Encounters

Well, what a great weekend! Met some fab people and found the spark of my writing mind re-ignited.

Now I've just got to get the career going. Piece of piss, surely.

No time to tell you more - I'll come back tomorrow.

Jeb Bush, you have a lot to answer for...

Damn those butterfly's wings!

Just imagine that way back when in Florida, the presidential candidate had NOT been the brother of the Floridan Senator. Do we suppose that things might have been fractionally different now?

If those few Republican voted had not made the difference in the presidential campaign, then would Britain now be facing a situation where a chunk of British Islamic youth is so radicalised that MI5 estimates that there are some 30 plots to commit major terrorist outrages on our shores? Would race relations have become so unutterably strained that a climate of fear exists where religious divides, almost unknown for decades, have once again become regular fodder on the evening news bulletins?

How would Al Gore have handled the fall-out of 9/11? Would he have brought the world to this terrifying impasse? If he had become engaged in Afghanistan, would he have carried on the pursuit of Osama bin Laden to the point of capture? Or would he have been distracted by the filial desire to avenge his father's defeat and invade Iraq, arguably at the time the most secular country in the Middle East, insisting that Saddam had links with the cabal of militant Islamic terrorist cells which is collectively known as Al Qaeda? Would relations between West and Middle East, between Christianity and Islam, between Sunni and Shia be as dangerously stretched as they now are.

I don't think so.

Jeb Bush, I think you have a lot to answer for.

In freedom is power

Apparently, our children are the worst behaved in Europe. Our teenagers drink more, get into more fights and have more casual sex. We didn't need research to tell us that. A couple of trips abroad makes it painfully clear. We also know that they can be abusive, thieve, knock down anyone who argues with them or stops them doing what they want and con old ladies.

Except that, for the most part, they don't. Most teenagers are delightful. And for the fact that some of them do behave as badly as they do we can blame the chattering classes and woolly liberals. Of whom I am a full, paid-up member.

Let me cite as evidence a small piece which is reported in the paper today. The Head of a secondary school (sorry - Community College) in Cornwall has advised his students not to hug each other.

Mr Kenning says ""Hugging has become very acceptable amongst students.

"This has led to some students believing that it is OK to go up to anyone and hug them, sometimes inappropriately.

"This is very serious, not only for the victim, but also for anyone accused of acting inappropriately. To avoid putting anyone at risk, please avoid hugging."

Risk? Victim? This is hugging we're talking about here, not anthrax. You can be a victim of torture, a victim of drought or famine, of rape or murder. You cannot be a victim of hugging. To use the word 'victim' is to disempower, to reflect the disempowerment of an appalling fate. The man whose family starves because his crops has failed can do nothing about it and is a victim. The woman who is raped by a man more powerful than she in an alley can do nothing about it and is a victim. The child strung up and tortured can do nothing about it and is a victim. The more we extend the use of the word victim, the more we disempower.

Similarly, when we place more stress on rights than on responsibility, we disempower. There are certain basic human rights and those must be preserved at all costs. Common sense dictates what those are. If we say beyond those 'you have a right to happiness" which is, in effect what people now believe, you then by implication, tell people that they have no responsibility for their own lives, and therefore they are powerless. It is up to others to ensure that they become happy, by making sure that it is NOT ALLOWED that others should do things to upset them, thereby making them victims. I would support that everyone has a human right to shelter, enough food to eat, clean water to drink, protection from crime and persecution, education, free speech, freedom to worship, and other basics. I don't think that anyone has a right to a breast enhancement on the NHS, the right to be protected from harm while burgling someone else's property, the right to expect one's child to be educated in school in areas beyond the academic curriculum, the right to have a baby at whatever cost, the right to a tertiary education, the right to a bedroom per child on state benefits or the right to a tv and video, among others. If you want something, you should be allowed the sense of achievement which goes with getting it by your own efforts. That's the way you bring up a child. We're leaving too many adults in child-like state. And those badly-behaved teenagers are just living upto the hedonistic model which is set for them in the media and in common currency. Expect to have. Don't expect to work to get.

I'm a socialist. I believe in the mantra of "to each according to his work". I also believe in the idea of the emancipation through work, so beautifully expressed by George Gissing in his 19th century novel "The Odd Women".

Not so much as a shopping list

Writing that is. I haven't written so much as a shopping list since I last signed in.

Creative hiatus, I call it. Don't even pretend to do anything remotely artistic and suddenly the muse will come. That's the theory, anyway.

So I took myself and the children off with my friend and her children to their house in the Charente region of France. It's like stepping back in time to a rural 50s countryside where children can roam free on their bikes and visit friends or play endless make-believe games in the large, rambling back garden, utterly free of adult interference. The only time they were summoned back was when the neighbouring farmer warned us that there were hunters out in the fields. The hunters target small birds, but are renowned, due to the amount of the local liquor they imbibe from about seven in the morning, for hitting larger, more domestic prey such as cows, or small children. The kids put on a circus in the barn. The two eight year-old boys performed with their flower sticks and diablos, the two ten year-old girls showed of their trampolining and trapeze skills and the three year old performed some magnetic magic. The audience of two mums was suitably impressed. During the day we pootled around doing not much at all except making sure that food was on the table at the appropriate times and chatting over lots of tea and coffee. In the evenings, trying not to indulge in nicotine, we did Very Difficult Jigsaws, mainly composed of blocks of one colour, read, talked, and drank loads, so much that my liver hurt by the end of the holidays. We also, for some reason, found it incredibly difficult to go to bed, and were still up at one am, even when we'd decided to get an early night. As we were up with children at seven, I came back from the holidays knackered.

I know that when we came back from Wales I said that I really wanted a holiday home in Wales. Well, now I really want a holiday home in France. Either way I'll have to set about earning it. That, if nothing else, is a good spur to my creative endeavour.

It was also quite nice to miss my husband. We get so used to the daily grind of domestic life that we never really have time to think about each other. We've made that classic error of ignoring our own relationship in favour of our roles as parents and family.