[Acrylic-bob]

English, the queen of languages, is so complex and refined that it affords it's speakers the ability to express themselves with a precision and elegance unavailable in any other language. It is crisp, succinct and melifluous. It is the language of Shakespeare and Dryden, of Byron and Shelly. Using it, Wilfred Owen wrote the epitaph for a doomed generation and Churchill spurred the next generation on to war. It is a language that has been developed and refined through thirteen hundred years of English history. It enables, and is at the foundation of, the current technological revolution, permitting us the luxury of almost instantaneous global communication. As a nation we spend billions of pounds every year educating our children in the use of this language. So that, by its mastery, they may master the challenges that the world may offer them.

How galling it is, then, to see that expenditure of time and resources, aspirations and dreams, flung in our faces.