Recently, under the new school inspection framework, schools that used to be judged as “good” have only rated a “satisfactory” rating.

This is not because their standards are declining. It is because, as Ofsted confess, they are “raising the bar” in order to “drive standards upwards.”

This is no different to attempting to improve the health of the general population by calling everyone “obese slobs” if they are more than 10lb overweight and can’t run a half marathon in less than two hours. It won’t work. All it does is alienate and upset people – confirming a few prejudices and reinforcing a few stereotypes along the way.

And worse of all is the Lib Dem spokesman David Law’s comment: “the bottom line is that half of schools inspected were not good enough.” The “half of schools” he is referring to are the 10% that failed their inspections and the 40% which gained “satisfactory” grades – which as we remember meant “good” just seven months ago and which Law himself was perfectly happy with at that time.

The bottom line is that if you believe the politically motivated spin on any government figures, you are exactly the sort of fool whose vote these morons want.

At the risk of starting a flame war…

Get a life, guys! Get a life!

(Comments are filtered. Trolling will not be approved. Constructive criticism will.)

Nice, isn’t it?

Thirty five grand’s worth of German luxury saloon as a courtesy car for the day while Darling Wifey’s little hatchback was in for servicing. That’s what you get when the dealership manager is pleased with the way his daughter was taught. Kudos to DW.

However…

It is so wide that it was a nightmare to drive in central York. It is so cumbersome that it was horrible on the forty mile round trip to collect the Chatterboxes from school. Why do so many of the other parents have A6s when they spend their lives on those tight, twisty country roads? The handbrake was awful. The footwell cramped (yes, I know I am bloody tall, but there is more room in the footwell of my tiny Citroen!) And why does a glovebox need remote control opening?

It all makes me feel so much better about being far too poor to afford such a beautiful car.

Nice to see that the Government is taking the economic conditions seriously.

They are promising not to make cuts (because only the opposition does that) and, to prove it, awarded themselves a 2.33% pay rise this year.

However, if you work for the Government, your pay will either be frozen or capped at less than 1%. This is because someone has to make the economies to pay for the sloppiness and indulgence of those held responsible for monitoring and regulating the economy.

Hang on – I exceeded all of my performance targets this year, which is more than can be said for those who are enjoying a far more generous pay rise than me, and who want me to give them credit for making “tough decisions.”

The “tough decision” I want New Labour to make is to accept that they were sleeping on the job, accept that they failed to regulate an industry they were demonstrably unable to understand, and then responded to the crisis by laying down the foundations for an economic boom and bust that would make the heady days of the 1980s look like a quiet day on a millpond.

And that’s before I even get started on their gross misconduct in education, social services, health and the small matter of a couple of wars.

There’s an election due. Bring it on.

I always knew I wanted to be a consultant, but by the time I get my act together and fill in an application form, this loophole will have been plugged.

Having said that, I’ll bet my trousers that it won’t stop the current lot of consultants charging £500 a day to tell me how to do my job, in spite of the fact that they haven’t done themselves it for at least half a decade.

We have had trouble with our lights for years. Not all the lights in our home, but the expensive lights in our front & back rooms. The ones with half a dozen high-powered halogen bulbs in each.

The problem is that the bulbs blow alarmingly quickly – a dozen a week if we replace them, at £8 each, and then finally the transformer in the light unit failed.

We have consulted electricians a couple of times about this, with £35 call-out charges and £30 per half hour plus parts. None has found a solution, although their list of suggestions is, shall we say, less than scientific.

• If you touch the bulbs with your skin, they will blow – you need to hold them in a tissue
• That’s an aluminium unit. Aluminium doesn’t conduct electricity. It does? Are you sure? (They used it for wiring in the 1960s because it was cheaper than copper!)
• In that case, aluminium conducts electricity, and that is blowing your unit
• You burn logs? That puts soot in the air which (you can guess the rest…)

I’ve finally found out what the problem is. Halogen bulbs burn much hotter, and their filaments are much finer. And in our house we have a creature called Tiny Flirt (Clodhoppus Babyelephantus) who travels everywhere at full throttle in gigantic leaps and bounds, and an enormous creature called Little Nutter (Autisticus Bouncii.) He can bounce on a paved driveway like it’s a trampoline.

