I’ll be flying to the UK very soon.
I’ll be leaving my isolated rural hamlet in France and heading into what looks like the chaos and danger of Kent and London.
I’m now a sort of retired, anxious, old romantic revolutionary slipping back into the country he used to call home; to walk into the midst of a midwinter of discontent, poverty, debt and a population unmasked in the misguided belief that Covid is over.
Risky.
I’ll let you know what i find.
At 60 I seem to be recovering from my childhood.
These days I sometimes enjoy watching sport. Not just Formula One and the motorcycle racing that I could once fantasise about excelling in but the actual running, jumping, hitting, kicking, diving, splashing, throwing stuff.
The Olympic Games is just about to begin; the stadium in reality a bullseye ringed by steel and my commute already complicated by drivers’ confusion over the status of the new Olympic and Bus Lane that’s appeared in Wandsworth High Street. I’m intensely – irrationally – irritated by most of the cyclists I come across on the open highway but I’m beginning to find even their sport strangely compelling when they are properly confined to the Velodrome. Last weekend I watched Wimbledon and allowed myself to Believe for a while. So what’s the connection to Grammar Schools?
There is Grammar School debate going on just below the surface in the Tory party with a vicious cat still hidden in Mr Gove’s bag; in a secret compartment just beneath the innocent and hesitant kitten of maybe, only maybe, replacing GCSEs with new O Levels and CSEs and vocational choices at age 12.
I could spend quite a few seconds on Google or Wikipedia gathering facts about when Grammar Schools were introduced, how many there were and cleverly quote the facts here: the history of the 11+, how demanding O Levels were, the transmission of the values of the British Empire, of civil society and of the polite customer service that’s so hard to find these days (because we have a service economy with few jobs that are not “customer facing”, employers are having to take on people I’d never want to face as a customer…).
There are academic dissertation questions here: Describe the extent to which Grammar Schools actually did deliver the Social Mobility in the 60s that the Coalition professes to believe in today? Did the new Comprehensives raise the standards for all to Grammar School levels or did they simply – in reality – shovel all the Grammar School kids into slightly larger rebranded Secondary Moderns where they had to play football instead of rugby? Did the closure of Grammar Schools end elitism in publicly funded education or simply divide the former Grammar School elite into those who could pay to enter the independent sector and those who were not prosperous enough to buy that choice or not prepared to prioritize school fees over the climb up a few rungs of the property ladder?
There’s another question about whether increased Social Mobility was delivered by education and how much by house price booms…And, incidentally, I’d question Niall Ferguson’s assertion in his BBC Reith Lecture that the collapse of UK civil society signified by the collapse of UK voluntary and hobby organizations is the fault of Facebook, TV and – somehow – comprehensive education. It’s more likely to be the collapse of Britain’s manufacturing economy and the closure of the mines, mills, foundries and factories that brought men, women and communities together. A colliery band is much less without the colliery, the factory drama club is nothing without the factory and the local social club becomes a haven for old alcohol-dependent men (rather like a Weatherspoons pub) when everyone else drives off to work in a call-centre or hypermarket. All that and what might be Marx’s predicted “increasing rate of exploitation”: even a part-time job demands you bring home and study the latest corporate bullshit so you turn up on-message next day. You have no time to gather and sing.
People write books about this stuff. So I’ll let them.
I am not writing a book. I just want to challenge the seductive, nostalgic and dangerous belief that the Grammar School of the 1960s was something akin to a Settlement House of academic excellence set down as a civilizing stairway of opportunity out of the mediocrity of the petty class-divided communities it served. They were schools for the children of home owners. The uncouth council estate kids could go to the secondary modern.
I can only really write about Mitcham Grammar School for Boys. I’ve no doubt that all its alumni that went straight through 9 good O levels and 3 A level and on to a good University will argue that it was a really fine school that got them where they are today etc. All I can really write about was my own personal experience of Mitcham Grammar School for Boys. How it was for me, what it taught me about boys and men and why I am only just now recovering enough to really enjoy sport without hating sportspeople.
Just now there seem to be echoes and small prompts that make this a good time to tell this story. There are the Olympics with their elite displays, the five year old who already has swimming skills that I have never had, gladiatorial Wimbledon on TV last weekend, the two bigger boys surreptitiously punching the arm of a slightly podgy boy as they passed in the doorway of a school fair, the short Year 7s, all burdened with backpacks, body punching and dead-legging another slightly podgy boy they called Sumo as they queued in a narrow corridor. (Me passing as a visitor not interfering with more than a look and feeling as the door closed that I had betrayed my younger self). The accepting observation of one mother to another at one of the school fetes that all teenage boys – including her own – are nasty, sneaky, vicious.
