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Of museums, cake and their role in educating the young.

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The great project of the English Middle Classes is the education – if not edification – of their children and any poor mite who falls into their clutches.  To this end no Saturday morning is incomplete without car loads of the unfortunates being dragged to take part in whatever dreadful craft activity the local museum has managed to tenuously collect with its rather thin collection.  Having been cleaned of glitter, one of the labours Hercules didn’t manage, the little lambs will be sent without word of consolation to some dreadful circus skills ‘workshop’ where they will learn that the origins of the word ‘fun’ was only used as a term for deceit because the fey looking ‘facilitator’ in a stark primary coloured boiler suite is not delivering much of the promised enjoyment.  Finally to violin lessons of such degrees of vileness that should Mozart hear it he really would have been considering a career in market gardening rather than being held accountable.  All the time...
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The Revolution may not be televised and it will not be an inconvenience

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  There are many places I never expected to find myself but, as it were, just seemed to have popped up.  Many a time I have found myself surrounded by ill-mannered coves with more opinions than is good for anyone and considered how fate has ordained that I should have been drinks monitor at the local Temperance Gardening Society or been asked to hand out prizes to snotty nosed terrors whose only redeeming feature is that they were prepared to be teachers at our own St Audrey’s School for the ridiculously low wages we pay them.  There was the time I ended up chairing trade talks between HM Government and the Tribal Confederations of the Lincolnshire Fenlands but that was mostly because I had taken a wrong turn on the way to the Gents and, as it were, stumbled in.  All I can say is that England will never be short of a spot of Poacher to go with their crackers.   None of this set up me up to find myself on the People’s Revolutionary Cadre’s Way and Means Subco...
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Heathen Studies: An example to us all

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This must not, I repeat not, happen again.  I have spent the entire holiday weekend dealing with the gentlemen of the press, some of whose claims to gentility would test even the most generous of Herald’s inquiries.  The only thing that can be held up , in way of mitigation, is that being barricaded in the office I avoided the inevitable visit to some dreary wayside tavern to celebrate the Risen Lord with the wife’s sister and her graceless husband, a man who reminds you that charity should begin at home but in his case, it might just skip next door.  If I hadn’t been impressed by the sheer planning and plain low cunning that went in to the whole thing I might have called for names to be named and retribution to be swift and bespoke.   It all began about a year ago.   It was revealed that one the exam boards were considering allow pupils to study Heathenism as a legitimate faith in Religious Studies lessons.   I find such stories always to be avoided; i...
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The Strange Case of the Grocer's' Apostrophe in the night

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  I must confess I enjoy a little innocent mischief as much as the next man which is why I always found Chirnside such agreeable company.   When working for the Min of Works it was his aim to slip as many fables into the national conscientiousness as possible.   It was generally felt, amid his chums, that the small footnote in the Culloden Museum Guide book was his masterpiece.     The innocent and wholly unreferenced assemblage of words claimed the reason Bonny Prince Charlie’s romantic hordes were slaughtered was not, as thought, due to tactical incompetence and the misfortune at last to take on a bunch of coves used to mixing it with Louis XV’s finest – rather than the usual garrison of chaps with a note from mother excusing them drill – but in fact because the entire Scottish nation had boycotted carrots as they were breed orange to support King William and his ilk.   The resulting night blindness led to an inability to find the British Army until l...
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Of the dangers of Counter-Insurgency in Lincolnshire and the Revolutionary Menace.

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  The fear of invasion has gripped blessed England on more occasions than were would like to be reminded but we have never been found wanting.   The Jacobite hordes turned back at Derby, realising that if Bonnie Prince Charlie went beyond that place, he ran the risk of being assailed by patriotic muggers, with which North London abounded.   The threat of the Swastika saw men rushing to the LDV and digging pits in parkland off the Piccadilly Line with the hopes of stopping tanks with a surfeit of optimism to fill the place of such mundane items such as Boyes anti-tank rifles.     Thank the Lord the Bosche were such duffers at sailing.   It was in that kind of mood that the nation faced the threat of Revolutionary France in 1796.   To be honest the court of Louis XVI had it coming, rank bad hats to a man, with little understanding of their fellow man but being French themselves they should have known what a tetchy blighter the average Parisian was...
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As to why retiring teachers should be sent home a once - a moral tale.

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  All the world is indeed a stage, as Stratford’s favourite son declared, and all the men and women have many parts, and voices.  I, for one, have my ‘talking to idiots’ voice – something I am increasing forced to rely on when shouting at those buffoons who seem to imagine the wireless news should be a branch of light entertainment at best, and creative fiction otherwise.  I have my ‘bucking up underlings’ tone, a mix of fellow feeling, firmness and unwarranted optimism and, of course , my ‘listening to’ Mrs the Hon Sec tone.  Today, I was using my ‘talking to accountants’ voice – which begins with reasoned murmuring and eventually contains a heavy note of exacerbation.  Perhaps I should explain.  I had been called to St Audrey’s as Chair of Governors to explain to the auditors why, against all financial expediency, we send any teacher who announces they wish to retire home, at once, on full salary on the single condition they do not return to the hallowe...
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Yule Tide Cheer and how to deal with it

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Somehow I feel calling the security guards was an overreaction, especially at Christmas, but maybe that is starting at the wrong end. 'It will be fun' opined Mrs The Hon Sec. Fun is a word used by clammy eyed and frightfully over optimistic distant cousins when trying to sell the charms of standing in a field, doing the sort of thing you felt was amusing when you were six and wearing a tabard in the sort of colour dyers ought to know better than to attempt. And all in the name of charity. It was on that basis I was plucked from 'Thought for the Day' and the warmth of an English bedroom to the Grocers to buy, as she puts it 'the last touches.' This is a tradition, which is presumably the only reason it is allowed to go unquestioned, which dates back and makes her feel she is in some mystical way the mistress of the Yule Tide Feast – even after F&M hampers have been delivered in due time with 95% of the makings therein. It is good to see the nation unite...
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