On Thursday we voted in the local council elections. We found ourselves voting for someone who used to go to the chess club that Phil ran for a while years ago at the local primary school. We were a little concerned about voting for someone so young, only a few years out of university, and relatively inexperienced but none of the other candidates had anything much to offer and at least that young man seems to have a brain and to be thinking the right way.
As the results came in yesterday mainstream media outlets started to talk as if it had all been a great failure for Labour. Defeat for Jeremy Corbyn, they cried, or perhaps crowed, success for Theresa May. But Labour now has 2,299 councillors across the country, up by 57, while the Conservatives have 1,330, down by 28. No, Labour didn’t win over the strong Conservative boroughs they hoped to win in London but London isn’t the whole country. Oh, I know that weather reporters think that when London has a heatwave the whole of the UK needs sunscreen, but political reporters should know better.
A
Spin, spin, spin!
UKIP won only 3 council places, down by 123. One of their own people said they have been like the Black Death, coming in, causing disruption and then fading away again. An odd thing to compare your own party to but who am I to expect rational behaviour from such people? Now, Radio 4 broadcast a regular programme which looks at statistics and how they are interpreted. Yesterday looked, among other things, at the number of times Nigel Farage has been invited to appear on BBC television’s “Question Time”. Some people had been suggesting that he had appeared more often than anyone else.
Not so, surprisingly. I think the overall winner was Shirley Williams. However, she had been on the political scene for a long, long time and her appearances had been spread over many years. Nigel Farage’s appearances, diminishing now, were concentrated over a much shorter period. Like Caroline Lucas, of the Green Party, he could be guaranteed to say things that would get other panel members going. So, lots of invitations and lots of appearances.
But those many appearances brought him more and more into the public eye and probably led to an increase in popularity for his party. Or at least, gave them a boost. (No, it hasn’t worked as well for the Greens, although they increased their total councillors to 39, up by 8. And Caroline Lucas does not appeal to rabid right wingers in the same way as Farage does.)
Whenever I reflect on the rise of Nigel Farage, and now on the rise of Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is receiving similar media coverage, I am reminded of a science fiction story I read long ago. In the story, time travel had been properly sorted out and travel companies had branched out into time-tourism, taking tourists on trips to significant moments in history. One of these was to that hill without a city wall where the crucifixion took place. The tour guide noticed that over the years that he ran the visits the numbers at the site grew and grew. More and more people shouted for Barrabas to be freed and for Christ to be crucified, speeding up the decision to release the thief. Might things have gone differently, he wondered, if tourism had not developed there.
Similar comments might be made about media influence on political standing and even about the televising of Parliament, for that matter.
Saturday, 5 May 2018
Friday, 4 May 2018
May the 4th be with you! And other cultural celebation stuff.
Today is May the 4th.
A friend of mine has been wishing everyone Happy Star Trek Day today. Intrigued, I looked it up. I admit to becoming a little obsessed with this DAYS business. Anyway, it turns put that today is not Star TREK Day but Star WARS Day. You have to getvyour Stars films and series sorted out.
Real Star Wars fans enjoying the play on words (“May the Force / May the 4th be with you” for those who don’t get.) make today their DAY!
Star Trek Day, by the way is September 8th because the first episode was broadcast on that date in 1966. Being Star Trek, it has a much more logical reason for its DAY. I missed that first episode, probably because I was busy going off the university. There is a whole lot of television stuff between 1996 and 1970 that just passed me by.
Here’s another one: Star Trek First Contact Day is April 5th to celebrate first contact between humans and Klingons in 2063. So, to probably misquote Sprinsteen, “we’re living in the future and none of this has happened yet”. But dedicated trekkies celebrate it anyway.
I wonder how fans will feel when 2063 comes around, assuming there are still Star Trek fans in 2063. It’s always a bit problematical putting an apparently far-distant date on something. 1984 and 2001 once seemed impossibly remote in time but now they have come and gone.
