A little foresight, that's all it takes

I made a mistake today. I went with mum to see her mum (my grandmother) in a nursing home, an hour before midday. As it's easiest to get there by bus, that is the mode of transport we usually take, as opposed to walking. However, we chose to go today, the first day of the schoolkids holiday. We waited at the bus stop forty-five minutes for a bus that is supposed to come every fifteen. On my terse inquest with the driver when he did turn up, he said it was traffic gridlock. That's because everyone has to take their children down to the riverside or to the beach in their cars; it's no use thinking that people might forgo their cars on such a lovely day. Oh no, that's far too much. The irony is, people in cars complain about all the cars on the road. The driver also had to pick up a lot of families and each time he did so, he had to go back into the traffic gridlock, but only a little down the queue, so the bus right behind was virtually empty. Of course, it wouldn't be so empty and there wouldn't be so much of a traffic logjam if some people got out of their cars and used it.
Rather interesting factoids I heard on the radio today. Twenty years on from the last analysis, a sociologist, with some yardstick, came up with the hundred most important journalists in the country. It wasn't too hard - there are so many prominent journalists to near enough complete a century, anyway. A striking figure though was that the number of these journos who had been to private school had gone up from 46% in 1986 to 54 of the list today. This is despite private schools educating only 7% of the population. The journalistic trade isn't quite as bad as Oxbridge where 60% of graduates come form private schools, but, when questioned, the people on the list believed that the proportion of journalists who came from a background of priviledge would incraese in the future. There are a variety of reasons: wealthy youths can work on the notoriously low pay of the early years, those from priviledge have more access to back channels allowing a way into the profession, but the biggest reason for why the number is on the rise is because of the abolition of most grammar schools. This meant that people from poor backgrounds couldn't get top-notch education because without a grammar school, the only recourse was to a private school which, of course, the poor couldn't afford and their references therefore were not as lofty as those whose parents could afford private schools. And as more and more who had a private education get in, they'll recruit others of their ilk who they can associate with. I think that's wonderful - the Labour government of the sixties and seventies abolishing grammar schools to create an elitist news trade. You might say this is the result of the law of unintended consequences, but as old Labour figures continue to bang on about completing the process and putting an end to all grammar schools one might think it was all planned for this to happen.