FEWER OR LESS

I really ought not to listen to the news…

On Monday evening an Ofsted inspector had me shouting at the radio as I waited in the railway station car park, mostly because of the incongruity of his bleating on about standards whilst allowing that most irritating of errors to slip from his own lips…

"In schools where there are one hundred and fifty pupils or less…" he burbled, before being immediately drowned out by my sharp intake of breath as I impotently raged "Fewer… fewer… FEWER!!!" back at the receiver.

I like the supermarket "Booths" up in the Lake District for this, by the way, and its insistence on having a "ten items or fewer" checkout always pleases me whenever I'm there…

Anyway, when my Beloved arrived, I asked whether this was an unreasonable response before sneaking away to Tweet about it as she had her shower after we arrived home.

Please write out 100 times "Schools with one hundred and fifty pupils or fewer..." ;-)

I mean, I know I'm not perfect when it comes to matters of grammar (I have acquaintances on FizzBok who seem to delight in pointing out my errors in that regard…) but then I suppose that, as a non-professional, I don't really have to be, do I…?

And I am most definitely never going to be asked to report upon the competence or otherwise of someone else like, I don't know, an Ofsted inspector might be...

Meanwhile, what is it about some of the astonishing women with the long, dark hair that sometimes makes them so very self-destructive…? During that particular news programme, the tragic news from New York about L'Wren Scott was breaking, which, given that a friend of mine who, I believe, actually rather resembled her, died in similar circumstances quite a few years ago now, it actually dredged up a bad memory or twelve...

And Ms Scott was the same age as me, too, which always puts a poignant thought or two into my head.

And all of those front page pictures of Mick Jagger the following morning, they weren't at all intrusive, were they? Such things really do make me sick of the whole news media profession, whether it's the paparazzi who took the picture, the journalist who wrote the copy, the editor who approved it for publication, or the publishers who put out these rags.

They ought to be utterly ashamed of themselves, and just saying that it's what the people want is really, really no excuse, in my, most irrelevant opinion.

All that I know is that when that friend of mine died in those really not dissimilar circumstances a few years ago, I don't think that I'd have reacted too kindly to having a camera shoved in my face at the very moment that I was told about it.

This may be an old-fashioned view in this modern era, but I think that some moments deserve a little bit of privacy and dignity no matter how enormous a celebrity you might be, and I genuinely believe that I would respect the photographer more if he'd stood back and said "Do you know what? This really is not the moment for this…"

What public service is served? What good does it do to intrude into other people's grief in such a crass and thoroughly unpleasant manner…?

Just to see, presumably, if they could get an unguarded reaction or an even more gut-wrenchingly awful headline about inappropriate behaviour or a crack in the facade something equally unsavoury.

Sometimes I wish that I could just tell these wretches to just go away and think about what they've done… but I don't suppose that it bothers them one jot.

Then again, perhaps it is just as scuzzy of me to reprint their headlines here to try and explain what it is that I'm getting quite so worked up about, or does the fact that I hid the photograph in question excuse that if it also reveals those scumbags working at the tabloids for what they really are…?

Not that we didn't already know, of course…