The European Court of Human Rights upheld the decision of a Rumanian court that a company was within its rights to monitor the private correspondence of one its employees. Ouch! Granted he was using the work computer to email his fiancée and his brother but even so, it's a very grey area. The fact that you have a WORK computer and sometimes a WORK phone does suggest that those things should be used for WORK. The clue is in the name. But sometimes the edges blur.
I was always careful to use my own computer and my personal email account to contact friends and family. However, there were people I knew through work who only had my work email. And occasionally they wanted to contact me for social reasons. What do you do then? Or sometimes, colleagues wanted to organise something like, a drink after work. The fastest way to contact everyone was via the work email. Should they lose their job for that?
The whole monitoring thing is very tricky. If your boss trusts you to do your job efficiently and well, should he really need to check your work email? Do you work as well as you could if you feel the steely eye of the boss on you at all times. Once again, ouch!
And then there is the question of the wider social media. Should your employer have the right to pry into your Facebook or Twitter account. My gut reaction is, certainly not! After all, they would not expect to have access to snail mail arriving through your home letterbox. Most of us denied our parents the right to read our letters from quite an early age.
And yet, I find myself wanting to tell friends to be a little more circumspect in what they put out there on Facebook and the like. Whether you like it or not, people who are not your "friends" still manage to see your posts on occasion, no matter what privacy settings you put up.
Stefan Stern, writing in the Guardian pointed out that there might be a plus side to the accessibility of your social media stuff. "For example, your social media presence may not only amuse and impress your friends, but could remind a potential employer that you are available. If we are heading for a “gig” economy, we will need to publicise our services even when we are nominally off duty. How many of your Facebook friends are really friends, for that matter? Are they in fact contacts? Or both? There may be no simple answers to these questions in 2016." It's an opinion, I suppose.
As for sending the odd private social message on your work computer or checking your Facebook on work's time, is it really so very different from having a private chat with a work colleague at the next desk, also on work's time?
Fortunately, I no longer have to worry about such things and can be amused by what younger "friends" or friends post. Two such had an exchange this morning where one was bemoaning the fact that so many people just use Facebook to recycle the news, especially when it is about the death of 69 year old celebrities, of which there have been rather too many lately. As one of them said, it's not really just about expressing how upset you are that yet another of your idols has popped his clogs; what it's really about is trying to be the FIRST to do so!
One of the things that amused me was an item from Newsthump, which can be relied on to take a sideways look at anything and everything:
"Game of Thrones author George RR Martin is responsible for ‘New Year 2016’ in which he kills off all your favourite characters, he has acknowledged.
He began writing the work late last year when he bumped off Lemmy in the prologue, before moving on to chapters one and two where David Bowie and Alan Rickman met sudden and ill-deserved ends, leading to an outcry from fans."
(So that is why George RR Martin has not been meeting his deadlines for writing the next book in the series. nothing at all to do with being busy writing screenplays for the TV series!)
Meanwhile, serious news items are warning the over 69s, or even possibly the over 60s to keep warm over the next week, when temperatures are expected to plummet to as low as -15!!!! Well, there was already ice on the puddles this morning, frost on the rooftops and a distinct chill in the air.
But the sky was blue instead of grey which was a good start. It waited until mid afternoon to return to grey and gloomy. Let's see what tomorrow brings.
Friday, 15 January 2016
Thursday, 14 January 2016
Equality Matters!
Women are supposed to be able to do anything that a man can do. Well, within reason! Let's not get carried away, after all. We all know that there are physiological differences that mean that both genders can never do exactly the same things as each other.
However, we have got used to women becoming bricklayers and men becoming midwives. As a general rule, we mostly agree that, even if men sometimes get paid more for doing the same job, women can work in most fields that were previously male-dominated. (And vice versa, of course. Except that in the latter case, the men often still get paid more than the women. And they often float to the top of the profession more quickly. There is something fundamentally wrong there.)
