William McGonagall's poems have plodded across these pages before, as has his play Jack o’ the Cudgel (or The Hero of a Hundred Fights):

Set in the court of Edward III, it tells the story of Jack, a “noble Saxon” who rises from pauper to royal knight and vanquishes his enemies by clubbing them over the head with an enormous cudgel. In one memorable scene, he stops a giant from attacking a minstrel, declaring: “Leave the minstrel, thou pig-headed giant, or I’ll make you repent/For thou must know my name is Jack, and I hail from Kent.”

Upon learning of Jack’s heroics, the King summons him to his court and makes him a knight.

He tells him: “Sir Jack, I give thee land to the value of six hundred marks/In thine own native county of Kent, with beautiful parks/Also beautiful meadows and lovely flowers and trees/Where you can reside and enjoy yourself as you please.”

These days would-be artists do not die poor for lack of talent; in fact a folio of thirty-five McGonagall poems, signed by the author, has just been sold at auction for £6,000. In his lifetime, however, McGonagall was paid only for one poem: an advertisement for Sunlight Soap:

You can use it with great pleasure and ease
Without wasting any elbow grease;
And when washing the most dirty clothes
The sweat won’t be dripping off your nose
You can wash your clothes with little rubbing
And without scarcely any scrubbing
And I tell you once again without any joke
There’s no soap can surpass Sunlight Soap
And believe me, charwomen one and all
I remain yours truly, the Poet McGonagall

 

Well, it beats "A Mars a day helps you work rest and play," and is probably more accurate than this, or its German counterpart.

I have some sympathy with commenter John who writes in response to Rebecca’s post:

 

I pay my taxes, as you do, and I demand the same right of regulation as you and all your heterosexual companions already expect and have - if you will not grant that then stop taxing us.  

 

And it is easy to find examples of gay couples who stay together for years in loving relationships, and, conversely, of marriages that end after an absurdly short time. A gold digger who marries an old codger with a nasty cough inherits his fortune, while a gay man whose partner of fifty years dies intestate gets nothing. Is this fair?

 

On the other hand, I agree with Rebecca’s view, that marriage is “the glue that holds society together” and must be “maintained as a special category”.

 

Perhaps the US could learn from the Great British tradition of muddling through. Thus, rather than accept gay marriage on “equal rights” grounds, or reject it on religious and moral grounds, find a pragmatic compromise.

 

Since 2005, gay couples have been allowed by UK law to enter into Civil Partnerships. This is not the same as gay marriage, which in the EU is legal only in the Netherlands and Belgium. From the rather tackily named Government Equalities Office:

 

Civil Partnership is a completely new legal relationship, exclusively for same-sex couples, distinct from marriage.

 

The Government has sought to give civil partners parity of treatment with spouses, as far as is possible, in the rights and responsibilities that flow from forming a civil partnership.

 

There are a small number of differences between civil partnership and marriage, for example, a civil partnership is registered when the second civil partner signs the relevant document, a civil marriage is registered when the couple exchange spoken words.  Opposite-sex couples can opt for a religious or civil marriage ceremony as they choose, whereas formation of a civil partnership will be an exclusively civil procedure.

 

So what rights and responsibilities do Civil Partners have? From the same website:

 

·         Tax, including inheritance tax;

·         Employment benefits;

·         Most state and occupational pension benefits;

·         Income related benefits, tax credits and child support;

·         Duty to provide reasonable maintenance for your civil partner and any children of the family;

·         Ability to apply for parental responsibility for your civil partner’s child;

·         Inheritance of a tenancy agreement;

·         Recognition under intestacy rules;

·         Access to fatal accidents compensation;

·         Protection from domestic violence; and

·         Recognition for immigration and nationality purposes

 

It is reasonable for gay couples to have these rights and duties. However, marriage should be a special category referring only to a man and a woman, particularly as regards the validity of a religious ceremony.

 

Is this compromise merely a matter of words? Have hordes of homosexuals been clogging up the Registry Offices? The short answer is no. In the first year after it was made legal, just over eighteen thousand couples entered into a Civil Partnership in the UK. The figures were at their highest in the first month, falling gradually over the course of the year. Statistics do not seem to be publicly available for 2007, but numbers are likely to have peaked in the first year the opportunity was available.

 

Has the UK opened the floodgates to all kinds of irregular unions, with people demanding to marry their pet parrot, or, worse still, more than one wife? Rebecca fears that gay marriage will lead to demands for polygamy to be recognised.