In the world of celebration of films all is not quiet and peaceful. The Cannes Film Festival is being criticised for accepting Lars Von Triers back into fold after he was excluded for making nazi jokes in 2011 and then more recently being accused of sexual harassment. On top of that critics are cross because only three of the films at the festival are directed by women. “Last year, before the #MeToo and Time’s Up campaigns took hold, only three women were in competition: Sofia Coppola, Lynne Ramsay and Naomi Kawase. Twelve months later, out of 21 films in the competition, and after so much upheaval and uproar … again, three: Nadine Labaki, Eva Husson and Alice Rohrwacher.” They have set up a sexual harassment helpline but are deemed not be doing enough in this post-Weinstein era.
Oh dear!
Also suffering is the committee for the Nobel Prize for Literature. They already upset some people by awarding a prize to Bob Dylan but this year there will be no award at all. You might think that so austere an organisation would not get involved in sexual harassment or sexual violence scandals but that is not the case. One of the members of the Academy, the poet Katarina Frostenson, is married to a French photographer, Jean-Claude Arnault. He has been accused of sexual assault and also, unrelatedly one imagines, of leaking the names of seven former Nobel winners.
He denies both claims but after the allegations were made public three members of the committee to select the literature prize winner wanted Katarina Frostenson expelled from the Academy. When a decision was taken not to do so the three protesting members resigned.
Consequently the committee feels that they are unable to make a decision until those three have been replaced and the scandal has died down.
There will be two prizes for literature next year. Phew!
Real Star Wars fans enjoying the play on words (“May the Force / May the 4th be with you” for those who don’t get.) make today their DAY!
Star Trek Day, by the way is September 8th because the first episode was broadcast on that date in 1966. Being Star Trek, it has a much more logical reason for its DAY. I missed that first episode, probably because I was busy going off the university. There is a whole lot of television stuff between 1996 and 1970 that just passed me by.
Here’s another one: Star Trek First Contact Day is April 5th to celebrate first contact between humans and Klingons in 2063. So, to probably misquote Sprinsteen, “we’re living in the future and none of this has happened yet”. But dedicated trekkies celebrate it anyway.
I wonder how fans will feel when 2063 comes around, assuming there are still Star Trek fans in 2063. It’s always a bit problematical putting an apparently far-distant date on something. 1984 and 2001 once seemed impossibly remote in time but now they have come and gone.
In the world of celebration of films all is not quiet and peaceful. The Cannes Film Festival is being criticised for accepting Lars Von Triers back into fold after he was excluded for making nazi jokes in 2011 and then more recently being accused of sexual harassment. On top of that critics are cross because only three of the films at the festival are directed by women. “Last year, before the #MeToo and Time’s Up campaigns took hold, only three women were in competition: Sofia Coppola, Lynne Ramsay and Naomi Kawase. Twelve months later, out of 21 films in the competition, and after so much upheaval and uproar … again, three: Nadine Labaki, Eva Husson and Alice Rohrwacher.” They have set up a sexual harassment helpline but are deemed not be doing enough in this post-Weinstein era.
Oh dear!
Also suffering is the committee for the Nobel Prize for Literature. They already upset some people by awarding a prize to Bob Dylan but this year there will be no award at all. You might think that so austere an organisation would not get involved in sexual harassment or sexual violence scandals but that is not the case. One of the members of the Academy, the poet Katarina Frostenson, is married to a French photographer, Jean-Claude Arnault. He has been accused of sexual assault and also, unrelatedly one imagines, of leaking the names of seven former Nobel winners.
He denies both claims but after the allegations were made public three members of the committee to select the literature prize winner wanted Katarina Frostenson expelled from the Academy. When a decision was taken not to do so the three protesting members resigned.
Consequently the committee feels that they are unable to make a decision until those three have been replaced and the scandal has died down.
There will be two prizes for literature next year. Phew!
Thursday, 3 May 2018
Choose your words with care!
