School (for me) is mostly out. Always has been. In summer there are no lessons, simply too hot. The local school could never afford the necessary air conditioning. Which leaves just winter, the putative season of learning.
Requires a bribe to get me to go. Only then will i leave the château, come down from the mountain and attend school. i am assuredly not on any scholastic mission.
So here’s why i sometimes have to go:
The school use a Shame-sniffer, a Beijing imported drone. Sent out to shame parents of truanting offspring. It is a low altitude model whose weapons have been removed (Health and Safety).
Around dusk during the school term the Shame-sniffer materialises in the sky above the château. It hovers like a helicopter, blazing blue neon and giving off a strong smell of kerosene, cheap fuel for a cheap flying machine.
It upsets species other than Homo sapiens. Germaine has a placid temperament, but, in the drone’s presence, she becomes most agitated… furiously roaring in the freezing night air. (Camels do indeed roar.) Colonel Barry, irritable at the best of times, also makes his displeasure known. Vigorously crowing well before his and the Kommune’s usual ‘waking’ hour. The vociferous cockerel is the Kommune’s alarm clock.
Only the goats mount no discernible protest.
Our curiosity had been initially piqued, but the novelty of its appearance soon wore off. It becoming an indefatigable nuisance of the night.
Glitch in drone’s software
Altering the drone’s flight path is easily done. No sophisticated de-programming required. What unfortunately is required is an act of sacrifice. And it is incumbent on me to make it!
By attending school, i electronically lock the drone to its default position: the school playing fields. (Mickey tipped us off.) The drone’s destination co-ordinates cannot be reset until thirty days have elapsed, my action thereby stymieing the school inspectors.
While drones of the non-clandestine variety are relatively cheap to buy, they are expensive to repair. I.e. re-programme. So Wilders’ only school drone remains defective. In winter IT personnel will not willingly come to Wilders, discouraged by plummeting temperatures and low levels of light. The town’s reputation is hardly a draw either because of the unsavoury elements of its settled populace: the drinkers; the grammarians; the smokers; the opioid addicts; the loafers and smilers recklessly flouting the convention to frown in public. Not forgetting those of equally dubious worth: the beardies. Wilders is indeed for the coders a very long way from their notion of civilisation.
The drone has defects other than errant software: a busted air bladder and kaput (infrared) cameras. Not that the school superintendent is bothered. The drone is not in the spying game. Shaming is its raison d’être.
Shame is a subjective emotion. And, in regard to my school absenteeism, Calculus feels not an iota of it. What elicits a strong reaction from him is the high whirring sound of the drone’s propellers.
How does Calculus put it? Something like this ‘airborne metallic prefect is violating the contours of our collective vision and hearing: our social space.’The noise is certainly a violation of his space of study; an aural invasion of his solitude, forcing him from the realm of the mental; a realm wherein he contemplates political theory and arcane philosophical quiddities shot through with number theory. (His absorption in such matters often mistaken for aloofness.)
While struggling with frequencies of sound within the audible range for humans, he can hear all too well the drone’s drone.
Reluctant to ask a favour of grandson, the arrival of the drone always darkens his disposition. For Calculus, unable to conceal his growing embarrassment, has to resort to a bribe, which he typically frames along the lines of ‘acting for the common good.’
C: Because, because of the drone, which is deafeningly loud, as you well know… none of us can concentrate… on whatever it is we are doing, you on your didgeridooing, Martha on the multifarious plots of umpteen books, the Sulanna Tribe on composing their medieval melodies, so I am making this request, for you to accede to a…. well, a collective request, as it were…
Yeah, yeah, i think. But i always end up agreeing to surrender my precious freedom for a day. The payoff, i well understand, being a whole lunar cycle of nocturnal peace. A sleep inducing silence, pleasantly punctuated by the hoots of owls and Germaine’s low moans of contentment. Not that all country sounds at night are soporific. Tis always with a beating heart that i listen to the rasping barks of arctic foxes and the ghoulish howls of wolves.
And star scintillating nights, we get those back too.
The bribe
i am lucky that neither Calculus nor Martha believe in classrooms which come with walls.
– School, that insidious thief of adolescent curiosity.
Says Martha whose grandiloquence betrays a psychological naivete. Her words are hardly an incitement for me to breach the school gates and submit to a school time table. Calculus is similarly disapproving of schools with fixed time tables, but he uncharacteristically keeps such thoughts to himself, fearing they might provoke a rebellious reaction from his grandson!
Six times a year i do it, fortified by shots of k-spirit. Towards the school i will tremulously walk, stopping at its de-magnetizing entrance. Said to foil all known forms of digital cheatery. After accessing the main touch screen there follows a face and finger scan (lasting a few seconds) and i am then registered as officially present. Very old hat i know, but then Wilders is in the middle of nowhere.
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Calculus calls the bribe an inducement, based upon the principle of work and time reciprocation: class time cancelling lotti time.
In practice the calculation is simplified to a day in school for a day off the lotti.
The fairness of this deal hangs on how much humiliation and boredom i suffer in class. It is not always as bad as i fear. Not that i let on. Whereas lotti graft is unambiguously hard: growing the brown buckwheat; weeding the onion patch; hoeing the rows of carrots and cabbages. The Kommune’s decision to use neither pesticides nor herbicides adds to the work load. The ache of digging muscles unalleviated by a magic glysophate molecule or two.
Martha has drawn Calculus’s attention to the sage observation of the French historian, Fernand Braudel: Every plant of civilisation creates a state of strict bondage. Yet Calculus stubbornly refuses to try permaculture methods that Koochie has suggested. Cultivating land is a strenuous activity, he says, and there is no way getting around that. So cultivation at the château is done with a hoe, spade and human engine. Once we tried to get Germaine to draw a plough, but she was having none of it.
Josef A levies fines on the commercial and amateur farmers who refuse to grow GM crops. In lieu of money (we eschew out of principle) Josef A’s minions confiscate a proportion of our produce. They can never get enough of our quinoa.