A Talent for Happiness

My inspiring English teacher at Uppingham half a century ago, Gordon Braddy, has just published a book of his own short stories, written over the past five years. Although clearly fiction, each taps into aspects of his own life, rich with his particular voice.  

I was struck in the last of them, the powerful ‘Visions and Revisions’, by an observation made by a headmaster to a young teacher in a job interview: ‘I do hope you have a talent for happiness… Oh yes! It has been my experience that even the most gifted schoolmasters only achieve the really important things when they are happy.’

A talent for happiness. Such a simple concept. So elusive.

My sense is that it’s important in many walks of life.

Learning to write

I wrote a year or so ago (22 November 2012) about the dedication of the great Bohemian violin pedagogue, Otakar Ševčík, to teaching not so much how to play, but  how to practise.

I see that the recently departed novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard extends the same point in her memoir, Slipstream. In it she credited her piano teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, Harold Craxton, in the same way, adding that he taught “… how to learn; how to take the trouble and go on taking it; and above all how to listen to what I was doing.”

And she continued: “Although I never emerged as a serious pianist, his lessons have been useful to me in learning to write.”

Ševčík would have been proud of her.