Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Next project.

1. "Colin - Seven Ages of a Man" tracing the life of a man in seven loves, in the form of seven loosely linked novellas.

2. An adaptation for the screen of the classic novel by George Gissing "The Odd Women" in which he argues for the women's emancipation primarily through work rather than primarily through suffrage.

3. "My Perfect Life" a comedy for the screen about a woman who loses everything and goes to a life coach to try and start all over again.

Decisions, decisions.

Monday, December 29, 2008

Life imitating art, imitating a facsimile of life.

I've always been fascinated by the twin themes of memory and identity. It's what my book is about, the idea that you are everyone you have ever met and everything you have ever done. Not massively original, I know. Some French chaps called Sartre and de Beauvoir among others got there ahead of me about forty years ago. It was a favourite part of my French degree course and I've never grown out of Existentialism, although I do still think it's quite an elitist philosophy, in that people who have the opportunity to experience a great deal will therefore have the opportunity to 'be' more.

Anyway, I digress. My twist on it is that I think you are everything you think happened to you. Our brains work in very complex ways and I have no faith at all in the reliability of memory. Recently, to explore this a bit, I've made contact with lots of people I used once to know in previous lives. Their memory of the small period of time in which our orbits crossed is invariably different to mine, and not just in small ways. A guy I went out with when I was twenty apologises to me for having treated me badly when for years I have felt badly about my treatment of him. Another friend remembers me as being a frail thing, when I remember a bolshy, spiky person inhabiting my body. One woman whom I have always described as a former best friend from my first year of secondary school before I was sent back to boarding school, although she tried hard to cover it up, quite clearly has no recollection of me at all from that time (yes, I did suss you, Jax!)

My friends have always laughed at my habit of 'unhappening' things, and maybe I unhappened a lot of things I don't want to recall. I wonder what else I hold in my head is objectively true and what has been warped in my mind to fit some kind of desirable reality. Or maybe everyone else is wrong... It's probably a bit of both, but none of us will ever know, will we?

"The past is no longer the past" said one friend (he who apparently used me ill) when he responded to me on Facebook, and he's quite right. Ten years ago before the internet and social networking sites I would be happy with my construct of the past, would never have questioned it. People in my life would have come and gone and though I'd have wondered about them (as I do) I'd never ever see them again, or have a potted update of their lives from across the pond, across the years. I've been so shaken by this whole discovery that I think I'm going to curtail my searches and lave the past where it should be. In my head.

But I'm still left with the quandary as to how I ended up being the person I am today. Although in a way the fact that we take a more active part in constructing our own pasts means that we're all more intense versions of ourselves than we thought, because we have taken our own experiences and distilled them through a process of filtering out or adapting what we don't want to recall to create a very personal version of ourselves.

Might have to rewrite the book a bit... I think I make this idea implicit and maybe it needs to be a bit more explicit. In previous attempts at books I thought I was hitting people over the head with an idea and they haven't got it.

The slightly weird postscript to this, which I won't explore here, is that things I write about keep happening to me. Can't help feeling it's all linked with the above...

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Oh dear...

I think I'm too thin-skinned to do this blog any more. Being accused of being Daily Mail-ish makes me think a) I must be shocking at framing my thoughts cogently, and b) Oh I don't know - I obviously don't know myself.

Volunteered to work with teenagers in care trying to help them practically in the transition from care-home to living independently. Not sure it's a wise idea right now.

Friday, December 19, 2008

The Joy of Old Friends and Books


Last night we had my book club's Christmas party here. A friend and I started the book club when we had both just had babies and felt as though our brains would never ever recover from the experience. It was for both of us as if at the moment when we'd delivered the baby we'd also let go of our higher-functioning brains, leaving us only with the animal capacity to feed and protect. So we decided that by getting together with friend to read and discuss one book a month we could give our minds a little exercise to keep them ticking over. So each of us invited two friends to join us and started up in June 1998. Our first book was Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. In the years since we've expanded and contracted in numbers and my friend has left Bristol to set up a (now incredibly chic and comfortable!) hotel in Dartmouth with her husband, but we are back to six. Every month we get together and one of us cooks a meal. We eat and drink and discuss the book and bitch about our families and laugh our heads off. It's a landmark in our month. Every year we invite our partners to join us at Christmas and make a party of it.

Once I'd got the food out onto the table , I sat and looked out over my fantastically festive table and reflected on how much I'm enjoying the process of getting older with these old friends. I know so much about them because I've read books and discussed with them - it's amazing how much you reveal about yourself by revealing your reactions to literature. I know that Catherine responds almost exactly as I do to most literature and have to examine myself and my reactions when we differ from each other. Jackie, who was born twelve hours and about twenty miles from me, is the least likely to share my opinions. I know that Penny needs to love the characters to enjoy a book and always wants to know our opinions before she gives her own and that quiet Gill is the most adventurous of us and the most likely to embrace an unlikely proposition. Helen has the most unexpected opinions which she voices unexpectedly quietly...

In our time together we've read about 125 books, ranging from classics (Bleak House, To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankenstein) to poetry (Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope) to thrillers (Robert Harris, and a book about a contract killer which gloried in the wonderful first clause "After the man was dead..." ). We've read quirky books like The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall, which defies description, and whose target audience is definitely young men but which most of us enjoyed - I'd advise you to read it, and also The Motel Life by Willy Vlautin, possibly one of the most thought-provoking novels I've read. Then there's the plain mad, like The Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami. We also had a book written by a Somalian model about female circumcision which I couldn't take, not because of the subject matter but because it was so shockingly written. And Down Among the Donkeys about a donkey sactuary - why, Gill??? I picked a book once based on an interview I heard on Radio 4 which was a sort of Chandleresque mystery set in Aberystwyth, and yes, it was as dreadful as that sounds. Someone picked up a book which she thought her partner had recommended but got it wrong and handed out copies of a book he'd actually thought was utter tripe (and was!). There was a book by an American woman who thought going on a coach to Yurrup constitued the limit in daring travel... the intrepid traveller in our midst, Jackie, was outraged by it. Our favourite author is Ian McEwan; we've read three of his. And we've discovered and discussed Rose Tremaine, Iris Murdoch, Yann Martell, Bernhard Schlink, JOhn Simpson, Laurie Graham, Toni Morrison (my favourite!), Amitav Ghosh, Marina Lewycka, JM Coetzee, Monica Ali and many, many more.

I'd advise anyone to get together with a few friends and start reading. It's the most wonderful thing you can do with a group of friends. And pour the wine when you discuss - it makes the words flow.
After our January meeting I'll come back and tell you what we all made of Barack Obama's "Dreams of my Father", which I gave out to everyone last night. Topical, eh?

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Etre et Avoir


I showed this wonderful film to my Year 10 class today.


It's a documentary about an amazing teacher in rural France who runs a tiny schoolroom with local kids ranging from the age of 5 to about 12 and it spans a year. It follows the children through their school life and occasionally delves into their home lives and it's utterly charming.


Monsieur never shouts. He handles everything with calm sensitivity and firm good humour. He's an absolute model of how to be in a classroom.
Even the boys were charmed by this slow, gentle study of life and people.


Breaking the cycle

There have been complaints, some from victims of child abuse, that the latest in a series of Barnardos advertisements is too shocking, and should be pulled. The ASA has ruled that the shocking images are justified.

