I've posted on numerous occasions about Domenic and the fact that he was snatched from his loving parents two long years ago. The fight just got very urgent because we understand the authorities are planning to apply for the right to remove parental responsibility from his parents altogether.
They have done NOTHING to deserve this treatment. I hope you will read about the case here:
http://friendsofdomenic.blogspot.com/
and sign the petition here:
and do everything in your power to help this family and this little boy.
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
How to be... Caitlin Moran
Review: How to be a Woman, by Caitlin Moran, Ebury Press, £11.99.
Like much of Caitlin Moran's writing, “How to be a woman” had me laughing out loud almost as soon as I started it. Her ability to express herself and to share her experiences is unrivalled. Apart from her wit and writing, I've always had a soft spot for her because she was home educated, and I eventually chose to home educate my own children.
But for me, the laughter was soon tempered with horror at the unremittingly dire and awful circumstances she described in a home where she wasn't even given the small amount of information I would have thought most modern, intelligent and caring parents would provide, about the beginning of being a woman, periods, pregnancy and childbirth. When she later describes a woman fantasising about a colleague, it is almost as though she believes the whole of womankind is similarly distracted behind a sham working facade. Maybe I'm the odd one, but I don't have rich internal imaginings about the men around me and I never did. Actually, I used to work at work... hard.
For a writer to be a good writer, an entertaining and accessible writer, they need to express some universal truth in a recognisible way, either from the inside of society or from the outside of it. It is clear that some of Caitlin's clarity about the idiocies of modern life and growing up a woman are from the outside, granted by her unusual childhood in a very unusual family.
There were some yawning gaps in the book, which is constructed in order to follow her progress from extremely lonely and isolated home-educated child to mother with children. She jumped from isolated teenager in Wolverhampton to columnist at the Melody Maker without explanation, and into television, and the world beyond, again without any real explanation. I think we are just supposed to recognise her talent, and presume it was that which took her from life before to fame and fortune in the city. It is clear that her unusual upbringing produced an unusual person, and I longed to know more about the rest of her family...are they similarly successful, or is she supporting the rest of them in their diet of cheese lollipops and furniture made from cardboard boxes?
I wanted the book to be full of the insights which usually make her writing so readable, but I became more and more depressed as I realised that she was just another feminist who claims that a woman is really the same as a man and a man is the same as a woman, give or take the odd high-heeled shoe, which no one should attempt to wear *anyway* according to Ms Moran, and the compulsion for daytime fantasy.
I don't agree with Caitlin's take on feminism... that for any woman to be a feminist in Caitlin's world, she simply has to be a woman. The trouble is, that in this post-1970s feminist society, the word feminist doesn't simply mean woman, it carries with it a whole lot of baggage. Generations before Caitlin, when I was a teenager in the 1970s, teachers would reserve special scathing for any girl who simply wanted to be a wife and mother. Not that any of my contemporaries would have dared express such a wish... we all knew that we were expected to want a career of our own, and to reject any idea of wasting our talent and education on home making.
In those days, I believed the lie that men and women were exactly the same, and that society and conditioning were all that stood between women and the boardroom. It was a lie then, and it is a lie now. What stands between women and the boardroom is that we are naturally nurturers and carers and the model of the boardroom which is currently in place doesn't value those things, it values the opposite – the sort of cut-throat, uncaring capitalism that puts profits first and people second.
That isn't to say that I don't think a woman is capable of making a success of business, or of making as good a job of being a man as any man might make – it is clear looking at those women who have risen to the top in many areas of life, that it is perfectly possible. But my feeling about the whole mistaken drive of the 1970s feminists and since, is that we haven't embraced the unique things about womanhood and applied them to our lives and to society. Instead we have spent our time denying that they are there at all, and claiming that we are essentially men, with different hormones.
I think women are different from men in many wonderful ways, and the main problem with what feminism means to my generation is that with defending a woman's ability to be equal with any man comes a requirement to reject anything specifically feminine, as though all the differences between men and women were a product of their conditioning, and nothing to do with biology, physiology and being a woman rather than a man.
The original suffragettes protested the vote, but they were also asking for the things which were traditionally women's work to be recognised as equally valuable to society. Think of that! The idea that child rearing, looking after the home, looking after the elderly, for example should be recognised as having a similar value to society as trudging up and down the metropolitan line in search of professional fulfillment. This wasn't to pin women into those jobs and prevent them from being anything else, but to recognise that those jobs, those activities, provide real value for our society and that should be recognised as being equal to other activities.
Of course, that didn't happen. Having been a housewife and mother for 20 years, I can tell you that there is nothing that you can say to kill a person's interest in you as a person so effectively as that you are a full-time mother. It's the equivalent of saying that you enjoy train spotting, or have a definitive collection of banana labels at home, neatly categorised by country of origin. People's eyes glaze over as they make the assumption that you must be very boring indeed not to be shelf stacking in Sainsbury's at the very least. Motherhood is the job with the lowest possible status. And feminism put it there, in my not so humble opinion.
I look back at my mother's generation, who were expected to give up work and to look after the house and home when they married, and I see a lot of unhappy and frustrated women, who wanted to be at work, and weren't satisfied with their lot. Have things improved so much for women? I look at my generation, and see a lot of unhappy and frustrated women, who expected their husbands to pick up half the housework and half the childcare, who learned pretty quickly that wasn't going to happen. Yes there are odd families where there is an equal division of labour, but for every one of those you can show me, I can show you twenty five – fifty! - where the woman is still the one doing all the cooking and cleaning as well as a full-time job.
I see women who felt that they were the same as men, who felt that they deserved careers and a life outside the home, who have come to realise that they are expected to work full time AND do the lion's share of the housework and childcare. I see a lot of unhappy and frustrated women trying to get men to cough up their half of the deal, and failing.
Even if they do get them to take half of the childcare, I have to tell you that in my experience a man doesn't do the job well. It's a generalisation, and I agree it is a continuum, with good men overtaking the bad women on the childcare spectrum. However, most men don't possess the sixth sense that women who are tuned into their children have... thus one of my friends who did succeed in sharing everything 50/50 with her husband still knew within two minutes of coming through the door that her baby was ill, when the man who had been with her all day, did not.
Don't get me wrong – I don't think that women should be forced back to the kitchen sink, any more than I think they should be forced into the boardroom. I think women should get a choice, though. Some women choose motherhood over a career. I did myself. I was lucky that I was willing to give up my salary, holidays, new clothes, ever being able to afford any extras, any prospect that anyone outside the family would want to talk to me, in return for the time I spent at home. I worked part time, I made sacrifices and I did what I wanted to do more than anything: I spent time with my children. I'd like all women to have that choice, with that work recognised as being of value to society. Maybe it is going to take more social disruption for society to start to recognise that a stable family life may have a greater value than making mothers work.
I wrote a letter to the Times when my children were small, expressing my frustration that people assumed that one was brainless and unambitious if one chose to stay at home with children. I received a lot of letters from other women telling me how much they longed to spend time with their babies, and how their families and especially husbands, pressured them to go back to work. Over a century after the suffragettes, I think that's terribly sad. We should have done better.
I'd like a book on how to be a woman to actually recognise that there are some positive things which do distinguish women from men, and that they should be celebrated. I don't want to oppress anyone into gender roles... I'm happy for anyone, including men, to be good at nurturing, and glad if there are women who want to be army generals or professional footballers. But I do want the caring, soft, kind, pretty side of life to be celebrated and valued, not just the success-at-all-costs, hard-nosed, taking-no-prisoners side of life.