Words are funny things. I have always found them fascinating, in my perhaps rather geekish way. I am not alone, however. A young colleague of mine used to try to expand his students’ vocabulary by instituting his “Word of the Week” system. Students won points, and eventually prizes, for successfully and correctly using the word of the week in class discussion (he taught history) and in essays.
The other day I came across an article about someone’s pet word-hates: the modern expressions that the writer finds hard to accept, to say the least. From the world of business he took “monetise”, “going forward” (one of my own least favourite expressions - what’s wrong with “in (the) future”?), “to action”, “to dialogue” and any more nouns that have become verbs! Demonic phrases, he said they were.
Then there is the word “nom”. I wince when people put pictures of food on facebook, not because of the pictures of food -after all, I do that myself - but because it is accompanied by the statement “Nom! Nom!”. In all the old children’s comics it used to be “Yum! Yum!” So where has all this “nomming” come from. And yes, it is used as a verb as well!
The writer also picked up on the use of the continuous present to express appreciation of things: clothes, new hairdo, whatever. Our daughter is guilty of this. She rarely tells you simply that she “loves” something. She has to tell you “I’m loving” whatever it happens to be.
It’s a funny old world.
You have to be careful about words that appear similar in different languages, those old false friends. Those of us who have taught Spanish have all experienced the pupils who refused to use the expression “estoy constipado” to say “I have a cold” because it reminds them of something else altogether. Much ruder examples abound. Apparently Monsieur Macron, Président de la France, has suprised and amused people by describing the Australian PM’s wife as “delicious”. Was it a mistranslation? Or was he echoing the words of one of the monsters in the children’s book “Where the Wild Things are”: “I’ll eat you up, I love you so”? Who knows?
And sometimes people can coin a term which later escapes from them and is misappropriated. About twenty years ago a woman having difficulty finding a boyfriend described herself an “involuntary celibate”. This led to Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project”, an all-text website where she posted theories and articles and ran a mailing list. “I identified that there were a lot of people who were lonely and not really sure how to start dating,” she said. “They were kind of lacking those social skills and I had a lot of sympathy for that because I had been through the same situation.” The term was later shortened to “incel”.
Life moved on, she got into a relationship, her social life improved and she did lots of other things and passed on the website to someone else, and forgot about it. Until, that is, she read about Elliot Rodger, who in 2014 killed six people and wounded 14 others in California. In online posts that raged at women for rejecting his romantic advances, Rodger had described himself as an incel.
Imagine her horror. That was her term, coming back to haunt her.
Then it was revealed that the young man accused of driving a van into pedestrians in Toronto just recently has links to incel websites. Alana’s community of lonely people who wanted help and advice about dating had turned into an online community of misogynists who posted stuff about wanted to use rape and violence against women.
The power of words had met, up with the law of unforeseen consequences!
The other day I came across an article about someone’s pet word-hates: the modern expressions that the writer finds hard to accept, to say the least. From the world of business he took “monetise”, “going forward” (one of my own least favourite expressions - what’s wrong with “in (the) future”?), “to action”, “to dialogue” and any more nouns that have become verbs! Demonic phrases, he said they were.
Then there is the word “nom”. I wince when people put pictures of food on facebook, not because of the pictures of food -after all, I do that myself - but because it is accompanied by the statement “Nom! Nom!”. In all the old children’s comics it used to be “Yum! Yum!” So where has all this “nomming” come from. And yes, it is used as a verb as well!
The writer also picked up on the use of the continuous present to express appreciation of things: clothes, new hairdo, whatever. Our daughter is guilty of this. She rarely tells you simply that she “loves” something. She has to tell you “I’m loving” whatever it happens to be.
It’s a funny old world.
