{"id":184,"date":"2008-07-02T10:47:42","date_gmt":"2008-07-02T18:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timdefenderoftheearth.com\/news\/?p=184"},"modified":"2008-07-02T11:53:12","modified_gmt":"2008-07-02T19:53:12","slug":"listen-with-monster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.timdefenderoftheearth.com\/news\/?p=184","title":{"rendered":"Listen With Monster"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hey there.<\/p>\n

I’m currently back in full Deep Dive Mode for some serious heavy work on Phase Three<\/strong>. But before I go all intermittent on you while I’m away in my brain (writing my new book, in other words!) today I surfaced briefly for what was my last school visit of this academic year.<\/p>\n

It was to Elthorne Park<\/a> high school in Ealing, and it was an absolute pleasure.<\/p>\n

I arrived in a tearing hurry, having foolishly believed that taking the journey-time promised by the London Underground website and doubling it<\/strong> might somehow allow me to get to the school punctually, like a professional. Silly me. Thanks – apparently – to ‘trespassers on the track’ (is there a story in there??) by the time I got through the door of the Elthorne learning resource centre my first audience was already sitting waiting. For one’s first visit to a school that’s just never a good look — very embarrassing, AAAAGH! But I jumped straight in, and things took off at top speed.<\/p>\n

Here’s a shot of me putting my heart into my work…<\/p>\n

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Here’s me pointing at something, apparently with such great emphasis that the molecules of my arm began to lose alignment…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And here (below) is what I think is one of the silliest photos for a while – and that’s even by these pages’ fairly stringent standards of silliness. Take a look:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Explanation: at lunchtime a photographer from a local paper showed up, to take some pics of my visit. This was great, of course: all extra publicity is very welcome to the Sinister Masterplan! But what he wanted was for me and the students to pose<\/strong> – as if I was reading and the students were supposedly hanging on my every word. A sort of Listen With Mother<\/a> effect, if you will.<\/p>\n

While we all did our best – and much respect to everyone in the above pic for being so game! – it was just impossible to take this seriously. If you look at the pic again you can see the oh-so-fascinated expressions already beginning to fail. And in the end…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

…we just cracked up completely. ;p<\/p>\n

My thanks to Mrs Donnithorne for kindly inviting me. And a GLEEFUL thank you to everyone I spoke to today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hey there. I’m currently back in full Deep Dive Mode for some serious heavy work on Phase Three. But before I go all intermittent on you while I’m away in my brain (writing my new book, in other words!) today I surfaced briefly for what was my last school visit of this academic year. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timdefenderoftheearth.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timdefenderoftheearth.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timdefenderoftheearth.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timdefenderoftheearth.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timdefenderoftheearth.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.timdefenderoftheearth.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timdefenderoftheearth.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timdefenderoftheearth.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timdefenderoftheearth.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}