I’m a regular Desert Islands Discs listener. A regular, but always emotional and heartwarming trope, is the influence of teachers, or usually a teacher, on the now-successful. They can often quote their encouragement word for word, and this week’s guest had kept a note written to her by her teacher for forty years or more. None went to Eton, but to comps and sec mods where they might otherwise have been written off. And thankfully their teachers didn’t chase the big bucks. Listen to Ian Wright and I dare you not to be moved
“Britain is braced for a winter of strikes – yet a public backlash just hasn’t happened”
There’s a lot of support, I know, for the striking nurses/rail workers/posties/firemen et al. But you don’t have to go far to hear quite a bit of ‘you know some of them earn £40,000 a year not bad is it and they get great pensions don’t know what they’re complaining about there’s no money anyway’.