I wanted a celebration of being a woman... and actually, a recognition that being a woman is something to value, to cherish, and not just an accident of biology. My sense of disappointment was extreme when it came to the chapter in the book labelled simply “abortion”. I don't presume to tell other women what they should do, and so I have always been pro-choice, despite knowing, incontrovertably, that I could never ever have had an abortion myself. I don't expect or want other people to be the same as me, but I suppose I do expect an abortion to be a big deal. And I don't understand it, not at all. Caitlin Moran had a stable family, enough money, two children already. It is clear that one of the facts of life her family omitted from her upbringing was the fact that while two children is definitely about four times as many children as one child, three children is only half a child more than two.
For those of you similarly handicapped by ignorance of the mathematics of child rearing, when you have one child, even if you were a successful businesswoman handling a budget of millions of pounds, you are completely amazed...invariably...by how much work one child can be. As Caitlin expresses it well, you can't believe how much time you have squandered in the past. Just catering for the needs and whims of a newborn baby is enough to keep two adults fully occupied 24 hours a day. And the house will still look as though a laundry bomb has hit it.
In the first few weeks of having a baby you look in admiration at anyone with more than one child. How do they manage to get dressed? How can they function? Eventually, when you succumb to a second child, all your worst fears are realised: the second child is just as time consuming as the first, but now you have the first child's needs and wishes to take into account. Instead of being able to fall asleep when the baby sleeps, you suddenly have to entertain baby one and try to stop her killing number two.
It seems like an impossible amount of work, and suddenly you are juggling two infants who want time and attention, food and changing, washing and combing, plying with stories and love. It seems that the amount of work and effort has grown exponentially, although the number of bodies only doubled.
The magic is that a third child can be added without seemingly adding much work at all. It seems shocking that a mother with two small children already would have an abortion with a third. Maybe it happens all the time and people just don't talk about it. It just seemed overwhelmingly selfish to me. Maye selflessness is one of the traits which she associates with the oppression of women and their real natures. But the defining characteristic of a good carer is selflessness, caring for others more than oneself. I found it hard to like her after that... she said it was an easy decision to take and one which she didn't regret afterwards... and I am afraid that made me dislike her more.
Women should have choices. I believe that all women deserve choices about how to use their time and their bodies. But in an age of easy contraception, I'd expect intelligent women not to fall pregnant if they know that they do not want to have another baby. I dislike the promotion of abortion as an easy decision and an easy answer.
Being a woman IS a thing... it isn't just society and convention that propels women into a nurturing and caring role in the family and in society. Motherhood is a thing too, and it isn't exchangeable for fatherhood – that's a different thing altogether.
At the end of the book, I had been entertained and horrified, but I don't know that I had learned anything insightful or useful about being a woman. I had learned a bit about being Caitlin Moran, however.
Like much of Caitlin Moran's writing, “How to be a woman” had me laughing out loud almost as soon as I started it. Her ability to express herself and to share her experiences is unrivalled. Apart from her wit and writing, I've always had a soft spot for her because she was home educated, and I eventually chose to home educate my own children.
But for me, the laughter was soon tempered with horror at the unremittingly dire and awful circumstances she described in a home where she wasn't even given the small amount of information I would have thought most modern, intelligent and caring parents would provide, about the beginning of being a woman, periods, pregnancy and childbirth. When she later describes a woman fantasising about a colleague, it is almost as though she believes the whole of womankind is similarly distracted behind a sham working facade. Maybe I'm the odd one, but I don't have rich internal imaginings about the men around me and I never did. Actually, I used to work at work... hard.
For a writer to be a good writer, an entertaining and accessible writer, they need to express some universal truth in a recognisible way, either from the inside of society or from the outside of it. It is clear that some of Caitlin's clarity about the idiocies of modern life and growing up a woman are from the outside, granted by her unusual childhood in a very unusual family.
There were some yawning gaps in the book, which is constructed in order to follow her progress from extremely lonely and isolated home-educated child to mother with children. She jumped from isolated teenager in Wolverhampton to columnist at the Melody Maker without explanation, and into television, and the world beyond, again without any real explanation. I think we are just supposed to recognise her talent, and presume it was that which took her from life before to fame and fortune in the city. It is clear that her unusual upbringing produced an unusual person, and I longed to know more about the rest of her family...are they similarly successful, or is she supporting the rest of them in their diet of cheese lollipops and furniture made from cardboard boxes?
I wanted the book to be full of the insights which usually make her writing so readable, but I became more and more depressed as I realised that she was just another feminist who claims that a woman is really the same as a man and a man is the same as a woman, give or take the odd high-heeled shoe, which no one should attempt to wear *anyway* according to Ms Moran, and the compulsion for daytime fantasy.
I don't agree with Caitlin's take on feminism... that for any woman to be a feminist in Caitlin's world, she simply has to be a woman. The trouble is, that in this post-1970s feminist society, the word feminist doesn't simply mean woman, it carries with it a whole lot of baggage. Generations before Caitlin, when I was a teenager in the 1970s, teachers would reserve special scathing for any girl who simply wanted to be a wife and mother. Not that any of my contemporaries would have dared express such a wish... we all knew that we were expected to want a career of our own, and to reject any idea of wasting our talent and education on home making.
In those days, I believed the lie that men and women were exactly the same, and that society and conditioning were all that stood between women and the boardroom. It was a lie then, and it is a lie now. What stands between women and the boardroom is that we are naturally nurturers and carers and the model of the boardroom which is currently in place doesn't value those things, it values the opposite – the sort of cut-throat, uncaring capitalism that puts profits first and people second.
That isn't to say that I don't think a woman is capable of making a success of business, or of making as good a job of being a man as any man might make – it is clear looking at those women who have risen to the top in many areas of life, that it is perfectly possible. But my feeling about the whole mistaken drive of the 1970s feminists and since, is that we haven't embraced the unique things about womanhood and applied them to our lives and to society. Instead we have spent our time denying that they are there at all, and claiming that we are essentially men, with different hormones.
I think women are different from men in many wonderful ways, and the main problem with what feminism means to my generation is that with defending a woman's ability to be equal with any man comes a requirement to reject anything specifically feminine, as though all the differences between men and women were a product of their conditioning, and nothing to do with biology, physiology and being a woman rather than a man.
The original suffragettes protested the vote, but they were also asking for the things which were traditionally women's work to be recognised as equally valuable to society. Think of that! The idea that child rearing, looking after the home, looking after the elderly, for example should be recognised as having a similar value to society as trudging up and down the metropolitan line in search of professional fulfillment. This wasn't to pin women into those jobs and prevent them from being anything else, but to recognise that those jobs, those activities, provide real value for our society and that should be recognised as being equal to other activities.
Of course, that didn't happen. Having been a housewife and mother for 20 years, I can tell you that there is nothing that you can say to kill a person's interest in you as a person so effectively as that you are a full-time mother. It's the equivalent of saying that you enjoy train spotting, or have a definitive collection of banana labels at home, neatly categorised by country of origin. People's eyes glaze over as they make the assumption that you must be very boring indeed not to be shelf stacking in Sainsbury's at the very least. Motherhood is the job with the lowest possible status. And feminism put it there, in my not so humble opinion.
I look back at my mother's generation, who were expected to give up work and to look after the house and home when they married, and I see a lot of unhappy and frustrated women, who wanted to be at work, and weren't satisfied with their lot. Have things improved so much for women? I look at my generation, and see a lot of unhappy and frustrated women, who expected their husbands to pick up half the housework and half the childcare, who learned pretty quickly that wasn't going to happen. Yes there are odd families where there is an equal division of labour, but for every one of those you can show me, I can show you twenty five – fifty! - where the woman is still the one doing all the cooking and cleaning as well as a full-time job.