Writing can be dangerous. Everything has context. When one starts recording an episode in one’s life it is difficult to know just where to begin. Zoom in on a period and the detailed memories flood back, sometimes along with tears of one kind or another. Mood-changers and polluters of dreams creep out of the past. Don’t spend too long there.
I am not yet quite ready to write the history of my first 11 years or of that one particular day in the November before I entered Mitcham Grammar School in my new blazer, cap, short grey trousers and long grey socks. But you should know that Dad was very proud.
Dad must have thought that his life was back on track. He’d remarried, he’d got a new mortgage. His eldest son, whom he’d taken to the Tower of London, Navy Days, The Royal Tournament and the Guards Museum (but never to a football match), the son whose mother had died beneath a tube train at Tooting Broadway 10 months before after a prolonged bout of post-natal depression, had since not only accepted the new wife his father had met on 1950’s Civil Defence exercises as his stepmother but had passed the 11+ exam! Off I went over Beehive Bridge to school with very shiny black shoes buffed to Grenadier Guards levels of gleam. A very smartly dressed, very damaged, under-skilled little boy in grey short trousers, a naive believer from the council flats heading for a new pecking order in Form 1L where the nasty, sneaky, vicious soon-to-be teenage boys waited to find out who they were.
Mitcham Grammar School was a disaster heaped upon a disaster for me and for the several others that found the same hiding places in (different) toilet cubicles, trombone lessons and pottery studios when we were turned out at break or dinner time. It was a little school for the middle classes that aped the schools of the upper classes. It was organised into four “houses”. Prefects had yellow braid around their blazers, teachers wore academic gowns, you got beaten by Dr C.R. Bingham (Oxon. and red Mercedes) if you got three detentions in a week, if he caught you cheating in German or if you farted during assembly. Everyone studied for those GCEs (five got you a job in a bank or as a clerical officer in the Civil Service). The 6th Form studied A Levels in proud preparation for a Good University or, more quietly, for Kingston Polytechnic. Cross-country running (around Mitcham Common) offered the shame of coming in last. Rugby and cricket offered the humiliation of not being picked for any team, ever.
There are emotions I wouldn’t want my children to experience. I felt them at Mitcham Grammar School.
The curriculum at Mitcham Grammar School celebrated the elite and only coached boys who could run fast to run faster, those who could jump high to jump higher, those who could already swim well to dive from higher boards. The whole school was designed for the 1st XV and the 1st XI. And, like Mr Thomas the Welsh, plimsoll-wielding PE teacher, Mitcham Grammar School wished the rest of us would go away.
All schools have a “hidden curriculum” that parents choosing schools should be aware of and which head teachers should seek to manage (just as CEO’s must manage the company culture if staff are not going to view personal development plans as “more corporate crap”).
The hidden curriculum at Mitcham Grammar was one of petty snobbery with a further undercurrent of what can only accurately be described as fascism. (Fascism with a capital F is really only an adult political form of an adolescent disorder. Fascists never grow out of their bullying phase and build an ideology of strength naturally exploiting or driving out weakness, the elite over the masses, the Nation against the outsider, any expression of compassion a perversion etc. etc.) This was odd when all the teachers had survived, if not fought in, the Second World War.
My first three and a half years at Mitcham Grammar School were absolutely awful. And three and a half years were a long time then, a quarter of my lifetime. I was the last in my year – by about a year – to replace my short trousers with long trousers. I had to wear a belted gabardine raincoat. I went to school dressed as a target.
I’d be willing to argue that at 11 years old almost all boys are technically fascists. And at 11 years old boys are mostly pint-sized, below an adult’s line of sight and invisible except for their new uniforms: in school corridors, in playgrounds, in the street, on the bus, even in art galleries and museums, in any unstructured and unsupervised context. The point is that nobody sees them. Or most of what they do. Ganging up, punching, kicking, dead-legging, robbing, humiliating and baiting victims to show who is the baddest; establishing the pecking order of terror. It is important to understand that there are not just one or two bullies who bully everyone else. There are just one or two victims who are victimised by everyone else. It turns out you are weird if you are not a bully. And the weird get bullied.