So in the midst of all that, along comes Bernie Ecclestone, maintaining that a female driver “would not be taken seriously” in motor racing. Asked about the possibility of women drivers returning to Formula One racing, he said: “I doubt it. If there was somebody that was capable they wouldn’t be taken seriously anyway, so they would never have a car that is capable of competing. There was a girl that was driving in GP3 for a whole season so it is not something that hasn’t happened.” A reporter went on to ask: “But it is not going to happen in the main event?” Ecclestone replied: “No. I don’t think so.”
So there we are. He's not against women racing drivers per se; he just doesn't think they will be very successful. In fact he went as far as to suggest the sport may never see a female racer again. And yet there were women in the sport on the past. Almost 40 years ago the Italian driver Leila Lombardi became the last woman to start a Formula One race at the 1976 Austrian Grand Prix. In fact she took part in 17 Formula One World Championship Grands Prix and was the only female Formula One driver to have a top six finish in a World Championship race (1975 Spanish Grand Prix).
But she was in a minority. She was one of the only two women who managed to qualify for a formula one race. The other was the first woman ever to race in a Formula One Grand Prix. She was Maria Teresa de Filippis ( who incidentally only died the other day, at the grand old age of 89), another Italian, who participated in five World Championship Grands Prix, debuting on 18 May 1958, but scored no championship points. Though largely unsuccessful in her Formula One racing career, she won races in other series and is remembered as a pioneer in the sport.
Personally I can't see the attraction of driving at speed round a race track but, nonetheless, if women want to do so, they should not be discouraged.
The same sort of attitude seems to apply to women who play what I still think of as computer games. Our granddaughter spends quite a lot of time playing shoot'em up and kill'em games and is often regarded as a little odd for doing so. It's OK for a girl to play Candy Crush Saga but other things are seriously a male preserve!
How odd!
However, we have got used to women becoming bricklayers and men becoming midwives. As a general rule, we mostly agree that, even if men sometimes get paid more for doing the same job, women can work in most fields that were previously male-dominated. (And vice versa, of course. Except that in the latter case, the men often still get paid more than the women. And they often float to the top of the profession more quickly. There is something fundamentally wrong there.)
So in the midst of all that, along comes Bernie Ecclestone, maintaining that a female driver “would not be taken seriously” in motor racing. Asked about the possibility of women drivers returning to Formula One racing, he said: “I doubt it. If there was somebody that was capable they wouldn’t be taken seriously anyway, so they would never have a car that is capable of competing. There was a girl that was driving in GP3 for a whole season so it is not something that hasn’t happened.” A reporter went on to ask: “But it is not going to happen in the main event?” Ecclestone replied: “No. I don’t think so.”
So there we are. He's not against women racing drivers per se; he just doesn't think they will be very successful. In fact he went as far as to suggest the sport may never see a female racer again. And yet there were women in the sport on the past. Almost 40 years ago the Italian driver Leila Lombardi became the last woman to start a Formula One race at the 1976 Austrian Grand Prix. In fact she took part in 17 Formula One World Championship Grands Prix and was the only female Formula One driver to have a top six finish in a World Championship race (1975 Spanish Grand Prix).
But she was in a minority. She was one of the only two women who managed to qualify for a formula one race. The other was the first woman ever to race in a Formula One Grand Prix. She was Maria Teresa de Filippis ( who incidentally only died the other day, at the grand old age of 89), another Italian, who participated in five World Championship Grands Prix, debuting on 18 May 1958, but scored no championship points. Though largely unsuccessful in her Formula One racing career, she won races in other series and is remembered as a pioneer in the sport.
Personally I can't see the attraction of driving at speed round a race track but, nonetheless, if women want to do so, they should not be discouraged.
The same sort of attitude seems to apply to women who play what I still think of as computer games. Our granddaughter spends quite a lot of time playing shoot'em up and kill'em games and is often regarded as a little odd for doing so. It's OK for a girl to play Candy Crush Saga but other things are seriously a male preserve!
How odd!
Wednesday, 13 January 2016
One of those Days!