 

There is a big difference between gay marriage and polygamous marriage. Polygamous marriage greatly increases the number and proportion of Muslims. The proportion of gays, on the contrary, remains constant whatever their legal status. So gay marriage is not the threat that polygamous marriage is. Still, the use of the word “marriage” implies an identity with man-woman unions, and this does set a dangerous precedent. Does a Civil Partnership imply the same thing?

 

There is no evidence that demands for polygamous marriage have increased as a result of Civil Partnership legislation. Such demands, were they made, would come from Muslims. There is a problem with in the UK with unofficial “polygamy”, and there was the ridiculous decision to recognise for the purpose of benefits polygamous “marriages” conducted abroad. But this is not a result of Civil Partnership legislation, and logically it cannot be. Consider the rights and duties of Civil Partners. These rights and duties are fundamentally at odds with the teachings of Sharia on marriage, whether monogamous or polygamous, because Civil Partners are legal equals. Equal inheritance rights, proper maintenance, equal rights on dissolution and, in particular, protection from domestic violence, all go directly against Sharia.

 

A seemingly minor provision of the legislation, making a gay union purely a civil contract, ensures that religion cannot play a role. Since equality before the law is a fundamental principle of civil contracts, the legislation could not logically be extended to allow multiple “wives” without also allowing multiple “husbands”. Muslims, of all people, would be unlikely to support such a change.

 

Civil Partnership legislation has worked well here, without much of a song and dance. Perhaps we’re not a song-and-dance people.

Joseph Bottum probes the very wordiness of words. While I share wholeheartedly his enthusiasm for “thwart”, I wonder if he is in danger of disappearing up his own eponym.

Thwart. Yes, thwart is a good word. Thwarted. Athwart. A kind of satisfaction lives in such words--a unity, a completion. Teach them to a child, and you'll see what I mean: skirt, scalp, drab, buckle, sneaker, twist, jumble. Squeamish, for that matter. They taste good in the mouth, and they seem to resound with their own verbal truthfulness.

I’m not sure about “verbal truthfulness”, but so far so good.

Admittedly, some of this comes from onomatopoeia: words that echo the sound of what they name. Hiccup, for instance, and zip. The animal cries of quack and oink and howl. The mechanical noises of click and clack and clank. Chickadees, cuckoos, and whip-poor-wills all get their names this way. Whooping cranes, as well, and when I was little, I pictured them as sickly birds, somehow akin to whooping cough.

And yet, that word akin--that's a good word, too, though it lacks even the near-onomatopoeia of percussion and lullaby, or the ideophonic picture-drawing of clickety-clack and gobble. The words I'm thinking of are, rather, the ones that feel right when we say them: accurate expressions, somehow, for themselves. Apple, for instance, has always seemed to me the perfect name--a crisp and tanged and ruddy word.

Apply, you might say.

Grammarians may have a technical term for these words that sound true, though I've never come across quite what I'm looking for. Homological, maybe? Autological? Ipsoverific? In a logical sense, of course, some words are literally true or false when applied to themselves. Words about words, typically: Noun is a noun, though verb is not a verb. Poly- syllabic is self-true, and monosyllabic is not. And this logical notion of autology can be extended. If short seems a short word, true of itself, then the shorter long must be false of itself.

But what about jab or fluffy or sneer, each of them true in a way that goes beyond logic? Verbose has always struck me as a strangely verbose word. Peppy has that perky, energetic, spry sound it needs. And was there ever a more supercilious word than supercilious? Or one more lethargic than lethargic?

Was there ever a more whatty word that what? And you can’t get much more itty than it, or more moreish than more. What, for that matter, is andier than and? But is as butty as you get – but me a buttier but and I’ll eat my hattty hat.

 

I wonder how Bottum – that name has a ring to it – would view my list of words that sound rude but aren’t, posted here some time ago:

Masticate
Bloviate
Onomastic
Dictaphone
Bomfoggery

Conversely, there are words that don’t sound rude but are, principally “merkin”. What a merkinsome word that is.

From the country that brought us crucified Santas, the toirebijutsukan, Goth-lolitas and slot-machine knickers, we now have the solar bra:

TOKYO - Ladies, take your battle for the environment a little closer to your heart with a solar-powered bra that can generate enough electric energy to charge a mobile phone or an iPod. Oh, it also has pouches to store water so you don't have to carry around environmentally unfriendly plastic.

Lingerie maker Triumph International Japan Ltd unveiled its environmentally friendly, and green colored, "Solar Power Bra" on Wednesday in Tokyo.

