Top-up fees

Just a quick morning gripe: why do the students who (rightfully) protest against the exorbitant nature of top-up-fees never turn up to class? I had four out of sixteen for my nine o' clock session this morning and it's an examination module, which is to say that it really might be a good idea for them to turn up and familiarise themselves with what they will be tested on. Garg.

I'd promised that I was only going to write about "things" on this blog, so I could turn this into a post about the distinctly unexciting supermarket claret I had last night (I ended up chucking half of it into the cooking pan). Maybe I should mention that I'm currently reading Idler editor Tom Hodgkinson's How to be Free, a kind of acceptable self-help book for those who are sick of being interefered with by the cappucino-toting ne'er-do-wells of the Blairocracy ("Chill! Spend! Work harder! Be more anxious! Chill!") I'll post up a proper review when I finished it (though I'm planning a bizarre work-related session with Agatha Christie when I've got the morning's teaching out of the way). Suffice to say that Hodgkinson's book, while a little wearing in places (he pushes it a bit far by offering up "free-wheeling actor Keith Allen" as a paradigm of the resistance to buereacracy) is a heartening read in a time in which people have to deal with the TV licence inspector on a daily basis because he refuses to believe that you don't own a TV. I figure that next time he comes round he'll start taking the books of the shelf trying to locate "my" phantom idiot-box in a kind of Fahrenheit 451*-style scenario. The less said about the Byzantine institution that is Powergen the better...

* This isn't a mistake, Michael Moore fans.