Duggie’s Ramblings

Duggie's Ramblings

There is, at the time of writing, an advertisement which does not require maths GCSE, witchcraft for young women.

Anyone you know who could apply?

So don’t miss the bus! Vacancies! Qualification? There is a mountainous area in North Wales named the Devil’s Kitchen and in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, (above Cheltenham), the Devil’s Chimney so it might demand climbing. What satanic practices it involves? Perhaps acting in a future Hammer horror film!

Lewis and Tolkien sup in the pub

I recall a widely sold and very popular fictional book, entitled ‘The Screwtape Letters’ written by C.S. Lewis. The book, still in print, is a correspondence between a senior devil (Screwtape) and a junior devil (Wormwood).C.S. Lewis met frequently with his great friend J.R.R.Tolkien over a pint and a pipe at a pub called “The Eagle and the Child,” in Oxford where they were both practising Christians and university lecturers.

One of my university lecturers had been a student of Lewis at Oxford. He said, apart from the high quality of his lectures, he was a very good and caring tutor; the latter is very important when you are in a very demanding, quirky and what can be a very isolating environment, not particularly Oxford, but any university or place of Higher Education.

Reading awareness

This can and does happen before university. At school there are many schoolchildren and students who lack confidence and self-esteem and can be teased. Why? There are a number of reasons, one stands out, reading! When a student transfers from primary to secondary school, one in four are unable to read at the level expected. Help? Coram charities supported over 100,000 children in 2022. Coram has a reading support branch (Coram Beanstalk) so that working with family and teachers the children do not fall behind. According to 70% of head teachers there is a rising literacy attainment gap each year which is only being reduced by volunteers from Coram and other organisations. These individuals give children confidence, skill and boundaries within which they can and will succeed.

Now that Holly Willoughby’s co presenter has departed, she spoke to the camera, “Are you ok?” Of course we aren’t Holly, we are watching a daytime TV programme!

A quote from the Times jointly from Pat Cullen, General Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal College of Nursing and the former Chief Nursing Officer, now Bishop of London, Sarah Mullaly, “No nurse wants to go on strike, the fact that they have been pushed to do so in record numbers indicates the sheer scale of the crisis unfolding in our NHS. Patients are not dying because nurses are striking; nurses are striking because patients are dying.”