It features a solar panel worn around the stomach.

But the panel requires light to generate electricity and the concept bra will not be in stores anytime soon, said Triumph spokeswoman Yoshiko Masuda, as "people usually can not go outside without wearing clothes over it."

People?

They'll be telling us next that the sun shines out of our backsides.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the Italians are better than the French, even at what the French do well: food, wine and looking good. 

Take food. My experience may not be typical, but my three favourite French restaurants are run by Italians. The food is excellent, and the waiters are not stuck up and arrogant, as French waiters are.

What about wine? I must concede that the best of the best wine is French, but the next best is Italian, and it comes at a much more reasonable price and with less snobbery.

As for looking good, Carla Bruni is the perfect Frenchwoman. She is stylish and beautiful - chic if you must - but without that miserable, haughty look that chic Frenchwomen have. She actually looks happy; a Frenchwoman of comparable looks would appear neurotic and strained with the effort of keeping them. And Italian men are vain about their appearance, certainly, but they are not precious about it, nor are they strangers to soap and water.

So, what are the French for?

Easy. The French exist to amuse the English and to give us an opportunity to make sweeping, possibly unfair generalisations like the above. That is why Anthony Peregrine, writing in The Telegraph, misses the point when he "examines some of the more persistent clichés about French life". The clichés are the point, perhaps the only point, of French life:

The French are... well, what are they? Twenty-three miles away, our nearest neighbours and oldest enemies. No other nation stirs such conflicting emotions in the British breast.

Conflicting emotions? There is no conflict in this particular British breast.

The French are cultural snobs

Granted, it is irritating to hear the French going on about Beaumarchais, Marivaux, Racine and Molière when we know perfectly well that the world would chuck all four off a raft to save Shakespeare. But it’s also rather touching - especially as, on our side of the Channel, everyone is currently in such a lather trying to define Britishness.

The French don’t bother with such questions. They know what Frenchness is. It’s an accumulation of their history, thought, arts and food - all wrapped up into a sort of “Project France”.

[...]

All Frenchmen wear berets and hooped shirts and ride bikes festooned with onions

No they don’t. Our cartoon image of the typical Français derives entirely from the Onion Johnnies. From the 19th-century to the 1960s, these guys sailed from Brittany, put on berets and pedalled round Britain peddling the celebrated pink onions of Roscoff. A handful are apparently still at it. They imprinted themselves upon the nation’s psyche at a time when most ordinary people never encountered any other sort of French person.

Non-Roscoff Frenchmen nevertheless remain puzzled beyond measure that we regularly depict them all as onion-toting cyclists. It’s as if they considered all Britons to be lobster fishermen, portraying us eternally with sou’westers and lobster pots. Should you wish to know more about the Onion Johnnies, visit La Maison des Johnnies, 48 rue Brizeux, Roscoff.

I thought an Onion Johnny was a kind of French letter.

The French say “Ooh-la-la” a lot

Indeed they do, but not as we imagine they do. First, they say it quite quickly, as one word (with a long first syllable, a long third syllable and a rapid “la” in the middle), not slowly and as three separate words, as we tend to parody them. Second, it is not necessarily, or even usually, an expostulation of delighted surprise at some frothily extravagant naughtiness. It is used much more often to indicate that one is impressed — by anything at all: a fine coq-au-vin, a particularly crunchy rugby tackle or the extent of the damage to someone else’s car. Quite how the phrase acquired its salacious overtones in our minds, I’m not sure. Certainly not from the French. Unlike us, they aren’t surprised by sex. Nudity (indeed, porn) on television, whores on country roads, adultery in high places: they’re all just part of the landscape.

So the French are impressed by a fine coq? Ooh-la-la.

If you change one letter of Arab, and rearrange the letters, you get ABBA:

Like Rebecca, but for different reasons, I don't like to see our Queen covering her head to visit a Turkish mosque. It isn't the head covering that bothers me, though. It's the fact that she went to Turkey in the first place.

For all my - by conservative standards - "strident" feminism, I have no objection to conservative religious dress, particularly in a religious context. I have visited many Muslim countries, and have been happy to wear a headscarf and take my shoes off when visiting a mosque. I have also taken my shoes off - I am a natural peasant and love being barefoot - in Buddhist temples. In Georgia, I was obliged to cover my head when visiting even the humblest of churches, while in Uzbekistan, a Muslim country, hardly any women did.  Men, too, must often dress conservatively in a religious setting, although the rules are generally applied more strictly to women.

