Found guilty of committing a crime Now I am serving my time; To this jail, I lately was sent For loitering without intent.
I was standing inside a large Mall, Though I had bought nothing at all. The judge says it’s bad for the pound We should all make an effort to spend.
So the tax payer is spending on me, Is that good for the economy? Now I am lingering in here, Imbibing the prison atmosphere.
Strangeways makes an excellent setting For the new novel I’ve been plotting. You can live quite freely in prison, If you possess John Bunyan’s true vision.
When I have finished this term I will not have this lesson to learn “If you really want to do naught……………… Don’t do it where you might get caught”
Well, I don’t write a letter very often, but after finding a replica of my old pen on E bay I decided to do a Round Robin. First of all, none of my children have got into Oxford or Cambridge nor have my grandchildren.They are all on the dim side but that is how I like them.I think IQ is very over rated and as mine is 65 when tested you realise I am a mere imbecile and so my ten children take after me. They all got degrees from places I’d never heard of like Chester, Bolton, Ormskirk, and Hendon.However, as I once lost a job offer from a well known university because I wore an engagement ring I kind of thought being a low flyer might be better. My brother is very nice.He is changed very much since we were adolescents when he was too put it mildly a pain.He has now told me I am in the top 0.1% of intelligence in the world.Imagine 99.9% of the world’s population has an IQ of 64 or less.Don’t expect an imbecile to explain that I can believe it about our delightful politicians, Theresa Paybum and Horace Yawnsome and their ilk. My children have done well.One is a violinist in Berlin.As I never go there I cannot be sure if she is lying but she does speak good German or for all I know it might be Yiddish as my great aunt was familiar with that old tongue.Perhaps my daughter is really playing the Jewish harp in a liberal Synagogue.And believe me, it would have to be very liberal to let that flame haired temptress near any man. married or single Is it her fault she is so attractive?After all, she is my daughter and blew dry every hair daily as a teen My eldest son had to miss an exam before he was accepted at Ormskirk Dental School.You see with 21 GCSE’s grade A star they wanted him to go to Cambridge but he knew his own limits He hates formality .He preferred being near the great Nature Reserves of the estuary of the Mersey and Nature and its exploration has kept him busy. Why he even spends whole days in the Mersey Tunnel.He said he wants to find the Universiy of New Brighton but he is still in the tunnel.I said I’d buy him a motorbike but he prefers walking everywhere and camping on the verges of the road maybe giving relief to a few virgins en passant Being a virgin nowadays is very hard socially.But as a Spanish waiter once said to me ” One virgin is very hard to find” Maybe two are easier…I’m an embecile. so I can’t say My second daughter is married and lives in Poole. She often walks around the Isle of Purbeck with the triplets in her back pack.How her husband stands her I cannot get.She is lazy and unable to cook even frozen chips.However, the babies are still on the breast and there is a McDonald’s nearby.Her Ph.D was on “Cats in Modern Physics”.She had a wonderful tutor at Wigan University.Why, he married her! Then he got a job in Bournemouth. which is by the sea!She always was lucky.Apart from givinh birth to three boys all at once,if you see what I mean. How she snagged him I do not know as she has little hair and wears thick glasses but her thesis was the first of its kind.Now everyone is doing animals in abstract mathematics.Or going to Art School to paint like an animal!With your paws! Well, it’s time for me to warm my frozen pizza on the coal fire so I’ll leave the rest for next time.Don’t take an IQ test.I used to think I was quite bright before. Au revoir Katy Krispberger {Siren]
The average is said to be nine years of age I a child who’s been to school for four years.
It doesn’t say what kind of average it is but being the average is a measure of the central tendency of the data which means that it’s in the middle and therefore a large number of adults in Britain would have a reading edge of less than 9.
To be functionally literate that is able to participate in society and to understand government publications and medical information etc you need a reading between nine and eleven
At least 15% of the population are less than that I believe it’s lot more than 15%
What is worrying is that a lot of NHS staff cannot properly understand electronic records etc and I wonder if some of the problems in the NHS are related to this
Surely turning out functionally literate adults and training NHS workers in dealing with modern technologies should be paramount in society
It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be functionally illiterate or unable to read a newspaper like the Guardian the Times or the Independent
This is probably why so many people look for the news on Facebook and they do not understand that all the media including the newspapers I’ve mentioned above do actually twist the news in some way can
I read the digital Times and it’s very obvious that they want to destroy this government. Sometimes more than once a week they are still publishing articles about how terrible it is that parents who send their children to boarding schools have to pay VAT now
Only 7% of children go to private schools so clearly it’s not really going to affect most of the population yet if you read the times you imagine it was on all our minds all the time worrying about it
I don’t agree with all the government are doing but it’s wrong to twist things around so much to give a totally false impression
Even if you have a good reading age it does not mean that what you think is always going to be sensible. People believe things when there is no evidence for it and believe that if they have an idea about something it must be correct without looking for any further evidence than what happens to come into their head
The constantly said the government are doing what they are doing because they’re envious of the wealthy. Maybe some people are envious of the very wealthy. My view is it most people would like a little bit more money but they’re not groaning with Envy which will destroy their lives.
And yet so much of our communication today is defined by a rather ungenerous unwillingness to listen coupled with a compulsion to speak.
“Words,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her abiding meditation on the magic of real human communication, “transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” But what happens in a cultural ecosystem where the hearer has gone extinct and the speaker gone rampant? Where do transformation and understanding go? What made, for instance, James Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s superb 1970 dialogue about race and identity so powerful and so enduringly insightful is precisely the fact that it was a dialogue — not the ping-pong of opinions and co-reactivity that passes for dialogue today, but a commitment to mutual contemplation of viewpoints and considered response. That commitment is the reason why they were able to address questions we continue to confront with tenfold more depth and nuance than we are capable of today. And the dearth of this commitment in our present culture is the reason why we continue to find ourselves sundered by confrontation and paralyzed by the divisiveness of “us vs. them” narratives. “To bother to engage with problematic culture, and problematic people within that culture, is an act of love,” wrote the poet Elizabeth Alexander in contemplating power and possibility. Krista Tippett calls such engagement generous listening. And yet so much of our communication today is defined by a rather ungenerous unwillingness to listen coupled with a compulsion to speak.
How my heart sings 