You have to be careful about words that appear similar in different languages, those old false friends. Those of us who have taught Spanish have all experienced the pupils who refused to use the expression “estoy constipado” to say “I have a cold” because it reminds them of something else altogether. Much ruder examples abound. Apparently Monsieur Macron, Président de la France, has suprised and amused people by describing the Australian PM’s wife as “delicious”. Was it a mistranslation? Or was he echoing the words of one of the monsters in the children’s book “Where the Wild Things are”: “I’ll eat you up, I love you so”? Who knows?
And sometimes people can coin a term which later escapes from them and is misappropriated. About twenty years ago a woman having difficulty finding a boyfriend described herself an “involuntary celibate”. This led to Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project”, an all-text website where she posted theories and articles and ran a mailing list. “I identified that there were a lot of people who were lonely and not really sure how to start dating,” she said. “They were kind of lacking those social skills and I had a lot of sympathy for that because I had been through the same situation.” The term was later shortened to “incel”.
Life moved on, she got into a relationship, her social life improved and she did lots of other things and passed on the website to someone else, and forgot about it. Until, that is, she read about Elliot Rodger, who in 2014 killed six people and wounded 14 others in California. In online posts that raged at women for rejecting his romantic advances, Rodger had described himself as an incel.
Imagine her horror. That was her term, coming back to haunt her.
Then it was revealed that the young man accused of driving a van into pedestrians in Toronto just recently has links to incel websites. Alana’s community of lonely people who wanted help and advice about dating had turned into an online community of misogynists who posted stuff about wanted to use rape and violence against women.
The power of words had met, up with the law of unforeseen consequences!
Wednesday, 2 May 2018
Eating out. Meeting people. The importance of singing songs.
On Monday I did ladies-who-lunch again. We went to a Catalan tapas restaurant in the rather picturesque Barton Arcade off Saint Ann’s Square in the centre of Manchester. They have a sort of two-tier lunch menu of two or three tapas per person. The portions are generous so two tapas are plenty for a light lunch. Our waiter, a young man with an appropriately Salvador Dali-esque moustache but who turned put to be Not Spanish but Italian, assured us that they cook all the food themselves on the premises - but not himself personally!
One consequence of their cooking on demand, as it were, rather than having loads of stuff lined up waiting to be microwaved, is that your tapas arrive individually, a little like having your birthday presents in dribs and drabs. Of course, I suppose it is quite feasible that they have stiff lined up to microwaved and just serve it in dribs and drabs to convince the clientele that they are doing proper chef-business in the kitchen. But somehow that all seems a bit too Machiavellian. And the food WAS good.
On my way home in the tram later in the afternoon, I was approached by an apparent stranger with one of those “It is you, isn’t it?” questions. As soon as she spoke I recognised her as well, someone I almost went into a translation business with almost 30 years ago, someone I’ve not seen for at leat 25. “You’ve not changed a bit,” she declared. Good grief, I thought to myself, if I truly have not changed a bit I must have looked pretty ragged in my forties! But, no, I understood perfectly well that what she meant was “I would have recognised you anywhere”. Peculiarities of the English language!
Yesterday our daughter came round for a second breakfast, having had her first at about 5.00 am when the small person woke her up and refused to go back to sleep. Just what she needed on her day off. The small person is now quite articulate and more than a little demanding. One of her favourite things is to smile at you and say, “Row, row”, which can be a request for you to sing “Row, row, row your boat” or, more likely recently, for “The wheels on the bus go round and round”. The latter receives the best response if sung while making a soft toy do the actions to the song.
Her mother thinks she is a genius. You would not think that she has been through this three times before. But then, the older siblings think the small person is a genius as well and apparently do not feel in the least supplanted or neglected. Unlike the 16-year-old daughter of a photographer I read about recently who wondered why her mother had stopped taking pictures of her now that she was a teenager. Why was her mother only interested in the small sister. So the photographer produced a book of photos of the teenager and her friends.
According to this report from the Independent many parents nowadays need teaching how to sing nursery rhymes with their small children. This need has been identified because so many children are turning up in the reception class in infant school with very limited vocabulary, a consequence of not singing enough nursery rhymes and not reading enough children’s story books.
