Voice of Reason
People these days are obsessed with money. Not exactly a startling revelation and a bit rich coming from you, I hear you cry. But the interesting thing about the current nature of this obsession is that it does not encompass care of money. The public will happily waste, or see wasted, enormous sums on pointless activities (such as the lottery), yet apparently play merry hell when relatively trifling projects are proposed.
As you probably realised, dear reader, I am referring to the replacement for Britannia. At Ł60 million, this represents about 75 minutes government spending. It is not, as some have suggested, a private plaything for the Royal Family, but a means for the Queen to discharge her duties as head of state, in much the same way as Bill Clinton uses Air Force One. Given our strong maritime heritage, a prestigious British-built yacht seems the perfect solution.
All talk that this money should be spent on education looks pretty flimsy in the light of the Ł2.5 billion to be spent on the cattle cull to satisfy a German food minister who constantly moves the goalposts of lifting the ban.
It also looks weak following the publication of results that show that in some London boroughs, at the age of seven, the reading age gap between the best and the worst is up to three years. Spend, spend spend is the mantra of both the opposition parties, but this is shown to be ridiculous when one also reads that the country with the highest standards of English in the world is apparently Barbados, where the average government spend per pupil is half that of the UK.
Pathetic basic literacy and numeracy is directly attributable to ‘progressive’ teaching methods, not socio-economic factors; Kensington and Chelsea, for instance, came out below the national average for basic standards of pupil ability.
Reading can be taught in a bus shelter with a copy of yesterdays newspaper. Since a significant proportion of the teaching ‘profession’ are incapable of realising the damage of their actions, it is about time that strict guidelines on primary education were introduced. In other words, turn the clock back thirty years.
I try to avoid writing about my own department so as not to ignore huge swathes of you, my readers, and also to prevent streams of abuse from my elders and betters. Last week’s explosion in Old Chemistry deserves a mention. It is a miracle that no one was killed during the incident, which, without going to details, generated enough force to blow a fridge through a closed door.
You would naturally assume that an incident of this nature would warrant a least a phone call to London Fire Brigade to explain what had happened. Not so, my friends. Now as you know by now, I have no truck with cynicism, so I won’t suggest, as some are saying, that this was to prevent the Health and Safety Executive getting wind of it. The apparatus that caused the fire is in wide use in the department and has long been seen as an accident waiting to happen.
The lab in question only had one exit. It now, of course, has two, courtesy of the fridge. An earlier request for more fire extinguishers for this lab was denied - ‘we don’t want any have-a-go heroes.’ In which case why bother with them at all. I could go on for several pages about College safety policy, which is more about eliminating liability than eliminating risk, but it would send all but a few chemists and Sherfield bigwigs to sleep. Suffice to say, it does not work.
Finally, regular readers will have wondered if I have gone cold on Southside Bar. I have gone cold in it, when the heating was on the blink, but the beer remains at the usual exceptional standard.
Recommendations here are fairly pointless - every pint should be tried (though not necessarily at once). If you thought real ale was synonymous with amorous activities in a canoe, then forsake Australian lager for something a little creamier.