I see women who felt that they were the same as men, who felt that they deserved careers and a life outside the home, who have come to realise that they are expected to work full time AND do the lion's share of the housework and childcare. I see a lot of unhappy and frustrated women trying to get men to cough up their half of the deal, and failing.
Even if they do get them to take half of the childcare, I have to tell you that in my experience a man doesn't do the job well. It's a generalisation, and I agree it is a continuum, with good men overtaking the bad women on the childcare spectrum. However, most men don't possess the sixth sense that women who are tuned into their children have... thus one of my friends who did succeed in sharing everything 50/50 with her husband still knew within two minutes of coming through the door that her baby was ill, when the man who had been with her all day, did not.
Don't get me wrong – I don't think that women should be forced back to the kitchen sink, any more than I think they should be forced into the boardroom. I think women should get a choice, though. Some women choose motherhood over a career. I did myself. I was lucky that I was willing to give up my salary, holidays, new clothes, ever being able to afford any extras, any prospect that anyone outside the family would want to talk to me, in return for the time I spent at home. I worked part time, I made sacrifices and I did what I wanted to do more than anything: I spent time with my children. I'd like all women to have that choice, with that work recognised as being of value to society. Maybe it is going to take more social disruption for society to start to recognise that a stable family life may have a greater value than making mothers work.
I wrote a letter to the Times when my children were small, expressing my frustration that people assumed that one was brainless and unambitious if one chose to stay at home with children. I received a lot of letters from other women telling me how much they longed to spend time with their babies, and how their families and especially husbands, pressured them to go back to work. Over a century after the suffragettes, I think that's terribly sad. We should have done better.
I'd like a book on how to be a woman to actually recognise that there are some positive things which do distinguish women from men, and that they should be celebrated. I don't want to oppress anyone into gender roles... I'm happy for anyone, including men, to be good at nurturing, and glad if there are women who want to be army generals or professional footballers. But I do want the caring, soft, kind, pretty side of life to be celebrated and valued, not just the success-at-all-costs, hard-nosed, taking-no-prisoners side of life.
I wanted a celebration of being a woman... and actually, a recognition that being a woman is something to value, to cherish, and not just an accident of biology. My sense of disappointment was extreme when it came to the chapter in the book labelled simply “abortion”. I don't presume to tell other women what they should do, and so I have always been pro-choice, despite knowing, incontrovertably, that I could never ever have had an abortion myself. I don't expect or want other people to be the same as me, but I suppose I do expect an abortion to be a big deal. And I don't understand it, not at all. Caitlin Moran had a stable family, enough money, two children already. It is clear that one of the facts of life her family omitted from her upbringing was the fact that while two children is definitely about four times as many children as one child, three children is only half a child more than two.
For those of you similarly handicapped by ignorance of the mathematics of child rearing, when you have one child, even if you were a successful businesswoman handling a budget of millions of pounds, you are completely amazed...invariably...by how much work one child can be. As Caitlin expresses it well, you can't believe how much time you have squandered in the past. Just catering for the needs and whims of a newborn baby is enough to keep two adults fully occupied 24 hours a day. And the house will still look as though a laundry bomb has hit it.
In the first few weeks of having a baby you look in admiration at anyone with more than one child. How do they manage to get dressed? How can they function? Eventually, when you succumb to a second child, all your worst fears are realised: the second child is just as time consuming as the first, but now you have the first child's needs and wishes to take into account. Instead of being able to fall asleep when the baby sleeps, you suddenly have to entertain baby one and try to stop her killing number two.
It seems like an impossible amount of work, and suddenly you are juggling two infants who want time and attention, food and changing, washing and combing, plying with stories and love. It seems that the amount of work and effort has grown exponentially, although the number of bodies only doubled.
The magic is that a third child can be added without seemingly adding much work at all. It seems shocking that a mother with two small children already would have an abortion with a third. Maybe it happens all the time and people just don't talk about it. It just seemed overwhelmingly selfish to me. Maye selflessness is one of the traits which she associates with the oppression of women and their real natures. But the defining characteristic of a good carer is selflessness, caring for others more than oneself. I found it hard to like her after that... she said it was an easy decision to take and one which she didn't regret afterwards... and I am afraid that made me dislike her more.
Women should have choices. I believe that all women deserve choices about how to use their time and their bodies. But in an age of easy contraception, I'd expect intelligent women not to fall pregnant if they know that they do not want to have another baby. I dislike the promotion of abortion as an easy decision and an easy answer.
Being a woman IS a thing... it isn't just society and convention that propels women into a nurturing and caring role in the family and in society. Motherhood is a thing too, and it isn't exchangeable for fatherhood – that's a different thing altogether.
At the end of the book, I had been entertained and horrified, but I don't know that I had learned anything insightful or useful about being a woman. I had learned a bit about being Caitlin Moran, however.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
My personal archaeology
Iteresting article in the Guardian, suggests one should think about what would endure for future archaeologists, of one's life. I felt inspired to write the following:
My Personal Archaeology
What would endure?
Not my laptop, which would decay into a sticky pool of plastic
Not my writing, which has burned in the heart of who I am
Not my children, who became my life, my joy and my reason,
Not me.
I propel myself forward
Watch decay set in as my ivy takes over the world,
My box of important things
Now probably a mush of family history papers
Coins I never learned to collect, a broken watch
My Life would speak incoherently
Glass bottles of long-gone vitamins
Would mislead about my care of my health
Scented oils and bottles for this and that...mirrors...
Might make one think I worried about how I look.
It would be random: glass beads scattered,
Sand-washed glass
Ugly porcelain mementos of beautiful friendships
The twisted frames of a hundred frozen moments
Stones and shells with no purpose but themselves.
I have concluded what lies about my life
Would lie about my life, so
Does it lie about those others I have watched
As Time Team discovers
Their bones, their bowls, and a series of small walls?
Or did they leave more durable memorials than I?
No emails, no letters, no life online
No excess possessions to deceive
No books, no gadgets, no plastic
Just the trusty stone, metal, glass
But then again, maybe the most important elements
Are not written on the ephemera or
bound up in the enduring ceramic, but
Are written on the hearts of others
Drifting forever in the dust which lights the stars
My Personal Archaeology
What would endure?
Not my laptop, which would decay into a sticky pool of plastic
Not my writing, which has burned in the heart of who I am
Not my children, who became my life, my joy and my reason,
Not me.
I propel myself forward
Watch decay set in as my ivy takes over the world,
My box of important things
Now probably a mush of family history papers
Coins I never learned to collect, a broken watch
My Life would speak incoherently
Glass bottles of long-gone vitamins
Would mislead about my care of my health
Scented oils and bottles for this and that...mirrors...
Might make one think I worried about how I look.
It would be random: glass beads scattered,
Sand-washed glass
Ugly porcelain mementos of beautiful friendships
The twisted frames of a hundred frozen moments
Stones and shells with no purpose but themselves.
I have concluded what lies about my life
Would lie about my life, so
Does it lie about those others I have watched
As Time Team discovers
Their bones, their bowls, and a series of small walls?
Or did they leave more durable memorials than I?
No emails, no letters, no life online
No excess possessions to deceive
No books, no gadgets, no plastic
Just the trusty stone, metal, glass
But then again, maybe the most important elements
Are not written on the ephemera or
bound up in the enduring ceramic, but
Are written on the hearts of others
Drifting forever in the dust which lights the stars
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Hate never wins
Hate never wins
It burns itself out on a hundred victim pyres
consuming the souls of the haters
whereas love burns eternal with the spirit light
A silver thread which knits us together
They are many, but we are one.