If the current generation of parents don’t know the nursery rhymes, this suggests to me that they problem goes back a generation. Presumably nobody got them to sing nursery rhymes either.
So, is my generation really to blame again?
One consequence of their cooking on demand, as it were, rather than having loads of stuff lined up waiting to be microwaved, is that your tapas arrive individually, a little like having your birthday presents in dribs and drabs. Of course, I suppose it is quite feasible that they have stiff lined up to microwaved and just serve it in dribs and drabs to convince the clientele that they are doing proper chef-business in the kitchen. But somehow that all seems a bit too Machiavellian. And the food WAS good.
On my way home in the tram later in the afternoon, I was approached by an apparent stranger with one of those “It is you, isn’t it?” questions. As soon as she spoke I recognised her as well, someone I almost went into a translation business with almost 30 years ago, someone I’ve not seen for at leat 25. “You’ve not changed a bit,” she declared. Good grief, I thought to myself, if I truly have not changed a bit I must have looked pretty ragged in my forties! But, no, I understood perfectly well that what she meant was “I would have recognised you anywhere”. Peculiarities of the English language!
Yesterday our daughter came round for a second breakfast, having had her first at about 5.00 am when the small person woke her up and refused to go back to sleep. Just what she needed on her day off. The small person is now quite articulate and more than a little demanding. One of her favourite things is to smile at you and say, “Row, row”, which can be a request for you to sing “Row, row, row your boat” or, more likely recently, for “The wheels on the bus go round and round”. The latter receives the best response if sung while making a soft toy do the actions to the song.
Her mother thinks she is a genius. You would not think that she has been through this three times before. But then, the older siblings think the small person is a genius as well and apparently do not feel in the least supplanted or neglected. Unlike the 16-year-old daughter of a photographer I read about recently who wondered why her mother had stopped taking pictures of her now that she was a teenager. Why was her mother only interested in the small sister. So the photographer produced a book of photos of the teenager and her friends.
According to this report from the Independent many parents nowadays need teaching how to sing nursery rhymes with their small children. This need has been identified because so many children are turning up in the reception class in infant school with very limited vocabulary, a consequence of not singing enough nursery rhymes and not reading enough children’s story books.
If the current generation of parents don’t know the nursery rhymes, this suggests to me that they problem goes back a generation. Presumably nobody got them to sing nursery rhymes either.
So, is my generation really to blame again?
Sunday, 29 April 2018
So they have named the latest member of the British Royal family Louis, have they? A good French name. After all, the French royal family, when they had one, had an awful lot of ‘Louis’s. However do you write the plural of names like Louis that end already in ‘s’?
Which brings me to pronunciation. One of the ladies I Iunched with on Friday regaled us with the tale of something she overheard in the post office. It went like this:-
1st speaker: They’ve named the new prince Louis. (pronounced like the Isle of Lewis)
2nd speaker: I think it’s Louis. (pronounced Looie x to rhyme with screwy).
1st speaker: No, you’re wrong. It’s Louis (pronounced Lewis).
2nd speaker: How do you work that out?
1st speaker: Easy. It ends with an “s”.
Enough said!
We all agreed that it is hard to resist the urge to correct odd things you overhear in the post office.
Goodness knows how that 1st speaker deals with names like Sean, Sinead, and above all Niamh!!
As regards the NAME, the child is Louis Arthur Charles. Now, his big brother in George Alexander Louis. Is it usual to give more than one child in a family the same name? I’m glad I was not made to share names with my siblings. But then the royal family seem to have a small number of names they share around:-
Charles is Charles Philip Arthur George.
William is William Arthur Philip Louis
Prince Harry is Henry Charles Albert David
It seems to me that there must be a lot of elderly relatives who would be offended if their name was not given to a royal offspring!
And John Crace, writing in yesterday’s Guardian wrote about friends of his who held off naming their newborn until the royal newborn was named. They didn’t want anyone to think they named their child after the little royal baby.
