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I'm sure everyone reading this would want to wish the cast of the Monty Python spin-off musical, Spamalot, all the very best in their world record attempt in Trafalgar Square on Monday. They aim to beat the world record for the largest ever coconut orchestra, by getting the public involved in playing "Always look on the bright side of life". In case you were wondering - the current record is held by them too.

Yes, they have officially registered their attempt with Guinness World Records. Those wanting to know what to expect can find photos of the previous world record, which was established on Broadway last year.

Those who were on Lymington holidays with me in the late 1990s will immediately know which member of the Oak Hill teaching staff really ought to be going along to take part. His part in the "Old Hag" sketch was always done with finesse. (No, I'm not talking about Mike - although I suspect he would rather enjoy being at the world record attempt, if he had the time).

So: All the best to them!

"Within the context of this vision 'the end' (19) need not be 'The End', the ultimate end of history. The earlier Hebrew prophets used the term 'the end' to indicate the end of a particular evil state of affairs or the final day of reckoning for a particular people (e.g. Amos 8:1-2). Sometimes what might seem to be 'end of the world' language is used of such events, though they clearly occur within history (e.g. Is. 13:9-22). These events within history are seen as foreshadowing the final day of reckoning, rather than being simply identified with it. This may be the case with the dreams and visions of Daniel, though at the end of the final vision there is a 'fusing' of the horizons of the end of Antiochus' career and the end of history."

This won’t make sense to many of you – except Jam

I just received my phone call from a recent pupil of the secondary school I went to. They’re phoning round us all to keep us up to date and to ask for money for their new maths and science building. Yes – it does need replacing. The old one’s drafty. Especially when the windows are left open. With snow on the ground outside.

I’ve just read (in the transcript online – I’d got home long before this point) Andrew Brown’s conclusion to the programme:

But what can we change? What should our arrangements be? We can’t disentangle the problems of children from those of adults. The government, too, sends families mixed messages. They are to be, in Gordon Brown’s great phrase, “hard working families”. But do the hardest-working families have the happiest children? The evidence suggests that they don’t and that it’s the family which plays together that stays together. In fact it’s hard to resist a rather heretical conclusion. Most of what we have seen as the peculiar horrors of modern childhood seem to arise from a lack of authority: they can, in shorthand, be blamed on the Sixties. But that was a complicated decade, with good as well as bad; and one of the distinctive attitudes of the Sixties was a distrust of money, and a belief that material success should not be the measure of everything. We’re never going to get away from a society that cares about status. But one in which status is measured only by material success makes us, and our children, needlessly miserable.

Slightly technical article here, but I post it just in case anyone else has been getting infuriated by the same thing I have been infuriated by.