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At the chalkface: London Calling

Teaching staff
Cities are good for you. Any fule kno this. We’re a mongrel island, a mongrel city. Of course there are tensions and anxieties, but we must surely be true to the better angels of our nature and not be seduced by a Farrago of fear. There’s too much good to

They’re shrieking high, talking trash and checking their cells, as they walk past Nail Bars, Tattoo Parlours, Polish builders, a Latvian Computer Garage, a Moroccan fishmonger, an Italian Coffee bar – “sixth cup free” – and an emporium peddling Jerk Chickens to the music of King Tubby. Many pupils munch on culinary catastrophes.

Delivery boys flirt in vain with the girls at the bus stop by Sainsbury’s. Small boys josh, push and put each other in headlocks, before storming the 52 bus. Their ties are skew whiff, their trousers too long and their sentences unfinished and mostly in Martian. A doe-eyed 10th year girl moons over a floppy locked 6th form boy. They’re the only ones not laughing.

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