As a Christian, I am completely in agreement with Rebecca about St Paul. He was a man of his time. Jesus, not so limited, cares far less about what is on a woman's head than about what is in it.

Coming back to the Queen and Turkey, it would be far more worrying if she had worn a headscarf outside the mosque, as one prominent US dignitary did, if I recall, on a visit to Syria. By wearing one inside the mosque, not outside, she has emphasised a distinction between the spiritual and the temporal. But this won't do. The problem is that Islam does not recognise this distinction, and her action may be interpreted as submission.

More seriously, the visit by a respected head of state to an Islamising country may seem to legitimise that country's Islamising. That is more important than the temporary donning of a headscarf.

Our Queen is generally wise and should know better. She should not have set foot in Turkey.

Not so fast, Mr Sloth. From The Telegraph:

The sloth has earned an unfair reputation for laziness and does not sleep for nearly as long as first thought, scientists have discovered.

In the first scientific study of sleep in wild animals, researchers found the sloth only sleeps for nine and a half hours a day, six hours fewer than previously thought.

The animal, which spends much of its time hanging from the canopy of the rainforest in South and Central America and eating leaves, was believed to get at least 16 hours sleep a day.

Scientists monitored the sloth’s sleeping pattern using two sensors on a hat to pick up signals from the brain to show when the animal was sleeping and when it was chewing.

[...]

The team found that sloths in captivity slept for nearly 16 hours while those in the wild slept for just nine and a half hours.

From the leading article:

Perhaps, inside, the sloth has been seething with indignation at the calumny against its character. In which case, it might instead be called the wrath. Certainly it shows few signs to justify a redesignation as the lust. Names stick, though. To vary the proverb: give a sloth a bad name and hang it. Except, in the case of the undemanding sloth, hanging is already something of a speciality.

In other news, an octogenarian mayfly comforts an infertile rabbit.

Gates of Vienna is generally rather eager to dance gleefully on British graves. However, in the clip shown it is clear that the small number of police present thought they were dealing with a minor disturbance involving one stroppy individual, and were not expecting the huge mob that showed up within minutes.

Compare the response here, when they were prepared.

Diffusing a situation politely - as they tried to here - is usually the best response. And we don't know what happened next - were reinforcements called to quell the mob?

 

Dean Godson in  The Times:

"Even the Israeli enemy never dared to do to Beirut what Hezbollah has done,” lamented Fouad Siniora, Lebanon's embattled Prime Minister, over the weekend. Yet British bien-pensant opinion - so vocal in its opposition to Israeli actions in Lebanon in 2006 - is strangely silent about the recent outrages.

Why? After all, Hezbollah is one of the world's most ruthless clerical fascist organisations - complete with ersatz Nazi salutes and Iranian-style Holocaust denial. When the legitimate, democratic Government of Lebanon dared to challenge it, Hezbollah went on a sectarian rampage, murdering scores of opponents and destroying much of the country's free media.

Yet there has been not a peep from the concerned humanitarians of the Stop the War Coalition, which boasted of putting 100,000 people on to the streets to protest against Israeli assaults. Nor has much been heard from two of Hezbollah's most high-profile and indulgent British interlocutors - the ex-MI6 officer Alastair Crooke and Michael Ancram, the former Conservative minister.

[...]

The other great myth about Hezbollah - peddled by too many of its Western apologists - is that it is an entirely indigenous “resistance” movement: if so, why have pictures gone up of the Iranian leader, Ali Khamenei, and the Syrian President, Bashar Assad, for the first time in Beirut since the Cedar Revolution of 2005? And, given the violent oppression of Sunnis by Hezbollah, why has so little been heard from the Muslim Council of Britain and the British Muslim Initiative, two predominantly Sunni organisations? Don't Lebanese Sunnis deserve a little solidarity from their brethren?

So why does Hezbollah's putsch of 2008 not excite stern criticism - as did Israel's invasion of 2006? It's simple: many “progressives” hate Israeli and Western policy far more than they love Lebanon.

And many Muslims hate Infidels far more than they love their fellow Muslims.

Of all the junk mail to come through my letterbox, Ken Livingstone's "free newspaper" The Londoner was the most annoying. It was not free, for a start - it cost London's council taxpayers £1 million a year. And it was not a newspaper, but a piece of advertising, telling us what a wonderful job Red Ken was doing. Boris Johnson pledged to scrap it, and to use the £2.9 million saved to plant 10,000 trees. He is true to his word. From Press Gazette:

London mayor Boris Johnson [is] axing The Londoner, the monthly newspaper published by the London Mayor's office.

