Opinion

Here I comment on a wide range of issues from education to politics, the arts and more. I welcome lively and opinionated debate, so please leave your comments.

  • Lost Worlds

    My father remembers how different things were when he was a child growing up in Northumberland: ‘I can remember when there was a bakery at Christon Bank, in the village near where my parents lived. I can still recall the smell of baking bread early in the morning, and buying the bread from the bakery […]

  • Racing Ahead in Iran

    On Saturday my stepmother and her sister, Shaheen, invited us to dinner. They cooked us Iranian food: amazing rice dishes and soup with saffron and pasta, yoghurt and cucumber sauce, fried aberguine. It was delicious. My stepmother is Iranian, as is Shaheen, who is visiting for a few months. Shaheen had invited around the son […]

  • Panic!

    Yesterday I saw Chicken Little with my five-year-old. I had been expecting to hate it but I actually laughed out loud at the beginning of the film. In it, Chicken Little — just like Chicken Licken — panicks when he thinks a piece of the sky has fallen on his head, waking up the whole […]

  • New Website

    This is the day that I launch my website!

  • Terrorists attack

    Finally, they have come. They have attacked. At the latest count, there are nearly forty dead. It is a traumatic time. I am in school when it happens. I see it come over the phone in the form of a text message from the Guardian. Explosions near Aldgate. Other people at work have heard differently. […]

  • Terrorists attack

    Finally, they have come. They have attacked. At the latest count, there are nearly forty dead. It is a traumatic time. I am in school when it happens. I see it come over the phone in the form of a text message from the Guardian. Explosions near Aldgate. Other people at work have heard differently. […]