Love connects people
In their compassion, the knowledge of how a mother feels
When her child is taken
Lives with me, although my children are but a phone call away
I feel her pain, her loss
I want to be able to turn back time
Give those children back to their families
I don't want one to suffer as I know they are
I want to be able to hug them and say it's all right
I want to be able to step into their lives and heal it
And I can't...
But we are one, though they be many.
I can't bear to think about the sudden end
The fear, the pain, the last thoughts
I can't bear to imagine what it's like
To run for your life
I can't bear to think about the families
Learning that the goodbye they said happily
Was the last one to be said
Learning that the goodbye hug
Was the last one to be felt
and they couldn't know it.
We are one and they cannot break us.
Hate never wins
Darkness is a prelude to the light
Dawn breaks
Chasing away the night
What endures is the love,
Hate never wins,
For we are one.
It burns itself out on a hundred victim pyres
consuming the souls of the haters
whereas love burns eternal with the spirit light
A silver thread which knits us together
They are many, but we are one.
Love connects people
In their compassion, the knowledge of how a mother feels
When her child is taken
Lives with me, although my children are but a phone call away
I feel her pain, her loss
I want to be able to turn back time
Give those children back to their families
I don't want one to suffer as I know they are
I want to be able to hug them and say it's all right
I want to be able to step into their lives and heal it
And I can't...
But we are one, though they be many.
I can't bear to think about the sudden end
The fear, the pain, the last thoughts
I can't bear to imagine what it's like
To run for your life
I can't bear to think about the families
Learning that the goodbye they said happily
Was the last one to be said
Learning that the goodbye hug
Was the last one to be felt
and they couldn't know it.
We are one and they cannot break us.
Hate never wins
Darkness is a prelude to the light
Dawn breaks
Chasing away the night
What endures is the love,
Hate never wins,
For we are one.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Help Domenic Johansson
I'm taking the unusual step of posting the same blog to all my blogs, no matter what their subject.
Domenic Johanssen was a happy child of two loving parents. His parents were taking him to India from Sweden where they had been living, when officials boarded the plane and took Domenic away. People who are told the story cannot believe that Domenic was removed from his parents on such flimsy grounds: the Johanssens were planning to home educate (which was legal in Sweden at that time), they hadn't allowed him to have all the vaccinations, and he had two cavities in his baby teeth.
He has been in the care of the Swedish authorities since then, and repeated attempts to get him back have failed. The separation has adversely affected the health of his mother and father, and the photograps of the child now compared to the child then make it obvious that he is far less happy in the care of the authorities than he was at home.
Th Swedish system seems to be a heartless and inhumane system which ignore human bonding and puts the interests of the family last in any decision. I find it absolutely incomprehensible that a state in a civilised country could be allowed to behave like this.
I don't know what can be done. I have written to judges and officials over the past two years. In a place where home educating seems to be considered abuse, it is very very hard to know how to communicate with these people.
Everyone to whom I have told this story have been suspicious that there must have been another, hidden, reason for taking Domenic away from his parents, but that truly isn't the case. If you can think of a way to publicise, or to put pressure on the Swedish authorities, please please let me know.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Starting out
For years I have been writing a book. For years. The only trouble is, that I have never actually worked out which book I am writing. Thus, I never finish it, I just keep starting it over and over. There's the children's story I have been writing since my own children were small. I must have twenty or thirty versions of the beginnings of that. I know how it starts, and I know how it ends, but the middle has evaded me and I have never managed to get past the feeling that I ought to know what's going to happen before I start to write it. And I don't.
There's the book about my spiritual journey, from childhood to adulthood. I have started this more times than I can count, and have drafts of the first few chapters in books, in word documents, on scraps of paper, in diaries. I have never managed to make a coherent narrative from it, and have even made lists of revelations, things that have happened, the things I believe and how I came to believe them. I find that once I start to work on it in a disciplined way, which I have frequently started to do, I get irritated by the idea that I might be espousing things I don't actually believe, in my heart, or espousing things I don't actually do when I have a choice, and that it is hypocritical to continue to write it. That or I think I come across as a saintly person which is very far from the truth. Writing the truth, so that it doesn't talk the talk without walking the walk is the most difficult thing.
There there's the book I have been writing about home education, and about my transformation from a wholly conventional mother, sending her children to school, to a rabid unschooler. Again, the trouble is that I have a natural (inherited) tendency to lecture, and I hate it when that comes through in the writing. I try try try not to lecture people if I can help it, but I know that I catch myself after the fact sometimes. In writing, it is obvious, and so I end up with a John Cage situation. I write and write and then erase more than I write and am left with nothing at all at the end of it.
Then there's the book about my family history, which remains unfinished despite thirty years of work. My major problem with it is the John Dickins who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries. I know so much about this man, about he jobs he did, the places he lived, the people he married, his children and who they married. What I don't know for certain is where he was born, and whether his father was indeed John Dickins of Church Preen, son of Richard Dickins of Church Preen. The book, the History of Church Preen seems to indicate that he was, indeed that John Dickins... but then I have done enough family history over a long enough time to know that people ought not to accept at face value what a relative says. My great aunt was convinced her aunt was a doctor, and she turned out to be a nurse. Not that different, but different.
So I have failed to write down in a coherent way the things I have learned over the last thirty years and I think anyone in the family who comes after me will curse my lack of information - not the lack of notes and material, but the lack of a narrative which puts them in context or tells them where I obtained information. I should have been doing this as I went along, and have advised many people not to make the same mistake, but the truth is, I would struggle to do this with the wealth of information I have collected, and I have so much information in my head and nowhere else, that it is difficult to know if I would ever finish, if I started now.
Then there's the more personal history I have not been writing for more or less all but the first 10 of my fifty two years. I have written diaries and odd notes and for the past 13 years have written blogs and posts all over the net... but I have never yet succeeded in turning that into a narrative that other people might be interested to read. Mostly I am like everyone else - say that I am interested in people and don't care if they are famous or not... but generally if I see an episode of "Who do you think you are?" for someone I don't recognize, it has to be said that I feel a lot less interested in it. I fight against that feeling, but I do have it.
Then there is the book about being a Quaker, I have started to write but have stopped, for many of the reasons that I gave above for the spiritual diary. Part of my belief as a Quaker is that everyone has their own path to God, and I don't like the feeling that I am telling people what it is right to believe or to think. I'm not, but it can appear that way when trying to write down what drew me to Quakers, and why I feel I am one, and have always been one.
I've also often wanted to write down my feelings and thoughts and what I have learned about reincarnation, although a lot of what I thought I knew has been called into question recently. I've started books about Second Life, how to use it and what it is. I've started books about being a family historian, about the history of the Quakers in Uxbridge, about how to unschool, and about how to do various crafts I love, like beading and papier and fabric mache. About the illness which struck my husband, and my experiences with my son when he was so ill in 2005. All perfectly viable ideas which I haven't finished.
So... the trouble is you can't cobble one book out of the beginnings of all of them. I need to have discipline, which I have never had, decide on a subject and stick with it, rather than changing my mind once I have written thee or four chapters. So. I have decided that as blogging is something I have successfully done in the past on a regular basis, I will try to make one blog post every morning, because I do other things and get caught up in the day. And this is the beginning.
There's the book about my spiritual journey, from childhood to adulthood. I have started this more times than I can count, and have drafts of the first few chapters in books, in word documents, on scraps of paper, in diaries. I have never managed to make a coherent narrative from it, and have even made lists of revelations, things that have happened, the things I believe and how I came to believe them. I find that once I start to work on it in a disciplined way, which I have frequently started to do, I get irritated by the idea that I might be espousing things I don't actually believe, in my heart, or espousing things I don't actually do when I have a choice, and that it is hypocritical to continue to write it. That or I think I come across as a saintly person which is very far from the truth. Writing the truth, so that it doesn't talk the talk without walking the walk is the most difficult thing.
