Blackboard Jumble

At the end of the day....it's night. And that's the only time you ever need use that expression.
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Rumbold, Haylett, Bordall, Welsh, Bown, Jones, Thomson...go on, you have a go. Write a list of your teachers who were rubbish. It's really quite cathartic. And I've only done a handful from secondary school. Imagine how long the list would be if I'd gone to university.
Everyone bangs on about the 'teacher who made a difference' when they were growing up. The one who inspired them, made them choose what they did for a living, introduced them to Shakespeare, brought physics alive, that kind of thing. And, yes, I had one or two of them too.
But what about the others. The ones just treading water until their pensions, the ones who couldn't care less and, worse, were counter productive in that they turned you off a subject for life which, with a better master or mistress, could have sparked a lifelong love affair with a science or a language or an art, if only you'd been given the chance.
Michael Gove, the education minister, thinks only people with first class degrees should teach. I bet most my teachers had first class degrees. But only a handful were first class teachers. And I suspect that anyone who has been to school feels the same. The teacher who influenced them most wasn't necessarily the cleverest in the staff room or maybe not even the nicest. He or she was the one who got through.
Then again, Michael Gove is a journalist who has risen above his station. Journalists are great - they can inspire, they can be creative, they make wonderful husbands (second time round) and they can keep a table full of dinner party guests amused for hours with anecdotes about Kelvin McKenzie. But we're not experts. On anything really.
I know there have been chancellors and foreign secretaries and spin doctors and chat show hosts and great novelists who started off as journalists. But we're not the sort of people to entrust with the future of this nation's children. Nor are lairy chefs with mockney accents, incidentally.
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My wife came home with a spring in her step I've not seen for a while. She'd taken our son's guitar into a shop in Harlow to get a new string - having trawled Essex to find one open on a Sunday - and the man had 'hit on her' in her words.
His name was Rob, he was a bit of hippy and around 60 but that didn't matter. He told her that as soon as she entered the room the aura changed and everyone felt it.
Far be it for me to say this is bollo but it certainly had an effect on her, I think (it was hard to tell as I was watching the Wolves v Spurs game when she got in).
More to the point, Rob charged her £1 for the string and put it on the guitar for her which took half an hour because the old string had broken and...oh, I don't know, I stopped listening at this point.
But if it means better service and cheaper prices in every shop she goes into, then I may send her out with this aura a bit more often.
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My wife, who knows about this kind of thing, thinks it's a given that HSBC will move out of the UK, as is being rumoured at the moment. She's usually right.
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I'm told that nurses and other hospital workers are given lists of rules about patient care. Years ago they had about half a dozen on the list which said they should make sure patients are comfortable and wards are clean and that sort of thing.
Now there are about 50 rules which include the instruction to prevent a patient from committing suicide if they see it and not to give them the wrong medication and to call a doctor if they are about to die, that kind of thing.
Thank heavens they've got these rules to stop nurses going round putting pillows over our heads when we get a boil removed.
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I think pretty much everyone has had their say on paedo-befriending freeloading porkster Prince Andrew. There was a good little tale by a Welsh MP who said the Duke of York turned up once to open a scout hut, flying in by helicopter. The cost of the flight was about as much as the scout troop had spent a year raising to build its new hut. Also, I can't help but notice that his daughters have the wide eyed look of someone who looks like they are walking round with a broomstick permanently wedged up their arse.
The Royal Family aren't like us. Just because Wills is marrying someone who is creepily turning into a dark haired Princess Di, (have you seen how skinny she's become?) doesn't mean they are.
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Jack Straw said that what is happening in Libya shows that we were right to get rid of Sadaam. Does that mean we were wrong not to get rid of Mugabe?
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At the end of the day....good night, Solly