Too right.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yFOcrZeMRUU

On their website Barnardos warn that children under 13 should not watch this without their parents' consent. It does appear on terrestrial TV though, although maybe it's only after the watershed. Anyway I don't stop my kids from watching things which disturb them. At 12 and 10 I don't think they're too young to know that they are very lucky to have the lives they have, and to start thinking of themselves as people who should at least want to make a difference in the lives of others who haven't had the same chances in life.

On the other hand, I have to confess to a slight worry that I don't know how worthy organisatins like Barnardos can help. I'm always tempted to hit the Donate button, but I wonder whether that's just me kidding myself I'm doing something useful, rather than getting involved at the business end and following through.

Off to investigate the possibilities...

Monday, December 08, 2008

When is exposure not exposure?


John Barrowman got into hot water when he exposed his genitals on the BBC. Complaints poured into the Beeb when he exposed himself during an interview on Radio 1. Yes, that's right. On RADIO 1.


Is it just me, or do you have to paint graphic pictures in your own mind to get over-excited about an actor saying that he's exposing himself? I haven't heard whether or not the interviewers were offended. If they weren't I shouldn't think that John's got much to feel remorseful about.


And yet he's solemnly made a statement abasing himself and apologising profusely for this offensive behaviour. If that's all that people have got to worry about...


Lessons in being happy

Apparently an overhaul of primary education in this country proposes changing the curriculum so that learning is done in six 'themed areas'. History and Geography will be sucked up into 'Human, Social and Environmental Understanding'.

Pupils should have the "personal, social and emotional qualities essential to their health, well-being and life as a responsible citizen in the 21st Century". This is being paraphrased as 'lessons in happiness'. I tend to the view that it would be beneficial rather to teach children the skills which equip them to get good jobs after school and that will make them happy. But then I like Aldous Huxley's view on this, which I have quoted before: Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7770469.stm

I'd be interested to know how much money has been spent on this 'root and branch' review. I'd be interested to know if its authors really think that their recommendations will improve the life chances of the children who pass through the schools of the future.

And I'm very glad that at the end of this year my children will be finished at primary school, because I think it's an absolute pig's ear of a proposal. When did reorganising a curriculum and renaming subjects result in an improvement of education? No, this is another example of change for change's sake, and addressing symptoms rather than looking at causes so that things appear to be better and nothing, absolutely nothing, changes.

Saturday, December 06, 2008

It takes generations...







It takes generations to produce a Karen Matthews or a mother of Baby P. It takes generations of feckless mothers who somewhere along the line lose a grip on the fine thread which binds mothers and their children together. It takes generations of absent or voiolent or drug or drink-addled fathers. It takes poverty and the disintegration of society and community and the disappearance of any moral or ethical stop to an individual's feeling that all they have to do is to look after their own needs, whatever they may be, and whether or not the fulfilment of those needs means that the welfare and happiness of others is destroyed.

"Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all." Er, no. It's not. That's the greatest lie of all. And a horribly popular one at the moment.

Ask a talent show contestant why they should win and they'll say "Because I really want it. This is the only thing I've ever wanted. I was born for this." As if that means that a lack of talent should be swept aside. Never mind what other people think, no matter if I have no aptitude for this, no talent, not enough talent; if I want it, I should have it. I believe in myself, therefore you should too. People are applauded for self-belief and admonished for lack of confidence. A lack of confidence sometimes stems from the ability to reflect - not always a bad thing.

Every time we tell a child how well they're doing when they're not really, every time we give them something they haven't earned, every time we gloss over errors and omissions we reinforce this idea that everyone is special, everyone is entitled to everything they desire. And if in years to come that means pizza and beer and 60 a day and taping a carrier bag to your baby's backside so that you don't have to change a nappy then, well, that's the extreme end of self-fuflfilment, but so be it.

Apparently the social service psychological profile commissioned on Karen Matthews worried about her "inability to prioritise the needs of her children over her own". No kidding. Despite this, though, they took the children off the at-risk register.

I once knew a woman very much like Karen Matthews. She had lots of children by different men. One of her children was fourteen and pregnant by a boy who was in jail. She was shacked up with a nineteen year old with whom she partied as her children shambled around the house making their own arrangements and trying to sleep through the heavy rock music which shuddered through the home all day and night. The kids were dirty and unkempt and on the at-risk register. They never had breakfast because Mum was in bed sleeping it off when they left for school on their own, making their own way in. Teachers were asked to 'keep an eye' on them. Apparently now there's a 47 page dossier issued to schools advising them what to 'keep an eye' out for (which of course all teachers have the time to read and inwardly digest). Back then we had to rely on common sense. One of her children was in my class and used to come in at 7.30, when I arrived, to sit with me and help prepare my resources for the day. He looked very proud when I said to the class as I used my flashcards "and Billy helped me with these". When his mother came in for a parents evening and sat opposite me, her hand clenched on the inner thigh of her unlovely toyboy, she gurned at me and said "He fancies you, does Billy." She couldn't imagine any other attachment between a female and a male, even a teacher and a child.

I've looked up that boy on social networking sites. He'd be in his late twenties by now. I doubt he'd have much of a chance of living a normal life. I doubt that if he's had children that he's a model Dad. But then I don't suppose she had the model Mum. I don't suppose she went home to a house redolent with the smells of childhood; no cakes baking, no fresh laundry, no sausages on the stove. Things don't go that awry in a generation.

So what do you do about it? That's the thorny one. In my teacher training I learned that whereas the link between any particular race and achievement has largely been broken, as has the link betwen gender and achievement (actually that one's reversed, but that's another issue), the most stubborn statistic in education is that your educational results result depend more than anything upon what your Dad does for a living. And if your parents do nothing, if they see no value whatsoever in education, well, basically, you're f***ed. (But God help you as a teacher if you suggest that loafing around all day smoking weed and watching daytime TV may not be the parental role model to end all parental role models, because you are stepping over the line.)

It's an interesting situation we find ourselves in right now. For decades professional wisdom has had it that a child is always best off with its mother, even if that mother is dependent upon drink or hard drugs, in an abusive relationship which she puts above the wellbeing of her child, feckless or helpless and unable to care for a child because of mental frailty. Almost regardless of anything social workers have bent over backwards to keep the child with the mother. Because there is a perception that because this adult person bore and gave birth to this small person they therefore always, always, have the child's best interests at heart.

And now the media is howling because the authorities have failed to remove children from mothers who lack this central mechanism, this instinct which entitles them to special regard. So now they bleat and the public bays for the removal of children from such mothers. There will be soon be an outcry in the other direction when women go to the papers with stories of children taken away from them with no reason.

Well I'm a hard woman, and I'm afraid that I think this rot has to stop. I'm really glad I don't have to come up with a solution and justify it and that I can just say something inflammatory and back away.

So here's an idea. If a woman "fails to successfully prioritise her children's needs over her own" why not leave her to her own priorities, whether that be her heroin habit, her toyboy with an extensive collection of child pornography, her violent partner, her drink or her idleness and greed? If we think that a mother is respected as a mother because she guards her child against all dangers, a lioness baring her teeth against an unfriendly world, then if she is not, why don't we stop thinking that her children's needs are best served by being with her? Give her help, give her guidance, try to see her do the right thing, but if she doesn't, change tack and look out for the child. Why not actually follow through on the assertion that a child's needs are paramount, and if they are not paramount to the mother, then the mother should relinquish her role as mother?