Someone told me today is National Left-handers' Day. Fine! Most left-handed people I know, and I know quite a few, seem to cope well with the so-called handicap. In fact, some of them consider themselves superior to right-handed folk. But, yes, I do sympathise with lefties and feel that allowances should be made for them .... but only while they are at school. Special scissors, seating them so that they don't bang elbows with their right handed desk partner while they work and so on. Once they reach adulthood, however, I think they are quite capable of fending for themselves. At any rate, the ones I know are!
And yesterday, another source told me, was National Kiss a Ginger Day. Having been a ginger, I can honestly say that this is a load of tommy rot. Being ginger never stopped me being kissed and I really wouldn't want random strangers coming up and offering to kiss me just because I'm ginger. This "girl with orange hair" never saw it as a handicap and just because people in media have conspired over the last 15 years or so to make people think that gingers are odd and inferior does not make it so.
What next? Green/grey/whatever colour you like eyes making a person inferior?
Mind you, in a world where people might be considered inferior for silly reasons, perhaps it's better to be left-handed than ginger. No one can tell just by glancing at you that you are left-handed. Well, not unless you have been writing with a very smudgy pen and have smeared ink all over your hand while doing so.
And then, maybe we need National Left-handers Day and National Kiss a Ginger Day to point out to some people the absolute silliness of prejudice of any kind.
Yesterday I went on a little about pigeon-holing people according to age and other factors. Well, today I found this clip from Antena 3, featuring an old lady of 81 who is assumed to be unable to dance because of her age and arthritis and such. There's a bit of me that wonders if the lady in question was a trained dancer. Is it possible to photoshop videos to make a young dancer look like an old lady as she arrives?
And then, without wanting to put old ladies into pigeon holes where they have to dress a certain way, you really should take a look at the killer heels the old dear is wearing! No wonder she needs a stick to walk down the road. Not that she is the first old lady I have seen tottering along a Spanish street in shoes that no sensible girl would, or indeed could, wear! I think Italian ladies have a similar stubborn refusal to give up their high fashion items.
So much for pigeon-holing!
And yesterday, another source told me, was National Kiss a Ginger Day. Having been a ginger, I can honestly say that this is a load of tommy rot. Being ginger never stopped me being kissed and I really wouldn't want random strangers coming up and offering to kiss me just because I'm ginger. This "girl with orange hair" never saw it as a handicap and just because people in media have conspired over the last 15 years or so to make people think that gingers are odd and inferior does not make it so.
What next? Green/grey/whatever colour you like eyes making a person inferior?
Mind you, in a world where people might be considered inferior for silly reasons, perhaps it's better to be left-handed than ginger. No one can tell just by glancing at you that you are left-handed. Well, not unless you have been writing with a very smudgy pen and have smeared ink all over your hand while doing so.
And then, maybe we need National Left-handers Day and National Kiss a Ginger Day to point out to some people the absolute silliness of prejudice of any kind.
Yesterday I went on a little about pigeon-holing people according to age and other factors. Well, today I found this clip from Antena 3, featuring an old lady of 81 who is assumed to be unable to dance because of her age and arthritis and such. There's a bit of me that wonders if the lady in question was a trained dancer. Is it possible to photoshop videos to make a young dancer look like an old lady as she arrives?
And then, without wanting to put old ladies into pigeon holes where they have to dress a certain way, you really should take a look at the killer heels the old dear is wearing! No wonder she needs a stick to walk down the road. Not that she is the first old lady I have seen tottering along a Spanish street in shoes that no sensible girl would, or indeed could, wear! I think Italian ladies have a similar stubborn refusal to give up their high fashion items.
So much for pigeon-holing!
Tuesday, 12 January 2016
Labelling!
You can grow a tad tired of being categorised, put in box with a label on it, having people assume that you are nothing but a .... (insert type here).
Recently when Marks and Spencer were having a change of top management and the usual round of criticism of their stuff - too dowdy, too frumpy, good quality but unfashionable (another example of cubbyholing) - and someone in one of the numerous interviews about it declared that the problem was that M & S tried, unsuccessfully, to appeal to too many age groups. According to the speaker this was a mistake because mothers and daughters never shop in the same place. Oh, no? I mentioned this in conversation with my daughter, and her daughter (18 years old) chipped in, "Well, all three of us often buy similar clothes to each other and often from the same shop!" So there you go!