There there's the book I have been writing about home education, and about my transformation from a wholly conventional mother, sending her children to school, to a rabid unschooler. Again, the trouble is that I have a natural (inherited) tendency to lecture, and I hate it when that comes through in the writing. I try try try not to lecture people if I can help it, but I know that I catch myself after the fact sometimes. In writing, it is obvious, and so I end up with a John Cage situation. I write and write and then erase more than I write and am left with nothing at all at the end of it.
Then there's the book about my family history, which remains unfinished despite thirty years of work. My major problem with it is the John Dickins who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries. I know so much about this man, about he jobs he did, the places he lived, the people he married, his children and who they married. What I don't know for certain is where he was born, and whether his father was indeed John Dickins of Church Preen, son of Richard Dickins of Church Preen. The book, the History of Church Preen seems to indicate that he was, indeed that John Dickins... but then I have done enough family history over a long enough time to know that people ought not to accept at face value what a relative says. My great aunt was convinced her aunt was a doctor, and she turned out to be a nurse. Not that different, but different.
So I have failed to write down in a coherent way the things I have learned over the last thirty years and I think anyone in the family who comes after me will curse my lack of information - not the lack of notes and material, but the lack of a narrative which puts them in context or tells them where I obtained information. I should have been doing this as I went along, and have advised many people not to make the same mistake, but the truth is, I would struggle to do this with the wealth of information I have collected, and I have so much information in my head and nowhere else, that it is difficult to know if I would ever finish, if I started now.
Then there's the more personal history I have not been writing for more or less all but the first 10 of my fifty two years. I have written diaries and odd notes and for the past 13 years have written blogs and posts all over the net... but I have never yet succeeded in turning that into a narrative that other people might be interested to read. Mostly I am like everyone else - say that I am interested in people and don't care if they are famous or not... but generally if I see an episode of "Who do you think you are?" for someone I don't recognize, it has to be said that I feel a lot less interested in it. I fight against that feeling, but I do have it.
Then there is the book about being a Quaker, I have started to write but have stopped, for many of the reasons that I gave above for the spiritual diary. Part of my belief as a Quaker is that everyone has their own path to God, and I don't like the feeling that I am telling people what it is right to believe or to think. I'm not, but it can appear that way when trying to write down what drew me to Quakers, and why I feel I am one, and have always been one.
I've also often wanted to write down my feelings and thoughts and what I have learned about reincarnation, although a lot of what I thought I knew has been called into question recently. I've started books about Second Life, how to use it and what it is. I've started books about being a family historian, about the history of the Quakers in Uxbridge, about how to unschool, and about how to do various crafts I love, like beading and papier and fabric mache. About the illness which struck my husband, and my experiences with my son when he was so ill in 2005. All perfectly viable ideas which I haven't finished.
So... the trouble is you can't cobble one book out of the beginnings of all of them. I need to have discipline, which I have never had, decide on a subject and stick with it, rather than changing my mind once I have written thee or four chapters. So. I have decided that as blogging is something I have successfully done in the past on a regular basis, I will try to make one blog post every morning, because I do other things and get caught up in the day. And this is the beginning.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Touched
I can't touch you
You can't touch me
And yet my heart leaps when I see
Your avatar in front of me
I cannot feel your hand or kiss
I can't feel you
You can't feel me
And yet I feel it when you kiss
(Even if the avatars miss :-))
I cannot watch your hand or eye
I can't watch you
You can't watch me
And yet I watch with inner eye
And hear your quietest, slightest, sigh
I cannot touch
I cannot feel
I cannot watch
I cannot hear
And yet the you that you are here
Is the one I hold most dear
Fee
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Gone
I had no warning you were going,
I turned around and you were gone.
I looked for you in every person that I met.
Caught glimpses of you in strangers' faces,
Chased your shadow around corners.
I waited for you to come back.
The love I had for you is still here.
At first, it was a shard of ice in my heart,
It woke a little after me, reminding me,
Stabbing me with the loss I felt.
It filled me with yearning.
Longing for poppy-sleep and you.
Gradually the ice melted and I remembered.
I found the love for you warming my heart.
I realised that love doesn't die, it lives forever.
When strangers remind me of you now, I smile.
Remember how I love you and you love me.
I turned around and you were gone.
I looked for you in every person that I met.
Caught glimpses of you in strangers' faces,
Chased your shadow around corners.
I waited for you to come back.
The love I had for you is still here.
At first, it was a shard of ice in my heart,
It woke a little after me, reminding me,
Stabbing me with the loss I felt.
It filled me with yearning.
Longing for poppy-sleep and you.
Gradually the ice melted and I remembered.
I found the love for you warming my heart.
I realised that love doesn't die, it lives forever.
When strangers remind me of you now, I smile.
Remember how I love you and you love me.
Priceless
I could have had one hundred thousand pounds by now
If I had stayed in the daily grind
Found someone else and given them my babies to mind
I could have bought them anything they wanted.
I could have had exotic holidays each year
If I had kept at the coal face
Trekked up and down the tube at a snail's pace
I could have gone anywhere I wanted.
I could have had clothes and shoes and jewels
If I had left my children at home
Left someone else holding the brush and comb
I could have worn anything I wanted.
But...
What I wanted was to feel my heart squeeze
Every time I turned and caught sight of my children
What I wanted was the joy of squidging the face paint
Even if most of it was squidged into the carpet
What I wanted was the tears and tantrums, the fears and nightmares,
and the firsts that scatter the land of childhood
If I had a million pounds by now
I couldn't buy one day in the past
The work is always there, but childhood doesn't last
The time I have had is priceless.
Fee Berry 2005
If I had stayed in the daily grind
Found someone else and given them my babies to mind
I could have bought them anything they wanted.
I could have had exotic holidays each year
If I had kept at the coal face
Trekked up and down the tube at a snail's pace
I could have gone anywhere I wanted.
I could have had clothes and shoes and jewels
If I had left my children at home
Left someone else holding the brush and comb
I could have worn anything I wanted.
But...
What I wanted was to feel my heart squeeze
Every time I turned and caught sight of my children
What I wanted was the joy of squidging the face paint
Even if most of it was squidged into the carpet
What I wanted was the tears and tantrums, the fears and nightmares,
and the firsts that scatter the land of childhood
If I had a million pounds by now
I couldn't buy one day in the past
The work is always there, but childhood doesn't last
The time I have had is priceless.
Fee Berry 2005
Spirits Rising
They left expecting ordinary days
Instead found they were going on a different sort of journey
They left their cups of coffee and unpaid bills
Stepped out of their homes and away from their lives
And can't return
Instead their souls set free today,
In darkness and confusion,
In smoke and pain,
Soared away from their broken bodies
Into a life beyond
Light a candle for their friends
and their families.
Light a candle for their children...
Their wives and mothers...
Husbands and fathers...
Light a candle for the loss
But their souls were set free today
Into a life beyond
The people in real need of light,
Of prayers and illumination
Set those bombs
Instead found they were going on a different sort of journey
They left their cups of coffee and unpaid bills
Stepped out of their homes and away from their lives
And can't return
Instead their souls set free today,
In darkness and confusion,
In smoke and pain,
Soared away from their broken bodies
Into a life beyond
Light a candle for their friends
and their families.
Light a candle for their children...
Their wives and mothers...
Husbands and fathers...
Light a candle for the loss
But their souls were set free today
Into a life beyond
The people in real need of light,
Of prayers and illumination
Set those bombs
Mr Trebus
I didn't know, I told my friends
I only saw the odds and ends
Littered over his garden.
I didn't know, I couldn't see
The person that he used to be
Before his confusion.
