Yes - I’m sure they could, it just whether there’s a will to do it. It’s so long ago since I did my GCSEs and yet the topics they’re covering barely seem to have changed at all!

Which are harder to answer when it comes to social history and everyday lives. Not impossible, but harder to generate enough potential essay questions. Back when we did more coursework, I imagine you could pick a social history topic to dig into deeply, but hardly any coursework left in GCSEs now.

I think it’s something to do with how essays are formatted: ‘compare and contrast these 2 leaders’, ‘explain how X and Y lead to Z, and what other outcomes might have been possible’ - everything is shaped around how to answer those types of questions.

A blue sky with clouds. In the foreground is a green Primary Route exit sign for the A140. The destinations given are Ipswich Diss Norwich. It’s a image I took from google Maps as I wasn’t quick enough on the draw with my camera.

In East Anglia they even put their civic/ football beefs on road signs

I’ll never forget watching The Wicker Man with my outer Hebridean mum. “I just don’t know where there got all that wicker from”

"History began badly and hav steadily got worse."
- Nigel Molesworth
#BookWormSat #BookChatWeekly #WorldHeritageDay #RonaldSearle

Revealed: Mandelson failed vetting but Foreign Office overruled decision Guardian investigation uncovers decision by UK security officials to deny clearance before Mandelson took up role as US ambassador

Forever a country where the idle rich fail upwards

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto

Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto theonion.com/man-who-threw-molotov-co...

We Ride at Dawn

I wrote and posted this to Instagram a couple of days ago and it became my most-read poem ever. I’m honored I get to feel big feelings alongside you all. I’m posting it here too and want to use this space more consistently. Hello friends ❤️

The first piece of literature my eldest created was simply called BUC. The credit on the cover was to WOFR (author).

I had the same one Christmas but with purple flavour/colour sweets. I ate a pack of Fruitella on the drive down to my grandad’s house, we had to stop so I could be sick at the side of the road, and I’ve never wanted to eat blackcurrant flavour sweets ever since then.

Svefn-g-englar by Sigur Ros. Not hard to work out who the band were, as they were playing live the first time I heard it, but I had got up in the early hours to get a flight to Spain for a festival - I was falling asleep at the venue but simultaneously waking up going ‘this song is AMAZING!’

We had some like this at school. There was a very upsetting story about something awful being done to birds. The one we actually studied was The Second Hut by Doris Lessing.

Hah! Depends on trouble for who. The school is on the border of two wards and two constituencies, so gets overlooked by both, or when there is trouble, caught in the crossfire.

This was a primary school near us he visited. For many reasons I suspect it wouldn’t be our school they’d hand-pick to have the PM visit…we are too troublesome.

I always shudder when I hear people say ‘I had a really good pandemic, being at home with the family and life slowing down’ - whilst having that time at home was special (some of the time), I was always fully aware it was at the expense of others extreme pressure and suffering.

A black-and-white very good boy sitting beside a tree while gentlemen of the press take photographs

It’s the 60th anniversary today of a dog called Pickles finding the stolen Jules Rimet trophy by a tree in Upper Norwood in south London, which will please anyone who’s watched Small Prophets

Mackenzie Crook’s magical suburban folk tale, #SmallProphets published by #PenguinBooks and #PuffinBooks down the years. A 🧵
1/

Ooh. When I was a student, there’d always be a knife like this in the communal drawers and everyone used it, but no one ever knew who it belonged to.

He’s done many years at the Globe, post-Covid - always worth seeing. And as he’s a man from the Midlands, I am sure Shakespeare would have appreciated him (and probably if you put them in a room together now, they could still understand each other pretty well, I reckon!)

He’s been a mainstay of the Globe theatre company for years.

Mary’s Prayer by Danny Wilson or Looking for Linda by Hue and Cry. White boy soul grinds my gears.

I was in the 6th form and I feel like we were all talking about it from day 1 - but it was The Day Today which we felt was ‘our’ thing.

(And I didn’t go to the cinema at all for a large chunk of the 80s as I was terrified of the AIDS ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ adverts. Between ET and Back to the Future 2 I barely saw a film.)

The 11 yo, as a Minecraft fan, was actively cross about the whole concept of the movie. It felt like her personal world going mainstream and she wasn’t on board. In the end she went bc it was someone’s birthday, smiled and politely said ‘thank you’ but said after she’d hated the film.

What I’ve always puzzled about is the random pockets of land in urban areas - which inevitably end up getting flytipped, or have sprawling trees/bushes that overgrow the pavement but the council refuse to tackle because they don’t know who owns the land. Plus I’m just nosey.

The thing I really notice about London skies is that I can see far more stars than I ever could. I have no idea if cleaner air is contributing to that, but the difference in numbers of visible stars is really clear to me.

It does take a while for the infrastructure to catch up, though - we’ve been stuck at around 10km range with all the chargers we tried broken. In the end my husband called the helpline and they reset the charger whilst we waited, and turned it back on. Not the first time we’ve had to do that.

Even a ‘bad storm’ in UK standards is just silly - back in 2022 we had a garden wall blow down (was already very shonky and amazed it hadn’t happened sooner) and a football blew right OVER the roof of the house and landed in the garden. Down one wall, up one football.