Let's divert some of the resources which are ploughed into keeping useless families limping along and put them into building up a really good care system, where care actually means what it says, and cares for children, rather than corralling them until they're sixteen and turning them out into an uncaring world unsocialised, institutionalised and unrecovered from their tragic beginnings. Let's spend money on turning all children's homes into places where children thrive and get over the horror and neglect which they were rescued from. Let's build up the bank of loving foster homes and adopters. Let's value people who love children and want to ensure that they have a launch pad into a happy adulthood over those who give birth to children and then carry on with their own selfish lives. Let's break the chain.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Luck + 10,000 hours = Genius

So it's official then. If you have a modicum of talent and you work really really hard, then you will get very good at your chosen field.

Who knew?

Well, practically everyone with a functioning brain, I would suggest.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1088303/Luck--hard-graft--Genius-OUTLIERS-Malcolm-Gladwell.html

We had post parents' evening chats with both kids. In both cases this resulted in red faces and sobbing. In one case it resulted in a terse text frommy daughter saying"Bullies!" .

Because you see as parents we're only supposed to say relentlessly jolly, upbeat things. Unfortunately I'm not good at not saying what needs to be said. I'm also fairly rubbish at paraphrasing to soften the blow. I reason that if I say things very gently they won't get through. I reason this way because I have tried it and it doesn't work. What I have to say is:

"You're not working hard enough."

It's not enough to be good at something. You have to work at it if you want the top marks. Sometimes children have a rather X Factor approach to success. "I want to be an A student, and I'm good at everything, so why am I not getting top marks?"

Well, as a wild stab in the dark, probably because you do the minimum to get by, cut and paste instead of researching properly and writing out the results, and spend more time trying to get people to compliment you than actually doing the work better.

Just a guess.

The other one needs to spend more time focussed on his work and less on larking around with his mates. It's not rocket science.

But probably the fact that they witness me grafting and not getting anywhere doesn't help... But then I'm not quite at my 10,000 hours yet. But I will be soon.

Another Day, Another Hangover

I think I've been drinking too much on a regular basis for about thirty years. There are days when I can feel my liver complaining.

Recently, in the last five years or so, the amount I'm drinking has risen. I'd actually be ashamed to admit how much I put away on an average day, and how most of these evenings by the time I go to bed I don't feel drunk, but just a bit numb...

As a result I don't sleep well, often waking up early in the morning and then worrying myself awake to the alarm at six. I have something of a paunch, and I rather know that that's something to do with wine. And an awful lot of the time I just rather hate myself for my lack of control and my immoderate nature.

In the past I've announced here that I'm going to stop, and then failed to do so, because I'm weak-willed. It's all a bit tragic.

Just thought I'd share.

Off to have a vat of tea...

Friday, November 21, 2008

Angels and devils.



Apparently Haringey Children's Services find it incredibly difficult to attract social workers to its team. I wonder why. I'm guessing that this means that in order to tackle the monstrous workload which they have the caliber of staff which they do attract is not the highest. And those who are there are overworked. Government guidelines say that no social worker should have a caseload of more than twelve chidren to deal with, whereas the overstretched staff whom Haringey have managed to keep are coping with caseloads of between eighteen and twenty. After the recent storm of criticism it will be even more difficult for them to attract staff.

Perhaps when the enquiry looks at what went wrong, they might address the profile of social workers in this country. Damned if they do take children away and damned if they don't, they perform an intensely stressful and emotional function, and the only time anyone pays them any attention is when something goes horribly, tragically, appallingly wrong. Or when a woman goes to the press with a story about how mean, vindictive, heartless social workers have ripped her innocent child from her without any justification at all. And yet there must be stories where the intervention of a social worker has made infinite difference to the lives of children and families all over the country. Have you ever heard one? No, nor have I. A girl I teach wants to be a social worker. I had to suppress my look of astonishment and dread when she said this. A more distressing and thankless job it is difficult for me to imagine. I can only guess at the stress levels which must be endemic in the profession. From the recent coverage you'd think that the social worker had joined in the beatings.

Someone who knows what he's on about said something interesting to me yesterday when I talked about a case of two children , a fifteen and a sixteen year old, who had beaten a man to death. I made some disgusted comment about them and my friend pointed out that they had probably had a brutal life, one not a million miles from that of Baby P, only they survived. You don't come out of a loving, supportive happy home and get your thrills kicking the shit out of people.

And yet we look at pictures of angelic, tortured and murdered children on one side, and police mugshots of dead-faced, hate-filled teenage thugs on the other and never consider that there might be a relation between the two. Both are damaged; both probably have known much misery. The older ones are hardened. And maybe they are hardened because they are the children of brutalised or neglected children, who themselves were dragged up by inadequate parents of their own.

It's a tough one, but at some point society has to look beyond today's awful, awful headline and see what needs to change.

Without pointing fingers at scapegoats. I object to it because it doesn't help.

Love and hate






Things I love:

1. Being a mother; love like you couldn't have imagined before they came along.
2. Being a teacher; best job in the world. Everything they say in those ads? It's all true.
3. Seeing friends greet each other on the street; smiles are infectious, and it always makes me feel that's all is right with the world when people are pleased to see one another.
4. Plain digestives with Philadelphia and strawberry jam. Mini cheesecake - yum.
5. Dark evenings and lights on mean Christmas is on its way.
6. Nights out with friends - laughing til I cry.
7. When the writing goes well and seems to flow from my fingers before I've thought it....
8. Winter clothes - no one looks better in summer clothes except supermodels.
9. My Dorothy shoes; red, high heels, platform soles, sequins, bows - what's not to love?
10. A night in with a bottle of wine, a DVD and Martin.
11. Historical fiction that sends me scurrying to the reference books.
12. Silence. So difficult to find.

Things I hate

1. Chewing gum. Why?
2. Anybody texting when they are in my immediate company.
3. The fact that this country allows poverty and brutality to pass from generation to generation so that children either die at the hands of their families or grow up to brutalise others.
4. Stupid or venal politicians.
5. The Rich List. Why?
6. The prison fashion of doing up your trousers under your arse. It makes you walk like a duck and you can't run for a bus.
7. Spitting. Not sexy.
8. People who say proudly stupid smug git things like "Charity begins at home" or "too clever by half".
9. All of my family being engaged on different electronic media and not talking to each other.
10. Petty officials who think they have power because they have a uniform.
11. Guantanamo Bay.
12. Mud. The dogwalker's nemesis.

Friday, November 14, 2008

Plus ca change...

Someone told me a joke today which I remember hearing at the time of the last recession:

Q: What's the difference between a merchant banker and a pigeon?
A: A pigeon can put a deposit on a Porsche.

Back then the word yuppie replaced the word banker but that apart it was word for word the same. The papers were full of lip-smacking relish about the upcoming gloom, and everyone giddily wondered how we got here so incredibly suddenly when just a few weeks ago everyone had been high on the loadsamoney ethos of the time.

The papers warned about the terrible dangers of deflation in the same slightly reproacheful tones that they'd used weeks earlier about the dangers of inflation. They told us that it was our duty to go out and spend to stimulate the economy at the same time as gleefully predicting massive job cuts. And if anyone dared suggest that there was something slightly unseemly about the press's role in the economical vortex, then they came over all sanctimonious.

Now as then, a slightly more upbeat tone, or at least a balanced one, might be a good idea.

And then there's Haringey Children's Services. Another sickening blast from the past. My brother was an expert witness for the enquiry into the Climbie murder and the failure of the social services to prevent it. An now we have this pitiful toddler. What we've read is appalling enough, and no doubt there are details which we have been spared. It's just too dreadful. That a child should have the misfortune to be born into that parentage, and then for that woman to meet up with those men is just a catalogue of appalling events...