So…this could become a true and detailed book – with rich characters with only slightly altered names – of how an emotionally damaged 11 year-old boy came to believe the bullies and further bully himself for his cowardliness in not following his Guardsman father’s instruction to “punch the biggest one back”. A story about the boy’s absolute uselessness at everything academic, his desperate desire to be something other than absolutely useless at running, jumping, hitting, kicking, diving, swimming, throwing, catching stuff. About the absence of any talent at all except perhaps a talent for masturbation, which added the ingredient of sin and crusty underclothes to the extreme anxiety and the venomous daily puncture of any hint of self-esteem. A friendless, distrusting, disgusting, bullied boy learning to lie and run away from the Grammar School of Social Mobility to the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery, The Imperial War Museum, The London Transport Museum and all the Museums of South Kensington. A story about a boy whose father threatened him with a psychiatrist if he didn’t stop lying and bunking off. A boy coming to believe that he should never have survived infant whooping cough, measles and mumps. A boy ashamed to be curious to learn which platform his mother jumped from….But this is a blog not a book…yet.
It will come.
Back then I thought I was useless because I was useless. Now I know I was useless because I lived with constant fear and anxiety. And someone should have called an educational psychologist. Or at least looked below their line of sight as they walked down the corridors. Or maybe have bought me some long trousers.
I’d like to be able to tell you I was helped to find my personal worth by the school counsellor, who worked with my form teacher to address the problems thoroughly and carefully. But I can’t. It was my Dad. One day someone started throwing my books out of my desk and I actually lost my temper. I punched him hard and his nose bled all over his Mitcham Grammar School tie. He staggered back across the classroom as I continued to hit him. Other kids got out of the way.
It was…liberating beyond belief.
There were a couple of other incidents where people I should never have allowed to bully me in the past got punched. And suddenly – very suddenly – I got some respect. Not enough to swagger about with but enough to join a small gang of guttersnipes of my own, to go shoplifting, to smoke in the corners I used to cower in, to vandalise stuff, to have…friends. Later, when I was retaking my O Levels some of my best and most talented friends were the few who joined the 6th Form from Western Road Secondary Modern. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t passed that 11 Plus.
My education didn’t recover for 10 years but I learnt a lot at Mitcham Grammar School:-
These days we’d hope that OFSTED uses a more balanced scorecard when judging schools and that it is not all about building the school’s reputation or its league table position on the examination results gained by it’s elites. These days we’d all hope that schools of all kinds have active and efficient anti-bullying policies, that children have a named person to speak to; a person they can have confidence in, who will listen and take action on their behalf without that action leading to another sneaky beating, kicking and humiliation later on. These days we’d hope that schools are monitoring and actively developing the intellectual and physical abilities and skills of all their children and taking particular care to spot the overweight, the unfit, the unskilled, the silly attention-seekers and to help them grow more quickly. Invest in them because they are our futures too.
But not so much has changed. I have many clients with Asperger’s Syndrome. One has been educated at home by his mother because schools could not meet his needs, another has just dropped out of a Level 3 mainstream college because the college insists he must now be an independent learner and a lecturer insulted him, another who is so afraid of gangs that he will not walk to his Putney corner shop and another who will not leave his bedroom because the world is “ugly” and it is the only place he feels safe. All these young men are over 18 years old. The world is not good enough for them and the government wants to spend less on the residential specialist FE Colleges which might provide them with respite from fear and a chance to shine in the history and astronomy which are their special subjects.
And me? I find myself liking football, athletics, swimming, gymnastics, ski-ing and even tennis and show jumping now mostly without wondering what bastards the participants were when they were at school. I even enjoy watching them in pubs. But sometimes I still want to avoid crowds. I’m still a bit odd. I ride a Harley but can’t talk football with the rest of the men. Sometimes I can be too cautious. Sometimes I can be too reckless. I am watchful. When I drink I talk too much and eventually I can meander into loud swearwords and louder politics. Even then I think I am watchful. But watch out for me. There’s a lot to come out.
Oh and don’t bring back Grammar Schools.
If you want to make some serious money sell clothes pegs for our noses. It stinks out there. The paperboy or girl might as well deliver a bucket of manure every morning. At least it would be honest…
This week seems to have been all about Bankers. I doubt if I can add many more words or expletives to those you will have read or spluttered into your cornflakes this week. So, I won’t add many…except to say what an exceptional time we seem to be living through. What follows is not about the Bankers because this is about a lot more than the Bankers.
