Roy Cross's Blog

1. What’s the point of school? (according to 600 kids) is a blog post by Ewan McIntosh, the founder of No Tosh https://medium.com/notosh/whats-the-point-of-school-according-to-600-kids-392f8f0bd981

Teachers and students agree what the point of school should be, by and large, but there’s quite a gap between their view and the official view of the purpose of school. Ewan’s post draws on the findings of No Tosh’s report into education in Scotland, Exploring the Four Capacities, which suggests that education in Scotland has rather lost its way. Here’s the whole report https://notosh.com/insights/curriculum-purpose-scotland and there’s a PDF below.

The ‘four capacities’ is a term drawn from Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, first implemented in 2004, “which aspires to develop in all children and young people the four capacities to become successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors”.

Here’s the Cambridge Dictionary definition of tosh if you’re not familiar with the term https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tosh

2.  Two poems by the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, who died in an Israeli airstrike on her home last October: “Pull Yourself Together” and “Seven Skies for the Homeland” https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2024-01/pull-yourself-together-and-seven-skies-of-homeland-hiba-abu-nada-huda-fakhreddine/

3. A gift article from the New York Times, Portraits of Gazans http://tinyurl.com/55c3wyw8

4. Killing Eve, based on the ‘Villanelle’ novels by Luke Jennings, was a huge hit for the BBC. Luke is now writing a new ‘Killing Eve’ story on Substack, with twelve instalments so far https://killingeve.substack.com/archive?sort=top

I can’t quite make up my mind whether I like it or not!

5. And, finally, a second video feature from The Guardian, Birdsong, about the dying whistling language of the Hmong people in northern Laos https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/nov/29/birdsong-the-dying-whistled-language-of-the-hmong-people-in-northern-laos Credit to ELT Buzz for this one.

1. Short notice of this short (45”) webinar, Dyslexia Awareness for Language Teachers with Boelo van der Pool tomorrow, Wednesday, February 7^th at 12:00 UK time. Free registration here, “to understand how to help the 10 to 15% of your students with dyslexia learn better” https://forms.gle/3Ub1kM5XdCri4G2RA

2. More than half of UK undergraduates say they use AI to help with essays The Guardian told us last week https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/01/more-than-half-uk-undergraduates-ai-essays-artificial-intelligence If half are prepared to admit they use it, I wonder how many really use it?

3. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) have just published a concise guide to Using research evidence, a surprisingly (?) contentious area in education.

The blog post about the guide is here https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/new-guide-to-help-education-professionals-to-make-best-use-of-research-evidence

and the guide itself here https://d2tic4wvo1iusb.cloudfront.net/production/documents/using_research_evidence_-_a_concise_guide.pdf?v=1707066553 PDF below.

‘Red flag warning signs’ to look out for when examining a piece of research evidence include:

• The research is funded by an organisation or individual who has a personal stake in the findings.
• The evidence is shared on a commercial website that benefits from the intervention or approach.
• The number of participants included in the research is small or isn’t representative of the target population.
• The findings have been extended to situations or people – for example, different year groups or subjects – that the research didn’t look at.

4. First mentioned by me exactly (!) a year ago and starting (again) today, is the very popular English in the multilingual classroom course from TeachingEnglish https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/training/english-multilingual-classroom

“This course will introduce you to multilingualism and what it means. Learn how to make your classroom and teaching multilingual so that your learners can learn to celebrate and use many languages in the real world.”

PDF of the work book for the course below, to give you a fuller idea of what you’d be committing to, and details of several other courses currently running, all free, on this page https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/training

5. Three recent case studies from TeachingEnglish next. Links to download all three on their page and PDFs below.

i) Exploratory Action Research in Thai Schools: English teachers identifying problems, taking action and assessing results Twelve Thai teacher-researchers document their research journeys in this very engaging and encouraging publication https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications/case-studies-insights-and-research/exploratory-action-research-thai-schools

ii) Why won’t they speak English? investigates children’s anxiety and autonomy during English lessons in three government primary schools in Alexandria, Egypt through the lens of Self Determination Theory and suggests ways to improve learning experiences https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications/case-studies-insights-and-research/why-wont-they-speak-english

