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Thursday, July 21, 2005

End of term

News: Incredibly the terrorists failed to cause any fatalities today despite their further outrages on the London transport system. Also amazing that they seem to have got away, but I suppose people were in shock or terrified of being shot by the bombers. It made me think of the song we used to sing at school: Someone left their parcel of pop, on the upper deck of a 26 bus. Thank goodness it was only a pop and not like last time. Let us hope there are enough clues to catch them.

I've been to church this evening - which isn't something I normally do. It was my youngest daughter's leavers' service. She will be leaving primary school to start at the local comprehensive in September. She attends the local state primary school, but the land is owned by the church and so it is a C of E school. This means it gets a bit of extra funding, I believe, but at the price of having its governors loaded with unelected "churchy" people, who are not necessarily the best people for the job. I send my daughter to this school because it is the school nearest to us and I do not think that religion should play any part in its governance.

Ours is an over-subscribed school and people from surrounding villages send their children there rather than to their own local school. This means that those schools are under-subscribed and so have less funding. It also means that the roads around our school are clogged with parked cars belonging to parents/child minders delivering children to a school that is too far away from their homes for them to walk to.

The school now has a breakfast club, which will take children from 7.30 am until school officially opens. This complements the after school club with takes children until at least 6pm, maybe longer, I'm not sure. This is in line with British Government policy but it seems all wrong to me.

I've got one eye on the BBC news, which has moved on to the cricket. As we walked back from the church we went past a group of men practising their cricket skills in the nets in the park. What a collection of fatties! They looked like a male ante-natal class, nurturing their nine months'- sized beer embryos. Cricket and golf have never seemed like proper sports to me, offering little oportunity for improving the players' fitness levels. Golf seems like a long drawn out slow walk in a park and cricket looks like a lot of standing about with a short run for one or two of the participants every now and then.

Football is best. What a shame it is so dominated by men, especially at school level. I played a five- a- side game once with some work colleagues, and thought it was fantastic. Unfortunately by the end of the game one person had a broken leg and the boss's secretary had a black eye. I think perhaps we should have had the rules explained to us a bit more clearly.

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