And just now I read about some psychological study which has concluded that people over 65 do not understand sarcasm. Clearly no-on has told them that 65 is the new 45, or something like that. And then, their study was based on the responses of just 116 (why that random number?) people of varying ages, which is hardly going to be a representative sample. Any basic knowledge of statistics would tell you that. Over 65 covers an immense age range. And maybe, when the over 65s in their sample responded in a way that suggested they did not understand implicit sarcasm, just maybe those over 65s were being sarcastic in their turn. That would be ironic, would it not? So, we must be careful about putting labels on anyone. That way intolerance and overreaction lie!
I was in Manchester again today. The city centre still appears to be one huge building site, and looking even more miserable in the chilly damp of a grey January day. In one of the shops I called in at, the shop assistant asked what I was doing with my day. So I told him. I was on my way to an Italian conversation class. He asked where it was and on discovering that it was at the Manchester Deaf Institute (one of the few places where the rent is anything like reasonable near the city centre for a class like ours) he proceeded to ask if that was the place where they do music gigs. After a bit of orienteering and geography we discovered that we were in fact talking of the same place. I knew nothing of the concerts organised in upper rooms of the place and he knew nothing of all the stuff that goes on for deaf students in the whole place. We had different "labels" on the same building.
We went on to chat about learning languages. He is learning French, gradually moving up through the levels of proficiency imposed by the Alliance Française. His motivation was having spent some time studying Media in Paris. He has a Masters in Media but, like many young people, the only job he has been able to get so far is working in a clothes store, perhaps one where he worked part time as a student. I wonder how many over-qualified shop assistants there are in Manchester alone!
For today's Italian class we had been asked to write a short biography of someone famous, past or present and of any nationality. So I chose the writer Jhumpa Lahiri because I had recently read an article of hers in which she talked about her experience of learning Italian and her decision from now on to write only in Italian. This was partly as a means of improving her fluency in Italian; it works! I used to tell my students to try to keep a diary in French or Spanish. It helps you begin to think in the foreign language. In the case of Jhumpa Lahiri it was also because she was interested in the way writing in a foreign language altered her writing style. Here is a link to her article .
Interestingly, I read somewhere that Samuel Becket said that he began to write in French to improve his fluency but also that wrote differently in French and in English. Becket translated his own work from one language to the other but Jhumpa Lahiri has her Italian writing translated by a professional and experienced translator. Oddly enough, I also read that the Galician writer Domingo Villar does not translate his own work from Galician into Castilian. Apparently he said that if he were to start to translate his work he would feel the need to alter it. If he wrote his books in Castilian Spanish, he maintained, they would be quite different books.
A different kind of categorising!
Recently when Marks and Spencer were having a change of top management and the usual round of criticism of their stuff - too dowdy, too frumpy, good quality but unfashionable (another example of cubbyholing) - and someone in one of the numerous interviews about it declared that the problem was that M & S tried, unsuccessfully, to appeal to too many age groups. According to the speaker this was a mistake because mothers and daughters never shop in the same place. Oh, no? I mentioned this in conversation with my daughter, and her daughter (18 years old) chipped in, "Well, all three of us often buy similar clothes to each other and often from the same shop!" So there you go!
And just now I read about some psychological study which has concluded that people over 65 do not understand sarcasm. Clearly no-on has told them that 65 is the new 45, or something like that. And then, their study was based on the responses of just 116 (why that random number?) people of varying ages, which is hardly going to be a representative sample. Any basic knowledge of statistics would tell you that. Over 65 covers an immense age range. And maybe, when the over 65s in their sample responded in a way that suggested they did not understand implicit sarcasm, just maybe those over 65s were being sarcastic in their turn. That would be ironic, would it not? So, we must be careful about putting labels on anyone. That way intolerance and overreaction lie!
