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  • My Talk — Saturday

    Blake Morrison raises his eyes to the heavens as he looks at the title to my event over breakfast. So you’re speaking about the role of the writer, are you Francis? That shouldn’t take long to sort out,’ he says with a wry smile. Blake is a renowned poet, whose anthology of British Poetry in…

  • First Day in Mumbai

    The drilling next door made the whole of my hotel room vibrate. I immediately regretted not buying the long, deep earplugs I saw at the airport. I had slept for three hours and I knew now that that was my lot. And yet, I didn’t know where to go next. Fortunately, Sunita, an organiser from…

  • The Buddha in Colombo

    The Buddha looked down at me in the murky temple. Nirpal Dhaliwal, a fellow writer going to speak at the Kitab Festival with me, explained that this was a good religion, a gentle religion, one that didn’t specialise in making you feel bad about yourself. I looked at the elephant munching at the sticks of…

  • How Jamie and school meal fascists turn kids into junk food addicts

    Her words are enough to make Jamie Oliver tear his hair out. Joanne, 14, a pupil at a large comprehensive in London, is sucking her Triple Power Push Pop as she explains to me why she insists on stuffing her mouth with such sweets. "I don’t buy any of the stuff in the canteen, it’s…

  • That’ll learn ’em

    SEVEN KINGS by Fran Abrams Atlantic Books, £9.99; 272pp THE HAPLESS TEACHER’S HANDBOOK by Phil Ball Ebury Press, £10.99; 320pp IT’S YOUR TIME YOU’RE WASTING : A Teacher’s Tales of Classroom Hell by Frank Chalk Monday Books, £7.99; 226pp DOES SCHOOL REALLY make a difference? Do all those thousands of hours of children sitting in…

  • A pub crawl worth toasting

    IT IS A SUCH A beautifully simple idea that I am surprised no one has thought of it before — to travel from the southern-most point of Britain to the most northerly sampling as many pubs as possible in between. Ian Marchant has written a digressive diary describing a delicious, drunken romp across Britain during…

  • Hey kids, leave that teacher alone

    As a teacher, I felt distinctly uncomfortable watching Channel 4’s new show, The Law of the Playground. But maybe that’s the point. This seven-part series is about all the stuff a phalanx of trendily dressed, tedious twenty and thirtysomethings got up to at school: the silly pranks, the mindless nicknames, the cruel imitations, the ritualised…

  • Sorry Mr Reid, we’ve every damn right to moan

    You might expect John Reid to know a lot about the vile culture of violence that has disfigured our country and made it feel less safe than at any time in living memory. Parts of the Home Secretary’s constituency on the eastern edge of Glasgow are notorious. Gangs of adolescent louts with knives have created…

  • The Green Moss Code

    He was staring at me, his face emerging from the rock, his cheeks covered in silky moss, his lips puckered green and glistening, his eyes sad and tearful. I stared back him at him, amazed. I hadn’t expected this. I hadn’t expected to go on what I felt would be a mundane tramp around the…

  • TEACHER ON THE RUN: True Tales of Classroom Chaos

    Teachers in the state sector, many would agree, are troopers, Trojans. Undervalued and underpaid, they have almost no strictures on their charges and little support from parents, the state or its politicians. Impotent, they face the anarchy and hedonism of our times on the front line. Gilbert teaches English in a London comprehensive. With this…

  • A class struggle for Jilly — Francis Gilbert’s review of Wicked! A Tale Of Two Schools

    This romp opens with Janna Curtis — a young, flame-haired, attractive deputy head — being appointed to take over Larkminster, which is threatened with closure because of its appalling results and the behaviour of its pupils. The school is on Shakespeare Estate, a shameful pocket of social deprivation in the prosperous, historic, fictional Cotswold town…

  • Teacher on the Run

    Francis Gilbert has been offered a job in the English department at his old school, a nice suburban comprehensive. He feels like he’s landed in toytown. But how long can Gilbert’s dreamland last?

  • Paperback Review Of ‘Teacher On The Run’

    Authors usually write about their working lives in order to escape them, draining them of the juicy bits (carefully changing the names and hair colour of key players), then tossing away the husk to enter the glam of literary life. Not Gilbert. This young teacher chronicled his earlier career in ‘I’m A Teacher, Get Me…

  • The Ultimate Stress Buster: a quick dip in the Welsh Sea

    Theo ran up and down the beach shouting. He couldn’t believe I was going to do it. The sun was shining, but the breeze was brisk, rippling against my goose-pimpled skin. The waves glittered before me, saying ‘Come unto me, I will wash away all the stress, and you will be a new teacher, a…

  • The Many Faces of British Yob Culture – an interview by Sheena Hastings

    "YOB: noun, a colloquialism from the mid-19th century, which is back slang for BOY. Originally it meant a boy. Now an uncouth, loutish, ignorant youth or man, especially one given to violent or aggressive behaviour, a hooligan." The Shorter Oxford Dictionary AT the age of 11, Francis Gilbert saw his dad attacked by a yob.…

  • Asbo City

    Bill Pitt, the former head of Manchester council’s Nuisance Strategy Unit and now the leading expert on asbos in the country, is a wiry and intense man. ‘The yobs in Manchester are frightened of us,’ he says proudly. ‘We have a reputation for being callous, brutal, obsessive and single-minded. This is an important myth to…

  • Yobs on the job

    The stereotypical image of a yob is the hoodie on the streets hurling stones or abuse at passers-by. But some of the worst yobbery goes on in the workplace. And when I compare the testimony of people attacked by thugs on the street with those who were the victims of attacks in their offices, factories…

  • Yob Nation

    A devastating look at the state of Britain today – a country being steadily corroded by the advance of yob culture.

  • Stuart Jeffries on Francis Gilbert’s ‘Yob Nation’

    When Sorbonne students look across the channel before demonstrating in the Latin Quarter, they realise how little France should aim to copy our economic miracle. And how much there is to fight for on the streets. Francis Gilbert’s new book, Yob Nation, is wonderful to read in this context. It argues that when Britons take…

  • Why do they do it? It’s a yobbo power trip

    Last Sunday I spotted trouble when I was returning home along the City Road in Islington, north London. At first sight the men looked harmless enough: they were white, well dressed in jeans and designer jackets, with shiny leather footwear and nice haircuts. They were not your typical hoodies at all. But I knew I…

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