Articles by Jane Kelly

Last week the BBC Trust ruled that during one of its children’s programmes in the BBC ‘Learning Zone,’ Florence Nightingale was shown racially discriminating against the travelling Afro-Caribbean cook Mary Seacole. Of mixed race, she called herself a ‘yellow woman,’ and set up cafes for soldiers on the battlefield. She was never a nurse but wrote an interesting book about … [Read on]

I began my day by walking to Tescos, it’s a small one and much of the meat sold in there is Halal, or very cheap frozen chicken which is unlabelled. But I can buy a limited range of fish there, and all the food outlets near to me are Halal. So it’s this shop or a drive or bus ride … [Read on]

One of the saddest things I heard this year, was the voice of someone working in a ‘care’ home, after the cases of abuse were reported in Rotherham and Rochdale. ‘There is no love on offer in children’s homes,’ he said flatly. ‘That is the one thing that we cannot give.’

First the coincidences, showers of them making me tingle. Today I was even looking in a mirror examining my nose when a voice from the radio started talking about Cyrano de Berjerac. There was a strange sense of time speeding up, and after that came the news of drastic change. Last Tuesday, 23rd, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, … [Read on]

Together we look at the things she has in two glass fronted cupboards. There are one or two things there which I really love and as she has now decided to sell her house, she wants me to have them. There is the black cat tea pot from the 1920s, with a badly glued crack in its red collar. ‘You … [Read on]

Columnist Jemima Lewis, aka Mrs Dimbleby, is an interesting example perhaps of the way newspapers have changed over the last twenty years, and reflects something of how society has shifted too, from vulgar meritocracy of the Thatcher years, when all journalists including feature writers had to leave the office to investigate and write stories, to well – what we have … [Read on]

I was in Morrison’s yesterday and noticed several stacked rows of Lindt chocolate bunnies wrapped in gold paper, lined up in their boxes horizontally, except many of them weren’t; their little chocolate bodies replaced by bunny shaped empty spaces, as many of them had been nicked, purloined, and guzzled before getting anywhere near the till. As I had heard that … [Read on]