U and Pre-U
Sir: I am, as a student approaching the A2 year, sick with envy at the small number of my friends lucky enough to be currently taking the Pre-University course. Not only did John Witheridge (‘An answer to the A-level debate — and Gary Lineker’, 28 August) succinctly describe the previous year of school for me with ‘spoon-fed coursework, punctuating and confusing the learning process with obsessive assessment’, but he also displayed the far more appealing alternative in the Pre-U syllabus. While I continue to attempt to meet the endless, pointless ‘Assessment Objectives’ of A-levels, it appears that Pre-U students enjoy a far more rigorous, yet encouragingly independent, form of learning. At A-level I expected to have the chance to immerse myself in my chosen subjects after the intense boredom of regurgitating set phrases at GCSE. However, I was disappointed that my short period of enjoying these subjects was punctured by AS exams, which were just as uninspiring as the GCSEs. If given the choice, I would have no qualms about choosing the Pre-U.
Lara Johnson
London N1
Tagging after
Sir: Heaven knows what will become of the coalition’s new policy to combat crime by having fewer police (‘Law and Disorder’, 21 August) and, in particular, handing out ‘community sentences’ to lesser offenders rather than sending them to prison. In over 35 years of prison visiting I have seldom befriended an inmate who had not done a ‘community sentence’ of one sort or another before reaching their cell in HMP Wandsworth or wherever. My experience inclines me to share Professor Ken Pease’s view that the shock of arrest and one month in custody would save us 60,000 offences a year, especially if the law moved at twice its present pace. Community sentences are already running at 186,000, an increase of 40 per cent in a decade.
But now Ken Clarke, our Justice Minister, has a further tool which could make a deal of difference. This is the GPS Tracking Tag. Largely unobserved by the media, this invaluable device, the idea of which we took to the Home office nearly 30 years ago, was piloted on the initiative of the blind, if far-seeing, home secretary David Blunkett six years ago, running from 2004 to 2006, in three areas of England. It was evaluated, essentially favourably, by Professor Stephen Shute of Birmingham University, in 2007. Magistrates and judges deemed it useful. Offender managers were positive. Even offenders themselves agreed that being monitored day in, day out helped to keep them out of trouble. The only reason the previous government did not follow up this admirable project was their fear of electoral penalties from a tagged offender committing a serious crime while on the tag.
In practice, that very seldom happens, as can be shown from experience in the US, where the tracking tag has become since 1998 a fact of penal life in a majority of states, and where some 40,000 offenders are today serving tracking tag sentences under satellite tagging.
Tom Stacey
Director, Offender’s Tag Association, London W8
An unconventional marriage
Sir: It was very good to see Ian Thomson’s excellent review of Paul Bowles’s Travels (Books, 28 August) but, as editor of the collection, may I add one correction? The review suggests that Paul Bowles ‘consigned [his wife Jane Bowles] to a psychiatric hospital’ out of envy at her alcoholic friendship with Tennessee Williams, and that she ‘passed her time [there] playing ping pong’. This is very far off the mark. Paul and Jane Bowles had an unconventional marriage — both had primarily same-sex sexual relationships and they lived in separate flats, one above the other, in Tangier — but as any reading of their letters will show, they were devoted companions. Paul arranged for Jane to be looked after in a clinic in Malaga as a last resort, and several times took her back to Tangier against medical advice. The sad truth was that Jane became unable to live independently, or with the support of Paul and other friends in Tangier (where she refused to eat and lay prone on the floor of Paul’s flat). She died at the Malaga clinic in 1973, paralysed and virtually blind, with Paul at her side.
Jane Bowles’s life was a tragedy but she did produce an extraordinary novel, Two Serious Ladies — which Tennessee Williams claimed was his favourite book. We have just put this back into print, for anyone curious to read the ‘other’ Bowles.
Mark Ellingham
Sort of Books, London NW3
Cat therapy
Sir: I was bemused by Celia Haddon’s suggestion (Letters, 28 August) that what Theo Morgan really needs to subdue his feline menace (‘I want to kill my cat’, 21 August) was a ‘cat behaviourist’, and then signs herself off as exactly that. I am appalled that The Spectator should allow itself to be tricked into publishing pompous missives which imply that the writer has the only sensible solution to a reported problem, in this case an insane cat running amok.
Mark Ribbands
Senior explosives engineer, Norfolk
Nobody’s perfect
Sir: It is a pity that in Nicky Campbell’s otherwise sparkling diary (21 August) he confused Tony Curtis with Jack Lemmon as Osgood Fielding III’s love interest in Some Like It Hot. As Fielding himself said, ‘Nobody’s perfect!’
Tim Gorrod
Co. Antrim
A few from down under
Sir: Toby Young’s correction (Letters, 21 August) to the ‘only Toffs flew Spits’ myth mentions the Czechs, Poles etc who were among ‘the Few’, but neglects to mention the Australians and New Zealanders, who were also there in strength and in disproportionately high numbers as usual when heavy lifting was required to save the motherland. This group was perhaps personified by the dashing cricketer Keith Miller, who in later life went on to help win the Ashes and also bring a twinkle to the eye of Princess Margaret.
Chris Wetherall
Sydney
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