Why I’m very grateful to grammar schools

POLICE have, in the last two years, investigated eight UFO sightings in Lancashire and an alien abduction in Accrington which, before this, was most famous for its football team and making the densest bricks known to man.

Aliens lurking around Accy on a Saturday night might well get a few volunteers for abduction from revellers looking for more excitement than that available from the town’s nightlife, which has gone through a slump in recent years.

“Take me! Take me!” those waiting for the bus to Blackburn might shout.

Stories of abduction have been around ever since science fiction was invented, although none have been validated. Which is just as well for those HERESA May’s plans to build new grammar schools brought criticism from headteachers, who said they are fundamentally wrong, and the Labour Party, which described them as “an ideological attack on the working class”.

Trying to answer the question about grammar schools seems to throw up pros, cons and confusion and I was reminded of Monty Python’s Life of Brian: What did the Romans ever do for you?

Then I read a quote from John Prescott, a hero of mine, when he commented on failing his 11-plus examination: “I left school with no qualifications except an A plus in resentment.”

Which led him to a lifetime of fighting the Socialist cause and brought him a title.

Unlike Baron Prescott, I passed my 11-plus and went to grammar school. In 1952. I didn’t realise I was entering a system that favoured the children of the middle class and wealthy.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, reports suggested the system was failing working-class children. According to the Gurney-Dixon report of 1954, only a small proportion of those from a poor background went on to university. In 1965 Harold Wilson tried to phase them out and Tony Blair banned new ones from opening but England still has 164 grammar schools.

My background was working class, companies, here and in America, that have sold upwards of 40,000 abduction insurance policies, redeemable only if the claimant can prove they were taken and returned to Earth. They also cover alien pregnancy and alien examination.

Many abductees say they have been interfered with for the purpose of producing alien hybrids. Usually these intrusive incidents are not pleasant although Brazilian farmer Antonio Villas Boaz boasted the night he was abducted he was smeared with a Viagra-type gel and seduced by an attractive blonde alien lady. Several times.

A famous local abduction case in 1980 in Todmorden, not too far from Accrington, was taken more seriously because it involved a West Yorkshire strongly rooted in poverty and struggle. I was the first of our extended family who could afford to go to grammar school.

I went to St Michael’s College in Leeds, where the Jesuit regime was strict and the teaching was formal. A year later, we moved to Manchester and I went to De La Salle College. Both schools bobby. Under hypnotic regression he described being in an odd room which included a bearded man called Yosef, who questioned him telepathically, a black dog and strange small droids. Which sounds like the back room of quite a few hill pubs I’ve been in.

Another abductee claimed aliens had revealed the universe was not created by the Big Bang but a god-like creature called The One. Perhaps the hierarchy at Old Trafford should check what Jose Mourinho gets up to in his spare time.

There are, according to one theory, as many as a billion planets in our galaxy alone that are potentially habitable. But I don’t think any of them have so far sent probes to Brazil or Accrington.