Gill on Fish, and dyslexia

Whilst looking for the address of Fish Club*, a restaurant around the corner from my house which I wanted to review on Yelp, I came across a Times restaurant review that AA Gill did a while back. Whilst the review was useful, what was really interesting was the first two thirds or so of the review, where he was talking about dyslexia:

I was asked by the nice facilitator what dyslexia had ever done for me. I said it had given me a brilliant lifelong excuse not to do things. I’m excused forms. I don’t do phone numbers or thank-you cards. I don’t text. I’m not Sudoku-, crossword- or Scrabble-friendly. And I don’t do quizzes, tests or exams.

It's a good, down-to-earth and succinct dissection of people's attitudes to dyslexia, and as you would imagine, it skewers a few myths in the process (emphasis mine):

In truth, of course, dyslexics end up in the art room or the music studio or the drama class after school, because it’s the only place they aren’t special-needs remedial. They get good because they can’t do anything else. We can be every bit as culturally rubbish as you — it just tends to take us longer to find out.

...

The people who really suffer with dyslexia are parents — mostly mothers, who get hysterical about statementing and special teachers and vivas and computers with coloured screens. They hurry their frightened and guilty children around the small coterie of nice-little-earner experts who repeatedly make them do spatial-awareness tests and talk in quiet, smiley voices.

School is never going to be a place for a dyslexic. The spine of education is words and numbers. But if you can get over the English bourgeois, obsessive snobbery with hardback reading, and just remember that the vast majority of people who ever lived never read a line of Jane Austen, then dyslexia should be a problem that, while it’s worse than having an annoying laugh, isn’t nearly as bad as halitosis or premature ejaculation. If you’ve got it, get over it; if your kid’s got it, forget about it.

Whilst on the subject, I highly recommend Gill's book The Angry Island, which has a passage on War Memorials which should be part of the History syllabus.

*The Fish Club website has the nasty 'design' feature of re-sizing your browser window to 1024 pixels wide. I was tempted to dock a star from the Yelp review just for that...