One by one the respected pillars of society – once respected by the gullible as institutions of morality – have become exposed as deeply corrupt, opportunist and exploitative of the rest of us (or maybe as the rest of us).
The law has always been an ass. Barristers have always told very tall tales for money. We expect little better. If ever I need one I hope she does a good job for me. But lately…MPs fiddling expenses, priests fiddling with little boys and girls, other priests covering up for them, Church of England Lords taking twenty-seven grand plus a year for turning up, phone tapping, policemen abusing women and taking bribes from journalists (and who knows who else?), bankers taking our money in bail-outs, mis-selling, insider dealing and fixing interest rates, supermarkets fixing prices, oil companies not passing price falls to the pumps, the already very rich giving to charity (and some very dodgy charities among the genuine) before paying tax whilst the rest of us buy our poppy after paying as we earn (or being “loaned” their pay by offshore holding companies (alternative comedy can’t even laugh at itself now) etc. etc. etc..
Suddenly all but the determinedly deaf will have woken up to the fact that not only the moral high ground but the very legitimacy of the institutions and persons that rule our lives has been nothing but a facade; a fantasy stage set behind which they can get on with all their dirty dealing, theft, perversions and embarrassingly conspicuous consumption that is obviously the reality of life behind the scenery and outside the theatre the rest of us were mis-sold tickets for. Honest MPs, bankers, politicians, priests, vicars, police officers, journalists and comedians must feel particularly sick.
Everyone is entitled to be an ass sometimes. In the Seventies sensible people – and anarchists – used to challenge me about the corruption in the Soviet Union. They were outraged by the theft of the aspiration of human liberty by grey men who put the Party ahead of people and themselves somewhere ahead of the Party. Men so immersed in bizarre, systemic hypocrisy and corruption that all they could hope was to learn to somehow direct it’s petulant and unpredictable tides whilst everyone else aspired only to float on the flood and avoid open drains. I tried to answer by pointing out Socialism had only been going since 1917. Capitalism had a 400 year start and had brought us a thousand little wars of empire and two world wars. A pathetic excuse for murder, famine, red empire and the gulag. But I was a EuroCommunist and it had nothing to do with me…
Corruption in a socialist state is something to point a finger at and be deplored as hypocrisy. However, capitalism IS organised corruption. Buy low, sell high, fix the market, intimidate, monopolise, export poverty, underdevelopment, disease and environmental degradation. Rob them, rule them, fool them with religion and racism, enslave them with credit, trade inside. Screw the rest of us. Keep the bonuses coming. The last few years have been a political education and more and more of us are learning.
These incidents are adding up to more than the sum of their parts. The rot seems to be running everywhere. The columns are crumbling quite severely and the temple is in impressive danger of collapse even without the crisis in Euroland. What will we read in the news tomorrow?
I find myself using the phrase “the rest of us” a lot in this article. I’m wondering how long The Rest of Us are going to put of with this behaviour. These days “The Rest Of Us” could be the big banner at the front of a very big demonstration or even the basis of the fabled broad democratic Alliance of the Outraged that overthrows the Coalition government to replace it with a Labour government that broadly demands…an end to austerity and a more humanitarian and compassionate capitalism. More fantasy then?
More than ever, it is up to The Rest of Us. A very nice young woman from the Green Party phoned me on the M2 this week and asked me to double my subscription. I did. Join me.
It has been a while since I blogged. Almost too much has happened. I have been to Turkey for the day – four aeroplanes, a very fast BMW, a ferry across the bay of Izmir and back home at 2am the next morning with AN IDEA. One that I am not going to tell you about.
Since then there has been a garden party where I met the new Mayor from the office next door, a new tyre, days at the office and days at home, a Grandparent’s Day at Manby Lodge School, an extraction and new dentures I can’t wear yet, sunburn and a soaking, a bank holiday, an attempt at the Jubilee Pageant and the Surrey Country Show . Life has been very, very busy and I havn’t given the blog the priority I need to. Events, events, events. Maybe I’ll call it research. At the same time I havn’t used Twitter or Facebook as often either. There have been fewer photographs taken. Perhaps I’ve been in a little downswing, what with the pain from the extraction and the renewed popularity of the Monarchy. Time now for an upswing and tonight I can feel it.
