Prince Harry follows in the distinguished footsteps of other members of the Royal family who have fought for their country.

Because, well, you know, that’s what Princes are for.

What’s more, the initial years of studying a language are tough: there is no escape from the grind of learning how to conjugate verbs, construct sentences and to absorb enough words to begin to understand what is written and said.

To elect to do this, young boys and girls need to know that, like practising a musical instrument, designing clothes or playing a sport, the end-result will be worthwhile. They need teachers who can inspire them, classmates who encourage them and families who understand the value of the skill. In Britain, none of this exists to a sufficient degree.

It is not as though the situation is new. Successive education secretaries say how they deplore the trends.

Well quite, English is one of the glories of our culture. A complex and near infinitely malleable language, capable in well trained hands of conveying nuances unavailable in many other languages.

So yes, children really should be taught the grammar of it, drilled in the vocabulary: they’ve been blessed with being native speakers of this language, it is important that they be taught how to manipulate it properly.

Ah, yes, sorry, my mistake. Willy is of course saying that everyone should learn French or German or Mandarin this way: but not that anyone at all should learn English this way. For that would be to go against the educational establishment’s insistence that children should not be taught their own language, only be taught other ones.

Myself I am actually rather annoyed that I never was taught English grammar, sentence structure, all those things. Whatever I do know has come simply from reading others and having a little mental light going off…..that doesn’t look right, play with it until it does.

This has caused problems: one American place I used to write for fired me precisely because I wasn’t using the grammatical structures insisted upon by whatever style book it was that they used. I simply did not understand the points that they were making (incomplete sentences? WTF are they?).

Similarly, in learning foreign languages I’ve no idea what the various books and so on are trying to say. Past particple? Gerund? Matching verb and object? WTF? What are these things? As I’ve no idea what they are in English I’ve of course no idea at all what they are in German, Portuguese, French or Russian (the other languages that I have a smattering of).

Whatever I have learned of these languages has been learned the same way I learned English: listen, repeat, keep doing so until people understand you.

This method has its advantages: I was in Prague on Friday talking to some sciency types about my favourite metal. A lot of the conversation they were having was in Czech (of course) and I was able to correct the interpretation to me of several things from my rudimentary Russian. It seems that it’s a common Slavic language thing to get confused between the thousands, hundreds, tens and teens in numbers (the tisiche or thousand in Russian, and I noted in Czech, often gets mistranslated to the teen and vice versa. So when they mean 12, or dvatsit, we get two thousand, or dver tisiche, or somethimes twenty, dvesti, or sometimes even two hundred, dversot…..spelling there is terrible of course) in English.

So that’s good, but that’s all been done by ear. I really do wish I knew grammar in any one language (but am far too lazy to start now) so that I could learn it in others. Perhaps that could be better put: I wish that someone had beaten grammer in one language into me when I was still amenable to having things beaten into me.

But that still leaves us with that wonderful Willy point, doesn’t it? That all children should be encouraged to learn other languages in exactly the manner that the educational establishment insists that English children should not learn English.

Oh dear.

Time was, as a country, we respected the rules. Whatever they were, the ref might be blind but on the field he’s the boss. Honours were stripped according to criminal convictions (a la Sir Lester) not to political campaigns whipped up in the mob.

When the rules were not followed, the hanging of Lord Haw Haw (how can a not Brit be guilty of treason to Britain? but the mob would not have it….and the deal done that he would hang but his bird would not to encourage him to acquiesce), it is now regarded (by me even if no one else) as a grave injustice.

Sir Fred did indeed fuck up right royally: but that is not the same as being a criminal. Other people fucked up right royally at the time too: those supposedly regulating Sir Fred and those who made him Sir Fred for example. And I for one would like the K to stand for that reason if no other: as a reminder that it wasn’t just one man at all.

But the larger point also stands. Quite apart from anything else I reject the idea of punishment for fucking up in business: for stealing, sure, for criminal acts, right on, but would anyone really expect to see advance in an economy where fucking up is a punishable offence, rather than just a financially painful one?