We used to call the council too
They'd charge him for the work, it's true
...though he hated them.
The blow fly problem abated for a little while.
The rats had nowhere to hide until he provided more accommodation.
I couldn't see, I told my friends
A garden full of odds and ends
Obliterated the man.
I couldn't know, I didn't see
He once was just like you and me
Before his confusion.
The council took his stuff away
It took them more than half a day
To move it.
We asked what he could possible want with second-hand garlic presses
and a pair of boy's shorts.
I didn't care, I told my friends
How many men the council sends
It will not solve it.
They'd need to know, they'd need to see
The solution's clear enough to me
He needs to go into an institution.
The council tried to talk him round
They never gained an inch of ground
He was intractable.
The junk helped him live his life
Old air conditioners and wood for healing was an unusual approach....
I didn't see, I told my friends
I hated all the odds and ends
Gathered with love.
I wouldn't know, I wouldn't see
He needed care from you and me
To cure his confusion.
The council only saw the crap
Only television saw the chap
Under the junk.
Even then, the hurts in his life were only diagnosable
Using the encrustation outside.
Fee Berry 2005
I only saw the odds and ends
Littered over his garden.
I didn't know, I couldn't see
The person that he used to be
Before his confusion.
We used to call the council too
They'd charge him for the work, it's true
...though he hated them.
The blow fly problem abated for a little while.
The rats had nowhere to hide until he provided more accommodation.
I couldn't see, I told my friends
A garden full of odds and ends
Obliterated the man.
I couldn't know, I didn't see
He once was just like you and me
Before his confusion.
The council took his stuff away
It took them more than half a day
To move it.
We asked what he could possible want with second-hand garlic presses
and a pair of boy's shorts.
I didn't care, I told my friends
How many men the council sends
It will not solve it.
They'd need to know, they'd need to see
The solution's clear enough to me
He needs to go into an institution.
The council tried to talk him round
They never gained an inch of ground
He was intractable.
The junk helped him live his life
Old air conditioners and wood for healing was an unusual approach....
I didn't see, I told my friends
I hated all the odds and ends
Gathered with love.
I wouldn't know, I wouldn't see
He needed care from you and me
To cure his confusion.
The council only saw the crap
Only television saw the chap
Under the junk.
Even then, the hurts in his life were only diagnosable
Using the encrustation outside.
Fee Berry 2005
Nearly Dead
Will they say I lived all my life
On suburban roads
Not of the city or of the country
But a place in between
Will they say I never took any risks,
Never had to hack my arm off in extremis
Never eating anybody's cousin in desperate straits?
Like millions I struggled from one pay day to another,
Trying to stop the haemmorhage of money through the bars and pubs of the town...
Trying to keep up, to keep the income over the outgoings.
I don't care what the Joneses do.
I long for the wild places without fences or walls,
Where the birds wheel and the wind blows lustily,
Where the sound of the sea is never far away
Where the shores rustle their greeting to the waves
And the driftwood tumbles up and down the beach.
I long to run without worrying I am going to break a knee or hip,
Long for those days when I didn't know what I had, who I was, what I was going to be.
"Youth is wasted on the young," said my grandmother, and I protested, but I didn't understand
Until now
How little I appreciated my youth while I had it.
Will they say I had talent but I
Frittered it away on unfinished projects
Neither brilliant nor awful, but somewhere
in between?
Will they say I never took any risks,
Never embroidered all my lovers or
Revealed my innermost self?
Like millions, I was always writing my book, a novel or
a handbook or an autobiography.
The truth is, I started too many times, and finished
Never.
I long for a place of my own, a library
A place to keep everything that means anything
A place to watch my family on the wall, laughing and smiling
While I write or sew or research or simply read
A place for being and a place for remembering and everything in its place.
I long to write without worrying about the consequences,
Long to say what I think
A place to scour the corners of my memory, to see the pattern of my life.
Will they say, they hadn't realised I was still alive?
Will they say, I never kept in contact, which is true
I have tested my ability to live without them all
And I can.
What will they say about the person I have become?
What can I say? I tolerated difference and saw none.
I loved the people I loved
Did the things that I did
And I am not sure what sort of future I made for myself, or what past.
On suburban roads
Not of the city or of the country
But a place in between
Will they say I never took any risks,
Never had to hack my arm off in extremis
Never eating anybody's cousin in desperate straits?
Like millions I struggled from one pay day to another,
Trying to stop the haemmorhage of money through the bars and pubs of the town...
Trying to keep up, to keep the income over the outgoings.
I don't care what the Joneses do.
I long for the wild places without fences or walls,
Where the birds wheel and the wind blows lustily,
Where the sound of the sea is never far away
Where the shores rustle their greeting to the waves
And the driftwood tumbles up and down the beach.
I long to run without worrying I am going to break a knee or hip,
Long for those days when I didn't know what I had, who I was, what I was going to be.
"Youth is wasted on the young," said my grandmother, and I protested, but I didn't understand
Until now
How little I appreciated my youth while I had it.
Will they say I had talent but I
Frittered it away on unfinished projects
Neither brilliant nor awful, but somewhere
in between?
Will they say I never took any risks,
Never embroidered all my lovers or
Revealed my innermost self?
Like millions, I was always writing my book, a novel or
a handbook or an autobiography.
The truth is, I started too many times, and finished
Never.
I long for a place of my own, a library
A place to keep everything that means anything
A place to watch my family on the wall, laughing and smiling
While I write or sew or research or simply read
A place for being and a place for remembering and everything in its place.
I long to write without worrying about the consequences,
Long to say what I think
A place to scour the corners of my memory, to see the pattern of my life.
Will they say, they hadn't realised I was still alive?
Will they say, I never kept in contact, which is true
I have tested my ability to live without them all
And I can.
What will they say about the person I have become?
What can I say? I tolerated difference and saw none.
I loved the people I loved
Did the things that I did
And I am not sure what sort of future I made for myself, or what past.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Zeitgeist
I watched a short film from WanderingMind which turned up on my Youtube feed last week, questioning the current economic system. I agree with him; I have often wondered why it should be that the same world should go into free fall because an elite set of people suddenly decide to crash the stock market.
In the comments for that video I found references to Zeitgeist the movie, and although I am busy and the film is over two hours long, I made time to watch it, because I thought it might be important.
I like a lot of the movie, I suppose because it reflected a number of things which I believe, about the nature of human beings, and the importance of nurturing children in their early years. It wasn't radical enough about education for me, but then, few things are.
However, I was very disappointed by the end of the film, the apparent solution to our dysfunctional money market system that currently abuses the planet. I felt that the film maker spent a lot of time discussing human nature and its need for nurturing, but then ignored a lot of basic human needs - for a place to call their own, and for possessions... for frivolous things which the state is never going to provide.
I looked at Peter Joseph, the film maker, and even before he propounded his communist utopia, thought how like Trotsky he looked. I don't know if there is anything in reincarnation theory, but he's definitely a candidate for examination. He looks like Trotsky, and he sounds like him too, in the theories he proposes.
What I was hoping for, was something different, and I suppose more scientific. There have been successful societies which have used different paradigms for their operation, where there has been considerable equality. Couldn't we try one of those systems instead? I feel that any system has to respect human nature, and our need to be diverse, to allow for the fact that one man's meat may be another man's poison. We don't all like the same stuff or even need the same stuff. We need to assert our individuality, even when we believe passionately in joining in society to protect the weak or to help those unable to help themselves.
I think the current market-based, money-based economy is a male-centric competitive system and we could be trying the alternative, which is a feminine nurturing system, which values caring and sharing and looking after people, and thinking about them. Which doesn't count the cost of everything in financial terms, but in costs to individuals, societies, countries, in human terms instead.