I was in Manchester again today. The city centre still appears to be one huge building site, and looking even more miserable in the chilly damp of a grey January day. In one of the shops I called in at, the shop assistant asked what I was doing with my day. So I told him. I was on my way to an Italian conversation class. He asked where it was and on discovering that it was at the Manchester Deaf Institute (one of the few places where the rent is anything like reasonable near the city centre for a class like ours) he proceeded to ask if that was the place where they do music gigs. After a bit of orienteering and geography we discovered that we were in fact talking of the same place. I knew nothing of the concerts organised in upper rooms of the place and he knew nothing of all the stuff that goes on for deaf students in the whole place. We had different "labels" on the same building.
We went on to chat about learning languages. He is learning French, gradually moving up through the levels of proficiency imposed by the Alliance Française. His motivation was having spent some time studying Media in Paris. He has a Masters in Media but, like many young people, the only job he has been able to get so far is working in a clothes store, perhaps one where he worked part time as a student. I wonder how many over-qualified shop assistants there are in Manchester alone!
For today's Italian class we had been asked to write a short biography of someone famous, past or present and of any nationality. So I chose the writer Jhumpa Lahiri because I had recently read an article of hers in which she talked about her experience of learning Italian and her decision from now on to write only in Italian. This was partly as a means of improving her fluency in Italian; it works! I used to tell my students to try to keep a diary in French or Spanish. It helps you begin to think in the foreign language. In the case of Jhumpa Lahiri it was also because she was interested in the way writing in a foreign language altered her writing style. Here is a link to her article .
Interestingly, I read somewhere that Samuel Becket said that he began to write in French to improve his fluency but also that wrote differently in French and in English. Becket translated his own work from one language to the other but Jhumpa Lahiri has her Italian writing translated by a professional and experienced translator. Oddly enough, I also read that the Galician writer Domingo Villar does not translate his own work from Galician into Castilian. Apparently he said that if he were to start to translate his work he would feel the need to alter it. If he wrote his books in Castilian Spanish, he maintained, they would be quite different books.
A different kind of categorising!
Monday, 11 January 2016
Families, famous folk and oddities about animals.
It must be hard to belong to a family which is always in the spotlight. One member of such a family must have been feeling that this morning when she had to turn up at a court in Mallorca, on charges of tax evasion along with her husband. The UK newspaper in which I read about the story still referred to Cristina Federica Victoria Antonia de la Santísima Trinidad de Borbón y de Grecia – her full title - as a member of the Spanish royal family and sixth in line to the throne. Now, I may be wrong but I am pretty sure they sort of threw her out the royal family at an earlier stage of this case coming to light. She still gets to visit members of the family. After all, you can't actually change the DNA and Queen Sofía is still the grandmother of Cristina's children. Come to that, the current king of Spain is still their uncle. But Cristina and Iñaki no longer seem to get invited to the big royal family holidays or have any official duties. She is no longer truly an Infanta.
What a come down. I remember the razzmatazz of their wedding, a very glamorous affair. Her sister Elena had been married some years previously in the huge cathedral in Seville; the first royal wedding Spain had seen since before the civil war and a televised event to rival the UK's royal weddings. But Cristina and Iñaki's wedding in Barcelona was heralded as a kind of unifying ceremony for all sorts of diverse bits of Spain. She was from the old royalty (de Borbón y de Grecia, after all), he was from an old Basque family (a troublesome region that needed some TLC) and they were marrying in Barcelona, Cataluña (another troublesome region that needed some TLC). What could be better? Such high hopes!
I wonder how they managed to get themselves into the morass of corruption and tax evasion. You would have thought that they had people to advise them about such matters.
Meanwhile Barcelona popped up in another news story. Trade unions there are fighting to prevent Pablo Picasso’s former art school being turned into a museum devoted to the film director Woody Allen, which they say would hold more appeal for the city’s legions of tourists than for its residents. It would seem that the mayor of Barcelona had promised that the building would be restored and reopened as an art school once more. But presumably a Woody Allen museum would make more money for the city. However, I do wonder WHY there should be a Woody Allen museum there. Surely New York is more his city. I know he filmed "Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona" in the eponymous Spanish (oops, Catalan!) city, which incidentally gave him a big chunk of cash towards the making of the film, but I would have thought that was the only real connection. Maybe he should also have a museum in Paris; after all he made "Midnight in Paris" there! Then tourists in both places could take selfies the.