The insistence on lynching the social services make me uneasy though, as does the queue of professionals queuing up to say that henceforth pursuing the interests of a child will mean that social workers will need to take a more combative and challenging line with parents. Does this mean that social workers start off from the position that parents are trying to pull the wool over their eyes? Are they, because they are on the side of the child, necessarily on the opposite side to that of the parents? Because if that is the case, they will be able to do very little - sad to say, the parents will always have more power over what happens in their homes that the children or the social workers. And sure as eggs is eggs there will soon be a story where a child is removed from parents whom children's services suspect threaten its wellbeing and there will be howls of protest about heavy-handed social workers ripping innocent families apart.

I don't pretend that I have an answer. But I'm pretty sure that shouting very, very loudly and acres of newsprint vilifying social services won't help as much as taking a deep breath and a long, cold, hard look at what needs to be done. Preferably out of the public eye.

Monday, October 20, 2008

How Markets Work

Martin just sent me this. It's over a year old. Eerily prescient, I think you'll agree.

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/187.html

So a pair of comedians could see it coming - why couldn't the sharp minds in the city join up the dots?

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Hello Friends!

This will be interesting I've just put a link to this blog on my facebook profile.

At least I thin I have. Which is not to say that I actually have.

Having been ranting anonymously to no one in particular on and off for a couple of years,let's see how it goes...

Anyway, if you're stopping by, hello! Hope you read a bit.

Right. Once I've hit POST I'm off to see if it's worked!

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Boys will be boys





I love boys!

Typically boys are interesting, sparky, questioning, restless, torn between arrogance and insecurity. They need to prove things to themselves, practically, actively, before they believe them. They won't just accept things because someone in authority tells them so. They won't sit quietly with their minds switched to recieve. They will smile sideways when they are reprimanded and charm the scolder, or they will pull up their shoulders and skulk off for all the world like a wounded primate.

And for all these reasons, for all the ways in which they are Not Girls, the educational establishment condemns them. Shame on the establishment!

This is from today's Times:

Girls already have a well-established educational lead over boys by the time they start school, a study claims.
The study of 15,000 UK children suggests girls are two months ahead of boys in tests of verbal, non-verbal and visual skills by the age of five.

What a pile of poo. This is the kind of nonsense you arrive at when you start measuring and testing as if it was ever going to give you anything than the most irrelevant results.

Go back to your Aesop. The Hare and the Tortoise, anyone? Is it possible, just possible, that children might make progress at different rates? Might we allow that that possibility is just strong enough to mean that making such idiotic pronouncements might be, oh, I don't know, a really, really Bad Idea? Isn't what matters where they are when they leave education and go out into the world to take over from their elders. Anything before is just a stepping stone on the way, and means nothing. Kids I teach are astonished to find that in France the first really meaningful tests the kids have to take is their Baccalaureat, the equivalent of our A levels. Are they worse off for that? I doubt it.

Boys are being taught, systematically, that they're rubbish compared with girls. Casual statements are lobbed around in the media and in conversation which enhance this effect and start from the presumption of boys' inferiority. In the media the words 'boys' and 'problem' share space in many a sentence. Whether it's their lack of educational achievement, their impregnating of girls, their violence, and God knows what else, they have journalists shaking their heads sadly. When there is a problem with girls, it's often because they are starting to be like boys; chiefly in the area of violence. I don't know when people started saying as a follow-up statement to an anecdote about some way in which a boy has failed "But then he's a boy," or "But that's boys for you." And in front of the boy. As if boyhood was some nasty condition.

Okay, so here's my analysis of the problem, illustrated with personal experience.

When my boy was three he went to pre-school for the first time. He was not ready for school; had he been living in Hannover or Bordeaux he'd have been playing at home with play dough and finger paints for another four years. He was, apparently, a source of exasperation because he couldn't sit still during circle time, and often fidgeted or even rolled over, disturbing other children. The rule in circle time was that children should sit still with their hands in their laps. Several of the boys couldn't do this and this was a problem. I'd just like to reiterate that they were three years old. Now perhaps this is a daft idea, but if none of the boys were able to sit still, and they were a) not learning and b) disturbing the girls, perhaps it might bave been worth looking again at the expectations to see if they were reasonable. It may be heresy to say it, but boys are different from girls. They tend to be more kinesthenic learners, and like to learn by exploration and trying and doing. They are, particularly at three or four years of age, not terribly good at sitting down and having somebody, however well-meaning, talk at them. So here we are: by the time they have their photo taken in their new school togs and stroll through the gates for the first time, they are disadvantaged by the school's expectations. Education has been well and truly feminised, and particularly early years education. A few years later government bodies, panicked by falling educational standards, took the decision to start formal education earlier, and children of four started being 'encouraged' (dragooned) to write letters and numbers. Talk about setting up half the class for failure!

The there's the matter of tests per se. As a massive generalisation I would say that there are about half children who see tests as an opportunity to shine, and half who either don't care what people think of them or are driven to bed-wetting by the whole idea. My boy hates being tested. He always underperforms in tests. Now that he's coming up to 11+ time, I am dealing with this problem with a technique known to psychologist, I think, as 'flooding'. Which means that I am making him do tests until they are coming out of his ears. When he sits the papers he will be so familiar with them it will mean nothing to him. I hate doing it to him and he's having a lot of choccy bars to compensate for this burden. But I'm a teacher. I'm in the know.

All through school my boy has been a problem. Because he's distractable and impulsive and wants to run around or handle things or take things apart to find out how they work, and otherwise difficult, a succession of teachers have told me what a problem he is, and barely mentioned what his achievements have been. And last year Mr Kelly came into our lives as Son's Year 5 teacher. Mr Kelly totally gets my boy; thinks he's incredibly bright, imaginative, sparky and thoughtful. (Oh, and by the way he's still rather easily distracted and his writing is a stream of consciousness with few gaps and almost no punctuation between his beautifully chosen words. But that'll come...) And Son has taken off in achievement. He gets home and can't wait to do his homework well. He does it standing and leaning on a table as his feet dance beneath. Because that's who he is.

And in all these tests he's been doing, I've discovered that his Non Verbal Reasoning score, the one that's supposed to measure raw intelligence, is extremely high. Go figure, as they say. I am totally confident that he will go out into the world as a fantastic young man with brains and a lateral approach to things and an ability to do whatever he wants to do. Unless, of course, people keep telling him that because he's a boy/adolescent/man he's not as good as the female sitting next to him.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Stephen Baldwin - rent-a-gob