I think any system which is going to work will have to consider the nature of being human, and allow for the endless variations which we come in. Certainly I think a feminine system would make sure that babies and children are looked after well, and particularly children who are removed from their families... currently I think our society takes children from abusive parents and consigns them to abusive institutions which compound the damage.
I will have to think about the information in the film. But I don't think it is the answer. Maybe the reported system which obtained in Britain before the arrival of the Romans, or the system reportedly used on the Island of Thera, known as Minoan Akritiri society, seems to have been egalitarian, nurturing system which led to a highly artistic and creative place which thrived. Why not look back in history to find better ways of doing things?
One thing is for sure... I think a lot of our trouble came when we allowed people to start trading in things which don't exist. If I were Queen of the World for a day, I'd ban that. I'd ban trading in futures, in currencies and in derivatives. And there's an end to a lot of the ills, right there.
One thing I think the film achieves, is to stimulate thought about the sort of world we live in, and the sort of world we want to live in. That can only be a good thing.
Saturday, March 05, 2011
Comic Relief 2011
One of the places that they work is Kibera slum, the biggest slum in Africa. It has to be seen to be believed, and even though one could vicariously understand the noise and smell from the reactions of the people involved, it was obvious that it was very difficult for a viewer in a comfortable home in the UK to really gain a sense of the poverty they were looking at.
The four volunteers were stripped of their belongings, including their clothing, and then sent to live alone for three days. They were given a very small amount of money and told to make their living. The culture shock must have been extreme... they were hurtled from cosseted lives in the UK to the worst living conditions imaginable... sewage running in open gutters in front of their doors, hole in the ground lavatories shared with hundreds of others, people whose only suggestion when work wasn't available was to go to a bar and sleep with a man for money.
I admired the people who did this. I'm not sure I would have survived the first day. I found festival conditions intolerable on a holiday couple of years ago. I'm not sure how I would have coped with open sewers and holes filled with human excrement. On the other hand, what struck me was that I think my lack of adaption would make me organise improvements... one of the striking things about the programme was that the participants had stopped noticing many of the things which made such an impression at the beginning. In this context I wonder whether survival by acceptance would be more useful than a refusal to accept the circumstances and insisting on change? I expect I am kidding myself about the possibilities for change... but what distinguishes Kibera from the urban areas which border it except for organisation?
At the beginning of the film, they stated that as Kibera is classified by the Kenyan government as an illegal settlement, they are not obliged to provide health services etc for the people living there. While I applaud the projects that Comic Relief are running in the slum, and the bravery of the four celebrities who went there, I hope that pressure is brought to bear on the Kenyans to put health workers and facilities in place, and not simply to bulldoze the camp which has been the response of some governments to clearing up similar places. We have to change things. We have to feel responsible for the people who are enduring that life.
If you wish to donate to Comic Relief, text "help" to 70005.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
End of the Archers
At least for me. For those who don't listen to the everyday story of farming folk, it ws the 60th anniversary of the Archers on Sunday, and the producers decided to celebrate Eastenders-style, with the death of one of the best-loved characters.
Had the actor, Graham Seed, been keen to pursue pastures new, I'd still have been annoyed by the clumsy and unbelievable way that they did it. In the episode the staid and sensible farmer David Archer, persuaded his brother-in-law to go up on the roof in the dark and a high wind to get the New Year banner down. I this had been Kenton, fabled Peter Pan of the series, it might have been just about believable, but nooo, David was the chosen foil. Actually, though, the news that Nigel was to die came as a shock to Graham Seed too. He played him beautifully, and it was mainly due to his continued involvement that I came back to the Archers after becoming irritated by previous shock-horror storylines.
The producers have spent the past few months turning one of the female characters into a whingeing and unlikeable harridan over the past few weeks. Now if someone had thrown HER off the roof, I'd have applauded wildly. But Nigel was the light relief in the programme... a hooray henry made good, who was kind and gentle, despite a recent storyline in which he has been forcing his small son to work ever harder in order to pass an entrance exam.
The choice of a shocking death, clumsily queued up a few episodes before, to mark the 60th anniversary of the show indicates to me that the producers are going for the depression and "excitement" of the TV soap, instead of the quality that kept Archers fans coming back for more. It was the affection they felt for characters like Nigel, and the lack of shocking happenings... the small scale triumphs and disasters of real life, instead of the artificial drama.
It amazes me that BBC radio knows its listeners so little... they are continually trying to interest Radio 4 listeners in Radio 1 and vice versa... when the type of person who likes Radio 4 is very very unlikely to want to listen to Rado 1 and vice versa.
Similarly, the person who loves the Archers, is not likely to enjoy the sorts of dramatic disasters which litter the TV soaps. The petty squabbles which mark real life are far more interesting than the sudden loss of main characters which happens all too frequently in Eastenders, Emmerdale and Coronation Street.
There should be room for both, and it should not be necessary for The Archers to pander to the tastes of people who are perfectly well served by the TV soaps. We deserve our own fare, and once we had it. Now it seems to me that the Archers has descended to the point where I don't want to listen any more. The end of Nigel is the end of the Archers, for me.
Had the actor, Graham Seed, been keen to pursue pastures new, I'd still have been annoyed by the clumsy and unbelievable way that they did it. In the episode the staid and sensible farmer David Archer, persuaded his brother-in-law to go up on the roof in the dark and a high wind to get the New Year banner down. I this had been Kenton, fabled Peter Pan of the series, it might have been just about believable, but nooo, David was the chosen foil. Actually, though, the news that Nigel was to die came as a shock to Graham Seed too. He played him beautifully, and it was mainly due to his continued involvement that I came back to the Archers after becoming irritated by previous shock-horror storylines.
The producers have spent the past few months turning one of the female characters into a whingeing and unlikeable harridan over the past few weeks. Now if someone had thrown HER off the roof, I'd have applauded wildly. But Nigel was the light relief in the programme... a hooray henry made good, who was kind and gentle, despite a recent storyline in which he has been forcing his small son to work ever harder in order to pass an entrance exam.
The choice of a shocking death, clumsily queued up a few episodes before, to mark the 60th anniversary of the show indicates to me that the producers are going for the depression and "excitement" of the TV soap, instead of the quality that kept Archers fans coming back for more. It was the affection they felt for characters like Nigel, and the lack of shocking happenings... the small scale triumphs and disasters of real life, instead of the artificial drama.
It amazes me that BBC radio knows its listeners so little... they are continually trying to interest Radio 4 listeners in Radio 1 and vice versa... when the type of person who likes Radio 4 is very very unlikely to want to listen to Rado 1 and vice versa.
Similarly, the person who loves the Archers, is not likely to enjoy the sorts of dramatic disasters which litter the TV soaps. The petty squabbles which mark real life are far more interesting than the sudden loss of main characters which happens all too frequently in Eastenders, Emmerdale and Coronation Street.
There should be room for both, and it should not be necessary for The Archers to pander to the tastes of people who are perfectly well served by the TV soaps. We deserve our own fare, and once we had it. Now it seems to me that the Archers has descended to the point where I don't want to listen any more. The end of Nigel is the end of the Archers, for me.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Looking forwards, looking back
It's that time of year again, when the papers and tv are full of round-ups of the best/worst/most noteable happenings of the year. A review is almost compulsory, and back here in St Albans, looking after my Dad, time hangs heavy, hot and loud.
I feel as though I have had very little time this year. Reading "The Quest of the Overself" by Paul Brunton, I find that I should be ensuring I have at least half an hour for meditation every day. I rarely achieve that, and so I am determined that I should try, now that things have become less pressured.