If you need it, like I did, here’s a bit more on Self Determination Theory  https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/

iii) Family attitudes towards multilingualism in bilingual education programmes reports on a large-scale study investigating the overall perception of multilingualism in the family environment of children enrolled in an English immersion programme in primary schools across Spain https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications/case-studies-insights-and-research/family-attitudes-towards-multilingualism-bilingual

Lots more case studies and research here https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications/case-studies-insights-and-research

6. And, finally, the first of three video features from The Guardian, Rowdy Flock, a short film about a big undertaking, Rakel’s assuming responsibility for her father’s sheep farm in the Norwegian fjords https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2024/jan/31/rowdy-flock-a-daughter-her-dreams-and-a-sheep-farm-in-norway

Here’s the article that accompanies Rowdy Flock https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/31/falling-in-love-with-sheep-farming-in-the-norwegian-fjords

1. Just under 25 minutes into this episode of Matt Chorley’s Politics Without The Boring Bits podcast you’ll find an excellent and wide-ranging discussion of education in the UK since the 1944 Education Act which introduced free secondary education – and free milk! – for all pupils. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-red-box-politics-podcast/id660638948?i=1000642106550

2. A provocative piece – with which not everyone will agree – from the latest issue of History Today by Andrew Ong & Minh Bui Jones, How ASEAN Lost its Way https://www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/how-asean-lost-its-way

“ASEAN was founded to promote peace between the nations of Southeast Asia. Incapable of moving with the times, what is the point of it?”

Minh Bui Jones founded and edits The Mekong Review https://mekongreview.com/ Try Tales from the Shan hills https://mekongreview.com/tales-from-the-shan-hills/

3. Two pieces about Facebook, neither to be found on Facebook itself, I imagine:

a Whistleblower Aid piece about a Facebook donation to Harvard University and its consequences https://live-whistleblower-aid.pantheonsite.io/joan-donovan-press-release/ Whistleblower Aid home page here https://whistlebloweraid.org/

a piece from The Markup, Each Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies https://themarkup.org/privacy/2024/01/17/each-facebook-user-is-monitored-by-thousands-of-companies-study-indicates

4. Here’s a BBC Radio 3 production of Thomas Otway’s C17 play, Venice Preserved that I enjoyed this morning on the way up to Yorkshire https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001g40k

Be ready for the slightly OTT sound effect when someone gets stabbed at the end of the play!

I didn’t know much about Otway: he was just a name on a list of dramatists I’d vaguely heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Otway

5. And, finally and challengingly, two quizzes from the BBC for the weekend:

first, one all about the use of apostrophes (I don’t agree with all the answers!) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/12vbByzjT1hcmFgh79f2MHw/are-you-grammatically-gormless-or-a-punctuation-perfectionist

second, Paul Sinha’s Perfect Pub Quiz (very few of the answers agree with me!) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5m4tC2Z6xbk7T7sF5KkDHgV/test-your-perfect-pub-quiz-knowledge

1. Thanks are due, as so often, to Stephen Downes’s OLDaily for this one: AI for Teachers: an Open Textbook https://www.ai4t.eu/textbook/ Here’s a bit more about the project that produced it https://www.ai4t.eu/about/ PDF below.

OLDaily home page here https://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm

2. Still on the AI theme, here’s a largely very positive report from Evelina Galaczi & Nahal Khabbazbashi (of Cambridge University Press & Assessment and the University of Bedfordshire, respectively), Everybody’s talking about Gen AI, but what are English teachers saying? https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2023/12/27/everybodys-talking-about-gen-ai-but-what-are-english-teachers-saying/

No copy of the study itself online that I could find.

3. Advance notice, to give you time to organise your diary, of this year’s Macmillan Global Teachers Festival, which runs for two weeks on weekdays from 19^th February to 1^st March https://www.macmillanenglish.com/global-teachers-festival-2024 Each session repeats three times a day, at 10:00, 14:00 and 21:30 UK time.

