Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Graduates


I lost most of the morning to the graduation ceremony at the local primary school. Unfortunately I had been called upon to say a few words.  I make no pretence of being a public speaker, so hopefully expectations were not dissapointed. I find it hard to maintain a lot of thoughts in one batch, so I based a fair amount of the stuff on advice from members of the family, which made it easy to put in some kind of order and remember.
Nice to see some of the little kids giving the songs a good go. One little girl who lives near us was particularly noticeable in her efforts to do the thing justice. One could see that she was internally doing the words of other kids' songs even when it wasn't her turn. Unfortunately no great shakes on portraiture here. 
There were several of the graduate girls wanting to be pianists, a few baseball and soccer player hopefuls.  The surprising thing was there wasn't a single astronaut. I abandoned the idea of making parallels between their 6-12 and mine, but perhaps I ought to give it a go next time round. I was six when the first Apollo landing took place nearly 40 years ago and by the time I was their age the whole moon mission movement had packed up, the space station seems like it should be inspiring a bit of awe amongst the young uns especially as the Japanese astronout is currently swooping about up there going for some kind of zero gravity bone melting endurance record. There was no reference to it at all that I could see in the school or hear in the speaches of others. Perhaps the underground ludite movement has spread to the orient. I must make a point of quizing the school Principal on the point when next we meet.