"Stephen Baldwin would like to step into the ring for a boxing match with US Presidential candidate Barack Obama.The actor is a supporter of Republican nominee John McCain and has told the New York Daily Times that he will leave the country if Obama is elected next month."I'd like to knock some good sense into Barack. I wouldn't hurt him. But if he wins the election, he'll hurt me. He's a cultural terrorist," said Baldwin.Earlier this year, Baldwin attacked rock star Bono for his attempts to ease third world debt.He told WENN that it would make more sense to preach the gospel of Jesus abroad. " from Digital Spy.
What a numpty. If he has been correctly quoted, which is not for sure, is it? If he he has been correctly quoted, then this is the kind of thing which makes my head explode with rage. Everything about it is wrong - it's a sort of moronic soup of fundamentalist Christianity, brawn over brains, borderline racism and greed. Honestly, it makes my head spin. Now the only things I know about Stephen Baldwin are that a) his name is Stephen Baldwin, b) he's obviously a raging halfwit and c) for some reason someone is giving him the oxygen of publicity.
I'm rather assuming that he's an actor and related to that other well-known man of moderate manners, Alec Baldwin, you know, the one who left an answerphone message calling his eleven year-old daughter a pig because of some lapse of phone etiquette. I'm assuming this because they look almost interchangeable.
I have absolutely no idea why actors feel entitled to pontificate about politics to the rest of us, nor why journalists with half a brain feel the need to pass it on. (But then why do I read it and feel as though my head is going to explode?)
This election campaign started off with me, for once, thinking that either of the candidates would be good for the US and the wider world. But then McCain plumped for Ms Palin, a woman who think the epithet 'pitbull in lipstick' is a compliment, and now a long line of simian celebrity supporters have been queuing up to drag their knuckles along the ground to some virtual podium and voice their wholehearted support for the Republican candidate. And he looks more and more bewildered as time goes by. How the Hell did he find himself tangled up in this circus of freaks? He's a moderate man, one who doesn't sling mud or rely on homespun and ghastly faith in some God exclusive to the white and conservative voters of America. (Why is God right-wing in the US and left-wing over here? Discuss. Ed) He's no dummy either, and yet now he looks out of his depth, an apologist for the extremism of his cohorts. It's a weird, weird spectacle.
Obama has stuck to his guns and looks increasingly presidential. He's got his share of nutter support too, but he manages to sidestep it and emerge unsullied. And for that political nous more than for anything else, I think I'd like to see him at the helm of the (so-called) civilised world.
And I'd quite like Stephen Baldwin to get back into his cave and shut the f*** up.

Monday, September 29, 2008

"The supreme vice is shallowness"

I read De Profundis by Oscar Wilde over the weekend. It's had quite a disproportionate effect on me. I don't suppose I'm the only person who didn't know beforehand that it is in effect a long, long letter of reproach and admonishment from Wilde, imprisoned in Reading Gaol, to Lord Alfred Douglas, known forever to anyone who knows anything about Wilde as Bosie. Bosie would have been unknown after his death were in not for his tragic love affair with one of literature's great geniuses (or should that be genii?)

"The supreme vice is shallowness" Wilde says on more than one occasion, as he lambasts Bosie for behaviour which, when one reads it, makes one wonder how he can ever have loved him. Tempers, sulks, cruelty, neglect seem to be according to this account, what characterised Bosie's behaviour towards his older lover. Wilde quotes Bosie as saying to him in a letter "When you are not on your pedestal you cease to be interesting." This is a young man enjoying the fruits of another's genius. Wilde repeatedly refers to his own genius, and to his own Life and Art with capital letters. It is a resolutely unfunny manuscript, devoid of bons mots or witticism, and comes from the heart of a desperately disappointed and confused man.

Shallowness is what the unenlightened might say is what lies at the heart of Wilde's brilliant writing. But it is shallowness as a thin layer on the surface of fanged social satire and comedies of manners. It is a shallowness that characterises the poetry of a less talented poet than himself as shallow. Were Wilde to see the shallowness which we observe now he ould spin in his grave.

Shallowness is what characterises quite a hefty slice of what passes for modern society. It derives from an almost vituperative refusal to consider things in any depth at all. It is a shallowness that tells schools that they must teach that Bullying Is Wrong; that they Shouldn't take Drugs, that Shakespeare is not so important to study and that perhaps other reading materials, like comics, should have their place on the English curriculum. It is shallowness as quite mind-exploding intellectual laziness which says that anything difficult should be dropped from the National Curriculum, and that fails to link the stepping away from intellectual rigour to the pettiness and ignorance of practically everyone in public life, from our top politicians to the appalling woman at passport control who thinks she has achieved something by putting on a uniform and being gioven tiny, unimportant powers.

It is demonstrated by smooth language which, on close analysis, either takes complex concepts and scientifically reduces them to a sheer gloss with an obvious right answer and wrong answer (Drugs are Wrong, Mums working is Right), or elevates the simplistic to something grandiose (Losing weight - eat less, move more, for God's sake. Practically every work of modern art which fetches large amounts at auction.). Look at the whole of the American election campaign. Never has so little been said by so few to so many,and never have so few swallowed it without challenge. I read today that the Republican campaign managers are salivating at the prospect of Sarah Palin's pregnant teenage daughter marrying her self-proclaimed redneck boyfriend, so sure are they that this grubby union will put them ahead in the polls for a week.

I coud go on for weeks, but I am today so sad at the lack of thought in most people's life. Thinking sets you free - the ability to disagree and debate with one another without taking offence or killing each other characterise us as sentient beings separate from our aniumal friends. Reason is what makes us human, and reason is being systematically whittled away to the point where if you diasagree with me you feel quite entitled to stab me, or insult me or lob a bomb into my home.

As some readers know, I think that if we taught kids to think for themselves we would have less violence, and fewer teenage mums, we woud have young people facing the future and embrace challenge and we would have a better educated workforce and a more civilised nation.

Rant over. I am sick at heart.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Matching the dogs.





Someone asked me yesterday if I'd bought my dogs to match my hair. I had to tell them that no, I'd changed my hair colour to match the dogs.

Not quite true, but probably there's something in it subliminally. I'll post a picture of me to compare and contrast if I can get someone to take a decent one.

Language is power

People underestimate the effect of our use of language. Where the meanings of words shift subtly so that our view of the world is warped, the effect is insidious.

There have been ludicrous attempts in some areas of life, notably the military and business, to take unpleasant concepts and attempt to soften their effects by wrapping them up in pleasant sounding phraseology, but these are not successful because they are so obvious. "Collateral damage" and "friendly fire" are brash, outrageous and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to make "people being killed because they are near your target" or "accidentally killing your allies" less appallingly offensive. A problem is still a problem, even if you rechristen it an "issue" or an "opportunity".

But some subtler shifts in the way we use language actually pervert the way we see life over time. There are some words which enrage me when I hear them especially in the news.

Have you noticed that the verb "to attribute" and the perfectly serviceable, and emotionally neutral, adjective "attributable" have all but disappeared from our language, replaced by the much blunter and more loaded "blame"? Years ago when job losses were reported on the news, we were told that the need for redundancies was attributable to the economic climate, or cheap imports from abroad, or poor sales, or whatever. Now we are told that the economy/cheap imports/poor sales are blamed. It may seem a moot point, but I would suggest not. We live in a world where anything that happens is somebody's fault. Nothing is ever an accident. If anything goes wrong, wew all look around to find someone to blame. If a child falls off a climbing frame, instead of dusting him off and advising him to be more careful next time, we insist that the climbing frame is dangerous and must be closed off to ensure that no other child incurs an injury. We may consider calling one of the "accident helplines" (ambulance chasing lawyers) who advertise shrilly on day-time TV, appealing blatantly to the dispossessed and unemployed, and bring a suit against the council/school/leisure centre. Accidents, or the matter of blame associated with accidents, has become a way for the desperate to make money and to feel important.

