The previous book ‘What A Carve Up’ was good
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I enjoyed it & could relate to that time quite well. I guess you must be 10 years younger. They did make it into a tv series at one point. I’ve read & enjoyed a few of his books.
Great clientele
Is that The Feelgoods c 1980?
There used to be a massive roundabout /hole right next to Waterloo Station. It was built to stop folk crossing the various roads around the roundabout. All of the subways converged on the centre circle.
Trouble was, the criss-crossing subways became a magnet for rough sleepers and became known as “cardboard city”
…So they built an IMAX on it 
Oh fucking hell not another Grammar school boy!
(I went to KE too…)
I went to Harrow,then Eton.
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Independent, dear boy
Pffft! Just say it as it is rather than hiding behind different labels 
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No, they are very different. Independent schools you pay to be separate from the scum of the earth; with grammar schools it’s state sponsored apartheid.
Oh so what you’re saying is that you went to KE Edgbaston, but were fee paying instead of those classmates you had who passed the 11+ and didn’t pay?
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It’s a fee paying school with an exam. You have to do both. A few kids get in with scholarships, the rest pay fees. I had an assisted place, which covered about 2/3rds of the fees as my folks weren’t that well off.
Edit: look https://kes.org.uk/admissions/fees/
Ah, so you’re actually grasping desperate to social climb scum, merely masquerading as parasitic middle class, and also part state subsidised to escape from being beaten up at the local comp?
It’s not state sponsored, the grants come from individuals and charities and stuff. Although there is an implicit state sponsorship from the charitable status of independent schools, which is rubbish.
Personally I think that any separated education system is a sign of a broken society. I can grudgingly accept a completely private school, as people have the right to use their money as they want, but any state complicity in this is inappropriate. Same goes for religious schools.
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Where do you draw the line between a) concentrating the most talented violinists into a musically specialist environment, thereby giving them a chance to become exceptional at something, and b) separating the intellectually more gifted out so that they can benefit from specialist teaching and a peer group which will stretch them (i.e. a selective secondary school) ? Just to be clear, I think there is no easy answer to this. But I’d hesitate to dismiss either non-selective or selective education out of hand.
VB
I think that most secondary schools are big enough to deal with this. Every school we looked at implemented a streaming system; there are many advantages to this - all kids are together and their position can be reviewed and kids moved about.
I believe that the 11+ is one of the shittiest things in our country - it divides kids into successes and failures at an absurd age, and foments division in a community. Grammar schools should be abolished and independent schools should have their tax breaks axed.
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