Blogs from District Two, Ho Chi Minh City, Southeast, Vietnam, Asia - page 5

This is a BBC radio play that I came across circa 1980 while teaching in the UK. I used it with considerable success in the classroom. Unfortunately, nobody apart from me seems to have any knowledge of it. I have written a separate blog about this fine play - about how, in 2017, I rediscovered the old reel-to-reel tape in a box in my Reading bedroom, and then brought it back with me to HCMC, where I had it digitized. There is no reference to the play on the internet - let alone a copy - so I have written down the text myself. This was a long and laborious process - listening to snatches of dialogue, then writing them down - but I enjoyed it. What kept me going was the thought that I was ... read more

I have long admired compound adjectives. They can be succinctly functional, as in an "ill-conceived plan" or a "man-eating tiger", or excitingly poetic, as in Yeats’s wonderful line: That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea. Some compound adjectives, such as "ill-conceived" and "man-eating", are frequently used and therefore catalogued in the dictionary, but a writer can create compound adjectives that are entirely new – such as "dolphin-torn" and "gong-tormented". The number of possible compound adjectives is infinite; just take two adjectives, or a noun and an adjective, or a noun and a verb, and yoke them together with a hyphen. Compound adjectives have a special place in English grammar – they are grammatically correct yet, because of their infinite variety, are outside the scope of a dictionary. As an English teacher, I ... read more

I’ve just written about the gorgeous flowers all over Ho Chi Minh City during Tet. Now I’m going to write a short piece about the lovely flowering shrub on our balcony. I don’t think I’m an anthophile (from ‘anthos’ the Greek word for flower) - an insect which feeds exclusively on flowers or a person who loves flowers to excess - but I do enjoy flowers. I don’t like watering them and tending them (I leave that to my wife) but I like looking at flowers and, if they are fragrant, smelling them. The ultimate flower is one which looks gorgeous and smells gorgeous. The frangipani tree springs to mind. Indigenous to the Americas, it is now common all over South East Asia. The word ‘frangipani’ is a modification of the Italian ‘frangipane’, which takes its ... read more

I am currently teaching an 11-year-old Korean boy who enjoys the short stories of Roald Dahl. I gave him an assignment - to write either a prequel or a sequel or an alternative ending to one of the stories we have discussed. As an example, I wrote my own alternative ending to 'The Landlady', which is my favourite Roald Dahl short story. I wrote it with my student in mind - using uncomplicated vocabulary. If you don't know 'The Landlady', I suggest you read it before you read my alternative ending. It is a horror story intended for adult readers which first appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1959. I have been using it with students since 1976. Here is my alternative ending. The opening words - in bold - are copied from Roald Dahl's ... read more

Our HCMC bedroom is festooned with photos from the many phases of my life; blu-tacked to every available bit of wall space are photos of myself, my parents, my friends and places I've visited. I recently wrote about the best photos I ever took and the best ones ever taken of me. In that essay I singled out three photos taken by yours truly; now, a week later, I’ve decided to write about two more. None of the photos in my previous essay celebrates my ordinary everyday life as a youth or young man in Reading UK. This was a very happy time – when I lived, either permanently or off and on, in the family house at No.36 Hatherley Road. After school in Reading, I spent three years at Leeds University but used to reoccupy ... read more