And now, here is someone advocating that little Louis should be the first royal child to be sent to a comprehensive s would make him truly a “people’s prince”. An interesting notion. Tony Blair did it, I seem to remember, selecting a “good” comprehensive for one or more of his offspring. Did that make the little Blair a true “people’s politician’s offspring”? Maybe it would make politicians look again at funding for state schools, other than academies that is.
It might be a little early in royal evolution for such a move though. After all Charles was the first one to be sent to school. Before him they were home-schooled.
Which brings me to pronunciation. One of the ladies I Iunched with on Friday regaled us with the tale of something she overheard in the post office. It went like this:-
1st speaker: They’ve named the new prince Louis. (pronounced like the Isle of Lewis)
2nd speaker: I think it’s Louis. (pronounced Looie x to rhyme with screwy).
1st speaker: No, you’re wrong. It’s Louis (pronounced Lewis).
2nd speaker: How do you work that out?
1st speaker: Easy. It ends with an “s”.
Enough said!
We all agreed that it is hard to resist the urge to correct odd things you overhear in the post office.
Goodness knows how that 1st speaker deals with names like Sean, Sinead, and above all Niamh!!
As regards the NAME, the child is Louis Arthur Charles. Now, his big brother in George Alexander Louis. Is it usual to give more than one child in a family the same name? I’m glad I was not made to share names with my siblings. But then the royal family seem to have a small number of names they share around:-
Charles is Charles Philip Arthur George.
William is William Arthur Philip Louis
Prince Harry is Henry Charles Albert David
It seems to me that there must be a lot of elderly relatives who would be offended if their name was not given to a royal offspring!
And John Crace, writing in yesterday’s Guardian wrote about friends of his who held off naming their newborn until the royal newborn was named. They didn’t want anyone to think they named their child after the little royal baby.
And now, here is someone advocating that little Louis should be the first royal child to be sent to a comprehensive s would make him truly a “people’s prince”. An interesting notion. Tony Blair did it, I seem to remember, selecting a “good” comprehensive for one or more of his offspring. Did that make the little Blair a true “people’s politician’s offspring”? Maybe it would make politicians look again at funding for state schools, other than academies that is.
It might be a little early in royal evolution for such a move though. After all Charles was the first one to be sent to school. Before him they were home-schooled.
Saturday, 28 April 2018
Terminology, interpretation, amother DAY and being nice to people!
Yesterday I went out to lunch with a group of female friends, and friends of friends, to celebrate the (significant) birthday of one of our number. The young man behind the bar referred to us at one point as “ladies”. One or two of our party objected to our being called “ladies”. They deemed it condescending and said we should be called “women”.
Okay!
Do feminists in other countries have the same problem? Should the French start addressing people of the female persuasion as “Mafemme” instead of “Madame”? I can see that causing some confusion. Should the Spanish start speaking of groups of women as “mujeres” instead of “señoras”?
And, my oh my, was it condescending of me the refer to the young man as a young man? Am I being ageist?
As for me, I quite enjoy being one of a group of “ladies who lunch”. I have no objections to the label whatsoever.
I hear quite a lot about a loneliness epidemic, in the Uk and in other countries. This seems to be a product of the busy lives everyone leads. We all rush around and have no time to meet and greet people properly. There is little time to establish proper friendships in the workplace and everyone is so afraid of being regarded as odd that they won’t talk to anyone on public transport.
But it’s not all negative. In today’s newspaper there was an article pointing put the difference between loneliness and solitude. They interviewed people who have jobs that mean they spend a good deal of time alone and who actually appreciate it.
One person commented on the practice of sending children to their room as a punishment for misdemeanours. According to this writer, being sent to your room should be a privilege not a punishment. Children should earn the right to go and spend time alone in their own space. I can understand that. Our four year old granddaughter often asks if she can go and play in her room, on her own, away from everyone. Even when she stays in our house, she will take herself off and do her own thing in what becomes “her” room while she is here. Occasionally she organises it into some kind of fantasy space and invites selected adults to go and visit her there.
