For the first time in a good while I was woken in the night by heavy rain on the roof. I considered staying in bed instead of running but by the time my alarm was ringing (and being snoozed) the rain had stopped. One of my nodding acquaintances on the newly puddly footpath through the trees commented that we needed some rain. Maybe so but personally I need some more sunny days.
I skim-read an article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, another one about how hard life is for new mothers, how much pressure there is to meet certain standards - in this case: “New mums are being ‘strongly encouraged’ to take regular exercise and get more sleep. Hahahaha”. Is it really more difficult than it used to be or are today’s new mothers less resilient?
I suppose she has to go on about the problems as she is writing a column about life with small children. She always ends with a “What’s working” and “what’s not” section. Today’s positive comments was about her three-year-old’s enjoyment of the trampoline. This is the negative one:
“What’s not
Several good friends are dealing with toddlers who run off, sometimes towards traffic. Reins are largely frowned upon by this generation of parents (one friend even received judgmental comments for using them in the vicinity of actual lions while at a safari park), but it got me thinking how they did perform quite an important safety function. Is it time to rehabilitate them, or at least be a bit more understanding of one another?”
I have come across a number of “runaway” toddlers in my time. My Spanish nephew, now at least 30 years old, used to run off in the supermarket, which was fine in their local supermarket back in Spain, where everyone knew who he belonged to. During visits to the UK it was more of a problem if he ran off in the middle of Tesco, for example! He needed reins. Living in Spain, I knew one who was given free rein,as it were, to run around in cafe areas, apart from the rooftop cafe by the docks in Vigo. This cafe had automatic doors which opened at the approach of even the smallest pedestrian.
Personally I felt the need for reins for 6-year-olds when Grandson Number One was that age. i used to collect him and his sister from school and catch a bus to their house. If something annoyed him he would set off at a run, impervious to his surroundings. I would have to drop everything, shout to his 8 year old sister to look after our belongings, and set off in hot pursuit. He definitely needed reins!
In the violent wider world, Israel has bombed Beirut again today, for the first time since a ceasefire with Hezbollah was signed in November. Before the bombing, Israeli’s military issued an evacuation order and warned it would attack a building in Dahiyeh. A spokesperson posted a map on X, with a building marked in red and warned residents to flee more than 300 metres away, reminiscent of the daily maps the Israeli military would issue before bombings during the its war with Hezbollah.
What about people who don’t follow 'social media? Well, apparently guns were fired into the air to alert those who hadn’t seen the warnings on social media. It seems to be a fact of modern life that “everyone” follows social media and those who don’t have younger relatives who do and who can let them know stuff they need to know. What a strange world?
Even stranger is modern warfare that operates on the lines of “we know there is an ‘enemy’ activist in a certain building, so we’ll target that building; if innocent parties get killed in the process, too bad”. But then, I suppose that for those sending the rockets and bombs there is no such thing as innocent parties.
Maybe war was more moral (was it ever moral?) when armies used to line up at opposite ends of a field and then charged each other at a given signal!
The world continues to be rather mad.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone?
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