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Friday

Mary Dejevsky

My failed attempt to game GP appointments

Nearly 20 years may have passed, but a good number of people will still recall the exchange between a salt-of-the-earth member of the public, Diana Church, and the then-prime minister, Tony Blair. The year was 2005, the occasion a pre-election edition of BBC Question Time, and the issue at hand? Well, plus ça change – the hoops patients had to go through to see an actual GP. Mrs Church had asked the PM whether something could be done about a system that required her to book an appointment no more than 48 hours in advance. That’s right, no more than (not no less than) two days before. A baffled prime

Daniel Sokol

Inside the secretive world of tutoring

‘There is absolutely no need for any child applying to our school to be tutored,’ said the headmistress of a prestigious London day school during the Q&A session. Relieved, I left the hall to wander around the booths in a nearby room. I was struck by the many tutoring agencies, offering advice, courses and books on how to boost your child’s chances of securing a place at an elite school. In light of the headmistress’s earlier comment, I couldn’t help but recall the famous words attributed to P.T. Barnum. ‘A sucker is born every minute.’ The majority of applicants are tutored to the hilt Not long after, I found myself

Wednesday

Kit Delamain

I’m a Nisbets addict

It’s a bright autumn morning and I’m first through the doors. There are only two shops that can inspire such a disregard for my finances, and the other is Swedish. Today I find myself in Nisbets, and the first rule of Nisbets is not to bring a shopping list. If you’ve not heard of it, Nisbets is a catering supply shop, with outlets all across country. Every professional chef that has ever cooked for you will have spent a small fortune in Nisbets, some of it on their restaurant’s business card and likely even more from their own dwindling debit account. What is a hobby if not a means of

Sean Thomas

Are you ready for the baby wars?

Such an awful lot of stuff is happening right now, even the keenest observer of social trends could be forgiven for missing a statistical milestone passed earlier this month. So here it is: at the beginning of October, it was revealed that, for the first time since the 1970s baby bust, deaths outnumbered births in the UK – meaning, in effect, that all of our population growth (about 680,000 for this year) came from immigration. The reason why is obvious. The boomers – i.e. people born during the great baby boom of 1945-1965 – are dying out, and they are not being properly replaced, thanks to a low total fertility