When halogen bulbs vibrate, they break. And when the children are in our house, it rings like a bell.

Time to get my screwdriver out. This weekend I shall mostly be fitting cheap light fittings…

I have to admit that I was amused when I heard the claim made in the USA that had Stephen Hawking been British and reliant upon the NHS, he would have been left to die.

I laughed out loud when I heard the claim that Senator Kennedy, who is in his late seventies, would not have been treated for his brain tumour if he was British.

But this claim made by Fox News, that nationalised healthcare systems are a breeding ground for recruiting Islamist terrorists, had me in hysterics.

It’s going to take the USA a very long time indeed to win back the respect it is losing because of its conduct in this debate.

Except I don’t live in suburbia. I live in the centre of York. Whatever.

Now that term has ended and I have a life again, I have chopped down trees and trimmed hedges and weeded borders around my house – and suddenly been all Visible and High Profile to my neighbours, who have been falling over themselves to pop out of the house and Have A Chat.

Readers of the great works of AA Milne will understand the significance of all these capital letters.

My neighbours are delighted that I have started to show an interest in gardening at last. My response: "No, I hate gardening. But that tree had to die. It kept whispering things about me. "

My Nuisance Neighbour Leylandii Hedge, which I planted five years ago , was trimmed down to a neat & tidy 7 feet tall, and no longer overhangs the footpath. The dead laurel has been disposed of. And that bastard whispering tree? A bloke in the pub dealt with that. "No questions, but yeah – there will be nothing left but ashes when we’ve finished with it. "

But no, I’m not going to mow the grass verge. A bloke from the council does that every other Wednesday. That’s good enough, unless you plan to play croquet on it – in which case you bloody mow it. And no, having dirty cars on my drive doesn’t bother me – mainly because my car looks less pink when it’s filthy.

And no, I hadn’t noticed that the enormous silver birch outside my house had been chopped down. When did that happen? May? Well, that explains it. I work for a living.

(Did you see what I did there with that pun in the title? Instead of writing “Slumming it” I wrote I.T. because… oh well, I can see you aren’t interested…)

Anyway, Darling Wifey needs a computer that runs Windows because the government agency that she marks GCSE exams for decided in their infinite wisdom to set up the software to work in that one platform only. So I bought one of these. It’s a lovely little machine…

Yes, you’re right – there is a “but.”

1. Going through the setup procedure for a new computer took four hours
2. While it logged on to my home wifi no problem, it threw a hissy fit when I plugged in my mobile broadband dongle. Problem status: not yet fixed.
3. Four attempts to get our copy of MS Office working all failed. We gave up and installed Open Office.

But I’m going to stop there, and list everything good about the machine:

1. It weighs next to nothing
2. The only moving part is a fan
3. The screen is excellent
4. There are two memory card slots, three USB ports and more than enough internal memory
5. The nine-cell battery pack we’re ordering should give it ten hours battery life
6. And it cost just over two hundred quid. It would have been a lot less if we could have had the Linux version.

Back in 1999 I bought one of these – I wrote my MA thesis on it. This Acer, which is only slightly larger, reminds me of that little machine.

Well, compressed air, to be strictly accurate.

This morning I noticed that my little car had low pressure in one of the tyres, so I stopped at a local garage to check all four of them – only to discover that their air compressor is now coin operated.

Stuff that. I have been giving them fifty quid a week for diesel for the last three years. I am not paying them 20p for ten minutes of compressed air.

So I drove on to the next garage, and then another one, and another… six garages, all now sporting brand new coin operated air compressors on their forecourts.

Why? A quick search on the Electric Internet reveals that coin operated air compressors cost about £10,000 more than free ones. Which means that in order to pay for themselves, they need to be used fifty thousand times. Get your calculator out – that would take a year of constant use, 24 hours per day, by paying customers.

And that’s not going to happen in a place like York: first because there are only 75,000 cars in the entire city, and we know that there are at least six places trying to charge customers to check their tyres; and second because Tesco are selling electric tyre pumps that run off your car’s power point for £4 each.