The Nth Columnist

 One book I'm looking forward to reading is Sathnam Sanghera's book Empireland, a succinct and by all accounts very well written book about the British Empire and its effect on the modern day UK. The legacy of empire, whether you like it or not, is all around us and inescapable. The trouble is that way too many people view it through the rosy glow of nostalgia, as evinced by the utterly awful vitriol and abuse Sathnam has been subjected to on social media. It's also fuelled, of course, by his ethnicity: You can imagine the variants on the theme of 'Go back home, then'. Since he was born in, I believe, Wolverhampton, that's not too far.  But anyway, why get so worked up about history? And why insist that one single view of empire is correct? And why, when it comes down to it, be so racist, so fragile? For starters, IT IS HISTORY - there's nothing that anyone can do to actually change it, so the best that can be done is to study it carefully - and in its entir

 I've been ruminating on making mistakes and owning up to them over the past week or so - perhaps it's a New Year thing: After all, Janus was the god of two faces, and it's always good (occasionally) to look back and reflect.  I was looking at mistakes in an educational context over on my teaching blog , but was also thinking about it in a wider social context. In particular, the UK government's seeming inability to 'fess up to anything whatsoever. Brexit is not exactly going well, as per EVERYBODY'S predictions; And 100,000+ deaths from Covid are not something to crow about. One things does appear to be going right, however, and that is the NHS rollout of the vaccine programme. Who would have thought that an organisation that was specifically designed to provide mass health care in precisely this sort of scenario would have coped so well? Not, apparently, the Conservative government, who are more than ready to take the credit for the vaccination programme, but