“With 20 unique talks and 22 international speakers, you can expect talks on subjects like how second languages shape how we think, the future of grammar instruction, hands-on with ChatGPT, involving parents, tackling bullying, igniting communicative practice, empowering emotional expression, and loads and loads more!” Boom, boom!

4. A gift article from the New York Times, We Need a New Word for Plagiarism, by John McWhorter http://tinyurl.com/3bsbyd4d

5. And, finally, two from Atlas Obscura: a doll hospital in Lisbon, first established in 1830 and still going strong https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/hospital-de-bonecas and ten remarkable beaches round the world https://www.atlasobscura.com/lists/unique-beaches-from-around-the-world

1. A Bit of a Stretch is a podcast by Chris Atkins, a documentary maker who went to prison for tax fraud in 2016. After his release, he interviewed twenty ex-prisoners about their time in jail, and turned the recordings into a podcast. On Apple here https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-bit-of-a-stretch-the-podcast/id1532249561 and on Spotify here https://open.spotify.com/show/2ZTvJeAeEzBumHkXRwZCPc

He wrote a book of the same name: here’s The Guardian review of it https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/05/a-bit-of-a-stretch-chris-atkins-review

2. An online event from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at 15:00 UK time next Wednesday, 31^st January: Learned Indifference: how Russians have adapted to war https://events.ceip.org/alternaterealityhowrussiansoci

“It’s been almost two years since the Kremlin launched what it terms its “special military operation” against Ukraine, and most Russians have learned to cope with wartime pressures by distancing themselves as much as possible from what is unfolding on the battlefield. At the same time, hopes for peace—or at least peace talks—are becoming more and more common. How can this combination of indifference and a desire for peace be explained? What could change the social consensus over the war, or shatter the “new normal” that has taken hold in Russia? What’s the shelf life of the political bargain in which both passive and active conformists support the regime in exchange for not being mobilized to fight in Ukraine?”

3. Happy Notes from OUP offers eight songs, each with a lesson plan and teacher’s notes: https://elt.oup.com/feature/global/happy-notes/?cc=gb&selLanguage=en and there’s a range of other CPD resources available from the same page.

“Music and movement make words more memorable and singing together builds confidence in a new language. Use these fun animated ELT songs and free materials in your primary classroom to motivate your young learners”.

4. Thanks to Jaime Saavedra for this pair of blog posts by his World Bank colleague Gabriel Demombynes on AI:

Misconceptions about artificial intelligence and what it means for people https://blogs.worldbank.org/investinpeople/misconceptions-about-artificial-intelligence-and-what-it-means-people

Will artificial intelligence change the course for human development? https://blogs.worldbank.org/investinpeople/will-artificial-intelligence-change-course-human-development

Interesting reading alongside the Mollick pieces from Tuesday.

5. Here’s a recent post on LinkedIn by Geoff Jordan, My View of General English Coursebooks https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-view-general-english-coursebooks-geoff-jordan-2s4me/

From his conclusion, to give a hint of Geoff’s view of general English coursebooks: “Coursebooks oblige teachers to work within a framework where students are presented with and then practise dislocated bits of English in a sequence which is pre-determined and externally imposed on them by coursebook writers. Most teachers have little say in the syllabus design which shapes their work, and their students have even less say in what and how they’re taught.”

You can subscribe to Geoff’s weekly newsletter via this page (you will need to join LinkedIn, if you’re not already a member, to subscribe) https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/doing-an-ma-tesol-7128407382128250882/

6. And, finally and oenologically, a winner at last in the cork vs screwcap debate! https://www.wineandmore.com/stories/screw-cap-against-cork-in-wine/

1. Ethan Mollick’s blog, One Useful Thing, focuses on AI and its impacts on work and education. Here’s his latest post, The Lazy Tyranny of the Wait Calculation: taking AI timelines seriously https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-lazy-tyranny-of-the-wait-calculation I’m now debating whether I can afford not to spend $20 a month on a subscription to Chat GPT Plus so I can play with some of the GPTs that he’s created. (And, no, I’m not quite sure what creating a GPT for oneself involves.)

