It’s not as if a single British athlete has asked to be honoured; in fact, quite the opposite is true. “To be mentioned in the same breath as Steve Redgrave and Chris Hoy is an honour, but ultimately it is all about the gold medals,” said Bradley Wiggins shortly after he won the time trial at Hampton Court Palace. “As much of an honour as it would be to receive [a knighthood], I wouldn’t use it. I’d just put it in a drawer. I will always be just Brad.” Straight-talking, humble, to the point: if only those who ran our honours system were more like our magnificent Olympians.
Cooking is not just for little women
Mary Berry looks like quite the loveliest thing this side of a Strawberry Shortcake book. But this woman can bite. Last week she was telling us all to have family meals together – the family that eats together stays together – and this week she has been serving up a lesson to young women. Namely: enjoy cooking, because you’re going to be doing it all of your life.
This is very upsetting to those of us who have long equated being a slave to the stove with being a slave to men. When I was growing up on take-aways as my marvellous mum smashed through the glass ceiling, I always scoffed at classmates who turned up at the Harvest Festival with a cake freshly baked by their mother. In my lofty mind they were little women, reliant on their husbands for money to spend on hundreds and thousands.
It’s only at the grand old age of 32 that I’ve learnt how fun cooking can be. At home my boyfriend and I fight over who gets to do the chopping: slicing an onion is great therapy after a tough day at work.
Mary is right on one count – you should enjoy cooking. But you should enjoy it whether you are a man or a woman, vegetable or mineral. Given that the hot favourite on The Great British Bake Off is a young bloke from Wigan, isn’t it time we realised that the battle of the sexes is over – in the kitchen, at least.
Don’t ban Mickey Mouse subjects
It has been so long since I took my GCSEs that in the interim glaciers have melted, species have become extinct and several new countries have been formed. Another significant change has been in the subjects you can take at GCSE: whereas in my day the most exotic thing you could study was German, today’s teenagers have a whole raft of wonderful topics to get their teeth into.
This week, I learnt that 90 per cent of 16 year-olds take at least one of the GCSE “equivalent’’ qualifications that were introduced by the Labour government in an effort to boost school league tables. Thus, instead of doing Maths you could go for Make-Up, while History could be junked in favour of Holistic Therapies and Horse Care. Other GCSE ''equivalents’’ include Cake Decorating, Pastry Craft, Interior Design and Floristry.
But from 2014 these 'soft’ courses will be axed from league tables in the hope of getting more teenagers to study rigorous subjects. So it’s goodbye to Call Centre Skills, even though this sounds like a perfectly useful qualification when you bear in mind how many hours one spends raging down phone lines at strangers as an adult.
Michael Gove is absolutely right to promote languages, sciences, history, maths and geography, the core subjects that make up his ''English Baccalaureate’’. But that doesn’t mean we should mock the 2,180 pupils who last year took Salon Reception, or the 31 who enrolled on a Soft Furnishings course.
I think we should find the single 16 year-old who took 'Sugar Confection’, and give him or her a round of applause for pursuing a subject that seems to be the GCSE equivalent of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
I don’t think we should stick a blanket ban on vocational subjects: not all of us are destined for great things academically; lots of us aren’t even destined for mediocre things academically.
It is easy to hoot with laughter at people who do Mickey Mouse subjects, but for many seeking better lives through qualifications, there is no alternative to those subjects. Where are the youth training schemes and the apprenticeships? It’s all very well taking a fancy-pants degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, but we’re always going to need confectioners.
In the thick of daft politics
The Thick of It returns to the BBC next month, and I can’t wait to see Armando Iannucci’s take on the Coalition. Apparently, the (fictional) Tories refer to their (fictional) Lib Dem counterparts as “the Inbetweeners”, which doesn’t sound too far off the non-fiction version of events. Meanwhile, a writer on the Bafta-winning series has revealed that aides to the Deputy Prime Minister got in touch to offer material on their boss. “Armando got an email after a political awards [ceremony],” said Sean Gray. “The person said, 'I’m working in Nick Clegg’s office until June. I’ll let you know what happened after that.’”
Just before the last series aired, Iannucci told this newspaper that “I always put in side stories that I think are just too daft, and then you find they’ve actually happened.” So he didn’t put in the one about the minister walking to the Commons with his red box following behind in a car “because I thought that was a bit silly”. We all know what happened next. Truth, as ever, is stranger than fiction. Sadly, it’s not half as funny.
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