I’ve just spent the weekend with three of our grandchildren, all playing happily together, sometimes watching TV together, sometimes sitting companionably doing stuff on their tablets but side by side and swapping notes. Mostly they’ve played imaginative games and spent what seemed like hours playing hide and seek around the house. This morning I’ve read this article about how children’s services are calling for a national plan for childhood. Thee are problems with obesity, tooth decay, mental health - former prime minister Gordon Brown described young people as the forgotten victims of a “poverty epidemic”. And I feel very lucky that our small people seem so well-adjusted.
There’s also this about mobile phones. But it seems that most schools already have measures in place to control use of phones in school but maybe putting a government rubber stamp on it will help enforce those measures.
Watching our small people on their various devices - tablet, switch, whatever - my son commented that they are the digital generation, the first to grow up completely surrounded by technology. The four year old may not understand it all but he can play the games. His seven year old sister understands some of it better than I do. Their ten year old cousin is mildly disappointed not to have been given a smart phone for her recent birthday but she still spends a good deal of time practising her gymnastic routines. It’s a regular thing to some across her upside down or walking crab-like across the living room floor.
Here’s a little oddity. In Japan the company who run the bullet train have decided to stop using food trolleys selling snacks and drinks on their high speed trains. The Central Japan Railway Company discontinued food and drink sales on the popular Tokyo to Osaka Shinkansen route, citing staff shortages and lack of demand from passengers who buy their supply of snacks for the 500km journey from railway station outlets before boarding.
They were just going to scrap them but have now decided to sell them as loads of people who wanted to secure a slice of Japanese railway history are prepared to pay ¥100,000 (£528) per trolley. There you go!
More seriously, it’s apparently still not acceptable to criticise israel. I read that Brazil’s president Lula had said, “what is happening in the Gaza Strip and to the Palestinian people hasn’t been seen in any other moment in history. Actually, it did when Hitler decided to kill the Jews. What’s happening in the Gaza Strip isn’t a war, it’s a genocide. It’s not a war of soldiers against soldiers. It’s a war between a highly prepared army and women and children.”
What's antisemitic about this? you might well ask, but in response there is this:
"Israel declares Brazil's president Lula 'persona non grata' over Gaza remarks it deems 'serious antisemitic attack'"
And so it goes on:-
“The world must know, and Hamas leaders must know – if by Ramadan our hostages are not home, the fighting will continue everywhere, including the Rafah area,” Benny Gantz, a retired Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, told a conference of American Jewish leaders in Jerusalem on Sunday.
As Israeli forces have expanded ground operations steadily southwards in their war against Hamas over the past four months, Rafah – situated on the border with Egypt, and before the conflict home to about 280,000 people – has become the last refuge for more than half of the strip’s population of 2.3 million.
Nothing changes, it seems.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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