On Sunday I went to the Cheltenham Literary Festival to bang the drum for free schools. I was expecting a warm reception. The local MP is a Lib Dem, but the county council is Conservative. This wouldn’t be like my trip to Manchester last month. Almost as soon as I stepped off the train I was recognised by an anti-government protestor who greeted me with a cry of ‘Fuck off back to London you Tory tosser.’
The first event was a discussion chaired by Marcus Brigstocke in which Natalie Haynes, Shazia Mirza and I had been asked to read three books we wouldn’t normally read. Natalie chose Who Moved My Cheese? and Shazia selected The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and they were both very funny about them. I chose Dickens’s Hard Times and made the mistake of being both too flip and too earnest.
Flip, because I thought it would be entertaining if I praised the central character, Thomas Gradgrind, for creating the Victorian equivalent of a Free School.
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