Metropol

I am confused.

It's quite simple. James hasn't written anything. So I wrote something to go in place of his non-existent writings while he writes a new one.

Tsk @ it not being in the appropriately named thread

Clearly, it was appropriate to make a new thread. Don't want my shit lumped in with James' good writings, after all.

Well it's technically not a hall rant but it still doesn't explain why ronnie didn't post it in the first place

Was Hall silly enough to give you the password to his account too?

Nono, it had to be clear that it was a substitute for his own writings, since I've no intention of randomly starting my own series of writings.

It's like when Charlie Brooker was ill, so they had guest writers doing the weekly 'Screen Burn' column. It was still under 'Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn', but from different writers.

Ronnie Rowlands wrote:It's like when Charlie Brooker was ill, so they had guest writers doing the weekly 'Screen Burn' column. It was still under 'Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn', but from different writers.

which means it should have been in the other thread. case closed.

The latest "rant" was pretty much in the style of the Daily Mail. That makes me unhappy. Let's not do it again...or if you insist lets have it in an appropriate thread.

Isonstine wrote:The latest "rant" was pretty much in the style of the Daily Mail. That makes me unhappy.

But I showed it to some journalist guy called Little John or something and he said he liked it

'Kissing by the wheelie bins? Not In My School Yard'
A DAILY MAIL CAMPAIGN BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE LETTERS "XXX"

Now, look. It’s far from me to suggest that school discipline standards have decreased – because I don’t know any different; I was brought up without the cane and matron, and with New Labour and all of that ‘touchy-feely’ bollocks. But I was, at least, aware what discipline and good behaviour was. It was being polite to old people, regardless of how belligerent, rude, incoherent and downright ironically childish they behaved towards me. It was saying “please” and “thank you”, even when being given a detention by some politics teacher who’s just doing it for the long holidays, whose wife had left him bankrupt and penniless, only to live on a weekly food budget of£8.75 and to reside in a grotty little hovel on Cullercoats’ Broadway (true story). And it was knowing when things have gone too far – like an alarming example I read of this morning in a school down south somewhere.

Everyone’s favourite national newspaper (I read it more like Private Eye now – when readers’ comments come up they usually eclipse even the stupidity and immaturity of Dick LittleTurd (see what I did there? An intelligent reference to immaturity, ironically not realising that I was being immature myself? Oh, fuck off) carried a story about a state-run school that imposed supposedly Dickensian rules upon its students; its pupils are (bizarrely) required to wear their heavy blazers at all times, even during summer, and taking them off is a detention-able offence. A student was supposedly threatened with expulsion for – either rightly or wrongly – refusing to accept a detention for eating an apple on a tennis court, where eating is not allowed. 22 students were accused of breaching the uniform code in 2003 for wearing “non-regulation shirts”, rather than the school’s own, rather costly, uniform shirt from a specialist uniform shop. Reading the rules on the school’s website, the nonsense continues. It’s full of self important, fascistic-sounding phrases like “Supervised Learning Unit” (classroom with a teacher) and “Learning Resource Centre” (it’s a fucking LIBRARY).

And the latest is as follows; the kids have been told that kissing, or any “personal display of affection [PDF]” is banned, and those who attempt to flout the rule risk detention or suspension. The move has been branded “Draconian” but many of the readers on the Heil’s website agree entirely; apparently – and this isn’t at all a sweeping generalisation – “kids are running wild these days”. We even have “ignorant morons who pass as schoolchildren these days”. Now, as far as I can remember, kissing doesn’t really rank alongside wiping your arse on the headmaster’s car, nor does it come anywhere near to hanging a giant inflatable penis from the clocktower with “fuck you” written on it. In fact, come to think of it, kissing isn’t really a problem at all. I was waiting for a bus yesterday with two of these “gooey teens slobbering all over each other” and didn’t notice it. I simply plugged my headphones into my ears and was transported into a world of my own, where girls from Babestation were fitter and a cup of tea didn’t cost £2.39.

These rules, however, will breed hatred. Rules nearly always do. It will be quiet hatred, though. Secret hatred. It is a common trait that children who have been brought up with strict rules and stiff discipline will grow up resenting authority, hating those in control and wishing they could have their turn. And when they do – well, that’s when the horror starts. They become Little Hitlers. They rise to senior, yet still quite menial, positions, and begin bullying. Trying to make up for their lack of authority when they were younger and their teachers abused them behind the bike sheds, they usually give themselves hilarious titles like “Chief Executive” or “Executive Director” of a school – not a company. They drive Toyota Priuses and they invent useless acronyms and mindless rules to waste their time. They write page after page of blogs on their official school “portal” pretending to be education experts, while secretly they’re plotting to blow up Rhyl using a nuclear missile filled with mice, Tim Wonacott and Betty from Coronation Street. They are the most dangerous and awful people on the planet (except Betty – she’s lovely).

My school was not without its problems. I’m not ashamed to say I went to a private school, and I come from a middle-class background. It’s not a bad thing – my parents merely thought that the local state school was failing me and that I was gifted enough for private education. Which was nice – but private education isn’t without its downfalls. Private school kids fall usually into three categories; the extraordinarily talented few, who gain places because they are so incredibly bright and gifted that it would be sin not to allow them access to private education; the middle class kids, whose parents have weighed up the pros and cons and come up with the best solution for their kids (that’s my category); and the rich, because it’s far easier to send your kid to private school than to teach them standards and manners at home. Unfortunately, the latter type pervaded my school, and still does. That’s not to say I didn’t have a good time and get a good education – the very fact that I’m writing these columns can be attributed to the fact that I was taught to put across my views articulately and coherently – but there were always some who didn’t want that.

Our discipline standards were high too, but never Draconian. [Sorry – just passing north of Berwick and isn’t it misty!] Our teachers understood, for the most part, that you can’t get the most out of tired, hot, creatively stifled and horny kids. They understood that buttons needed to be undone, that blazers needed to be taken off, that ties needed to be loosened, and that pants needed to be [that’s enough of that. Ed] But they also understood that kids who are oppressed by strict rules find themselves restricted to a life of eternal retardation – they become people who don’t understand what to do with girls or how to talk to them because they weren’t allowed to during the school day, and run the risk of becoming rapists and paedophiles because they’re so confused. They become people who are still scared to go out into corridors at work or even at home, for fear of someone seeing them there and asking why they aren’t in lessons. And – perhaps worst – they become people like Chris Richardson (who, according to Wikipedia, finished fifth in the 2007 series of American Idol).

School is, despite what the papers say, getting harder. A-level exams may be getting easier or not, but school as a concept is now harder to deal with. Continual government pressure, combined with students who find themselves constantly debased and devalued by having their achievements quashed by resentful, bitter people whose life hasn’t turned out the way they’d wanted, has made Britain’s schools a less-than-cheerful place to be. And schools should be bloody cheerful – if kids have no enthusiasm for learning (and let’s face it, a lot of them don’t find it at home) then they have no enthusiasm for life, and they’ll never truly achieve their potential. All that might be very liberal wish-wash, but I hope it makes those old hags who’ve never woken up and felt good about their lives die just a little inside. Because then they’ll feel a little bit of the hope they continually crush in our kids, and hopefully, they’ll keep their right-wing, Victorian, miserable and downright bitter bullshit to themselves.

This Week James saw We Will Rock You at the Sunderland Empire and thought the girl playing Meatloaf (yes, girl) had a strange Australian accent – “it dipped between Scottish, American and Welsh but was totally forgotten when I saw Curly Watts talking about his erection”