Culture

Guardian journalist in self-awareness shock. A very good piece by Hadley Freeman about the utter ubiquity of public school-educated monkeys at the top of every desirable profession (and, of course, trade). Here’s the crucial bit: Life is unfair, and I benefit from this unfairness every day. Even besides being born in the era of modern medicine and Ryan Gosling’s face, I went to a private school. As much as I’d like to think my career is all thanks to my special snowflake qualities, it’s difficult, when looking around at the rest of my heavily privately-educated profession, to draw any conclusion other than that my schooling might have helped me. Yes, Hadley. And your affluence, the two going hand in hand. She is an exception which proves the rule.

A friend of mine, another journalist, is getting terrifically worked up about the Department for Education’s persecution of exclamation marks. He’s busy writing a defence of free punctuation and because he’s a better stylist than the people laying down the law on this one, this will sting. Apparently, exam bureaucrats told teachers and moderators at a briefing run by the Standards Testing Agency last month that the use of an 'exclamation sentence' must start with either a 'how' or 'what' and must be a full sentence – including a verb. So, 'What a delightful home yours is!' is fine; 'Awesome!' is not. Naturally, there’s going to be a backlash.

Among the treats the mothers of Britain can look forward to on Mothering Sunday there are some rum offerings. A company called Nosh Detox is offering a hamper including something called a Nux Vom drink, and the Guardian has helpfully drawn up a list of mother-related films you only take your mother to if you want to terminate the relationship. Meanwhile, the profile of the mother as depicted in the gift sections of M&S and Waitrose is that of a woman with a penchant for anything pink, who loves imported roses and has a thing about prosecco. Her day is made if you take her out to tea. I quite like prosecco, I suppose, but my own tastes run to burgundy, daffodils, Hotel Chocolat supermilk and handmade cards. My own mother is grateful for anything.

I’m planning to propose to my boyfriend this leap year. I’m proposing that he earns another £10,000 and loses a stone. But marriage? Hell, no. I don’t know why, in the age of equality, society still endorses women going down on bended knee on one solitary day every four years. The internet blames it on St Bridget, who in the 5th century allegedly complained that some men took too damn long to propose. It was St Patrick, though, who came up with the wheeze of granting us special dispensation to propose every 29 February. But to propose on this day is hideously outdated. It is tacky. It is tabloid. It is a love cliché.

For years, now, the Sutton Trust has been releasing research showing how many doctors, judges, journalists etc were privately educated and conclude that it’s all a posh boys' stitch-up. The British press loves banging this old drum, but in doing so they drown out a new tune. Today, there is more academic excellence in the state sector than the private sector. Not that many people want to know. Take, for example, an article in this week’s Economist. “Education should not be about wealth” it quotes Tony Blair saying in 1996. Wrong, Blair! The Sutton Trust’s report shows that “two decades later, it still is" about wealth.

Something very strange is happening in London: its state schools are going through a huge renaissance - while attainment in many northern English schools is going into reverse. The chief of Ofsted, Sir Micahel Wilshaw, laid the problem bare in a speech to the IPPR today:- Three in ten secondary schools in Manchester and four in ten in Liverpool require improvement or are inadequate compared to one in ten in inner London. The situation in some of their satellite towns is even worse. A third of the schools in Rochdale are not good enough, as is a similar proportion in Salford. In Oldham, six in ten secondaries require improvement or are inadequate and in Knowsley not a single secondary school is good or better… His list goes on.

I’ll never forget the first 'Funisher' I met. It was sometime in the late 1980s when you could meet all sorts of interesting girls. She was one of the moderately attractive, moderately intelligent broads the media has always been jam-packed with, the on-off up-down girlfriend of a male mate of mine, and one night she was annoyed by some roué writer who seemed to think he had droit du seigneur over all the PR girls at his publishing house, of which she was one. She fussed and fumed about it for a bit, then three vodkatinis in, a serene smile swallowed her face and she said ‘I know how to punish him - I'll have sex with him!’ My second husband couldn’t help exclaiming ‘Gee, I wish women had punished me like that when I was single!

I love Twitter. Just like the historian Dan Snow, I find the social media site to be an overwhelmingly positive experience, and a great place to make friends and acquaintances and share ideas. Sure, most of the friends I’ve made are as politically insane as I am, but that’s the inevitable result of any service that allows for social sorting. However, one point with which I would disagree with Mr Snow is the idea that the site is a force for the ‘revolutionary democratisation of discourse’. In fact one of the great attractions of Twitter is how hierarchical it is, with each individual being measured by the size of his or her following, plus of course whether they have elite blue tick status.