Because if you bring a suit, you are a "victim". And that's my second loaded and dangerous word. Recently I notified the police that I had had my car wing mirror knocked off. I had to in order to claim on my insurace. I received a sympathetic letter from the Victim Support Unit, offering me comfort because I had been the victim of a crime. I wasn't the victim of a crime. My car was. Sometimes you just have to accept that shit happens. If every time something unwelcome happened to me I was told that I was a victim, I would be completely disempowered. I have control of my life because I have personal responsibility. My wing mirror got knocked off because I parked badly. Not long ago I read a statistic which told me that (and I'm being approximate as to the actual figure here) something like 1 in 5 women in Britain had been victims of sexual assault. Appalling, I'm sure you'll agree. Except that further enquiry revealed that a bottom grope was included in this. By that token, yes, I have been sexually assaulted. Now how ludicrous does that seem? To lump someone on a crowded tube squeezing my bum with the ordeal of my friend who was a true victim, pinned to the ground and raped in her own home? It is an isult to those who have been rendered powerless and diverts resources which should be targeted for their use. I am not a victim. Many, many bad things have happened to me, but I am not a victim. What is the point of making us all feel scared and powerless by labelling us as victims? The only possible outcome is that gradually we learn to accept that we have to entrust to others our lives and our futures. Because we are all victims we can do nothing for ourselves.

My third pet hate is "deserve". Because you deserve it, trills the spokeswoman for L'Oreal. How do you know I deserve it? What do you think I have done to deserve it? Have I done something really great to deserve it? We're told a lot about what we deserve, but we hear very little about what we should to to get our desserts. Again, we are disempowered. We are pampered like babies and told we are all special and we all deserve all that is good in this life, and we don't need to do anything to get it for ourselves. We can't all be special. If everyone is special then no one is special. As was so brilliantly illustrated in 'The Incredibles'. The only exception to this is babies: all babies are special to their parents. And so we ARE babies. And babies are powerless. If you've seen Wall-E and seen the baby-adults drifting around in their TV chairs on tramlines, well, that's where I believe the trilogy of 'blame', 'victim' and 'deserve' are taking us.

Of course there are victims with people to blame. But they are in a small minority and they must be cared for by those of us who are able to look after ourselves. We are the majority.

I was brought up with a firm belief in the power of personal responsibility. I believe that if I work very, very hard I can have whatever I want. I deserve nothing, unless I work for it. I have no entitlement, and I have no one to blame for my future but myself. I am no victim. And I think I'm very happy for that reason. Aldous Huxley said "Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities." I'm with him on that - the clue is in the word 'activities'. Take control, grab responsibilty and you will find yourself empowered. And then you'll be happy.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

The times, they are a-changing.



It's been a funny old year. Daughter is twelve today and the world is a different place to what it was the day she hit eleven.

New terms have entered the vocabulary; hopefully they will die away very soon because they are ugly, annoying and imprecise terms. Credit crunch is used to mean the fact that everyone's a bit poorer. The term staycation means not going away as soon as school breaks up and holidaying at home - hardly a novel concept except perhaps for the mega-rich. Food costs more. Vegetables don't cost a lot more yet but they will, because it's rained for the last eight weeks. Meat already costs more and we can all afford just a dribble of petrol because the price is rising at a rate which would be reasonable only in Zimbabwe. Power executives are giving themselves mammoth pay rises and bonuses (boni?) funded by 30% hikes in the bills of their customers. Nice work if you can get it - I wonder how you sleep at night.

No one is flying because the price of aviation fuel has increased so fast, so budget airlines are going under. We all holidayed in Britain this year and we were repaid for our forced patriotism with the biblical floods we all enjoyed all over Europe. A few thousand who gave up and went abroad for fear that their feet would rot in the wet got stranded when their carrier went bust.

Pubs are finding it hard to keep going, especially in the countryside. The smoking ban brought in in 2007 has made it tricky to keep that convivial manly smoky atmosphere that we all either loved, or which stopped us darkening the door of a pub. In addition supermarkets sell beer so cheaply that people are staying at home to get legless and smoke themselves to oblivion in the comfort of their own front room. And they don't need to worry about getting home.

Some eejit has decided that children in this country should be taught creationism alongside evolution. This suggestion in being treated with some seriousness because the eejit in question is a science professor of some ilk. Not a very eminent one, I would venture to assume.

I am being forced off the computer because Daughter wants to use the computer and is playing the birthday card. (No pun intended...) Suffice it to say that I don't think any of these changes are making life particularly better. Shame, because I think so much could be taken from our situation and used to community advantage. I'll bore you with that later.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Sarah Palin. OMG.




I don't know where to start.


When I first saw the anouncement of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate I thought, in my knee jerk reaction way, "Oh good. A woman. That makes a change. Nice balance for John McCain." I'm a woman. I like to see the advancement of women. It goes with the ovaries.


The I saw her billing as "mother of five" and thought, "Well, yes, but if she's reached this stage in her political career then I'm guessing that the children have not been uppermost in her considerations over the past seventeen years." It'd be like calling George Bush "golfer". He does play golf, but frankly there are other important things about him. Like the fact that he's a congenital idiot. But I digress. I overlooked the fact that she's burdened her children with stupid names. Maybe they don't seem as stupid in Alaska. But someone ought to have told her (preparing for office as she obviously has been from the cradle) that in English English Bristol is slang for breast, as in 'Look at the Bristols on that.' I've no idea why that should be.


The I read that John McCain has only met her once for a half an hour and the whole illusion started unravelling in my mind. She's not a brave choice of running mate - she's a walking lure for the feminist Hillary-ites who might not go for Barack Obama.


Then I keep seeing pictures of her clad in fur with something dead at her side; sometimes she has her kids with her (alive). A little off-putting. I know Alaska is cold, but not even polar explorers drape themselves in dead animals these days. I mean, come on!! The photograph of her parents watching her nomination in their Alaskan home was remarkable for me because of the skins festooning the walls as much as for the total lack of expression in her father's face.


Then I start reading her credentials; pro-life, anti-gay marriage, pro-hunting [and how, pray can you be pro-life and pro-hunting? Make your mind up.] , in favour of creationist teaching and the tinciest bit sceptical about evolution. Hold on!! What??? Creationism?? And I bet she fulminates against the mad excesses of fundamentalist Islam without any sense that there might be some irony in her position...


And if you look at her eyes behind the glasses (which according to her she had to take to to tone down her attractiveness - I paraphrase, but that's kind of what she was saying...) there's this mad emptiness in there. A massive well of ambition and mad emptiness. Is it just me, or does she look slightly startled in those toothy staged family portraits, as if she's wondering who these other people are?


So so far, getting pretty dreadful. And then this morning I read that her daughter is pregnant. But the Republican party reassures us that we should not worry - Bristol will be keeping the baby and she will be marrying the young man who is the father.


Pro-life? Give me a break! What about poor Bristol's life? First of all they saddle her with a name that means tit, then she is brought up the oldest daughter, forever lugging younger siblings around and, one might suppose, instructing nannies on how to bring her up while Mum is chasing office. She is occasionally dragged outside to pose in blood-stained snow alongside some furry corpse. By accident (presumably) she finds herself pregnant, and one can only imagine the scenes inside the Palin household at that little nugget. As they are evangelical Christians, it is possible to believe that she feels that she has made her bed and must now lie in it by keeping the baby; just possible. But I cannot and will not believe that a child of seventeen decides voluntarily to enter into a marriage as an inevitable consequence of such a mistake. And where does this rumour stem from that the youngest and most ridiculously named Palin child, Trig, is not Sarah's but actually Bristol's? Why is Trig shoved into Bristol's arms for public appearances? Is Mr Palin so underendowed in the muscle department that he can't hold his own child?