This is partly, I suppose, the result of being an only child - and one who is not plonked in front of a tv set for entertainment purposes except at specific times.
Even the idea of having you own space is a relatively modern concept. When we were children, back in the dark ages, it was the accepted norm that same-sex siblings shared bedrooms. Consequently I shared a bedroom with my two sisters throughout our childhood. Our brother had his own room, of course, which we used to take turns in “borrowing” when he went off the scout camp or some such residential visit. I didn’t have a room of my own until I went away to university. There you go!
Today is another “DAY”. Facebook invites me to help celebrate “Pay it Forward Day”, a day for doing nice things to others. As if we all needed a special day for that. The name comes from a book by Catherine Ryan-Hyde which I discovered years ago, the story of a boy who invents, for a school project I think, a plan where one person does something good to or for three others, who then have to “pay it forward” by each doing good to or for three others and so on and so on, spreading good will around the world. Some cafes have a system where you can “pay forward” a coffee for a homeless person.
We are none of us really alone; we just need a reminder sometimes to do things to make life a bit easier.
No doubt tomorrow will be another DAY!
Okay!
Do feminists in other countries have the same problem? Should the French start addressing people of the female persuasion as “Mafemme” instead of “Madame”? I can see that causing some confusion. Should the Spanish start speaking of groups of women as “mujeres” instead of “señoras”?
And, my oh my, was it condescending of me the refer to the young man as a young man? Am I being ageist?
As for me, I quite enjoy being one of a group of “ladies who lunch”. I have no objections to the label whatsoever.
I hear quite a lot about a loneliness epidemic, in the Uk and in other countries. This seems to be a product of the busy lives everyone leads. We all rush around and have no time to meet and greet people properly. There is little time to establish proper friendships in the workplace and everyone is so afraid of being regarded as odd that they won’t talk to anyone on public transport.
But it’s not all negative. In today’s newspaper there was an article pointing put the difference between loneliness and solitude. They interviewed people who have jobs that mean they spend a good deal of time alone and who actually appreciate it.
One person commented on the practice of sending children to their room as a punishment for misdemeanours. According to this writer, being sent to your room should be a privilege not a punishment. Children should earn the right to go and spend time alone in their own space. I can understand that. Our four year old granddaughter often asks if she can go and play in her room, on her own, away from everyone. Even when she stays in our house, she will take herself off and do her own thing in what becomes “her” room while she is here. Occasionally she organises it into some kind of fantasy space and invites selected adults to go and visit her there.
This is partly, I suppose, the result of being an only child - and one who is not plonked in front of a tv set for entertainment purposes except at specific times.
Even the idea of having you own space is a relatively modern concept. When we were children, back in the dark ages, it was the accepted norm that same-sex siblings shared bedrooms. Consequently I shared a bedroom with my two sisters throughout our childhood. Our brother had his own room, of course, which we used to take turns in “borrowing” when he went off the scout camp or some such residential visit. I didn’t have a room of my own until I went away to university. There you go!
Today is another “DAY”. Facebook invites me to help celebrate “Pay it Forward Day”, a day for doing nice things to others. As if we all needed a special day for that. The name comes from a book by Catherine Ryan-Hyde which I discovered years ago, the story of a boy who invents, for a school project I think, a plan where one person does something good to or for three others, who then have to “pay it forward” by each doing good to or for three others and so on and so on, spreading good will around the world. Some cafes have a system where you can “pay forward” a coffee for a homeless person.
We are none of us really alone; we just need a reminder sometimes to do things to make life a bit easier.
No doubt tomorrow will be another DAY!
Friday, 27 April 2018
The coincidence of institutionalised thoughtlessness
We have been watching Ken Burns’ TV series “The West” telling the story of how the west (wagon trains, cowboys and Indians, rawhide and all that) was “won”. Interspersed with stories of individuals’ endeavours to make a new life for themselves is the ongoing saga of how the native Americans were cheated and mistreated all the way along.