Which leads us onto ownership of selfies and a silly story. A US court has ruled that a macaque called Naruto cannot own the copyright to “selfies” that he took with a nature photographer’s camera, throwing out a lawsuit brought by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta), which sought to use proceeds from the photograph to help other monkeys. Here's a link to the story behind the court case. Well, of course monkeys are clever enough to work out how to use a camera and take selfies and the story is quite amusing but, as the person who wrote the article where I found this story said, surely the PETA organisation should be spending the donated money on more important things than monkeys owning the rights to photos. Even if they took the photos themselves!
And finally there is the story of a Chinese tourist who tried to kiss a snake. She went to a show organised by a Thai company and decided to lean forward and kiss one of the pythons. The snake was clearly not the sort to be kissed by just anyone and bit her on the nose. She has been paid £2,200 in damages.
And there I was, thinking the silly season didn't start quite yet!
What a come down. I remember the razzmatazz of their wedding, a very glamorous affair. Her sister Elena had been married some years previously in the huge cathedral in Seville; the first royal wedding Spain had seen since before the civil war and a televised event to rival the UK's royal weddings. But Cristina and Iñaki's wedding in Barcelona was heralded as a kind of unifying ceremony for all sorts of diverse bits of Spain. She was from the old royalty (de Borbón y de Grecia, after all), he was from an old Basque family (a troublesome region that needed some TLC) and they were marrying in Barcelona, Cataluña (another troublesome region that needed some TLC). What could be better? Such high hopes!
I wonder how they managed to get themselves into the morass of corruption and tax evasion. You would have thought that they had people to advise them about such matters.
Meanwhile Barcelona popped up in another news story. Trade unions there are fighting to prevent Pablo Picasso’s former art school being turned into a museum devoted to the film director Woody Allen, which they say would hold more appeal for the city’s legions of tourists than for its residents. It would seem that the mayor of Barcelona had promised that the building would be restored and reopened as an art school once more. But presumably a Woody Allen museum would make more money for the city. However, I do wonder WHY there should be a Woody Allen museum there. Surely New York is more his city. I know he filmed "Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona" in the eponymous Spanish (oops, Catalan!) city, which incidentally gave him a big chunk of cash towards the making of the film, but I would have thought that was the only real connection. Maybe he should also have a museum in Paris; after all he made "Midnight in Paris" there! Then tourists in both places could take selfies the.
Which leads us onto ownership of selfies and a silly story. A US court has ruled that a macaque called Naruto cannot own the copyright to “selfies” that he took with a nature photographer’s camera, throwing out a lawsuit brought by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta), which sought to use proceeds from the photograph to help other monkeys. Here's a link to the story behind the court case. Well, of course monkeys are clever enough to work out how to use a camera and take selfies and the story is quite amusing but, as the person who wrote the article where I found this story said, surely the PETA organisation should be spending the donated money on more important things than monkeys owning the rights to photos. Even if they took the photos themselves!
And finally there is the story of a Chinese tourist who tried to kiss a snake. She went to a show organised by a Thai company and decided to lean forward and kiss one of the pythons. The snake was clearly not the sort to be kissed by just anyone and bit her on the nose. She has been paid £2,200 in damages.
And there I was, thinking the silly season didn't start quite yet!
Sunday, 10 January 2016
Children.
Apparently David Cameron plans on calling for all parents to attend parenting classes. "In the end," says he, "getting parenting and the early years right isn't just about the hardest-to-reach families it's about everyone." It's true that children don't come with an instruction manual. Neither do puppies but it is probably easier to find a nice, straightforward, easy to read how-to-look-after-your-puppy book than it is to find a similar tome about child-rearing. So maybe, just maybe, he has a point.
