting....

Then you see him going off with another woman and "le echa una copla de desprecio" - you sing him a disparaging copla.

Other copleras talk about exactly this - singing your own life into the copla. It reflects what is happening in your life right at that moment. It helps you with life. It seems to be both a form of support in song and in community. The songs reach into the past and a continuous vital thread, is kept alive now for future generations. The songs are receptacles for communal wisdom, revitalised every time they are sung.

Gabriel asks his grandmother what her favourite copla is.  She tell him one of them:

Cuando era chiquita, andaba de brazo en brazoY ahora que estoy grandecita, ni los perros me hacen caso.  

When I was young, I went arm in arm quite free,

But now I am old, even the dogs ignore me.

 

And with that she grins quietly and shuffles across the yard to make him a mate over the open fire.

Many of these conversations happen outside, under a tree or outside a house with dogs and chickens roaming around. It is a profoundly natural setting for a kind of music that is both ordinary and extraordinary. This is how I most like to hear the coplas, outside, rather than sung for a performance. The same idea seemed to strike Atahualpa when a coplero told him that it is the landscape that puts the beauty in his song. 

Although there are famous copleras and copleros, many songs are sung by ordinary people with ordinary voices. The aim is not singing for fame or fortune, to be applauded or to be liked which, in contrast, seem very modern, very western aims. It is singing alone or in community, or in the case of the vidala, sometimes in a harmony of two or three others.  It is singing for altogether different reasons.

In the Pequeños Universos documentary, Mariana Carrizo sits among tree with the musician, Chango Spasiuk. He seems quiet, respectful and sensitive, and, according to a friend who met him when he came to their town, was indeed so. Mariana explains the caja [handheld drum] comes from our ancestors. The melody is also ours. The coplas came from the Spanish, during the conquista, even from the Arabs before them. She says more than 90% of this form is native to that land and people because each place has different melodies and ways of singing and each person adds something of their own experience at that moment to the copla as they sing it. Things that can't be said with the voice can be said with the caja, she says, which is like the heartbeat of the earth and of the singer.

There is a clear statement about that this music is part of a particular culture, heritage, area and people but which the Spanish contributed to in a small way. It is more than a validation, it is a claim.

Paula Suárez, in Amaicha del Valle, the same Amaicha as in Atahualpa's introduction to his baguala, works, hoeing her land among her goats and singing. The pachamama, mother earth, the earth itself becomes happy, she says, with song. Again, those very different values and beliefs. I am reminded of having read something like: anyone who has ever set foot in the Americas knows that there is another pulse, another life below the surface; something, it was implied inexplicable, not to do with rationality and very un-European.

The narrator says that singing the songs is a way of evoking and validating their Diaguita origins in the Calchaquí valleys. The Diaguita were known for their courage, organisation and resistance to succeeding colonisers. In cultural stories about Argentina and the wider continent you hear again and again about past, even present disparagement of native cultures. Even now, indigenous cultures suffer more poverty and discrimination than other social groups. El indio is often described as being words of prejudice, that lacked dignity, respect, words to denote someone "lesser". I first heard this word, indio, sung by Atahualpa, maybe in Camino del Indio and it was a word sung with respect and honour. The way we are introduced to things is important.

Paula says: I sing what I feel... That authenticity of feeling again; the fact that we feel something being justification enough to express it, whereas, a European, I was told repeatedly, growing up, and we still are, not to be emotional, that emotion was problematic, was liable to spoil things, should be suppressed in favour of bloodless reason. It is that left and right brain thing again. I was appalled when a compañero from one of the American countries savaged me in an unexpected, unjustified and emotional outburst earlier this year. In shock, horror and distaste I recoiled into silence. It's what I felt! he said, later. Shouldn't I say what I feel? And I, who had repressed for months criticism of my own, because it would be impolite not to, thought, No, not if it's like that. I still feel raw and conflicted on the subject. It's what emotion does, I guess. The Greeks, the Romans advocated moderation in all things. A more cautious friend, European, said There is a line I don't cross. Maybe that is why we are still friends.

Paula continued, We affirm our roots. We are not ashamed when they call us “indios”...we look after the earth, we remember the advice of our forebears. Again, that very different way of life, connected to community and to the land. I am reminded for the nth time, of Mark Boyle, who, renouncing the values (and comforts) of the West went looking for just this, I think, in his book, not surprisingly called The Way Home.

