Nobbut Laiking, by Ross Brewster
If you are lost and in need of directions, a busy pub is the best place to go for information.
I had cause to pop into a pub recently, after driving round for what seemed like hours vainly seeking an address.
It wasn’t for the beer you understand, although on a sweltering day it was mighty attractive.
Pubs were always places where you went for good conversation. Local gossip. All the latest news and chit chat.
Not any longer. Nearly everyone in that pub was head down, reading or texting on their phones. Some were even texting with one hand while shovelling in their lunch with the other.
Is the art of conversation dying? Has it already become as moribund as a Norwegian Blue, the dead parrot of Monty Python fame?
Goodness, if you can’t expect to meet up with people for a chinwag in the local, what hope is there for “oracy”.
A word new to me, if not to Sir Keir Starmer who last week announced Labour’s plans to make speaking skills a core part of England’s education system.
Sir Keir said his party would embed oracy — the ability to express oneself fluently and grammatically in speech — into the curriculum to help shatter the “class ceiling” that leaves disadvantaged pupils behind.
Helping children find their voice would improve academic attainment and, said the Labour leader, aid young people to find jobs.
It’s shameful that there are currently 1.7 million children struggling with the basics of talking and understanding words. Thirteen years in the education system that’s taught them to say “like” every other word and, my particular hate, “it is what it is.”
Still, it’s good training for all those who intend to work from home and miss out on office inter-action with colleagues.
I can find nothing wrong with Starmer’s aim, other than the time it would take to train teachers and the funding that Labour claim will come from a raid on private schools which it hopes will bring in more than £1bn.
Is Starmer better at his grammar than his maths? Critics say the party has pledged to use that money to fund other policies including the recruitment of thousands more teachers.
They could start by banning mobile phones being taken into classrooms. My generation managed without them. Is it really true that kids text their pals across the room?
Pubs and restaurants can’t dictate to customers. Otherwise I’d delight in a ban on phones in the bar and most certainly in eating areas.
Sir Keir might also start his oracy campaign by including some of his own MPs. In fact his own sometimes pompous style of speaking could do with a dash of the linguistic pzazz he wants the next generation of schoolkids to enjoy.
The boys at Wetheriggs have done good
Don’t mention the score. By half time I’d stopped counting and we were playing more like a bunch of Basil Fawltys than a football team.
However I am rather chuffed to make a modest appearance in the 60th anniversary brochure of one of our most successful local football clubs.
Set up in the 1963-64 season, Wetheriggs were a group of schoolboys from the estate of that name in Penrith. I was present at their first game. I was playing for the opposition, a team I’d got together in Keswick mainly from lads of a similar age who could not get a regular weekend game.
To put not too fine a point on it, they slaughtered us. It’s poignant to think some of those lads are no longer with us, but on July 22nd they and a lot more Wetheriggs players and officials will be remembered at a special match and community day on Castletown rec.
After their facile win against my outfit, Wetheriggs went on to win league titles and play in cup finals and they are still going strong to this day. They have, as is said in football parlance, “done good”.
Recycling old material
As columnists, we’re great re-cyclers — just ask Boris Johnson.
The ex-Prime Minister has returned to our ranks with a column for the Daily Mail who may have been anticipating great revelations about his former ministerial colleagues in return for the six figure sum they are paying him.
However Johnson’s first contribution, about his late night raids on the fridge, will have left them thoroughly cheesed off.
Private Eye magazine did some checking and found Boris has used that same cheesy line at least eight times in his columns.
I’ll come clean. I’ve re-cycled old material occasionally. Not as effectively as the elderly columnist of Hare and Hound for over 50 years who confessed to keeping cuttings and bringing them out for an airing every five years.
Johnson has some way to go to emulate such devoted re-cycling.
I can rest easy now
It’s official. I can sleep easy now boffins at University College London have confirmed it’s perfectly okay to take an afternoon nap.
The scientists say a kip during the day is beneficial, particularly to us old codgers. It helps to stop our brains from shrinking.
At least forty winks is preferable to watching those funeral plan adverts on afternoon telly.