Here’s a recent paper he co-authored with his wife, Lilach, Assigning AI: seven approaches for students, with prompts https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4475995 You’ll need to sign up to SSRN here, if you’re not already a member https://www.ssrn.com/index.cfm/en/

More Team Mollick papers here https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=5621131 and PDFs of all three below.

2. The first Green Action ELT event this year, Staff fridge to conference buffet: reducing our food emissions, at 16:00 UK time this Friday, 26^th January, looks at how we can reduce emissions from food and food waste, from snacks in the board room to full catering at residential schools https://green-action-elt.uk/events/

3. Three recent pieces from Engelsberg Ideas https://engelsbergideas.com/

Grey zones and dark tourism in Europe’s hinterlands by Hannah Lucinda Smith https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/grey-zones-and-dark-tourism-in-europes-hinterlands/

Roald Dahl’s readable but regrettable Uncle Oswald by Alexander Larman https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/roald-dahls-uncle-oswald/

Best of Engelsberg Ideas in 2023 https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/best-of-engelsberg-ideas-in-2023/ Ten for the price of one, that last one!

4. I am way off the pace according to Trinity’s new report, Trinity uncovers the new slang that worldwide Gen Z wants to master when learning English https://www.trinitycollege.com/news/viewarticle/trinity-uncovers-the-new-slang-that-worldwide-gen-z-wants-to-master-when-learning-english

Of the twenty words Trinity list, I only knew ‘rizz’ – and that’s only because it was OUP’s word of the year. I bet Mr Beast knows them all!

Trinity also researched “the turns of phrase which cause the most difficulty for Gen Z”: ‘Elvis has left the building’; ‘cock and bull story’; ‘neck of the woods’; ‘get someone’s goat’; ‘have a bone to pick with someone’; ‘best thing since sliced bread’; ‘sacred cow’; ‘earworm’; ‘monkey business’ and ‘the tail wagging the dog’ – all of which I know and use …

The one my younger colleagues were already flummoxed by a few years ago when I used it was ‘a sprat to catch a mackerel’.

5. And, finally and photographically, the winners in the 2023 Travel Photographer of the Year competition https://www.tpoty.com/galleries/2023-winners/

Be sure to scroll right down the page: there’s some great videos at the end.

1. The Faculty of Education at Cambridge University often highlights interesting recent research on their website https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/news/index.html#2dd826a9

Try this one, Fewer than 1% of schools have school-wide policies on second languages, language learning and English https://content.educ.cam.ac.uk/news/23-forbes-language-policy

or this one, Disadvantaged children’s struggles at school have little to do with character, attitude or a lack of ‘growth mindset’ https://content.educ.cam.ac.uk/content/disadvantaged-childrens-struggles-school-have-little-do-character-attitude-or-lack-growth

PDFs of both studies below (there’s also a link in each blog post).

2. Continuing the theme of disadvantage, here’s two recent press releases from Oxfam:

first, a depressing one on wealth https://www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/wealth-of-five-richest-men-doubles-since-2020-as-wealth-of-five-billion-people-falls/ (PDF of report below);

second, a less depressing one on millionaires with a sense of altruism https://www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/nearly-three-quarters-of-millionaires-polled-in-g20-countries-support-higher-taxes-on-wealth-over-half-think-extreme-wealth-is-a-threat-to-democracy/

3. Here’s UNESCO’s Bangkok Priorities for Action on First Language-based Multilingual Education https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000387958.locale=en PDF below. No great surprises, perhaps, but good to see their six priorities spelt out nice and clearly.

4. I’ve just discovered Toby Litt’s blog, which has been fun each day this year so far: https://awritersdiary.substack.com/ I’ve got a bit of a backlog to catch up on!

5. And, finally, Wiki Loves Folklore! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Folklore_2023/Winners?1=1

Be sure to watch the video of the gusli player near the bottom of the page.