As a rule the owner of a new puppy is not usually exhausted after giving birth and so has more energy to put into studying what to do. And you can more easily take time off, putting the puppy in his nicely equipped puppy cage and going out for a drink. Now, I know there are people who would say that you really should have a babysitter for your puppy as well, so he doesn't get traumatised in your absence, but it's not the same as popping your tiny baby in his carry cot and leaving him on his own while you go out for the evening.
And when you think about the kind of training that the best professional nannies receive, then maybe it is a little unrealistic to think that new parents instinctively know how to look after children.
Coincidentally, before reading the news item about parenting classes, I had been talking to my daughter about one of the children in her class. This child is a physically large nine year old who mostly does what he is told in school, perhaps a little clumsy, perhaps not terribly well co-ordinated, perhaps a bit distracted on occasion, probably not the brightest button in the box but not a major problem. His mother, however, thinks he should be statemented as being somewhere in the autistic spectrum. She has a litany of things he does and doesn't do at home, all of which indicate to her that he is a problem child. Only after a long parent-teacher consultation did the mother concede that her child was actually not a problem at school but she still feels he needs support if some kind, which in fact he already receiving according to my daughter.
It may be that this mother needs some training in parenting but how do you make her understand this without making her feel that you are patronising or even insulting her. Even David Cameron agrees that it will be necessary to incentivise parents to learn how to do it. "I believe we now need to think about how to make it normal - even aspirational - to attend parenting classes."
Then there are the children getting no parenting at all in refugee camps like the one in Calais. I was reading about the case of a 15 year old Afghan, Massud, who suffocated in the back of lorry as he tried to get into the UK. He got fed up of waiting for someone to help him process his claim to join his sister in the UK and took matters into his own hands in the period between Christmas and the New Year, with fatal consequences.
And yet, it turns put that he was one of a list of unaccompanied minors in the camp who were forming part of a test case, a legal challenge against the Home Office which will be heard on January 18th. He was handpicked as a desperate case, a vulnerable child who deserved to be reunited with a family member already in the UK. I wonder if anyone told Massud that this was going on.
He was 15, still a child but quite old enough to understand the processes that were taking place. Children need to be talked to. Had someone told him, he might have lived to find put the results of the challenge!
Post script on a lighter note. After my rant about sportswear yesterday, here is a link to a cartoon called "Things I have learnt from ... taking up jogging" by Simone Lia.
As a rule the owner of a new puppy is not usually exhausted after giving birth and so has more energy to put into studying what to do. And you can more easily take time off, putting the puppy in his nicely equipped puppy cage and going out for a drink. Now, I know there are people who would say that you really should have a babysitter for your puppy as well, so he doesn't get traumatised in your absence, but it's not the same as popping your tiny baby in his carry cot and leaving him on his own while you go out for the evening.
And when you think about the kind of training that the best professional nannies receive, then maybe it is a little unrealistic to think that new parents instinctively know how to look after children.
Coincidentally, before reading the news item about parenting classes, I had been talking to my daughter about one of the children in her class. This child is a physically large nine year old who mostly does what he is told in school, perhaps a little clumsy, perhaps not terribly well co-ordinated, perhaps a bit distracted on occasion, probably not the brightest button in the box but not a major problem. His mother, however, thinks he should be statemented as being somewhere in the autistic spectrum. She has a litany of things he does and doesn't do at home, all of which indicate to her that he is a problem child. Only after a long parent-teacher consultation did the mother concede that her child was actually not a problem at school but she still feels he needs support if some kind, which in fact he already receiving according to my daughter.
It may be that this mother needs some training in parenting but how do you make her understand this without making her feel that you are patronising or even insulting her. Even David Cameron agrees that it will be necessary to incentivise parents to learn how to do it. "I believe we now need to think about how to make it normal - even aspirational - to attend parenting classes."
