Don’t come out, Mr Cameron!

Tags

Brexit, Conservative Prime Ministers, Cotswolds, David Cameron, Referendum, shepherd's hut, writer's retreat

… all is not forgiven.

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart. All Rights Reserved

The Last King of Scotland

Tags

Id Amin, Referendum, The Last King of Scotland, Writing to Review and Comment

Nigel was on prep duty in the Boarding House.  He was checking what

the boys were looking at on their computers in the study.

John Boothroyd-Smythe was typing away furiously.

Sorry, Mr Milford-Haven, I’ve got to get this finished for tomorrow.

We’ve been set a film review for English.  It forms part of the Writing

to Review and Comment component of the syllabus.

Well, you should have started it earlier.  It’s nearly cocoa time. Just

save and print it out.

He looked over the boy’s shoulder and wasn’t sure how to react.

His charge had integrated a picture from Wikipaedia.  Nigel hoped

that it was in the public domain.

He scanned the boy’s comments.  They seemed pretty factual and

declarative. He supposed that as a reviewer, he should have been

showcasing more evaluation skills to reach the higher tier, but it was

getting late.

Please can you check it over, sir, for punctuation and all that?

Okay.

And this was what the boy had written:

FILM REVIEW

THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND

Idi Amin was known to invent and adopt fanciful imperial titles for

himself, such as ‘His Excellency President for Life’, VC, DSO, MC Lord of

All The Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea; Conqueror of The

British Empire..

(Hmm… I bet he plagiarised that from somewhere…)

In the film, Amin admires Scotland’s resilience and resistance to those

south of the border.  He saw himself as avenging the Scots by defeating

the English.

He has a Scottish doctor and exchanges his own military shirt for the

physician’s Scotland shirt.

(Maybe he could have used a synonym here as the vocabulary was

becoming repetitive…)

Amin tells his practitioner (good word!) that he wants to modernise his

country’s health care system and explains that his cracking down on the

opposition is vital if lasting peace is to be brought to his country.

(Should the boy have inserted the adjective ‘perceived‘ in front of the

phrase ‘cracking down?‘  One has to be so careful as a writer.

It’s a bit declarative, but it will have to do.  Maybe your class teacher will help

you to develop your evaluation skills a bit further.  Anyway, that’s enough

for now.  Bed!

He wished they would all settle down as he wanted to watch the results

of the Referendum.  Being half-Cornish, it would be interesting to see how

Nationalists fared.  But he didn’t think he would be persuaded to join

a separatist movement.

Oh no!  It suddenly dawned on him what the boy might be insinuating.

Was he imagining it, or…?

Actually, he would let the English teacher deal with it.  There was no denying

it: the kid was clever, if devious and able to cover his back, whatever he did.