Friendly chat

Hello Anne, More like a door wedge! It was beautiful. Two & half inches thick.

'Shut your cake ole' or I will fill it with a bunch of fives' Not the most ladylike term but it worked.

I'm afraid to say anything now

Scaredy cat ! 🙀

_Meow. Just call me Tiddles. ^Meow.

So, Amanda Holden is to host a new TV show about adultery. Something she should know all about ! She adds " I always wanted to host a show about love and relationships" "A series about second chances and un-finished business" Perhaps she will invite Neil Morrisey as a guest ?

Helen, It works every time !

Hello, Before I ever arrived into this world, mum & dad lived in both Tipton & Dudley, after being bombed out of Grangmouth Rd. Mum took over a cooked meat shop & made a good pastime selling hot takeaway food. Faggot & pea batches & so on. Dad was working on armoured car development in Bingley Hall. Anyway, she made confectionery too. Using dried fruit, making pastry sandwiches. She called them "Fly Cemeteries". I might have mentioned that before on here.

They sound a bit like Garibaldi biscuits. We used to call them squashed fly sandwiches, the same as Eccles cakes. Love both

Hello, It's Saturday, or Shreddies day.

Hello, Illiteracy & numeracy! UNESCO, is reporting that illiteracy is now more prevalent than ever, world wide, Europe included. Germany & France highlighted. What's going wrong? Here in the UK, grab an on the spot sample of folk walking through Broadgate, Coventry a bastion of technology & education, the chances are that out of five folk, one will have very limited reading ability in any language & will struggle with the simplest arithmetic. One in eight of that same sample will have such poor literacy, that they cannot recognise a number, whether it's a quantity or a description. That scenario is now 100fold increase on the same sampling from 1970. Someone that I have known for most of my adult life, can hand out an apple to someone, then hand out an apple to someone else, so in his mind he has quantified 2, but he cannot read the number 2. He's worked as a labourer for all of his adult working life, so it's not that he can't think. He can think. I've got so many questions in my mind about this, but what do we on here think? Coventry is quite bright compared to many other locations that we might pick!

Hi Philip Here in the Australian Capital Territory - the most educated city in Australia - they've just discovered that twenty years of schools without phonetics or grammar have resulted in this country plummeting down the advanced countries rankings for literacy. Some doctrinaire "expert" years ago demanded that kids should be encouraged to "guess" how to pronounce a word, and that all kids should go through the exact same process; as a result, our five-year-old daughter was reading Black Beauty at home and bored senseless reading "Look Jane - Look Peter" at school. Fortunately, we were able to shift her to a school linked to - of all places - the French Embassy! Quotes from the Canberra Times May 3, May 6 2024 And as for maths, I despair - checkout kids can't even work out the bill WITH the aid of a calculator before I tell them the answer! Yet we have contestants on our version of "Letters and Numbers" who are brilliant. The problem is how we teach the least advanced of our primary school kids.

Hello Johnnie, I wonder if the contestants who "Are brilliant", started their formal schooling, already aware of basic reading & counting?

It wouldn't surprise me at all, Philip. Literacy is hereditary. Our 12-year-old grandson (our aforementioned daughter's son) had a bedtime story read to him by his mum or dad every night from when he was born to when he didn't need help to read. He's got through Stephen Hawking's "Brief History of Time" with about as much understanding of it as I did (possibly more!) and can discuss the implications of it! He tops his class in literacy and numeracy, has started to build robot machines, and is a great goalie for his local football team too! Yes - that kid was 11 years old when that photo was taken - he had just saved a penalty! His parents had to take his birth certificate to games to prove his age! Mind you, I don't approve 100% in encouraging infants to read - that aforementioned daughter was given my VERY favourite Bambi picture book to read at bedtime when she was two years old, and she ripped the book to shreds!

Hello again, Over my lifetime I've had a cross section mix of most of society. I started volunteering with Coventry Mind in 1988, not because of any virtue of mine, it was to help a friend do motor pickups whilst he was on holiday. I loved what I saw being done. So for me involved in the professional part of society along side my volunteering forty years ago, I have a comparison on what I'm seeing now in Coventry. If I didn't have that personal comparison, I might struggle to believe what I'm now seeing as fact.