Loving Marconi and Hating BT Goonhilly

We are learning a lot about communications in Cornwall. It's quite the place to be, this end foot of England, kicking the ocean waves of the Atlantic. If you want to do a home education project on communications, I can recommend it.

I can recommend the whiskery chaps, members of the Poldhu Amateur Radio Club, tipped up at the top of the Lizard peninsula, in the shed there now, at Poldhu. In this place, Marconi sent his first wireless dot dot dot to Newfoundland, across all those waves of the Atlantic Ocean, and in doing so scared the knickers off the cable company down the road who'd just spent the economy of England dropping cable lines on the sea floor, to be chewed at by sharks and sat on by barnacles.

In these days, the radio amateurs hang around in a rebuilt version of Marconi's shed. They seem a decent lot of eccentrics in their coastal sweaters and breezy sea salt faces. Admittedly, one or two of them look like they might've been living in Marconi's shed since 1901, and are as likely to be enticed out of it, blinking into today's bright world, as they are to be enticed to sit inside a burning car, but no matter to us. After all, we home educators actually seek out people like this. These are the lost and best of British eccentrics. In this world of pin numbers, bar codes and steam rollering normality, we actually think these wonderfully mad people have something to teach us. And, we tell the children, there is mad talking to trees, and there is mad blowing each other up, so let's get in contact with the former before we are scattered around by the latter.

So I can recommend a pleasant hour in Marconi's shed with some old amateur radio codgers, enthusing over dots and dashes.


But I cannot recommend to home educators BT's Goonhilly. Oh dear. Not at all.

We thought that the BT Goonhilly site and their trillion-billion pound enterprise science station, 'Future World', would be a fine educational contrast to place alongside Marconi.

But what we did not appreciate is that Marconi's shed is staffed by informed, enthusiastic, engaged people who genuinely are inspired to communicate a slice of life that they find of life long fascination. But Goonhilly is staffed by corporate clones with no interest whatsoever in engagement, nor with communicating any subject with passion, possibly apart from BT rules and regulations. But why should they? They are staffing a site which is unimaginative and, by our book, anti-educational.

At Goonhilly we pay a whopping wodge of money for a list full of horrors. A preachy animation about how we must look after the planet. A room of computer games like a down market arcade. A bus tour of the site. (Sorry about the satellite dishes! They've been dismantled!) A ten minute stop off at 'Future world', which is actually two rooms, where we are not invited to linger for more than five minutes each before a prison warder barks 'One minute more because the bus is waiting!'

By the end of ten minutes, Shark is in a temper tantrum, while Squirrel and Tiger are in tears. Dig is snorting, which in Dig's way is the equivalent of nailing someone's testicles to the floor, and I feel like taking a swinging punch at the smug young face of the 'tour guide'. I cannot explain to this man with the flippant attitude that I have three children who can spend five hours in a museum before they are dragged kicking and screaming out by the security guard with the keys. They simply are not accustomed to five minutes engaging with a drawing screen before it flickers off because their time is up.

In BT's bleak, corporate, time-limited future, there'll be nothing for us. Apart from the pleasure of physical violence from Grit, possibly. But at the end of the day, while we are ushered out of the Goonhilly site at 5.27pm, and while I see if I can muster up a contemptuous wee on BT property, we suggest that Shark, Squirrel and Tiger go play on the playsite. In ten seconds flat, Tiger slams her head into a stray iron bar on the play equipment and draws blood. Now I do not approve of those members of our public who sue the local council because a paving stone is wonky and thereby make all our lives more miserable at a stroke, but right now I feel as litigious as a wronged, broke woman, cheated from knowledge and withheld from power. And is that ever a dangerous combination.