Pinkie and Dave

I've been asked to look at Conservative Party policy and do a presentation to senior members of the Party sometime next month (hush hush, top secret when and where!) on the future of Conservative Party policy.

This has come at a most inconvenient time as I've just moved into the spare room of a local couple here in Ludlow, and still have my various resources packed into boxes. My hosts are a young couple, called Pinkie and Dave. Dave is a mobile sales trainer for a well known company and I can't quite work out what he does, but I think he drives around the country to various branches of the store (I got that bit right; I've seen his travel allowance cheques!), where (I think) he teaches people how to stack shelves.

Pinkie is on maternity leave, having recently given birth to their first child, is from the Far East, and has a psotgraduate degree in nursing, whereas Dave has a Level 2 NVQ in retail display. I've been living with them for a little while now a token effort to give him a qualification., and I've only ever seen them argue once, over their qualifications, in fact. He reckons that his qualification has more value as it's equivalent to a degree (although a quick phone call to Connexions, the careers advise people, proved him wrong; it barely has equivalence to a GCSE), and it's from the UK, rubbishing Pinkie's long years of study and training in one fell swoop. It seems he was sold the idea of doing an NVQ on the grounds that it apparently has a lot of value in the workplace. It seems the NVQ assessors 'bigged it up' to him far more than it was actually worth....

Maybe I should speak when I talk on policy about addressing New Labour's disastrous education policies, giving false hopes, how it's failing the people? Mind you, Dave seems to be doing all right out of it, with his travel expenses cheques.