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A Burning Issue 2
Festival Reborn? 4
Martin Rowson 5
Good Neighbours 5
News in Brief 6
The Hasidim 8
Straight to the Point 11
Fluid Federation 12
George Alagiah 13
Girls Go Shopping 14
Old Kids 16
Christmas Treats 17
Council Sketch 20
Stokey, My Stokey 20
Gourmet Guide 22
Festive Gigging 24
Christmas Quiz 27
Auld Shillelagh 28
Pretty Ironic 29
Scrooge 29
Surfing N16 30
Winter Herbs 33
Bublicious 35
Garden Presents 36
North Bank 37
Crossword 38

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OnLine Edition
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straight to the point

Sue Heal

p11

I know I've a small reputation for leaping from the perambulator over certain Stokey issues but the latest Hackney schools debacle takes even my breath away.

At the start of this term there were over 80 11-year-olds languishing at home in N16 because no secondary place could be found for them in the locality. And the situation is on course to get considerably worse. Stokey Comp, or Stoke Newington Tap Dancing Fame Academy as I believe it likes to be called, is monstrously oversubscribed with a sizeable pocket of Islington kids having fled the truly dire sink secondaries in their home borough. Personally I think the comp is just Flavour Of The Month and from what I hear has some serious problems which are being swept aside in the frantic race! for a place ­ any place ­ which isn't in the wilds of E5 with flick-knives optional. But I digress.

The fact is if you don't live in a campavan parked outside the gates you can forget Stokey Comp. And as 80-odd parents have recently discovered can be reduced to gazing balefully at a depressed Archie or Amy across the kitchen table, struggling with logarithms for the first time in 30 years while work goes hang. This magazine would like to hear first hand from these parents and maybe an apparatchnik from Hackney Council might grace us with a word or two?

By the way, I bumped into the parent of a 10-year-old this week recently moved from N16 who used to vigorously sing the praises of Stokey's most fashionable primary. She and hubby were called to see said son's new head in Westminster (bog standard ! state) and told bright Little Jimmy was roughly 18 months behind the national average for his year group and would be playing serious catch up for some time to come. 'Apparently, Sue, he can paint wonderfully expressive pictures but has no idea where to put a comma.' Scales had not merely fallen but been ripped from her eyes. I suppose if you shovel them straight into the Comp you're none the wiser.

'Sod the planet', said I, 'show me the napalm.'

•  The council have been round our gaff this week. A deeply eccentric man from Pest Control arrived to zap the mouse/mice who are now cosied up on the sofa watching Eastenders with us. I am utterly mortified of course but he assured me 'you ain't The Chosen One darlin', Stoke Newington is bloody rife'. I'd already galloped round to KAC where I was shown a vast arsenal for rodent destruction. Apparently, the best seller by far in this ecologically sound neck of the woods is a politically correct, non- poisonous, Heath Robinson-style sticky pad. 'Sod the planet', said I, 'show me the napalm.' There is now enough poison scattered around my house to keep Al Qaida going for the next 6 months.

•  It's like when you go into Fresh and Wild and they ask you very pointedly whether you'd like a carrier bag. Inference being they'd rather you masturbated with a crucifix in the main aisle. No, actually I'm in training for Zippo's and thought I'd juggle these 27 cartons and bottles up Church Street. God knows why they bother when every other supermarket on the block hands you an instantly breakable carrier bag if you buy so much as a box of matches.

•  At least the skies over N16 appear finally to have lost their Blitz-like glow. For weeks on end it's been like living in downtown Kosovo with enormous fireworks rending the air each night. Apparently the source is a gunpowder palace i.e. firework shop on the High Street across from Bar Lorca with incendiary competition from one on Newington Green.

Just what the disaffected youth of Stokey have been yearning for ­ weapons of mass destruction. I'm off to pay a visit there, re the mouse.

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