Going Places

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“Teachers are those who help us in resolving problems which, without them, we wouldn't have”
- Unknown

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Okay, I might be off to Hanoi in two weeks, This is how you get to spend twelve weeks in Vietnam:

* After applying for a short-term contract, do a telephone interview at eight in the morning, because they're seven hours ahead. Assuming everything goes well...

* Get vaccinated against typhoid, tetanus, tuberculosis and a few other things. Start a course of anti-malaria tablets.

* Fax your passport to the school. They will arrange a work visa with the British immigration office and the Vietnamese embassy, and email the confirmation back to you. You then visit the embassy in person with visa number and passport, they provide a visa three days later, after which you've got five days to leave.

* The school pays for your airline ticket but you book it.

* You buy health insurance, which for any period less than six months is travel insurance.

In short: A few needles and a lot of red tape.

The interview will probably be tomorrow (Friday).

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People tend to confuse good writing with good content, and I don't think it's a new thing.

I don't really know what makes good writing good, but then I don't know in detail what makes good cookery good, and we can all tell the difference even when we don't know how we're doing it.

During my studies of christian theology some years ago, one fact kept cropping up in parentheses, but was never explored. Those texts chosen (after a century of debate) for inclusion in the bible are notably well written - while the vast heap deemed philosophically unsophisticated or politically undesirable are mostly bad from a literary point of view.

It's as though the four canonical gospels were chosen, not for their historical accuracy, moral rectitude or coherence within and between themselves - qualities they rather lack - but because their authors knew what they were doing.

This is obviously to overstate the case. The bible was assembled as an ideological tool to support a political power structure, not to be a good read. But if the author of the gospel of James had been a better wordsmith, or the author of John had had an off day, theological disputes over the centuries might have been different.

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