So because they are 'pro-life', which means that they value the life of a mess of cells more highly than the person they have lived with for seventeen years, and because Sarah is on a mission to the history books, they consign their child to a miserable adolescence of duty-mothering and duty-wifing, and an early, miserable and widely publicised divorce.


I have immense and overwhelming distaste for a woman who foists her own dubious ethics on a child. And contempt. You should under no circumstances be allowed to bill Sarah Palin as a mother. It's as ludicrous as calling Dubya a golfer






Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Talent

It's been an interesting few months. There was a lot of uncertainty over my job, and it looked as if I would have to look elsewhere, and then the threat went away. But there's nothing like such a prospect looming to make you evaluate what you want out of life. And I realised that i really do love my job - I really love the company of children, especially teenagers, and I think I get quite as much from them as I am able to give them. I wasted many years of my life trying to shove my round psyche into a square career and it wasn't until my 30s that I realised that what I would be really good at, and what would therefore really fulfil me, was teaching. Like my mother and at one point my father. And like my grandmother. You can run but you can't hide.

It wasn't long before that that I also discovered that I love to write. I wrote stories as soon as I could write, and continued for practically all of my life but regarded it as something I did for fun, without working too hard at it. I am unfocussed about my writing, and I wasted too much time trying to write for the screen before finally giving in and admitting to myself that I am not good at forcing myself to write to someone else's rules. 22 steps and 3 acts and inciting incidents and avoiding the present continuous and all that - with the greatest respect, it's bollocks and akin to voluntarily going around in a straitjacket. So I'm indulging myself with prose at the moment and it feels very liberating and good. But now I really, really want to be published. And I think I'm good enough. This despite the fact that all I have to show for my endeavour so far aare a couple of letters saying 'nearly but not quite', a short story published in an anthology and a script in pre-pre-production.

Son has discovered, at ten, that he loves the stage. He's been going to a Saturday drama school for about two years but hasn't taken it very seriously. But last month he took part in three shows, one a school production of Bugsy Malone, one a drama school production of Oliver and one, after the first audition of his life, a professional Bill Kenwright production of Evita. And now it all makes sense! In Evita he didn't have that much to do, but he did it with aplomb and has now seriously got the bug. He loved everything about it from going in at the stage door to the quick costume changes to sitting in the dressing room with the other kids playing Nintendo games between scenes. He can't wait for the next auditions to come up. How fantastic to discover something you love at his age! It probably won't last but he should enjoy it. And now that we've spent two wet weeks in a cottage in Wales, he's also discovered that he is a book worm. In the last year he has read all the Alex Ryder books, all the Harry Potter books and sundry other series, but in the last fortnight he has read all seven of the Narnia books. That's the proper CS Lewis, and none of your abridged rubbish. I wasn't sure if he was old enough, but he devoured them at the rate of one a day. And as a result of all his reading he has started to write beautiful, complex stories.

Daughter has been named as a language scholar at her academy after taking some aptitude tests. (She's never knowingly learned languages, although whenever we've been abroad anywhere I insist that the kids learn to say at least 'Hello', 'How are you?', 'Please', 'Thank you' and 'Goodbye', and use them for our stay. Apart from anything, making an effort means that people are more willing to help you. There's nothing more depressing than seeing a Brit at the front of a queue with that fearful look in their eye saying, rather too loudly 'Do you speak English?'. Get a damn phrasebook.) I'm really pleased that someone has divined this talent in her, given that I'm a languages teacher. I sometimes feel that everything I have is going to die with me. I've also been told that she has a talent for mathematics and is a natural mathematician who should achieve an A* at GCSE. I was told this when she was eight. No pressure there, then. Curiously now that she's starting secondary school, she's discovering that the things she had a real talent for are not the things which other people think she's good at. She thinks of herself as a sportswoman, but while she's okay at sport and learns quickly it looks unlikely that she will ever excel in it. She learns violin, and I've now been told that she has a real talent for that, and if she works at it she could be quite special. But she wants to give it up. So what I intend to do is have word with her teacher and try to make violin playing more like sport - make her do grades quite quickly. Nothing motivates her like a challenge and then a piece of paper telling her she's done well!

Also while we were on holiday in Wales, the kids rigged up a ramp on the road and then launched themselves down a hill on their fronts on a skateboard, seeing how far and how fast they could travel. The one who wasn't skating ran alongside making sure that the other didn't get run over. Son decided to have a go while daughter was inside nursing a wound, and nearly did get run over, but threw himself off in an act of self-preservation. Both of them are covered in cuts and bruises but very happy. I looked on and wondered if that was how someone would discover that they had a talent for, say, the luge?

Anyone who's read me much will know that one of the thing I'm frustrated by is the amount of talent in our people which must go undiscovered. How many people are wandering around towns and countryside of our nation, slaving away at dull jobs, unaware that they might be a champion synchronised swimmer, or a world-class percussionist, or a peculiarly sensitive dog-trainer... or anything else? We can't test people for aptitude in everything. Middle-class families with a bit of spare money can introduce their children to a huge range of activities and therefore their children have much better chance of finding things which they love to do and which they are great at doing, but how tragic that for the majority of families this is simply not possible. What a waste of potential, and we don't even know how much potential.

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Girls, girls, girls.

Girls fight a lot these days, apparently. They abuse alcohol and drugs practically from the cradle and shag slack-jawed youth and fight each other and film each other fighting each other on their mobiles. They might not have been given any moral scruples or aspirations by their parents but they've all been given mobiles.

Life's tough in some parts of our land. I read somewhere that nowadays chief executives ern about 17 times what their workers earn. Apparently not that much earlier in the 20th century the ration was 5:1. And yet what we're wanting from women is that they get themselves out into the workplace. Never mind if you have to rip your nipple from the squalling mouth of your tiny infant and stick in a dummy instead - the important thing is to take your rightful place as a paid up member of the Almighty Workforce. Doesn't matter what you do with that kid - get yourself out there.

So you have low-paid families who don't see each other, eat together, or have more than the haziest idea about what each other are doing; parents who probably hate their lot and drink too much themselves. Excellent. Then we send the kids off to primary schools which will coach them to pass exams at ages 7 and 11, and not bother about the rest of what the world has to offer, so that they can gain entrance to secondary schools which will teach them the subjects which are the easiest to gain 'good' GCSEs in, so that they can get 'good' ratings in the League Tables. And of course if children are particularly difficult, and aren't doing well, we can quietly not put them in for said GCSEs. So you have bored, alienated, under-educated children. Better and better. Then you spread the heinous and unforgivable dogma that teaching children from a working class background about high culture or high thought is elitist, and that what they need is to learn things that are relevant. By which they mean relevant to a life as a wage slave.

Then you make alcohol universally and copiously available to children and throw in a few drugs for good measure. You know what Marx said about religion being the opiate of the masses? Well, no. Opiates and alcohol are the opiates of the masses, except they are not dulled by these drugs, but enraged and filled with loathing at their miserable, meaningless lives.

And all they have is football and celebs and boozing and shagging and fighting. And then there are weird low-browed men who think that women fighting is sexy. Probably in the same way that they think girls who booze so hard that they're sick and have lost the ability to say no to them are sexy. So stigma is gone.

Then you light the touchpaper and retire and hope that they just all kill each other and don't get out into the light where the rest of us live.