1. “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of the YouTube sensation that is Mr Beast” is the first sentence of this article that I read last week. I’ve clearly been living under a rock! https://www.unilad.com/celebrity/news/mrbeast-x-elon-musk-youtube-earnings-835450-20240111

Intrigued (and chastised), I did some research on Mr Beast. Here’s a New Statesman article (which I hope you can read without subscribing; you may need to register) about him https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/social-media/2024/01/understand-gen-z-watch-mrbeast

This video of Mr Beast’s, Protect $500,000 Keep It!, attracted 13,631,744 views in the first five hours after it was posted two days ago (and has now been viewed nearly 68 million times) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ESeQBeikKs and this one, I Spent 7 Days In Solitary Confinement, has so far been viewed 109,214,641 times https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_CbgLpvH9E

More Mr Beast here if you think you can cope https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast

2. This Friday, 19^th January, at 15:00 UK time sees the launch of the two volumes of Multilingual Learning in Sub-Saharan Africa by a stellar line-up of its editors and contributors. Volume 1 “explores the development and implementation of multilingual education in diverse African school contexts”, and Volume 2 “the persistence of former colonial languages and monolingual approaches in education, despite the proven effectiveness of multilingual pedagogies”. More info here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-KVn3_VMts

3. Tomasz Kamusella’s Words in Space and Time: a Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe is free to download from the Central European University Press website https://ceupress.com/book/words-space-and-time PDF below; it’s a big file.

“With forty-two extensively annotated maps, this atlas offers novel insights into the history and mechanics of how Central Europe’s languages have been made, unmade, and deployed for political action. The innovative combination of linguistics, history, and cartography makes a wealth of hard-to-reach knowledge readily available to both specialist and general readers. It combines information on languages, dialects, alphabets, religions, mass violence, or migrations over an extended period of time.”

Thanks to Andrew King for sharing this one!

4. There are big differences between US states in terms of the native-to-the-state, other US, and non-US composition of their population – which must surely have an impact on a state’s culture, mustn’t it? https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/where-are-americans-born/ More Big Thinking here https://bigthink.com/

5. And, finally and by way of a contrast with Mr Beast, John Drew’s account of the metamorphosis of his own story of the first cricket match in India in 1721 into the medium of dance https://scroll.in/article/1062006/how-a-gujarati-dance-drama-recreated-the-first-known-instance-of-cricket-on-indian-soil-in-1721

Scroll https://scroll.in/ was new to me. Here’s their take on the separation of Burma (Myanmar) from the rest of British India https://scroll.in/magazine/1062050/why-burma-was-separated-from-british-india

1. In my first week at university reading English (in my own case, a much more appropriate verb than studying or writing), along with all my friends from school, we went to hear Jeremy Prynne lecture: one of our group, more au courant than me, had heard he was ‘the best lecturer ever’. And his lecture was indeed spectacular, a firework of a thing – all the more extraordinary because he’d forgotten his lecture notes. He turned his briefcase upside down but couldn’t find them, so gave the lecture “as best I can” from memory, pitch- and word-perfectly. I went every week to his lecture – a rare excursion of that kind for me – and enjoyed the series so much that I was there in good time for his first lecture the following year. For which he had forgotten his lecture notes …. That’s by way of long introduction to this extraordinary online collection of his guidance for students, Mr Prynne’s Notes and Materials for English Students https://www.cai.cam.ac.uk/documents/jhp13

PDFs of his Tips on Essays, Tips on Lectures and Tips on Reading below, to give you a taste.

2. Thanks to Dave Allan for bringing The Versatile ELT Blog to my attention. The author, James Thomas, modestly describes it as “a space for short articles about topics ​of interest to language teachers”. This week’s post, The mighty power of the asterisk, is typically eclectic https://www.versatile.pub/blog

3. English Medium Education in a multilingual francophone context: Primary school learning in Cameroon by Kuchah (Harry) Kuchah, Lizzi O. Milligan & Valentine N. Ubanako is a new ELTRA report, with a wider geographical and language relevance than its title might suggest: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications/case-studies-insights-and-research/english-medium-education-multilingual-francophone

PDF below.

