KINDERGRADS

My grandson came home in a mortarboard and gown … on
his last day at nursery school

I am proud to tell you that one of my grandsons has just graduated. No, not from university… from nursery.

 

The boy is four years old but turned up on our doorstep the other day wearing an outsize T-shirt, which I think was meant to represent an academic gown.

 

On his head was a mortar board, fashioned in Blue Peter style from cardboard and Sellotape. And he carried a white paper scroll secured with a piece of ribbon. A beaming smile completed the ensemble.

 

At first, I thought this was a stroke of mad genius by the nursery staff. But no, it’s a thing, apparently. You can buy the mortar board on Amazon.

 

It has made a huge impression on Ollie’s young life. He is due to go to “Big Boys’ School” in September. But now he has a First in Lego building, he is wondering whether it’s worth it.

 

There’s just no stopping the little scamp. He wants to take a master’s degree. He’s already working on the dissertation – Superheroes and their vehicles.

 

There’s a particularly impressive passage on the Batmobile. Who knew it started out as a 1939 Cadillac convertible and gradually morphed into a $4.5million Lamborghini Veneno roadster as Batty fought the dark forces in Gotham City?

 

Oliver’s graduation called for a celebration, naturally. First, we took the obligatory photographs of him in the quadrangle with his parents, then his grandparents.

 

Afterwards, I broke out the Yazoo strawberry milkshakes and we drank them with Vimto chasers. We all cheered when he flung his mortar board up in the air and into the neighbours’ garden. Shouldn’t encourage him, I know, but hey, it’s not every day you graduate.

 

I popped in to see Oliver’s student digs a while back. If you’ve had kids at uni, it was just as you would expect. His bed was a mess, Marvel T-shirts lying all over the place and the room was littered with half-sucked Chupa Chups and Pick’n’Mix wrappers.

 

But the Lego! He has a special green table you sit at to do your building and on it were boxes of 7+ construction kits – baffling to a 76-year-old but a mere bagatelle if you’re four.

 

Following his triumph, Oliver hopes to move on to even greater things. Already he is being headhunted by Legoland. He hasn’t agreed terms yet. He is holding out for more money or a bigger job.

 

Hamleys of London is offering a graduate trainee post, starting on the shop floor (literally) in Regent Street but on a fast track to the dizzy heights of management. But that is not going to satisfy his aspiration either.

 

He wants them to give him a job like Tom Hanks had in his film Big. Hanks’s character, 12-year-old Josh Baskin, makes a wish on a fortune-telling machine to be “big” – and it is granted.

 

Josh gets a job in a toy firm and wins the respect of the owner, who asks him to come up with a new range of toys. There is a downside, of course. His executive duties weigh on him and he forgets how it feels to be a child.

 

So, welcome to the world of work, Ollie. Or would you rather just settle for primary school at the tail end of summer? I think so, don’t you?

 

There’s plenty of time to choose between ambition and fun. Or you could go into journalism and enjoy the best of both.

 

*****

 

Tony Gray, in his book Fleet Street Remembered, interviews the late Milton Shulman, a film critic for the Daily Express and long-time theatre critic for the Evening Standard, who tells him what Shulman regards as “the archetypal Fleet Street story”.

 

The Standard’s then Editor Herbert Gunn asks Shulman to go to Germany to launch a search for Martin Bormann. Shulman warns it will take a long time.

 

How long? demands Gunn. “At least two or three weeks,” says Shulman.

 

Long pause. “Two or three weeks?” Shulman nods.

 

“Then, if you don’t think you can find Martin Bormann inside two or three weeks, would you like to go down to the Palladium and interview Chico Marx for the Diary?”

 

Shulman, who died aged 90 in 2004, also recounts how he wrote a review saying British starlets from the Rank Charm School were boring and he could find six girls who were more attractive on the Central Line any day of the week.

 

Go on, then, challenged Rank.

 

So he stood outside Bond Street station, where the models at the time got off to go to work. He soon found his six pretty girls.

 

“None of them ever made it as film stars but the point was that it was a good stunt and it made my name,” says Shulman.

 

Can you imagine that happening now? No chance. Everybody’s hunched over their keyboards, blagging stories from websites that blagged them from other websites.

 

*****

 

So who do you trust? Who are you going to put your faith in as the General Election draws nearer?

 

Oh, I don’t mean the politicians. They’re all useless, to a man or woman. I mean the journalists who are covering this tedious charade masquerading as democracy for the modern age.

 

There isn’t a fag paper between the two main parties if you examine their policies, their charisma-free leaders and their absence of courage and conviction to tackle the woes that beset our country.

 

As someone said to me the other day: “The state of this lot just goes to show what a class act Thatcher was.”

 

But what about the reporters? Well, on Sky there is Jon Craig, formerly of the Daily and Sunday Express. Jon is the Chief Political Correspondent and he and Tamara Cohen are the only two on the station’s political team I’ve got any time for. They manage to inject a few facts into their reports.

 

My heart sinks every time I see Political Editor Beth Rigby comin’. And I reach for the remote when her deputy Sam Coates comes on flapping his arms about and offering opinions in his weird presenting style, breathless and aghast. Even worse, shouting inane questions in Downing Street.

 

On Times Radio, which bills itself as the election station, you’ve got Matt Chorley – he of the irritating Brummie voice – but he is leaving soon for Radio Five Live. He’s a political pro and Times Radio will miss him.

 

But fear not, Andrew Neil, doyen of political commentators, is joining the station and it also has heavyweights Kate McCann, Adam Bolton and the much under-valued veteran Carole Walker, who is worth more than the dogwatch 10pm to 1am shift.

 

Talk has Julia Hartley-Brewer, former Political Editor of the Sunday Express, who has insight and contacts and Mike Graham, who does the breakfast show and was a shrewd operator as Foreign Editor and Night Editor of the Daily Express.

 

The brilliant Caroline Wheeler runs the politics desk at the Sunday Times and another former Expressman, Tim Shipman, provides acres of well-informed commentary.

 

So I think we’ll be well served for political news – until the election is over and the lunatics move back into the asylum.

RICHARD DISMORE

28 May 2024