I've been reading through my back pages, writes Luke Meddings and I'm younger than that now. Well, older if you insist, but a Dylan reference can't do any harm. What? Oh. Some idea of where we are going might do no harm?
It is better to travel than to arrive, as British Rail said in one of their classic advertising campaigns of the 1970's, when it was frequently better not to set out at all.
And as we are not working to a rigid timetable either, there is all the more reason to enjoy an Adlestrop moment.
Adlestrop was immortalised by Edward Thomas in the poem of the same name, and for some reason I was under the impression that the place did not exist. It does, and according to adlestrop.org.uk 'provides a peaceful rest to walkers on the Macmillan Way and the Oxfordshire cycle route' - though what walkers are doing on the cycle route I don't know. They'll know they've arrived when the Tour of Britain cannons into them.
The Macmillan Way of course joins the Heinemann Way and - alright, I won't bother, but don't say I didn't spot the opportunity.
Adlestrop celebrates what happens when nothing happens - when you are able to let the moment work on you, rather than the other way round.
ADLESTROP: PASS NOTES SUMMARY FOR READERS SITTING EXAMS
A train stops where it shouldn't on a hot day, someone coughs, and the possibilities of the moment are seemingly unlocked by the name of the station - these are amplified and echoed, both visually and orally, so the willows suggest the willow herb and the sound of a lone blackbird is joined by 'all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.'
Passive and caught off-guard - off-guard at a station! You can't say I'm not trying - the poet's state of mind is like blotting paper, so a single note spreads and deepens to embrace the immediate world.
This might be a precious analogy for T-ching, but it is nevertheless an apt one. Because this is how many words spin out from one, if you let them, and how a single example of language can suggest many others.
For example, Adlestrop itself came to mind not because of railways but because of birdsong: I was looking for an interview with Kurt Wagner, the leader of Nashville-based alt.country collective Lambchop, and my mental Googling around birdsong turned up Adlestrop as a search result.
In this interview, which I tore out and saved up (phrasal verbs, trans.) a few years ago, he tries to explain his delight in the fact that birdsong at one open-air London show was famously as loud as the band itself.
Alert to the fact that he is picking up on a conversation in German which is taking place near himself and the interviewer, he concedes that he 'probably could shut that out, but I'm easily distracted by sound. It's a three-dimensional experience to me - people walking in off the street, noises in the venue, and the music going on. That's how it's been for centuries. Music is a social activity.' Like teaching, like language.
The fifth step of T-ching is not to focus on the aims, but to escape them: to develop not just peripheral vision (eyes in the back of my head, son) but peripheral hearing. To be allow ourselves to be distracted.
This doesn't mean stopping the lesson, but enriching it, dimensionalising it with incidental detail. Picking up on the asides of classroom life which are real, present and social.
What is important in T-ching is not to pursue a rigid course towards Friday afternoon, but to enable language and conversations that have developed in the course of the week to pick up again, or to close, or to just drift away.
This sort of flexibility rather paradoxically demands concentration and - for here is the analogist's revenge - hard work. The original quote about travel and arrival turns out to be from moustachioed Treasure Island man Robert Louis Stevenson: 'To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.'
One level this column has been an Adlestrop moment - the subject matter suggested by a chance association - but on another it has been analytical, teasing out what is relevant to the immediate context from what has turned up. T-ching is the same.