4. Time for our bi- (tri-?) monthly visit to the UKFIET blog, I reckon  Here’s three thought-provoking pieces from towards the end of last year:

Sustainability, Linguistic and Cultural Diversity and Decoloniality in European Schools by Rachel Bowden & Denise Hornig https://www.ukfiet.org/2023/sustainability-linguistic-and-cultural-diversity-and-decoloniality-in-european-schools/

The Gem Report is More Than Just a Report by Manos Antoninis https://www.ukfiet.org/2023/the-gem-report-is-more-than-just-a-report/

“Good Buys” Bought and Shelved – Reviving Unused Structured Teacher Guides in Afghanistan by Siddharth Pillai & Sarfaraz Sahebzada https://www.ukfiet.org/2023/good-buys-bought-and-shelved-reviving-unused-structured-teacher-guides-in-afghanistan/

5. And, finally, a reminder of Carol Rumens’s long-running ‘poem of the week’ – well into its seventeenth year! – in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/series/poemoftheweek

Try Slow Waker by Thom Gunn https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/16/poem-of-the-week-slow-waker-by-thom-gunn

or Llyn Gwynant by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2022/jun/27/poem-of-the-week-llyn-gwynant-by-elizabeth-jane-burnett

That second one’s for MS!

1. Will AI rule the world before too much longer? Here’s an interesting paper on exam marking in Spain (courtesy of OLDaily), Consistency analysis of assessment boards in University Entrance Examinations in Spain, the conclusion of which is that humans mark so badly – inconsistently – that AI would make a much better job of it. Online here https://osf.io/preprints/edarxiv/672sm and PDF below.

2. Teaching English as an International Language in the Cambridge Elements in Language Teaching series by Ali Fuad Selvi, Nicola Galloway & Heath Rose was free to download while I was away over Christmas and New Year, so I downloaded a copy while I could. Details online here https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/teaching-english-as-an-international-language/083B560D9D34A42B66B8F9DBBD2F63C4 and PDF below. In future, I probably won’t offer a PDF of publications in this series as my doing so deprives the series editors of lots of useful download data – but I will make sure the free download is advertised in good time!

3. How to respond to the PM’s pride in his international dependant ban is a piece on the WONKHE blog by Wendy Alexander and David Pilsbury which, prompted by Rishi Sunak’s gleeful tweet at the New Year https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1741782514270671194?lang=en-GB, makes the case for “a UK international strategy that responds, rather than reacts, to global concerns surrounding immigration” https://wonkhe.com/blogs/how-to-respond-to-the-pms-pride-in-his-international-dependant-ban-2-2/ I’ve tried to give Rishi Sunak the benefit of the doubt, partly because he’s a popular local MP up in Richmond and partly because he’s clearing up after Johnson and Truss, but that benefit is now exhausted.

If you’re puzzled by the use of both dependant and dependent as a noun in the WONKHE piece, here’s Webster’s take on that https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/spelling-variants-dependent-vs-dependant#:~:text=The%20difference%20between%20dependent%20and,more%20common%20for%20the%20noun.

4. I discovered the Radio 4 Classic Novels website over the holiday: it offers unabridged versions of over twenty classic novels https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09j3xmb

And there’s also a (slightly more diverse) Classic Stories equivalent with a hundred short stories https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06w4v4x/episodes/player

So far, I’ve rediscovered Jane Eyre and I’m halfway through Wuthering Heights, which was a set text for ‘O’ level that I remember enjoying but seem to have forgotten a great deal of!

5. And, finally, here’s Stuart Cassells of the Red Hot Chilli Pipers demonstrating the bagpipe to staff at Frankfurt Airport https://youtu.be/api4OnqwH5w?feature=shared Here’s two more Red Hot Chilli Pipers numbers: Hellbound Train https://youtu.be/TJ4NdxfWdvk?feature=shared and Smoke on the Water https://youtu.be/Isxaq6yuKxE?feature=shared