Some odd things in the 21st century!

Despite what their president might say about climate change being a myth. US scientists and weather monitoring experts say that winter has grown shorter by one whole month in the last hundred years. The first frost of the winter comes gradually later and later.

I suppose that tallies with the reduced snowfall we have seen in our bit of the Northwest of England where we used to get snowed in back in the 1970s, something that simply does not happen now. This does not prevent everything grinding to a halt when it snows but the snow rarely stays on the ground for 12, let alone 24, hours.

And here in the Iberian peninsula, even though this year some people complained that the summer in Galicia did not get going until later than usual, the good weather seems to be lingering on and on. With blue sky and sunshine and temperatures in the top 20s, we have just bought sun hats and suntan lotion! No doubt this will provoke a rapid meteorological change! Fine weather we certainly hoped for, but we are seeing people wandering about in short shorts and vest tops. I clearly should have packed sun dresses.

In the 1960s, when I was a grammar school girl - yes, one of the privileged, upwardly mobile! - my school had a strict uniform code. Bottle green almost everything, including knickers but you really only had to worry about that on days when you PE, and prefects strategically placed along everyone’s route home to make sure you were wearing your bottle green beret correctly and did not pop into the sweet shop for a snack along the way. Heaven forfend that we should let the headmistress down by being seen eating on the streets and in uniform. She would spin in her grave to see our local high school kids queueing outside the baker’s or walking along with a portion of chips!

I mention all this because I heard about a school in Japan which excludes not only pupils who dye their hair a funny colour but also those who happen to be born with brown rather than black hair who neglect to dye it properly black! One poor girl has had to miss school because of an allergic reaction to the hair dye. She is sueing the school for compensation. What a topsy turvy situation!

That school may be extreme but it is not alone. “This year a survey of high schools in Tokyo found that almost 60% asked students with lighter hair for proof that it was naturally that colour. Ninety of the 170 schools surveyed by the Asahi newspaper said they asked students to provide photographs of themselves taken when they were infants or attending junior school to prove they had not coloured their hair.”

And finally, here’s a link to an article about a judge in Canada who suggested that the victim in a sexual assault case might have been “flattered” by the advances of her aggressor. Although she had a pretty face, the 17 year old was a bit plump, he suggested, and so might have welcomed the attention! The man in question was a 49-year-old, who the judge said “looks good and doesn’t seem his age”. 

This is still the 21st century, is it not? And we have had a lot of stuff about sexual predators in the news lately, have we not? The mind boggles!