Over and above that I’m afraid that I really am very English. Rules is rules and we don’t change them dependent upon the way the political winds are blowing. Far from it, rules is what protects us from those gales.

Taxpayer Scotland, which is linked to the London-based Taxpayers’ Alliance organisation, estimates Scotland’s debt could be as high as £189bn, even before taking into account its share of the national debt.

“I’m more the sort of person who doesn’t like hugging strangers because we don’t know each other, so we shouldn’t.”

Some would call this sort of behaviour emotional repression. Others would call it being English.

Scottish independence: Wales and Northern Ireland make unity plea

Break-up of UK would lead to an English-dominated Westminster parliament, say first ministers of other home nations

The problem with this is?

As England would have 90 odd % of the nation’s population why shouldn’t it dominate the legislature?

The Nobel prize, and now honorary knighthoods, awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov reaffirm the old adage that the simplest ideas are the best.

Mssrs Geim and Novoselov are British citizens. There is nothing honorary about their knighthoods they are now, respectively, Sir Andre and Sir Konstantin.

Grrr.

Now a collection of liberal feminist groups has come forward

There is nothing fucking liberal about these unshaven harridans determining how others should live their lives.

The essence of liberalism is that consenting adults get to do as they wish as long as it is indeed consenting adults and they don’t frighten the horses out in the streets.

Attempting to censor the press so that 19 year olds can’t display their iced nipples, 50 years olds drool over them, is not liberal. It is authoritarian, puritan, it is many things but all of the things that it is are not liberal.

If you wish to use the American perversions of our language then please only do so when writing in America for Americans.

Gerald Ronson, the veteran tycoon jailed for his part in one of Britain’s best-known stock market scandals as one of the “Guinness Four”, is among those recognised in the New Year honours list.

Ronson, who claims to have pioneered self-service petrol stations, served six months after his conviction in 1990 for involvement in a share-trading scandal. Once out of prison he embarked on a concerted campaign to clear his name, rebuilt his business empire, and devoted money and time to charity work, for which he is now awarded a CBE.

Yup, naughty boy.

Ronson’s honour follows £30m in donations to organisations such as the NSPCC and the Prince’s Trust as well as work with Great Ormond Street Hospital.

If it weren’t for the conviction that C would be a K.

So it’s not that “Oh my, a convicted criminal has got a gong”, it’s that he’s only got a CBE for what would have garnered anyone else a KBE.

I know, I know, hard to believe, isn’t it? And I speak as someone who has twice taken a US test, once in Virginia, once in California (licences only last a few years, that’s the reason for taking two, not that I failed one).

Where, in the first one, I was in an automatic, backed out of a nose to the wall parking space, got to the road and turned right. To the light, turn right, to the light, turn right, next light, right turn, and, would you believe it, right at the next light and right into the parking lot and parked nose against the wall.

And that was that, the whole practical test. No emergency stop, no left turn (recall, other side of the road, left is the difficult one), no parallel parking, certainly no reversing around a corner nor three point turn.

But here in Jolly England it’s not quite that simple:

When it came to the 67 drivers who tried for the 12th time, 11 were successful. All eight people taking their 15th driving test failed.

The Driving Standards Agency’s figures for 2010-11 show that the traditional advice – “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” – does not ring true for some drivers. The pass rate falls the more times candidates sit their test.

It remained steady for the first three attempts, at between 46 to 47 per cent, before falling sharply. It stood at 44 per cent for the fourth attempt and 41 per cent at the fifth go. Just over a third of people taking their test for the sixth time were successful and for people who kept going it kept getting worse.

Melvyn Bragg: ‘Why shouldn’t Britain be the clever country?’

Because of the British?

I came away thinking it was a splendid place, and also reflecting how much England suffered in the 20th century from its metropolitan bias. A healthy country needs strong provinces such as England had in the Victorian Age, the exceptional century in its history, when so much of the cultural and intellectual vitality of the nation was to be found in the North and Midlands rather than in London.

