Call yourself English - if you have won life's lottery

The daily telegraph is lecturing its mostly English readership on calling themselves British. Given that such loyalties are not forthcoming from the Scots, Welsh and Irish - it can only be seen as an attempt to fool the English into being the fall guys of the Union.

I have said this before - but I'm going to repeat it. I'm in favour of the Union, but it must be a positive Union based on justice, fairness, common culture and purpose. Now that three of the home nations have been given recognition it is time for the forth and main nation to get the same respect.

Call me English, restore my parliament and provide again justice to the people of England that existed before devolution - then I may also call myself British.

The English are being asked to keep their eyes shut and hum loudly as the other nations have a party at our expense and are allowed to celebrate their identity and culture when campaigns are arranged to suppress ours.

Grasp of English

Man in a Shed's chosen career has been in Chemical Engineering. This is down to an enthusiasm for science at school and then the realisation that applied science and engineering were a lot of fun. ( Burning motors at that back of the lab as you rewire them, re-routing oxygen to your bunsen burner to get better combustion, spending 2 days rewiring a combination switch - just to prove that an extra digit could be used and seeing just how many of the power cells you can wire up in series before the physics teacher catches you ).

However - the English language continues to be a bit of a mystery. A case in point here has been my use of the term ex-patriot rather than expatriate to describe PragueTory, IstanbulTory and The Last Ditch. Firstly my apologies to all three - their patriotism is not in question ! And I'd have to ask for previous offences to be taken into consideration, specifically when taking a school entrance exam at 11 when is mistook the words corporal and capital punishment and wrote an essay which had, in effect, executions being handed out for dropping litter. ( The exam did not go well - but if enacted it would have kept the pavements clear ! )

Man in a Shed takes the view that he must try harder - and is quite happy to be corrected. We all have weak points and I'd like to improve on mine. Though I do believe English is an evolving language - and I'm quite happy to contribute to that evolution ;-)

When at school I was diagnosed with dyslexia, and had a note to hand into the exam board (made no difference that I could tell - there were no concessions from the Oxford Delegation Board in those days ). At 'A'-levels I refused to hand it in ( much to my mothers disapproval ) - my reasoning was I had to compete in the outside world on the same basis as everyone else, and would just need to work harder at the language aspect.

Now if I can only get my daughters teacher to start correcting her spelling and mirror writing ....

PS There's a limit of course. Marks out of Ten, and notes to see me later" in comments will just get deleted ....