Keeping to the rules!

Some time ago I read about hotels losing money because of people leaving without actually checking out and therefore not paying the bill. Do they sneak out with their bags before anyone has a chance to see them go? The hotel equivalent of the moonlight flit. I imagine the receptionist stopping guests and asking just where they are going with the suitcase.

I was reminded of this because I just read about a bunch of Italians in Pamplona who tried to do a runner from a restaurant and were made to go back and settle the bill: €620! That's rather a lot of money for a restaurant to lose in one night. There were fifteen in the group but still, that's over €40 apiece. You see, we simply would not have gone to a restaurant with those sorts of prices!

Teachers, even retired teachers, can't afford such things. And now our government is insulting teachers once again by restricting their proposed pay-rise to 1%. I wonder if they will ever realise that if you want quality public service workers you need to play them properly. Fortunately for the government there are still enough people who feel inspired to go and work in schools and hospitals. How long will it last.

Here's a link to another bit of nonsense about schools: testing pupils. The gist of it is that primary school pupils might well learn to punctuate properly and understand when to use a semicolon (something that many adults find really difficult) but if they don't make a perfectly formed comma or semicolon, with the tail of the comma facing in the right direction and the dot of the semicolon at just the right height, they may lose marks. If you have to insert punctuation into a printed text it can be extremely difficult to make the mark in a perfectly neat way, especially if your teachers and parents have stressed you out about the whole thing! Don't the "experts" who oversee the marking of tests realise this? This is not testing but trapping!

But I mustn't get started on the whole issue of testing. Not good for anybody's blood pressure!

I also read recently about female journalists being expelled from the White House press room because of inappropriate dress. Apparently the women concerned were wearing sleeveless dresses. It is summer after all! But female journalists' arms and shoulders are deemed disrespectful. Or maybe it's only the kind of female journalists who might tell "false news" stories. Maybe they should start to carry tasteful stoles to cover their bare arms, as many women tourists do when visiting Italian churches. Or perhaps the White House could invest in those paper cover-ups that some churches, again Italian, hand out as you enter if they deem you to be showing toomich flesh!

I was reminded of our trying to visit the Vatican one summer holiday and Phil being denied entry because of his knee-length shorts! So a middle-aged man's knees are offensive to the Lord, are they?! 

Strangely enough, having read about this dress code business, I then saw Kellyanne Conway on the news, standing outside the White House in a sleeveless dress! Shock! Horror! Perhaps she too had been expelled!