Make public transport, the railways, heck, make private transport, the motorways, worse.

Such cultural and intellectual vitality depends upon clustering. And clustering just isn’t going to happen in Bristol when London is 90 minutes max by train. And the better the transport networks, the greater the distance that can be travelled in the magic time period (which could be what, 2 hours, three?) then the more that vitality will cluster in one place, the more that one place will suck it out of those places that it can be sucked out of.

Not even the Victorians believed that Reading, Slough or Clapham were going to create vibrant intellectual spaces of their own. It was obvious that people would travel into London, to the great national concentrations for that. And the better the transport system the larger the area over which we can hear that great sucking sound.

Provincial revival depends upon bad transport connections with London, not good: a lesson for the HS2 peeps there perhaps?

Whoops, sorry, the quote is from Allan Massie.

Some Tories believe that Cameron’s attachment to the nobility will resurface when he no longer has to face the electorate. They believe that when he eventually stands down Cameron will revive the tradition of granting an earldom to a former prime minister. The Camerons would become the Earl and Countess of Witney, the name of his Oxfordshire constituency.

This is the opposite to Maurice Glasman’s thing about wanting to become Baron “of the City of London”.

He couldn’t because the City has, in matters of honours and precedence, the status of a County. Which his far too grand for a mere Baron to be of.

However, Witney might be somewhere too small for someone to be an Earl of. A Baron, yes, but an Earl? Two entire steps up?

Looking back, Earl of Stockton (Macmillan), but Stockton is much larger. Before that with PMs, Earl of Avon (umm, bloke with mustache), Earl Atlee (no geographic assignation) and pre-war I don’t know about.

He certainly can’t become Earl Cameron, half the Highlands would kill the other half over that.

So, if the Boy Dave does become and Earl, what would the Garter King at Arms (think he’s the right bloke to decide this) allow him to use as his title?

Actually, might be Clarenceux who makes that decision.

Strange but true story: I once woke up to find the wife of the then Clarenceux asleep on my sofa. I’d rented out the spare bedroom of my flat to a student from the university: deal was, no rent, but keep the place tidy, general light housework. Mother had come to make sure that’s all there was, this wasn’t to be an introduction to night time creeping.

Our anger over runaway top pay is more about merit than money

I have a suspicion, more strong than sneaking, that it isn’t actually.

Ah, comes the reply, but these are the cream of the international crop, among the very best bankers in the world. The commission report blows a hole in that tired argument, revealing there’s hardly any cross-border poaching of corporate talent. Not many of our monolingual high earners could work abroad and even fewer would want to. They like it here and do not have to be paid lottery jackpot money to stay.

That’s one of the biggest lies (as in, misleading use of statistics) in the report. Some 46% of FTSE100 CEOs are not British. Some unknown but high percentage of those bankers are not British. It’s not that we’re trying to stop ours going there, we’re in fact attracting them to here.

Strikingly, the commission found that even the mega-earners do not kid themselves they deserve their pay. They admitted that they had got lucky, that they worked no harder and risked no more than those earning much less.

As Mr. Dillow (pbuh) likes to point out, this is true of all of us. We all have a varied bundle of talents, likes and desires and some of us are lucky enough to be born into a time that values those specific bundles. Wayne Rooney would have been on a maximum £25 a week 60 years ago. Those of us who scribble for a part of our living might well have earned more 70, 80 years ago, given the profusion of papers that would pay for freelance work back then. Options traders would not have been paid much for that talent before the invention of options markets.

All of which is in fact entirely irrelevant. One of the things that markets really are good at is allocating resources to their highest value use. Sure, this is the highest value use as defined by those markets but so what? And what is a high value use clearly changes over time: footballers are more highly valued than they were, scribblers perhaps less so.

