Monday

For much of the evening I sat at home watching the news channels as Notre Dame burned. A compulsive mixture of horror and disbelief as centuries of history and culture went up in flames. Even its partial loss diminishes us all. But I was also struck by how emotionally caught up I was in the fire, even though I had never actually been inside the building, as on previous trips to Paris the queues to get in had appeared never-ending.

I certainly never felt such a personal sense of connection when York Minster and Windsor castle were gutted by fire. On both occasions I just felt, “that’s a shame”, and got on with my day. The act of watching a disaster unfold in real time – the shock of a collapsing spire – changes the nature of the experience. Either that or I am going soft.

I also couldn’t help feeling that the UK government has missed a huge trick by not offering to make a small donation towards the rebuilding of Notre Dame. Having just spent £4bn on preparing for a no-deal Brexit that the government clearly had no intention of ever allowing to happen, it wouldn’t have been too much to ask for the UK to give £10m as a symbolic gesture. Not only would it have been an acknowledgement that the cathedral is part of the UK’s own heritage – Henry VI of England was crowned king of France there in 1431 – it would have been the perfect statement that we may be leaving the European Union, but we are still very much a part of Europe.

Tuesday

Jeremy Corbyn has announced that Labour will get rid of Sats if it wins the next general election – and immediately scores of education traditionalists are declaring this to be the end of days. Standards will fall! Children need to get used to the pressure of being tested! These are just two of the arguments that have been rolled out. Having worked on the education desk at the Guardian for more than 10 years from the mid-90s, please allow me to say a polite “Bollocks” in reply.

For a start, Sats were never introduced to measure a child’s performance: their purpose was to be a blunt instrument for measuring how well a school was doing. Making it all about pupils is just mission creep. Then there’s the more important issue of pupil intake. An inner-city school that has a high percentage of special needs children and children who speak English as a second language are always going to have an uphill struggle to match the attainment levels of a more middle-class catchment area. The league tables were slightly modified with a “value-added score” to reflect this, but no school had much faith in the methodology and it’s still the headline Sats scores by which primary schools are judged. And as a poor set of results means schools get financially penalised as well as Ofsted on their back, it’s no wonder that many spend much of their time teaching purely to the tests and that cheating by teachers is widespread.

I’m all for measuring pupils’ progress. It’s just there are many better ways than Sats.

Wednesday

Not quite sure I’ve yet recovered from what some observers are calling the best football game ever played. When I set off for Manchester at lunchtime, I did ask myself why I was bothering to make the 400-mile round trip to see Spurs almost certainly lose to one of the best and most expensive teams ever assembled. A feeling that only deepened when the journey up took the best part of five and a half hours – how come everyone else was inconsiderately bunking off early for their Easter hols? – and Tottenham went 1-0 down inside the first four minutes.

What followed was the most extraordinary, tensest game I’ve ever seen and by the final whistle I was a total mess. Just minutes earlier it looked as if Spurs had thrown away the tie in typically Spursy fashion when a tired back-pass gifted City a fifth goal, only for it to be ruled out by VAR. Despair had turned to one of the greatest nights in the club’s history in a 190-bpm heartbeat. And I was there. One for the bucket list.

So Spurs go onwards to a Champions League semi-final, though whether we’ll have a team to play Ajax is another matter as so many of our squad are injured. I’m available, if selected. The journey home flew by, though it did occur to me that if Spurs do make the final I won’t be able to go as I am due to be at the Hay festival that weekend. It’s good to round off a triumphant night with an edge of regret.

Thursday

With the new Brexit party currently polling somewhere in the low to mid-20s (depending on which poll you believe), it is on course to challenge Labour for the highest share of the vote in next month’s European elections. A remarkable achievement for a brand new party. But what’s also astonishing is the free ride Nigel Farage has been given both by many sections of the media and the public.

Farage’s new narrative, that he is just some kind of ordinary local hero who happens to be angry at the way career politicians have tried to stop Brexit, has been left almost unchallenged. He is the saviour who is going to deliver the no-deal Brexit that everyone apparently voted for. The fact that he has no policies and the country would be worse off is an irrelevance.

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This time round, he has also made a point of not mentioning immigration: Brexit is now about sovereignty, not numbers. So time for a quick reality check. Farage is the very definition of a career politician – 20 years an MEP, a former Ukip leader and a man who seven times tried and failed to get elected to Westminster. He has also spent the last few years making a good living on the US far-right TV chat show circuit sharing platforms with conspiracy theorists, and during the 2016 referendum promoted racist advert campaigns and made false claims on immigration.

The Brexit party has also struggled with racism. Its first leader and its treasurer both had to be removed even before the party had its launch after they were found to have made Islamophobic and antisemitic comments respectively. It’s equal opportunities of sorts.

So vote for Farage if you must. Just don’t be under any illusions about the company you will be keeping.

Friday

My mother and father were not the best with money. A quality I have had the misfortune to inherit. Given the choice of making a good investment or a mediocre one, I will invariably choose the latter. Partly because I’m a bit clueless – as I have mentioned before, I must be one of the few people to have mis-sold myself my own mortgage endowment policy during my short, ill-fated career as an insurance salesman – but mainly because I’m a bit lazy and work on the principle that doing anything must be better than doing my default option of nothing.

So when our children were born, my wife and I took out a savings plan for both of them in the hope we might be able to give them some money when they need it. Our daughter, Anna, has long since used hers up, but Robbie’s is still going. Just about.

This week I got a letter from Sun Life saying they are winding up the fund in which his money is invested because it’s been a bit rubbish for some years. And they now recommend switching to a better performing fund that has lower administration charges. Which is kind of them, I suppose, though I can’t help feeling it would have been more thoughtful of them to have let me known they had been overcharging me for a poor service rather earlier. I live and don’t learn.

Happy Easter everyone.

Digested week: Out of the ashes.