Here is Mariana, accompanied by Chango, singing the lovely vidala, Te he'i de olvidar (I will forget you).  

Te he'i is a way of saying "I will" which I have only found in songs.  I think it comes from guaraní - a people, culture and language with a rich literary tradition, centered on Paraguay and adjacent regions.

The ultimate companion

Later, I listened to another version of the Baguala de Amaicha by the inimitable folk singer Jorge Cafrune. I have heard no other Argentinian singer to date who so encompasses and transmits the sense of a wide landscape through the voice. Don’t be deceived by the gentle start to the song.

After I had returned from Barcelona, Olga sent me this affecting summary of the copla (or couplet) and the caja (a type of drum associated with the copla).  I learned that the tone of the copla changes according to the season.  Here too, I learned that entregar does not just mean to give to, to submit, as when dancing tango, but to give yourself to a musical performance as in "la entrega y la expresión intensa del canto en la música folklórica".

Another friend sent me a short documentary which opens saying the baguala is a way for the mountain to speak through the caja  and that the people, through the copla, can say what they feel.  Olga sent another brief documentary on the same subject.  I was puzzled at first.  Atahualpa's baguala is not like the caja and the copla.  Then I realised that while the music may be unalike, it is the idea in Atahualpa's song that is shared with the copla and the caja: that the land speaks through the music and with the people. It was in this film that I came across the vidala (a type of folk genre). Of the vidala and the baguala, perhaps the former is the slower, the more melodic, the more contemplative, more spiritual genre.    

There, I found this haunting song in an unforgettable version by Mariana Carrizo.

The poem was written by Julio Santos Espinosa who was from Salta, in the far northwest of Argentina.

In El Gato Utópico, Gabriel Tuya writes:

Los hombres y mujeres del norte argentino saben de historias y justamente una de ellas cuenta que el bueno de Manuel Castilla trataba entre vino y vino, que don Julio no le escribiera a la muerte. Que eso era muy peligroso porque la muerte se enamora de uno y entonces viene y se lo lleva. Y don Julio, que entraba y salía del hospital cada pocos días, seguía escribiéndole a la muy puta. Cuentan también, que cuando el poeta escuchó la grabación que realizara Atahualpa Yupanki de su vidala, bebió lentamente un sorbo de vino y dijo bajito: -No me convence la interpretación.- Y dijo esto sin saber que en la voz de Atahualpa, él también estaba entrando en la leyenda del folclore argentino. Al día de hoy, su "Vidala para mi sombra", es el segundo tema más grabado de la música argentina.

“The men and women of northern Argentina know about stories and in fact one of these tells that the good Manuel Castilla, in between glasses of wine, used to ask Don Julio not to write about death. It was very dangerous, because death could fall in love with someone and spirit them away. And Don Julio, who was in and out of hospital every few days, continued writing about that damned death. They tell also that when the poet heard Atahualpa Yupanqui’s recording of his vidala, he slowly took a sip of wine and said softly, “I’m not persuaded by the interpretation.” And he said this not knowing that, through Atahualpa’s voice, he too was entering the legend of Argentinian folklore. To this day, his “Vidala for my shadow” is the second more recorded piece in Argentinian folk music [after La Cumparsita].”

Here is Cafrune’s version.

A veces sigo a mi sombra, a veces viene detrás, pobrecita si me muero con quién va a andar. No es que se vuelque mi vino, lo derramo de intención. Mi sombra bebe y la vida es de los dos. Achatadita y callada dónde podrás encontrar, una sombra compañera que sufra igual. Sombrita cuídame mucho lo que tenga que dejar, cuando me moje hasta adentro la oscuridad. A veces sigo a mi sombra, a veces viene detrás, pobrecita si me muero con quién va a andar.

Sometimes I follow my shadow Sometimes it goes behind Poor thing, if I die With whom will it go It’s not that I spilt my wine I poured it on purpose My shadow drinks and life Belongs to us both Compact and quiet, where can you find a shadow companion That suffers the same Little shadow, take great care of me, Of what I must leave When darkness laps me Inside Sometimes I follow my shadow Sometimes it goes behind Poor thing if I die With whom will it go*

*English translation © The Outpost by F Graham