It wasn’t just me though. The major topic on the “Connexions Services Need To Unite And Fight” Facebook page during this peculiar period of hiatus seems to have been the question of whether we should allow users to post adverts to recruit other people to Multi-Level Marketing Schemes. Not exciting but the beginning of a theme that has emerged over the Jubilee weekend. A sort of “this is what we’ve come to” theme:-
Daughter Number One is in the History Business and wanted to see some so we went to the River. We met at the Tate Modern Cafe (where they don’t seem to use butter and put toast instead of fried bread on your Full English) with Daughter Number Two and Son Number One at 10am. We took up a great position on a slight rise upstream of the Wobbly Bridge That No Longer Wobbles. It was cold and wet and already there was no paper in the Portaloo. Son Number One was on pretty good form. We watched the artists set up their weasels (private family joke) on the bridge. Daughter Number Two didn’t really want to get any colder or wetter. My absence of teeth was hurting and I really did feel quite alarmed at the rapid build-up of Idiots behind us.
We were too early. It was already midday and it looked like it would be another 5 hours before we might see someone waving not drowning. A man should never be where a man does not belong. Maybe it was the overdose of Nurofen Plus but I felt really weird. I made a decision to be really assertive (not aggressive) and honest and..walk back to Waterloo. The Offspring were concerned about me but off I trudged past more Idiots. More flooded off the train I boarded at Waterloo. More waited at stations I passed on the way home. These people have the Vote.
I felt I had let the Offspring down. As I entered my home Queenie was just climbing into her first boat. I’d made the right decision.
I phoned The History Daughter later to be told The Offspring had watched it on TV and that it had been a disappointment: less colour, more rain, bigger gaps between the types of craft than in the Canaletto that had inspired us to go and eat at the Tate Modern. Health and Safety and unpaid security staff.
The Balcony obviously needs a bit of scaffolding if it wouldn’t hold the rest of the family. William and Katherine were so worried they appear to have been dieting heavily for the last few weeks. For some reason that will upset those who would like to think it was time we stopped going on about the War they sent a flypast of Spitfires, Hurricanes and a Lancaster. Queenie became more animated than we’d seen her all day; smiling and pointing the machines out to the crowd. Merlin’s do make a wonderful sound. The RAF sent the Red Arrows for a quick whiz-past and we all had tea. Where are all the Eurofighters we are paying for?
My position on the monarchy might surprise you. I’m not as rabid and tasteless a republican as some of the groups I subscribe to on Facebook. If we are going to have a Monarchy we might as well have the Balcony People as anyone else. Mostly Harmless and less expensive than they used to be, I believe. My father was a Grenadier Guardsman. Some of it rubs off.
The Balcony scene was interesting. Here were Elizabeth II, Charles (who seems more generally competent and maybe likeable these days), Camilla (who seems to have been Forgiven), the aforementioned Thin White Duke and Duchess and The Boy Who Doesn’t Resemble His Father Or Grandfather But Whom We Like The Best. A good few years of monarchy to come right there then.
In these times of global terrorism I half-expect an outrage at every major public event and imagine the spooks and other people who hold up the umbrella the rest of us live under must be very busy right now. Well done whoever you are. Do keep it up!
Maybe there were so few on the balcony because they didn’t want to risk having the entire Royal Family wiped out by one Rocket Propelled Grenade launched from a hotdog stall in St James’s Park. Maybe someone is keeping their powder dry for the Olympics. Paranoia is a terrible thing.
It is what we’ve come to. Let’s go somewhere else.
It is a sunny fresh Saturday morning, even here in Walton Leisure Centre where Heather is selling books to passing gymnasts and swimmers. The coffee shop manager has three kids and two jobs. She is not quite at her best this morning. It has been an exhausting week for everyone. This will be a long blog entry. I’ve been working, listening and watching not just drinking and sleeping…
My Dad used to ride a bike around Westminster as a messenger for Conservative Central Office during the Heath Government. His political conclusion from this and other experiences was that the country was best run by the Tories with a very strong, inquisitorial, challenging Labour Opposition. We used to argue like any working-class Tory and his teenage socialist hippie son but now I find myself wishing the country was in just that position as maybe some kind of improvement over the messy incompetence we are splashing about in on all sides. I also wish Mr Altzheimer hadn’t knocked Dad off his bike and ridden off with it.
