105 days ago
I now feel a bit of a wuss writing this as my pal Darren sends photos of the snow in Canada outside his rural retreat where it is minus 17 degrees. I am not sure if it will snow here in North Wales next week. My kids hope it does and so do I as if there is even a light dusting of global warming, the Marxist Madrassa where the Mrs works will shut down and we will enjoy her company all week. But I do know that it will be cold by Welsh standards and that an alternative to switching on all our hugely expensive gas radiators is to run a fire in the main living room where folks can snuggle up and watch mid rot on the telly.. And that brings me to my birthday present to myself, in the first photo below, a heavy splitting axe.
877 days ago
Back in the 1970s my late father would make a point of crossing the picket line when his colleagues were on strike. He, and his friend Bill Whitehead, would march past the other liberal arts teachers with pride. After the event, my father would note how unusual it was to see so many of his co-workers in the Warwick University English department actualy turning up on campus. Dad would have been proud to see the Mrs breaking the strike this week although as she was working from home that day it only meant answering emails. According to the bright young thing of socialism, Zarah Sultana MP, it is as University staff have suffered a 20% pay cut so she backs the strike. As so often Zarah makes things up. My father was the sort of lefty who believed that Government should look after the deserving poor and that folks should speak the truth. He would not have been a big fan of Ms Sultana on either count.
891 days ago
The rule here in North Wales is that you need to call our local surgery over in England at 8 AM to get an appointment.The Mrs has had a chesty cough for three weeks so – according to in the interweb – needs some antibiotics and thus a scrip. So she started calling at 8 AM. The line was engaged.
1130 days ago
No I had never heard of the University of Winchester either. It is not quite up there with Oxford. In fact it is not even up there with joke marxist madrassas like Bath Spa. Two years ago its staff went on strike as Winchester announced it was cutting 10% of teaching posts because of a funding crisis. Last year it warned that it needed more voluntary redundancies as covid threatened. However…
1232 days ago
" target="_new">Does Steve McKellen have such severe Brexit Derangement Syndrome that he wants 17.4 million folks sacked tomorrow or is he a parody? I noted earlier, in another context, that it was increasingly hard to tell genuine hate-filled woke liberal Twitter warriors apart from parody accounts of hate-filled woke lefties. Is this vicar/lecturer at a Marxist madrassa/Guardian reader a member of one of the Teacher’s Unions for real or just another send up by Andrew Doyle? That brings us to Steve McKellen whose deranged outpourings on the matter of Brexit featured here yesterday. Is Steve for real and thus a man we should pity and pray for as he battles severe BDS or is he a parody?
1244 days ago
Of course Black Lives Matter. This is a mixed raced household so why would we think anything else? However, as I noted at the weekend, the Black Lives Matter movement has fallen from popular grace and is now overwhelmingly seen as increasing racial division by both white and BAME folks. As I noted then, there are those last redoubts who seek to hide inconvenient truths. The teaching unions and the school system is one redoubt. So too are the Marxist Madrassas, such as Manchester University. Also doing its bit is the National Trust. But the strongest supporter is, of course, the BBC.
1245 days ago
I noted yesterday that while popular opinion is now turning massively against the Black Lives Matter movement, there are still redoubts, notably the BBC and other sections of the media establishment and academia. Today’s madness from one such redoubt is from Manchester University where students want to ban the noun “black”. The sheer lack of academic rigour on display is horrifying.
1334 days ago
The screenshot below, from an online faculty meeting at what you might have thought a decent university, says it all. Welcome to the Marxist Madrassas of 2020 where you must admit to, and confess to, thought crime in a mass ritual. Then you can leave Room 101. Once upon a time, academics celebrated freedom of thought. But that was in the days before history was rewritten, and before the clocks chimed thirteen.
1348 days ago
The peak years for state school entrance to my old University, Oxford, were in the 1960s. Then, successive Governments and Education ministers including, in a rare error of judgement, the blessed Lady Thatcher, started to scrap grammar schools. That ladder which gave bright working-class kids educational and social mobility was whipped away as they went along to comprehensives. Comprehensive schooling has, almost entirely, failed both the bright poor and the not so bright poor who, on most measures, fail in later life as badly as they did in the “bad old days”. But one institution has a solution… an establishment where most of the senior staff went to public schools and Oxbridge. Yes, you have guessed it…
