free school meals

Basically, what Ian McMillan said. Never buck the Nameless Dread. It tells the truth. It may not be particularly expressive, but neither is a tail-warning radar and the two concepts are similar in function.

It's interesting how many people remember sharing school textbooks as a 1980s trope. It's my generation's version of "if you can remember the 60s you weren't there" - if you didn't share your textbooks, you didn't live the Thatcher years. I have a specific sense memory of the feel of the title page of a book that has been missing its cover for a while. Thinking about it, unsold books are stripped of their covers before being returned-for-credit to the publisher, so perhaps it wasn't wear and treat, and we had managed to get hold of some surplus stock.

Weirdly, although we couldn't afford books, we did have computers - BBC Micros, the wonderful machine designed by, among others, the man (Dr Christopher Evans) who J. G. Ballard glossed as "Dick Sutherland" in The Kindness of Women and, perhaps less of a friendly gesture, as "Robert Vaughan" in Crash, and a trans-woman (Sophie Wilson, later to work on Broadcom's DSL chipsets). So that probably explains 90% of this blog.

This is of course a convoluted way of getting around to saying that I'm quitting the Lib Dems, as should perhaps have been obvious earlier.