In 1973 I bestrode the stage of the Colwyn Bay Theatre for four nights as a new, young, enthusiastic member of the Colwyn Abbey Players as a cuckolding dentist in a medley of Alan Ayckbourn sketches with a performance that the critic from the North Wales Weekly News described as “barely competent” (It’s OK I’m over it now). Ed Milliband bestrides the Political Theatre stage to similar acclaim. People come and applaud at the end of the play because it was well written, some of the other actors are quite good and they are very bored with the black and white “Austerity” documentary playing endlessly at the Gaumont down the road in Llandudno. Tickets are sold but there is muttering in the theatre bar and the young would-be star is blanked back-stage. The electorate swept the Tories and their orange labadoodles out of Town Halls in reaction to the incompetence of the Coalition and in spite of the incompetence of Milliband. I left the Abbey Players and both they and I moved on to better things. Labour needs a Real Star for The Next Time.
The fading Livingstone’s predictable failure in London should be a very sharp lesson: with Milliband as leader Labour won’t win the next election, even if Cameron loses it. With you, me or almost anyone else at the top of the bill they might win. I’m sure he’s a nice man though.
Globally the Great Economic Experiment has become more interesting .
A “socialist” France (how socialist it will be we’ve yet to learn) will seek a sort of hopeful, Keynesian, Nouveau Deal, growth-led route out of the depression of recession to set running alongside the British public service cuts-led route that seems to be based upon the increasingly obviously mistaken belief that the sainted private sector will take up the challenge to provide the services and paid jobs that will allow people to spend on their credit cards again and get the whole bloated illusion of capitalism off the ground…again. If only UK wages and pensions can be depressed enough to make investment attractive enough in competition with the Chinese, Indians and soon-to-be desperately poor and desperate for jobs Greeks. Let’s see who gets out of recession first. The French? or the UK? Where would you invest? In people with hope or in people without hope? Either option means working people accepting – and one way or another paying for – a “reality” they did not create and need not accept.
The extraordinary people of Greece have not accepted the Poverty Is Inevitable option and have voted; expressing their anger at having been told the crisis is all their fault and at the same time distrust and confusion in the absence of any clear political alternative. Recently unified (remember?) and energised Germany, who might (perhaps embarrassingly) have been quietly achieving dominance in an increasingly politically unified Europe (a kind of bloodless 4th Reich?) now seems increasingly willing to let Greece leave the Euro if those unreasonable Greek voters insist upon having decent schools and a health service. The Greeks are, when you think about it, further down the road of Prosperity Through Impoverishment than the Tories can yet confess they are about to lead the UK.
Sadly the various Greek fascist parties have become dangerous again as Greek voters (this time including the ignorant and angry searching for scapegoats) get desperate enough to vote. In the UK the Nasty UKIP offer populist, petit-bourgeois, free-small-business, cut-red-tape (read workers’ rights), foreigner-blaming, solutions in a relatively small way so far.
Meanwhile Simon Heffer in the Daily Mail attacks Cameron for not being a Conservative and not using the Queen’s Speech to pledge still deeper cuts to public services so we have enough cash available to shore up a couple of the banks that might be overexposed in the Eurozone. Simon, what if we just said “Bollocks!” to that. Maybe a new spectre should be haunting Europe…
Obama has begun his campaign for a second term with speeches from a moral ground considerably higher, more competent and more intelligent than that scrapped over by the collection of bizarre Republican personal grooming models that oppose him.
China’s economic miracle/threat has faltered a little because people in the West can’t afford to buy stuff even at their prices. Russian generals threatened pre-emptive action if the USA and NATO pushed ahead with the deployment of anti-missile technology in Poland (designed to stop any stupidity from Iran we are told) whilst Putin was sworn in (again) and blessed (again) and continued to back the Wrong Side in an Arab Spring after which only the truly courageous and lucky look like seeing Summer.
The world is not without hope, even if it looks more disgusting and disturbing the closer you look (especially around Rochdale). We do our best to make our way in it. Before it gets right down to you or me it gets down to families and here, a little closer to the abyss at the edge of Civilisation families must strengthen and enrich themselves as the secure and loving home from which we venture out into the wasteland that is being created by a capitalism that looks like it is running out of wheezes. We might not be able to vote with any meaning but we can do that.
Stick together out there and bring something to the party. We did. My son William was 21 on Wednesday. Together we recommend Bluebeckers ribs followed by chocolate cake with candles on.
I have recovered from The Swarm at Thorpe Park, which is best visited on a rainy day it turns out…
TerryMiles.blog 