The newly-elected Conservative mayor described the move as the first attempt to cut “unnecessary funding” of the Mayor’s Office's publicity budget. Johnson's office claims the Mayor's Office would have spent £2.9 million on the newspaper this year had Ken Livingstone been re-elected. The new adminstration pledged to use some of the money saved — around £1 million per year — to plant 10,000 trees in London's most deprived areas by 2012.

Johnson announced the closure of the newspaper, distributed to three million homes across Greater London, at a tree-planting scheme in Brixton.

 

Johnson said: “I believe that as many areas as possible should enjoy the many advantages that street trees bring. So today I have taken the decision to cut unnecessary funding of the Mayor’s personal publicity budget to plant 10,000 street trees by the end of my first term.

“There was little commitment of resources from Ken Livingstone to reverse the trend of decline in the number of street trees. I am taking immediate action to reverse this short-sighted decision.

“In the last few years a third of boroughs have seen a decline in the number of street trees. Many London streets, particularly in deprived areas, have no street trees at all.

“Trees improve the street environment in which Londoners live and work so I will do all I can to save the trees we have and campaign for more trees to protect London’s open spaces.”

When it comes to trees, Boris is the tops. As London turns over new leaf, let's hope he can branch out even further.

Ufologist is a silly word.

Bomfoggery is another.

As for fomboggery - get thee behind me.

"Bomfoggery" is a highly expressive word, not silly at all.

You say that because you're American, and therefore don't have the words "bum" and "bog" buggering around in your head.

It isn't your fault.

The attitudes of Saudi Muslim men differ in degree, but not in kind, from those of Heather Mac Donald:

"You’re reckless,'’ one of the young men said to me.
He said that it was dangerous to drive into the desert with a group of Saudi men we did not know well.

Mac Donald says women should be told by rape counsellors that it is "dangerous" to get drunk and be alone with a man.

In both cases, boys will be boys, and rape is the woman's fault. At least the Saudi man calls it rape. Mac Donald says it isn't rape if the woman is drunk or "slutty" - a word very loosely defined and used exclusively of females. And a woman should be "advised" to "be careful" - again loosely defined and combined with a reflexive disbelief of rape victims who are not "careful".

Thus Mac Donald embraces a double standard and ingratiates herself with those men who long for the days when they could screw around with impunity and marry a virgin. But at least the Saudi man is honest, and doesn't pretend to be concerned for women's welfare.

If most Muslims were white, Mac Donald would approve of Islam.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Mauris vel risus. Nunc a nunc. Nam eu tellus sed mi hendrerit porta. Duis ipsum. Maecenas feugiat eros ac libero. Donec mattis, augue interdum aliquet lacinia, lectus risus eleifend libero, ac tristique risus arcu non elit. Aenean tortor turpis, vehicula dapibus, euismod ac, semper sit amet, turpis. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Proin dapibus pede non pede semper tincidunt. Ut ut tortor vitae nisi commodo sagittis. Nulla sit amet augue eu ante adipiscing feugiat. Pellentesque bibendum. Morbi orci justo, luctus eget, iaculis nec, ornare ac, sem.

I don't know much about cricket, but I know I like the togs. Charles Spencer reviews Richard Bean's new play, The English Game in The Telegraph (my emphasis):

Bean, one of our finest and most prolific dramatists, has played a good deal of club cricket over the years, and has the knackered knees to prove it. His play is a sometimes spiky valentine to the game that has absorbed him for so long, as he depicts an amateur London team, the Nightwatchmen, on a hot August Sunday.

By and large, the team are a tolerant, easy-going bunch. There's a Hindu among the players who is also gay, and a black man, but there is no sense of prejudice except from a boorish guest player mistrusted by all.

But there is an extraordinary passage when one of the most likeable and longest-serving members of the team, and a former radical Sixties firebrand to boot, turns on radical Islam and the fact that we are sleep-walking into an Islamic caliphate. He describes suicide bombers as "racists, fascists and bastards", deplores the credulity of right-on, anti-American attitudes, and insists that "self-hatred is the cancer at the heart of our nation".

It's always dangerous to assume that any character's words represent the view of the playwright, and here another character, a sympathetic GP, leaves the team because he is so upset by his friend's remarks. But this play seems to me to mark a defining moment on the English stage when the conventional liberal pieties that largely obtain in our theatre are finally put under fierce scrutiny, and Jihadist Islam is at last denounced as a malign evil.

