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.

  • 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 Famous Biographer and the Cheeky Waiter

    It’s a cold, rainy Friday evening. I scooter through town, clattering along bus lanes and over the pavement, nod a polite hello to my great-great grandfather’s sculpture Eros at Picadilly Circus, and arrive at a posh hotel, where a famous biographer and his husband greet me warmly in the lobby. I’ve known him for years […]

  • New suit, new tie, new person

    First day back after half-term, and everyone is astonished at how smart I am: I am wearing a new black suit with those trendy small lapels and a longish cut, a new swish tie with silky red stripes, and I have a neat, short back and sides haircut. L in the office says I look […]

  • Scooter At The Opera

    I took my scooter to the Opera this week. It was the first time my scooter had ever been there, and only my second trip. I asked the check-in lady whether she had ever checked in a muddy push scooter at the Royal Opera House before. She said with a wry smile that she hadn’t. […]

  • 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. […]