Today being Wednesday, I ran to Uppermill so that I could go to the market first thing before the fish man had sold up and moved in. I ran along our local bridle path, the Donkey Line, which is awash with bluebells at the moment. This makes a great change from being awash with muddy puddles which was the case until the recent sunny spell came along and dried them all up - well, most of them; there are still puddly places under the bridges but you have to have a prolonged drought for those to dry up. 
I hadn’t got far along the route when I was warned by another regular Donkey Line user, a young lady who walks her dog and baby, not to frighten the baby owl on the path. 
The young lady with the baby was already on the case and had sent someone off to get a box so that they could perhaps take him to the RSPCA. Apparently his mother had been around earlier but I saw no sign of her. However, when the box man returned, equipped with gardening gloves to protect his hands, and tried to pick him up, the small owl showed he was probably unharmed by spreading his wings and flapping off into the undergrowth. Taking off seemed to be beyond him though.
At that point I decided that there were enough people around possibly causing panic in the creature’s life. So I went on my way, did my bit of shopping at the market and was just in time to catch a bus back home for a shower and a late breakfast. I rather like Wednesdays.
Over breakfast I read bits of the newspaper online. Now, it’s not often I feel sympathy for the trials and tribulations of the royal family but today I found myself for once siding with Prince Charles. He is in Canada at the moment and in conversation with a museum volunteer whose family had fled Nazi Germany he made some comment about Putin acting in the same way as Hitler at the moment. It was a private conversation not a formal interview (consequently Clarence House sees no need to comment on it) but the comment was overheard and reported. Now a British MP is calling for Prince Charles to abdicate. (Is it even possible to abdicate when you’re still not king even though you’re 65?)
There’s something very sad about the modern world where even private conversations are reported, analysed and criticised. Of course, famous people in the public eye have to be careful not to be too outrageous but pretty soon we’ll all be watching our backs, and our tongues, in case we say the wrong thing in the wrong place and are accused of being disloyal to the state. I’m currently reading “Life and Fate” by Vasily Grossman, a story set in Russia towards the end of the Second World War. There people find themselves under arrest because someone has reported to the authorities an “innocent” comment made in a private conversation. Hmm, why does that sound vaguely familiar?
Another thing that’s upsetting me at the moment is privatisation, in particular the move to privatise child social services. One of the companies suggested already has a poor record for running prisons, for goodness sake! Private enterprise is intended to make a profit. How do you make a profit out of social services? Or education? Or the health service? Or prisons? Or the probation service? It’s potty!! There have been a couple of stories of dangerous prisoners escaping from open prisons or not returning from a day out of prison. Have these incidents been a consequence of “outsourcing”, as they call it? I’ve even read that some of the “outsourcing” ends up with government money going to foreign companies. So the privatising isn’t even helping UK enterprise. As I said before: potty!
And now for a final rant: language! I’m just a little tired of hearing about “outsourcing”, “inputting”, “uploading”, “downloading” and such like. I find it all more than a little off-putting!
That’s all!
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