WYL: Introducing myself

Piers Cawley

This is the first exercise in chromatic’s Write Your Life essay writing project. Follow the link for more information.

This is the first exercise in chromatic’s Write Your Life essay writing project. Follow the link for more information.

How do I look? Right now, I look uncomfortable; I’ve just changed career tracks and after years as a happy Perl programmer, I’m training to be a maths teacher. Which is fine, not a problem. What makes me uncomfortable is the dress code. After years of working in environments where the most formal outfit you’re likely to see is a polo shirt with the name of the company embroidered on it (worn only by weirdoes and the poor schmucks who drew the “Manning the trade show stand” short straw), suddenly, I’m having to wear a suit.

It’s not all bad; when one is as generously proportioned as me, off-the-peg suits aren’t an option. Once you reach the realms of the 64 inch waist and the 60 inch chest the only option is bespoke. So, right now I’m wearing two pieces of a bespoke dark grey woollen suit that (oh joy of joys!) fits me. It doesn’t ride up around my ears when I’m writing on the board. Give me a few more weeks and I might even start feeling comfortable in it. I already look slimmer in it.

Hmm… somehow I don’t think you’d recognize me from the above. So… I’ve a large head, crew cut dark brown (and rapidly greying) hair. I wear a full, but close cropped, beard which is slightly redder than the hair on my head, but it’s going grey too. My eyes are grey/blue behind a pair of rimless glasses with rounded rectangular lenses that turn dark brown in UV light. I’m 6 feet tall and weigh more than my bathroom scales can measure (and they top out at 25 stones).

There are very few photos of me; I’m generally the one behind the camera. I enjoy taking what I think of as ‘candid portraits’ of friends at parties, but I don’t always carry my camera with me. Photography’s a strange thing, if I want to take good photos, then it’s as if the social part of my brain gets turned off, or turned to other things as I concentrate on where the light is, where I need to stand, where to put the edges and all the other minutiae of taking a photograph instead of a snap. I’ve taken some great photos at parties, but I haven’t really enjoyed the parties as much as I would if I were actually taking part. The “photographer’s stance” almost requires you to stand apart. People have commented on how, when I’m taking photos I kind of disappear into the background—no mean feat when you’re built to my scale and shooting with long, fast lenses. I’ve no idea how I do it. I prefer film to digital for most things, but I’ve still gone with a digital SLR camera. Just because I prefer the quality of a black and white silver print doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the benefits of almost instant feedback that digital gives you. A couple of months ago I was shooting at my cousin’s wedding. With my laptop and an appropriate card reader I’d put together a slide show of everyone’s digital photos before the party had finished, which went down rather well with the bride and groom.

I’m generally laid back. All the courses and material I’ve seen on behaviour management in the classroom emphasises the importance of under-reacting; responding with the head, not the gut. Most of the time I do this naturally, I’m not pretty when I lose my temper, and I try not to do it most of the time.

I am naturally argumentative though. As far as I’m concerned, argument is a sport. I think it runs in my family. My dad’s long enjoyed a good argument with my uncle Joe, who seems to enjoy it too. A good argument is far more enjoyable if both parties are aware that it’s not ‘for blood’. The old saw, “Do not wrestle with pigs, you only get muddy and the pig enjoys it” is appropriate here. I’ve noticed that, sometimes, it can be hard to tell who’s the pig in the more vicious kind of argument.

Politically I’m a pragmatic anarchic atheist pacifist, which tends to boil down to something approximating ‘woolly liberal’ most of the time. The problem with anarchy as a system of government is that it requires good will and understanding from all concerned, which is probably possible to maintain if you already have a functioning anarchy, but a complete bloody nightmare if you want to get to a functioning anarchy from anything else. Being a pacifist/coward means I’m not about to propose any bloody revolutions, so I’ll continue to choose the alternatives that tend to increase freedom.

I’m not a big fan of recorded music. As far as I’m concerned a recording is a pale shadow of what happens between musicians and the audience during a live performance. Live performance is what it’s about, whether music, comedy, theatre or poetry reading. Nothing else comes close. As a folk singer, I prefer the informal performance of a session or singaround to formal performance with a stage and PA and all that jazz. When audience and performers are sitting together, when the audience is made up of performers waiting their turn. Well, it doesn’t take much for the magic to happen. Once there’s a stage, and PA, and all that stuff in the way it’s far harder for the thing to catch light. It takes a Springsteen, a Prince, a U2, or your favourite live band here, to really do the business in a big arena.

Having said I don’t particularly like recorded music, I still have a home studio and a small collection of condenser microphones. Just because listening to a recording isn’t as good as being there doesn’t mean that recording has no value. My recording gear is a tool; an objective listener if you like. Just because I’m not a professional performer doesn’t mean I don’t want to get better at the craft of singing, and one way to do that is to record myself then listen to the results critically, to think about how I did something and how that made it sound. It’s a good deal easier to try something for the first time in front of a microphone than it is to try it in front of an audience…

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