The neglect and waste of generations disgusts me, as does the attitude that says that it cannot be otherwise.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Don't listen to me


People have a skewed idea of what democracy is. They think it boils down to the ascendancy of the majority view, but that was never the plan. In ancient Greece not everyone had the vote.


The essence of parliamentary democracy is where we accept that we don't know how to run things ourselves / don't have time or resources to run things ourselves / can't be arsed to run things ourselves and therefore we employ professional politicians to do the job for us, on a fixed term contract to be renewed if they're doing well, paying them out of the public purse and firing them when they step out of line. Our job is to do the hiring and firing. Our job is not to do the thinking for them - why keep a dog and bark yourself?


I looked forward to Gordon Brown coming in. I thought he'd do the sensible thing - come in, sdtand for election, win hands down and thereby give himself 5 years to make all the difficult decisions, accept the howls of opposition at PMQ and reassure himself that he was doing the right thing, and that by the time he came up for reelection, his record would be his election campaign. Thank God! I thought. Here is a man who won't be America's poodle! Here is a man who is not telegenic, who will not be charismatic, who will be rubbish on TV and is practically incapable of cracking a smile. Because he is a serious man. He is an intelligent politician. He is an intelligent man. He is the kind of man who can do great things for this country. Unfortunately he is also a massive wimp. Because he didn't stand for electuionm when he should have done, because he was worried to an unseemly and indecorous degree. And he's not making the tough decisions because he knows they are unpopular.


He keeps telling me he's listening to me. I don't want you to listen to me. I want you to lead me. I want you to tell me how it should be done. I want you to be better equipped than I am to run the country because, to be frank, if you're counting on the numbnuts in this country to tell you what to do, we're all f***ed. And we might as well be anarchists. It'd be cheaper.
That's Plato up there, by the way. About as keen on democracy as I am. And he didn't have to contend with what passes for it now.

Get out the red pen for th statute book

I like to fantasise on dog walks about what I would so if I were, even briefly, in charge of the country. If I have an opinion, I must test it and try to think about ramifications.

My latest idea is that upon entry to number 10, my first priority would be to rebuild a healthy idea of community, to rescue it from the nightmarish Thatcherite 'community of one' inhabited by the poor benighted youth of some hellish quarters of this land.

My first act in this regard, and it would not be quick, would be to go through the statute book with a thick red pen and get rid of anachronistic, outdated or superceded laws and then enforce the relevant and effective laws which remain.

Let's take the rash of drunken assaults which have seen such tragic, brutal, bestial murders committed by young people recently.

Under the Licensing Act of 1872, you can be done for drunkenness in a public place Let's enforce that, (but we could lose the extra penalties which apply if you're drunk in charge of a bicycle, pigs, sheep, cattle and/or a steam engine). The same act stipulates that you should not be drunk in a Public House; it would be nice to see bar staff refusing to sell drinks to drunks. It used to happen. When I was serving in a bar in the 80s we'd routinely refuse to serve drunks. Forfeiting profits, sure, but also preventing violence and a really bad reputation. (Martin was recently in the US and was impressed to see a barman refusing to serve some drunk people in a bar; impressed by the attitude of the barman, but also of the drunks, who after trying a couple of times to get friends to appear sober and buy drinks, acceped the ban and went away. Here barmen would be frightened of violence.)

The threat of violence could be dealt with under the same act with the charge of 'Drunkenness with aggravation': If you're drunk and threatening you can be charged for drunkenness with aggravation by refusing to leave a licensed premises when requested, and for being drunk and disorderly - a broad term and a useful one. The moment a drunk lout yells at an old lady or a lady in a burqa or whoever else they could be picked up on a drunk and disorderly charge. Or one of public drunkenness, or if they're under 18 then their alcohol should be confiscated and their parents troubled as stipulated under the 1997 Confiscation of Alcohol (Young Persons) Act.

And come down like a ton of bricks on shops which sell alcohol to kids, and come down like an equally large ton of bricks on gangs of kids who intimidate shopkeepers into selling them booze. And make sure that police are alert to emergency calls from shopkeepers. If you can't stop illegal supply of booze through legal outlets, then you must expect that the ramifications will be a widespread disregard for minor laws, and, by extension, major laws and the law itself.

So much more to say but I have to go to work...

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Shits happen.

A friend of mine lost her husband 6 years ago yesterday. Yesterday also she received a text from a man she had been seeing for several months confirming that their relationship was over and there's no way back.

She had a great relationship with her husband, the father of her children, and for several years after his death licked her wounds and tended to her children. But then she decided that she was lonely and wanted to find love again. And in the time since then she has met a number of men who have dumped on her in a big way from a great height.

There has been a weirdo who checked her mail and her texts and God what else and who frightened the bejaysus out of her, a lothario who visited her but found excuses not to have her visit him and was probably married, and a couple of cowards who fizzled out with pathetic excuses.

Then lately came this weakling who crowded her, squeezing out all the oxygen around her, integrating himself into her family's life so that he occupied a central place, ingratiating himself with her kids. He came to take her out to lunch from work. If she had a night out without him he was often there to take her home. If she went away he might collect her from the station or the airport. He came around to cook for them, or brought goodies. The children enjoyed having him around. My friend felt spoiled. But the deal was that she was not allowed to ask to share his life; her access to him and his time was rationed. Lord knows that their short relationship would have been much shorter had she behaved as he did, because one night they had an argument about an arrangement he'd made and lied, or at least flim-flammed about, and he decided that he felt crowded and dumped her. After a few days silence, mealy-mouthed texts and emails arrived about how it wasn't her, it was him; how he needed to be on his own; how he hadn't had time since his divorce to sort himself out. How he needed to find himself. He's nearly 50 for crying out loud! Don't men realise what a laughing stock when they talk like that, especially when such a statement is going to make the hearer unpick the facts of the case and that will always, ALWAYS, make them look bad.

The lack of imagination of this man as exhibited by what he has done is breathtaking. He probably coungratulated himself on how well he was getting on with the kids. He thought he was doing a really good job. His ego was masturbated.

A message to all those divorces out there: if you need to find yourself, do it on your own before you involve some poor woman in your self-indulgent navel-gazing. If you feel you must indulge yourself and avail yourself of the attentions of some attractive and engaging woman, but you suspect that there might be some possibility in the future that you might feel the need to find yourself, then choose a woman without commitment. Don't sink yourself wholeheartedly into the life of a family and do all you can to put yourslef at the heart of it. And if you can't avoid that simple rule, avoid at all costs choosing a woman and children who have lost the most important thing round about the anniversary of that loss.

Decide if you need to find yourself before you do these things. Because it is not honourable to do so. It is not respectable and it makes you less of a man.

Now if anyone in the Bristol area would like to meet an engaging, lively, slightly crushed woman and her lovely family, see me, because I'd like to vet you first.

Monday, May 05, 2008

Andrew was right

I started to think about Andrew's comment that I was more effective when I wrote about personal experiences, rather than my 'big ideas' and it rather shut me down. I think he's probably right. And in real life I'm probably more effective when I just tell anecdotes rather than preaching at everyone. Certainly my kids think so. It's been a tough upbringing for them with Mum overstating the case at every turn.

So I think now that I'm restarting this thing I'm going to try and keep my comments on what's happening in the world a little more pithy. It'll be a useful discipline for me because pithy isn't generally what I do well.

I've been away busy with work and wasting time on Facebook, that most uiseless of 'social utilities'. This is going to be my open blog. I'm going to start a more scurrilous one where I can vent anonymously though. I think I need it...