He has been commissioned to paint portraits of the Royals starting next month with the Duke
He has been commissioned to paint portraits of the Royals, starting next month with the Duke of Edinburgh and followed by Prince Charles and the Queen and Queen Mother sometime next year. Among current QEST winners is Charlotte de Syllas, an East End jewellery maker, who was awarded pounds 10,000 to cast intricate glass forms on a delicate scale. She has already spent six months studying this method at the University of Wolverhampton, which houses one of the country's leading glass research units. Age, by the way, matters not to the Trust (Charlotte is 53; the youngest winner was 19).
What matters is pride in one's craft and the desire to take it still further Awards range from pounds 2,000 to pounds 15,000. So, if you think you stand a chance to bag a millennium scholarship, all it will cost you is a 31p stamp to stick on an A4 reply envelope. Send it to The Secretary, The Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust, 1 Buckingham Place, London SE1E 6HR Applications must be completed by 17 January 2000. Go to it. Zucker and spice: Perhaps I should not have read A Class Act on train journeys. It was written by a couple of primary teachers called Jonny Zucker and David Parker and claims to be "the funniest book about teaching ever written.. with some serious bits in between".
I kept begging it to make me laugh but found my eyes straying to the doings of fellow passengers and the passing landscape The book reflects too much truth to be funny But then, so did Yes, Minister, which was hilarious. And The Other Side of the Dale, by Gervase Phinn, reviewed here on 8 April, is vastly funnier. Yet A Class Act (Sapphire Publishers, PO Box 22715, London N22 7WH, pounds 5.99) has its moments of glory, such as some of its definitions: "A graduate... is someone who has managed by talent or trickery to convince some collegiate body somewhere to part with another certificate." The new teacher asks: "What shall I do with the remaining 75,200 hours of my working life?" Too true to be funny. I found the "serious bits in between" - verbatim interviews with Chief Inspector Chris Woodhead, his leading adversary, Birmingham's education boss Tim Brighouse, and union leaders Doug McAvoy (NUT) and Nigel de Gruchy (NAS/UWT) - a great deal funnier, simply because none of these chaps seemed capable of smiling.Shelling out prizes: The first I knew of the large number of grants made available by an oil company for local projects to improve the countryside was on a recent trip to Scotland. At Kinloch Rannoch, with its grand loch and majestic Schiehallion mountain, I came across a book, Rannoch, New and Old, produced by a handful of children, Clare Ellis, Martin Grant, Janice Morrison, Samantha Paul and James Shorthouse, pupils of Kinloch Rannoch School, and beautifully illustrated by Janet Barr, one of this lovely town's older residents.