Middle class parents will always game the system, whatever it is. Schools where I live are non-selective; pupils go to their nearest school, but obviously some are better than others. The house prices in the catchment areas of the good schools mean that only the well off can afford to live there.
My fave example of this kind of thing was the player who objected to the chant “he’s here, he’s there, he’s fucking everywhere” because he was quite religious and didn’t approve of swearing. The fans promptly adapted their chant to “he’s here, he’s there, he’s told us not to swear“!
It was your comment about them being “emotionally and mentally healthy“ that annoyed me. That is surely more than just stating a “plain fact“, no?
Argh, this take infuriates me! I’m retired and I’m astonished at the number of people who expect me to do some sort of voluntary work, and are shocked when I say I have absolutely no intention of doing any work ever again. I worked for 40 bloody years and I feel I’ve done my bit, thanks very much!
Not the first…
bsky.app/profile/drdi...
The England women’s football (soccer) team has a player called England. A nice challenge for the commentators!
Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone knows it’s Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb.
Sigh. I dream of the day when “some people don’t want to get married” isn’t considered a mysterious aberration, worthy of newspaper articles.
The “if I personally haven’t experienced something, then it can’t be happening“ people are a strange lot. It’s hard to tell whether they genuinely believe what they’re saying or are just stirring, but either way I wish they’d give it a rest!
Sorry to break this to you but your brother sounds like a total creep.
Thank you! Hardly anyone seems to understand what “evidence” means. When I was a lawyer I seemed to spend half my life explaining to clients that “evidence” and “proof” are not the same thing.
Parklife!
Sometimes the juxtaposition of BlueSky posts is just too much.
And also astonishing that no one noticed even after the book was published, until she was interviewed about it on Radio 4 and the interviewer (very politely) ripped it to shreds. I do wonder if that public humiliation is part of what caused her to lose the plot. She‘s clearly mentally unwell now.
“Look! A squirrel!”
A French friend once asked me what the English word was for “chic”, and I had to confess we don’t have an exact equivalent. (We just use the French term.) This led to an interesting chat about words for fashion and style, including the discovery that French has no word for “frumpy“!
This is the nub of it. To all those people going “ah, trains are so lovely!”: no, they are not. They’re slow, dirty, overcrowded, unreliable and hideously expensive. For any long journey within the UK, I drive. Going abroad, I fly.
Totally with you on this. If I’ve got limited time off, I don’t want to spend half of it on the train!
Depends on the airport. London City is great!
That may be true in movies, but not in book world! A book that’s published as a “romance“ will have a happy ending. That’s an absolute rule. I think it’s a stupid rule, but I think you’ll struggle to find a publisher who does it differently!
You can’t reason with NW, she’s a total fruit loop.
True! But if Shakespeare wrote that today, publishers would not market it as a romance!
Isn’t that part of how literary genres are decided? For example, you can’t call your book a “romance” if it doesn’t have a happy ending. Well you could try, but you’d get a lot of angry reviews!
Oh, it’s quite famous. I liked this story…
www.itv.com/news/2022-09...
I get the opposite. “I thought you’d be taller.” Why?
The definitions do tend to move as one gets older. Once you are in your sixties, you’ll see that anyone under 40 is young!
I think you’ve summed up the entire Spectator ethos. It was once a fairly well respected publication, but these days it’s just full of unpleasant idiots.
Happy Birthday! (I've never understood why the birthday boy/girl is expected to supply cakes for their colleagues. Surely they should be giving YOU cake?)
Extract from wiki page describing the French cartoon characters The Shadoks. They are very stupid and can’t remember more than 4 words.
Am increasingly suspicious that Goodwin may in fact be a Shadok.
I know a French/British couple whose children are completely bilingual. They say French is their mother tongue and English is their father tongue!