It is, however, only one aspect of a splendidly rich play...

No doubt, but the Islamic angle has bowled this maiden over.

Of course, there is no Islam other than "Jihadist Islam", at least not an Islam that has officially renounced Jihad. Still, "Jihadist Islam", in a mainstream newspaper, is better than "extreme Islam" or "Islamism". Denouncing Jihad is a good intermediate strategy, where denouncing Islam itself would alienate the uninformed reader. This reader can imagine that there is another kind of Islam, which may stop him feeling guilty about learning more.

It sounds like a good play. I wonder if they will stop for tea.

Never trust a man who says "discourse". Never trust a woman who says "nuanced". And never trust anyone, male, female or transgendered who says "zeitgeist".  This week's dozy bint and pseud is Muslim Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik. She attacks "Islam's refuseniks" Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Wafa Sultan for being insufficiently "nuanced". Watch those mangled metaphors:

The post-9/11 crisis also created an audience which was eager to hear about the depravity and barbarity of the Muslim world but also not keen on subtlety. A quick, convenient, stereotypical picture was needed, and the "sisters" certainly paint that. There seems to be more of a platform for the angry disenchanted Muslim female. Male exiles from the faith do not seem to attract the same sympathetic open-armed treatment as the damsel in distress who has liberated herself from the shackles.

The "post-9/11 crisis" caused this lack of subtlety? Not 9/11 itself? Is flying planes into buildings subtle, then?

The most prominent of the "refuseniks", Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Wafa Sultan have caused a stir for allegedly being "brave enough" to criticise Islam and nail their colours to the west's mast of values.

Why is "brave enough" in sneer quotes? All three are facing death threats - the quotation marks will not save them.

For me, as a Muslim female, the three women all represent false dawns. Wafa Sultan's debut on al-Jazeera , where she bleated hysterically about the irredeemable retardation of the Islamic faith, made her conservative Muslim opponent seem positively temperate.

Yes, we remember how temperate - and how lovely - her opponents were. Sultan is a bit shouty for my taste; I am English, after all. But her opponents were deranged.

[T]he (sometimes faux) extremity of their views spoils the appetite for more nuanced, considered, opinion.

Frenchification - friend or faux?

The "sisters" have set the mould and any address that is not predicated on a complete acceptance of western values and a rejection - nay, abhorrence - of Muslim ones is too dilute, too bland for the numbed palate.

Nay? Nay for 'orses?

I should have a natural synergy with these women but I am appalled at how cavalierly they have appropriated the very limited opportunity to capture attention and raise awareness; how they merely ride the zeitgeist and milk it for all it's worth. Their personal histories exhibit a disturbing ruthless tendency to twist half-truths into a media-friendly tale of woe.

Question - how do you ride a zeitgeist and milk it? Is it like having your cake and eating it? Or is it a winged horse, like Pegasus or Cholima?

It's Eighties and yet Sixties:

Not to be confused with Penrith, although they both gave succour to commuters.

It's beautiful weather here. Brilliant sunshine with a gentle breeze.

Only a couple of weeks ago it was hailing.

That's it, really.

I'm wondering whether it will stay like this, and for how long?

Talking of educational nonsense, this, from The Times is depressing:

Teaching children a passion for Shakespeare and the beauty of his language used to be one of the main aims of English lessons. Now the plays are being chopped up and shown to schools in truncated form.

Rather than visiting Stratford-upon-Avon or going to the theatre for a full production of The Tempest or Othello, pupils see performances only of the scenes on which they face tests.

Critics say the practice illustrates the growing trend of teaching to the test, with children’s education restricted just to material that is likely to be assessed. Schools are told in advance which lines of a Shakespeare play will crop up in tests at Key Stage 3, when pupils are 14.

In response, at least four theatre companies are offering stripped-down productions that focus on the key scenes. Even the questions explored in these workshops mirror those likely to be asked in Key Stage 3 tests.

Teachers complain they are under increasing pressure to ensure that pupils perform highly in the tests, the results of which contribute to school rankings. Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: “This is teaching to the test. Shakespeare shouldn’t be in a national exam for 14-year-olds — they should be acting it out and enjoying it, not sitting tests. It’s a nonsense and completely unnecessary. The thinking is that if you are not tested on it you haven’t done it.

“The play’s the thing, not extracts from the play. If you’re watching only one scene you don’t have it in context and don’t get the experience of Shakespeare. But this happens — schools analyse three scenes in forensic detail, which is utterly boring.”

Jacques Barzun would be turning in his ... er... study.