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The full written version of this post will be published on 29 March at 08:00.
I have to apologise again. This was supposed to be out yesterday, but I have been completely overwhelmed with new work - getting my head around things and getting used to the pace of things - and have not had time to sit down and do a proper catch up. It’s been a good week, though.
I did make it up to Birmingham, though I can’t claim to have seen much beyond the NEC and a Travelodge that, for reasons still unclear, did not believe in running water in the shower. So I’ll reserve judgement on the city for now.
Aside from that, things have been chugging along quite nicely here. Life is getting back to normal after a pretty insane February and March with my dad passing away and flying back to South Africa. I’m looking forward to getting back to a more regular schedule. In terms of the news this week, it has been the same - war, the orange dictator lying, the usual thing - but something did pique my interest, which was political, but not necessarily in the way you might expect. That was the book Suicide of a Nation, published this last month, written by Matt Goodwin. There’s a lot of controversy around the book, not particularly around the contents so far, with most of it being focused on exactly how it was written.
Those are perfectly understandable critiques. I don’t disagree with them, but there is something else about the book.
Full disclosure: I have not bought it.
The last thing I’m going to do is put a couple of pounds in Matt Goodwin’s pocket. I bought Liz Truss’s book, I bought a bunch of books written by right-wing ideologues, and I always regret it because they’re always just a bit shit.
They’re always the worst polemics that are badly sourced and just not worth the pounds. I have not read the book. I am not going to read the book unless someone can give it to me for free, in which case I’ll grudgingly sit my way through it. But one of the standout bits in the book that has come through is the discussion around language, and very specifically, English as an additional language.
