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Delussions of Labour
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/ 3WAITING FOR a pardner at a West Coast hotel (who was actually in a submarine off Bridgetown), in a rare period of complete idleness (which can only happen to someone with a job accidentally nowadays), I watched a young hotel employee wheel an empty coat-rack from one end of my sphere of vision to the other, and then, after a few minutes inside a building at either end, back.
After his second round trip, I put aside my book - Paul Krugman’s excellent End This Depression Now! - and waited
Decomposition
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/ 0TODAY I’LL do the English essay of the 11-Plus exam paper I began three Mondays ago in sympathy with the children who sat the real thing. I’ll do all five topics in one, or there’d be no challenge to a man who’s made his living writing compositions in the papers for the last 24 years.
You have 30 minutes to write an essay on (for me, ALL FIVE) of the following topics: 1. My dream
11-PLUS 40 EXAM
User Rating: / 0THIS MORNING, in sympathy with the little ones, I continue my attempt to pass the 11-Plus exam the children of Barbados just sat. I’m hoping to do better in this, last year’s actual English paper, than I did in the maths, but chances are I won’t do as well as my son, who sat this very paper last year. (He scored 98 in the maths paper; last week, I completed an aggregate family century.)
Section A. Write the correct form of the adjective in brackets. Question 1. Sandra is (young) than Harriet. Is this English or Detective-ing? Who gives a flying firetruck if Sandra is young more Harriet? 3. John occupied
11-PLUS MINUS
User Rating: / 0UNLESS YOU have a kid whose future as either company president or cocaine paro was sealed last Tuesday, you’ve probably forgotten the 11-Plus exam stress; I propose to jog your memory by attempting it over three Mondays, starting today, with an actual maths paper (from 2009).
1. ADD 24 + 63. The usual easy start so the Attention Deficit Disorder children (aka “boys”) can get at least one mark. 2. DIVIDE 69 by 3. Is it me, or has the 11-Plus suddenly gone prurient? In any case, without wanting to piss off the LGBTI crowd, surely 69 can only be divided by two! 3. Write in
Good Muslim Nation
User Rating: / 0PLANET EARTH is 4.5 billion years old and women are equal to men. These statements are both simple, unavoidable, undeniable facts, and the latter is also a matter of law. Yet, in a liberal democracy - which is what Barbados is, as a nation, regardless of what Barbadians may be, as individuals - citizens have a constitutional right to believe what the hell they please, including believing in Hell itself, a most unlikely concoction of Eastern imagination. (The Devil himself did not exist in the West before 600 BCE, when he was likely invented by Persian clergy.)
If their faith or superstitions instruct them, people may wholeheartedly believe the Earth is flat, as Catholics did until shamefully recently, or