Compassion and community are things to cherish

I LOVE to see the lights at this darkest time of the year.

- Hilton Dawson

Then the excitement of the bairns, and the rest of us.Amongst all the tawdry advertising, the enduring sense of hope and goodwill, for everyone.

I've been writing a piece on what became of all sorts of people who have travelled a long way to live in Northumberland - and stayed.

It isn’t finished yet, but some of the examples are exhilarating, often in their sheer ordinariness.

Amongst some fancy titles in fancy online companies, there’s the school dinner lady, the supermarket cashiers, teaching assistants, the factory worker, carers, some nurses, a railway worker, people flipping burgers in their own business.

Then students - of engineering, of science, of sports management, the wonderful high aspirations of children still to face their GCSEs for dentistry, medical school, the police.

We'd be proud of them all, if they were ours. We can take pride in them all because they came here in fear, and so many of us are helping to build them hope.

It’s a funny thing, education - it changes lives.

Last weekend I met up with Matty, at a very radical, inspiring, highly inclusive founding conference in Liverpool.

We hadn’t seen each other for 50 years, since we graduated in philosophy & politics, from what was then the 'hotbed of student revolution' at the University of Warwick.

Goodness knows what happened to everyone else, but I think we were quite pleased that, fundamentally, we haven't changed.