Then there are the children getting no parenting at all in refugee camps like the one in Calais. I was reading about the case of a 15 year old Afghan, Massud, who suffocated in the back of lorry as he tried to get into the UK. He got fed up of waiting for someone to help him process his claim to join his sister in the UK and took matters into his own hands in the period between Christmas and the New Year, with fatal consequences.
And yet, it turns put that he was one of a list of unaccompanied minors in the camp who were forming part of a test case, a legal challenge against the Home Office which will be heard on January 18th. He was handpicked as a desperate case, a vulnerable child who deserved to be reunited with a family member already in the UK. I wonder if anyone told Massud that this was going on.
He was 15, still a child but quite old enough to understand the processes that were taking place. Children need to be talked to. Had someone told him, he might have lived to find put the results of the challenge!
Post script on a lighter note. After my rant about sportswear yesterday, here is a link to a cartoon called "Things I have learnt from ... taking up jogging" by Simone Lia.
Saturday, 9 January 2016
Working out.
Years ago I used to go to an aerobics class. It was kind of a follow-on from a do-it-yourself fitness programme using Jane Fonda's Workout book. That book had lots of good ideas but I sent it to a charity shop a good while ago, although I still do some of the amazing Ms Fonda's exercises.
Anyway, I signed up for an aerobics class, in the local church hall if I remember correctly. It was very good. Fun, lively, fast moving exercise to music. The accepted "uniform" was leotard and tights. In my case, that meant basic black. I was working part time, we had a couple of kids and little money to spare on fripperies. I soon discovered that this was not the case for some of the ladies in the class.
They appeared in a different colour combination every week. Granted, some of them went to several classes and so needed a change of exercise wear while the other was in the wash. But it soon became very tiresome to hear the repeated conversation along the lines of " What a lovely leotard!" "Where did you buy that outfit?" "Don't you think (insert brand name) do really nice colours of sports wear?" Good grief! This was clothing to get hot and sweaty in! All the people in the class were women so there weren't even any men to attract! But then, some of them were also immaculately coiffed, manicured and made-up! Just a bit of feminine competition then?!
I was reminded of this today by this item in the Guardian Weekend magazine, which is full of features about exercise and fitness. Some of the sportswear featured costs silly money. Leggings for £108! Vest tops for £68! I can just about understand the high price of running trainers; after all, your feet and legs need proper support if you are not to suffer joint problems. But the rest is just fashion nonsense.
And it has become hard to find stuff reasonably priced, especially if you want the kind of fabric that wicks away sweat. So I tend to buy my running gear when they have a sale at the running shop in Manchester. You can usually find something to suit in the right size at a reasonable price, so long as you are not particular about colour and don't insist on everything coordinating.
That's all!
Anyway, I signed up for an aerobics class, in the local church hall if I remember correctly. It was very good. Fun, lively, fast moving exercise to music. The accepted "uniform" was leotard and tights. In my case, that meant basic black. I was working part time, we had a couple of kids and little money to spare on fripperies. I soon discovered that this was not the case for some of the ladies in the class.
They appeared in a different colour combination every week. Granted, some of them went to several classes and so needed a change of exercise wear while the other was in the wash. But it soon became very tiresome to hear the repeated conversation along the lines of " What a lovely leotard!" "Where did you buy that outfit?" "Don't you think (insert brand name) do really nice colours of sports wear?" Good grief! This was clothing to get hot and sweaty in! All the people in the class were women so there weren't even any men to attract! But then, some of them were also immaculately coiffed, manicured and made-up! Just a bit of feminine competition then?!
I was reminded of this today by this item in the Guardian Weekend magazine, which is full of features about exercise and fitness. Some of the sportswear featured costs silly money. Leggings for £108! Vest tops for £68! I can just about understand the high price of running trainers; after all, your feet and legs need proper support if you are not to suffer joint problems. But the rest is just fashion nonsense.
And it has become hard to find stuff reasonably priced, especially if you want the kind of fabric that wicks away sweat. So I tend to buy my running gear when they have a sale at the running shop in Manchester. You can usually find something to suit in the right size at a reasonable price, so long as you are not particular about colour and don't insist on everything coordinating.
That's all!
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