Much of this we had read about already but the relentlessness of it all is still overwhelming.
There is the mix of greed and hope in the gold rush. Everyone who dashed off the pan for gold thought they could strike it rich, rather like everyone who buys a lottery ticket imagines they will win millions. Some of those who went were comfortably off before they set off on the great adventure; the adventure was all. One man went, dug and panned, found little, suffered a lot and eventually went back home to the family farm in the east. But until he died he regaled family members with tales of his adventures. Maybe that’s what it was all really about - the spirit of adventure!
There were the Mexicans as well, the ones who had lived forever in places that became part of the United States and who found their way of life disrespected, undermined and marginalised. It was as if everyone had to conform to an ideal of being American!
But it was the series of broken promises to the native Americans, the First Nations, which were the most heartbreaking. They were promised territory over and over again, only to have it stolen because settlers needed homesteads. If such a thing as institutionalised carelessness and thoughtlessness exists, this was it.
Coincidentally I have been reading “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave”. He tells of how slaves did not know their birthdays and his indignation about this: “The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege.” Even asking about it was considered “improper and impertinent and evidence of a restless spirit”. A restless spirit might be fine in a white man, a sign of ambition and of a sense of adventure, but in a slave it meant that he might become “unmanageable”. Heaven forfend!
Frederick Douglass, when he became a town slave in Baltimore rather than a plantation slave, gave food to poor white children who did not have as much to eat as he did. But he recognised that fundamentally they were more fortunate than he because on e they reache the age of 21 they would be independent. Not he! He had to run away to achieve that.
And in the northern States he was amazed to find that people could be rich without being slave owners - such was the institutionalisation of the slave!
But he did escape and helped others to do so.
And then I came across this article on lynchings, which is very disturbing.
Here in the UK we have all the scandal of the Windrush business and people being told they don’t belong here after all.
It’s a rather cruel old world!
Much of this we had read about already but the relentlessness of it all is still overwhelming.
There is the mix of greed and hope in the gold rush. Everyone who dashed off the pan for gold thought they could strike it rich, rather like everyone who buys a lottery ticket imagines they will win millions. Some of those who went were comfortably off before they set off on the great adventure; the adventure was all. One man went, dug and panned, found little, suffered a lot and eventually went back home to the family farm in the east. But until he died he regaled family members with tales of his adventures. Maybe that’s what it was all really about - the spirit of adventure!
There were the Mexicans as well, the ones who had lived forever in places that became part of the United States and who found their way of life disrespected, undermined and marginalised. It was as if everyone had to conform to an ideal of being American!
But it was the series of broken promises to the native Americans, the First Nations, which were the most heartbreaking. They were promised territory over and over again, only to have it stolen because settlers needed homesteads. If such a thing as institutionalised carelessness and thoughtlessness exists, this was it.
Coincidentally I have been reading “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave”. He tells of how slaves did not know their birthdays and his indignation about this: “The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege.” Even asking about it was considered “improper and impertinent and evidence of a restless spirit”. A restless spirit might be fine in a white man, a sign of ambition and of a sense of adventure, but in a slave it meant that he might become “unmanageable”. Heaven forfend!
Frederick Douglass, when he became a town slave in Baltimore rather than a plantation slave, gave food to poor white children who did not have as much to eat as he did. But he recognised that fundamentally they were more fortunate than he because on e they reache the age of 21 they would be independent. Not he! He had to run away to achieve that.
And in the northern States he was amazed to find that people could be rich without being slave owners - such was the institutionalisation of the slave!
But he did escape and helped others to do so.
And then I came across this article on lynchings, which is very disturbing.
Here in the UK we have all the scandal of the Windrush business and people being told they don’t belong here after all.
It’s a rather cruel old world!
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