Categories: uncategorized
Date: 21 December 2010 23:14:31
There has also been drink taken, so this post may end in me sobbing over my copy of The Dark is Rising, proclaiming "I love you, I really love you, you're my best mate you are," and hiccuping.
This post is also written whilst surrounded by books. In Rosamundi Towers, I might be living off Tesco Value pasta and tinned tomatoes, but there is always money for books and coffee. Always.
Literacy is a gift and a treasure, a key that opens doors to other worlds, a light and a guide to better things, an exerciser of the imagination and a balm to the soul.
And so the government are removing their funding from Booktrust from the next financial year.
This is insane. A Booktrust book is often the only book a child owns. How dare, how dare our smug millionaire cabinet sit there and slash the funding to something which does such immense good for, actually, very little money? An annual £13m in government funding generates a further £56m in sponsorship, which is a handsome return on investment by anyone's standards, not counting the immense benefit gained from a lifetime of literacy.
I pay my taxes, Mr Cameron, and I want them spent on literacy programmes and the NHS and care for the disabled and stopping my local school's roof leaking, not on bailing out your mates in the banks so they can pay billions in bonuses whilst still being owned 80% by the taxpayer. You remember the taxpayers, don't you, Dave? The little people? The people who don't have offshore trust funds to cushion the blows you are raining down on them?
Someone asked me, recently, "Where did you learn to put words together in such a fashion?" To which the only answer I could come up with was "I buy books like normal people buy food." Don't starve our children, Dave.