We need to revive the lost notion of merit and desert, to make those bagging huge, undeserved salaries feel a sense of shame or at least loss of reputation at such unwarranted rewards.

Which I think brings us to the heart of what is actually being whined about. What we’ve really got is one part of the urban upper middle classes mightily pissed off at another part. The relative values assigned by the market to different traditional career paths has changed and we’re seeing those relatively worse off as a consequence complaining.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the graduates of the top schools and universities, the grammar boys made good who followed them, would find that whichever of the various career paths they took the financial rewards would be rather similar. Accounting, law, medicine, the professions, off into one of the crafts that were socially acceptable like journalistic punditry (but never actual journalism you understand) into banking or The City, perhaps into business (those last two being socially inferior as they were alarmingly close to “trade”)….but only business as a manager of course, to actually start your own was akin to running a market stall…. the cash at the end of it all would be quite similar.

A top solicitor or barrister (the 80s had barristers on £1 million  a year) would make about the same as a CEO or City man, top surgeons with their private practices much the same. The four bedder in the Home Counties with the wife, paddock and pony grooming daughters, the flat in town with the mistress, success in any of the various acceptable careers would provide these. And near success, being good but not great, in any of the careers would similarly provide a similar standard of income and living across those different careers. KBEs to those who made it to the top in any of them, CBEs to those who nearly did. It all rather came out in the wash whatever the career chosen.

This is no longer true. London is home to the world’s international financial markets. Those in them, the bankers, those working alongside them, the lawyers and accountants, make multiples of what those writing Guardian columns do. Those running companies 50 times larger than those of old make multiples of what those writing the Indy do.

And that is what is driving this. The dorks who did sums are earning more than the intellectual people who worked at words and drama clubs. The nerds are getting more than the cool kids they went to school with. And that will never do, will it?

This is, as ever in England, a class thing. Just within a class rather than between them.

Deep-fried peasant with chips anyone? A chippy in Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk, is offering this novel dish, making use of those shot on local estates. I am inspired. Peasant is a difficult meat; with almost no integral fat, the flesh can be dry when roasted, needing a bucket of bread sauce and gravy to swallow. Destination deep-fat fryer is a great solution, with the breadcrumb coating holding in the meat juices. Fryer Marcus French is on to something. The winter peasant glut, tonnes of good value, free-range and nutritious meat, needs consuming, and even a fussy eater would enjoy these. Could this be the birth of a chain of KFPs?

There is value in this, yes. Although to make a real go of it as a business we’d have to extend the season so that it can be served year-round.

Hmm, no, perhaps that wouldn’t really work for we’d never get the free-range supplies over the long term if we interrupted the breeding season. Perhaps the solution would be to serve peasants half the year and hostages the other half?

A man who divided opinion without ever appearing to care much what anyone thought of him, he was simply an odd chap.

Yes, yes, he was. And this country needs more odd chaps.

As does every country, of course.

We’ve just lost one and who is going to step up?

I don’t really see myself as a mixed-race person, I see myself as an Englishman. It’s just such an unnecessary detail, I think.

Seal.

Quite, having gained the first prize ticket in the lottery of life why qualify it?

Did I ever tell you that Pops Worstall was in the Royal Navy?

Firstly you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own regarding their propriety. Secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and thirdly you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil.

Do note, implicitly, not explicitly. The point of the orders, not the orders themselves. What made Britain Great that.

Plus the hating Frenchmen, of course.

Another example is his use of stats to show the quality of life outside London, a famous phrase which those of us who enjoy it know to be true, but only in that vague, gut way that is anathema to statisticians.

With his colleague Bethan Thomas, he searched for gold-standard data that might apply and came up with benzine air pollution, crime figures, electricity consumption and malicious calls to the fire brigade. This partly playful but exceptionally reliable quartet made the City of London and Kensington and Chelsea the least desirable places to live in the UK, and Rotherham, Redcar and Barnsley the best.

That would be why 11,500 people live in The City and 230,000 live in RRB.