I read in the national press that Barmy Bournemouth council has banned a driver from working as a cabbie - because he can't use apostrophes. Heck I’ve never even tasted one never mind used one, what’s that all about then eh?
Would be cabbie Laurence Kirk was denied a private hire driver licence after failing an English exam designed to test his grammar.
Although he has worked as a taxi driver before and knows the streets of his home town like the back of his hand, he was turned down because of his lack of grammatical knowledge.
Laurence, 50, says he is a victim of a new "barmy" test that Bournemouth Borough Council in Dorset has introduced.
All applicants have to pass a BTEC qualification in taxi driving and the council has designed its own English test to check if they are suitable.
Mr Kirk said the idea was potty because it did not test his driving skills and instead, questions included picking up grammatical errors in a written text.
'I used to be a taxi driver and I was a good and successful one', Mr Kirk said.
'But now the council are telling me I can't work as a taxi driver because I don't know how to use an apostrophe or where to put a semi-colon.
'No one has asked me if I know Bournemouth or what I would do if approached by a drunk person, just where to put an apostrophe.
The exam is designed to catch out foreign drivers who do not speak English. But obviously the loony council didn’t think that it would be a more sensible to have an oral English test. The horrible truth is that a lot of folk like me, for whom school is just a distant memory, do forget some of the more complex grammar. But by the same token a lot of the younger generation only seem to able to write in text speak, “if uno wot I mn m8.”
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