My stepmother died on New Year's Eve a year ago. Her room is still full of her clothes and toiletries, and the living room is full of a pot of ashes. My stepsister, her only daughter, hasn't felt able to deal with her mother's things, and my sisters and I have felt reluctant to interfere, or to upset her, by dealing with them ourselves. She did ring up and insist that my father and sister should collect her mother's ashes during the mother's day weekend, but they have sat here untouched since then.
It's hard to know how to handle this reluctance to deal with things. She wasn't our mother, and didn't attempt to be. My father doesn't seem unduly morose in the run up to the anniversary. His way of dealing with my stepmother's death was to take every picture from the albums they had built up and throw away any which didn't have her in them. Thus he has an enormous pile of pictures all ripped from their context, of my stepmother smiling at the camera.
During her funeral, the officiant - I have no idea if he was a deacon, vicar or priest - referred to the "happy-go-lucky" personality of my stepmother... which occasioned a few puzzled expressions among the family, wondering who in their right minds might have used that phrase for her.
The problem is, that there wasn't much to say about her, apart from the fact that she worked for ATV for a while. She smoked, she talked, she ordered my father around, she complained, and she smoked some more. By the end of her life she had given up smoking, stayed in bed all the time, and watched soaps on tv. She seemed annoyed that people were interrupting her soap-watching when they came to see her.
Her daughter and granddaughters were the only people she was ever positive about. Generally, she seemed content with her life, but not particularly happy or unhappy. Certainly not happy-go-lucky.
Hopefully my stepsister will feel able to tackle her mother's possessions in due course. It would certainly make life easier if there were space in the wardrobes and drawers for things to be.
I feel as though I have had very little time this year. Reading "The Quest of the Overself" by Paul Brunton, I find that I should be ensuring I have at least half an hour for meditation every day. I rarely achieve that, and so I am determined that I should try, now that things have become less pressured.
My stepmother died on New Year's Eve a year ago. Her room is still full of her clothes and toiletries, and the living room is full of a pot of ashes. My stepsister, her only daughter, hasn't felt able to deal with her mother's things, and my sisters and I have felt reluctant to interfere, or to upset her, by dealing with them ourselves. She did ring up and insist that my father and sister should collect her mother's ashes during the mother's day weekend, but they have sat here untouched since then.
It's hard to know how to handle this reluctance to deal with things. She wasn't our mother, and didn't attempt to be. My father doesn't seem unduly morose in the run up to the anniversary. His way of dealing with my stepmother's death was to take every picture from the albums they had built up and throw away any which didn't have her in them. Thus he has an enormous pile of pictures all ripped from their context, of my stepmother smiling at the camera.
During her funeral, the officiant - I have no idea if he was a deacon, vicar or priest - referred to the "happy-go-lucky" personality of my stepmother... which occasioned a few puzzled expressions among the family, wondering who in their right minds might have used that phrase for her.
The problem is, that there wasn't much to say about her, apart from the fact that she worked for ATV for a while. She smoked, she talked, she ordered my father around, she complained, and she smoked some more. By the end of her life she had given up smoking, stayed in bed all the time, and watched soaps on tv. She seemed annoyed that people were interrupting her soap-watching when they came to see her.
Her daughter and granddaughters were the only people she was ever positive about. Generally, she seemed content with her life, but not particularly happy or unhappy. Certainly not happy-go-lucky.
Hopefully my stepsister will feel able to tackle her mother's possessions in due course. It would certainly make life easier if there were space in the wardrobes and drawers for things to be.
Monday, December 06, 2010
Being there
It's -5 in the shade outside, I awoke to a hoar frost which had edged the leaves with a sparkling white fringe. So it came as a bit of a shock last night to step across the threshold and be hit by a wall of heat, like Hawaii in summertime.
He started off with a chest infection, moved to a possible bladder infection and then revealed a badly infected toe on Friday night, something he had apparently been nursing for weeks without telling anyone. My sister operated on him over the weekend and no, Doctor, she doesn't have any medical qualifications.
He seems to be feeling better than he did last week, but is terribly terribly weak... only just about managing to make it to his chair this morning.
I must admit I was anxious about coming. I love my father, and he's a kind, generous and loving man, but he is also addicted to the Daily Telegraph (and insists on reading great chunks of it out), plays the tv at 90 decibels (and shouts at it) and is normally quite exercised about various tings in the news. The Labour government really used to get him going; now he mostly reserves his ire for the EU.
I haven't done a lot of work today, although I do have a broadband connection. It is pretty hard to keep my concentration up under the current conditions, not least because I have to go somewhere to try to find some oxygen every so often. Still, the doctor came, and prescribed stiffer drugs for the infection, which I fetched from the Chemists, taking pictures of the amazing frost along the way.
He's eaten a little dinner, but is mostly not very hungry. I hope he will feel better tomorrow.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Power and powerlessness in the NHS
The Guardian today reports the tragedy of twins dying because of a mistake over drug administration, at Stafford Hospital, already at the centre of an investigation into poor standards of care. The investigation into allegedly hundreds of unnecessary deaths at the Staffordshire hospital, is looking into why so many NHS bodies didn't act sooner to halt the "terrible standard of service inflicted on patients...".
Whenever anyone says anything like that, I am transported back ten years, to a time when my husband was admitted to hospital with an abdominal obstruction. He was seen in the Accident and Emergency department by a junior member of a team of doctors who weren't from the Gastroenterology department, and admitted to one of the wards in Hillingdon Hospital.
There he was literally used as a guinea pig by several junior doctors from that team. At one point they planned to give him an explosive laxative to try to shift the obstruction, and it was only when I asked them what would happen to my husband if the obstruction was not to be shifted by the use of laxatives that they decided to abort that procedure.
He was put on conservative treatment, which meant nil by mouth and drip only for fluid. I frequently found that his drip had run out and no one had replaced it... something which gradually increased the pain from his stomach. I would try to insist on the drip being replaced rapidly because he is a patient who "tissues up" very quickly... if a drip is left unused for more than half an hour, it become unusable. Thus often the simple job of replacing the fluid turned into a lengthy fight for him to have a new drip inserted and the bag replaced - often there wasn't a doctor available to redo the drip, and he waited hours to have it inserted... and then the fluid wasn't increased to take account of the fact that he had had none at all for several hours.
I complained about his treatment, and had one nurse tell me that she often didn't drink all day and it didn't do her any harm... and another nurse tell me that the nurses were fed up with me complaining because they had some "really sick" patients on the same ward.
I watched my husband deteriorate day by day, and called in all the friends and family with any experience of nursing or medicine to see if anything would make a difference. By the time he had been in hospital a week, he was vomiting faeces, weak, dehydrated and deteriorating before my eyes.
I wont go into the gory details, but there were many incidents... my husband was screaming in agony one day when all the nurses were in handover meeting and ignoring the bells, and so all the men in the cubicle of the ward, threw things and shouted until someone came. The man across the ward was constantly complaining about pain, and the nurses laughed at him and told him to use his morphine pump... he complained that it wasn't working and they ignored him... only realising when the hadn't had to change the syringe after three days that it hadn't ever worked at all.
The low point was when I was sent with John in a wheelchair to the X-Ray department and the X-ray staff were so kind that it made me cry... they realised he should never have been made to get into a wheelchair, and his drip should not have been disconnected for the journey.
A doctor came in to see him and when I said I was very concerned about his condition, said: "Mrs Berry, are YOU a doctor? I can see him, he doesn't seem that ill to me." I turned to him and said that I didn't need to be a doctor to see that he was deteriorating day by day... and that looking at him from the end of the bed was not the same as examining him.
He examined him and suddenly, he was an emergency. It seemed that even though they were seriously concerned about his condition, he wasn't scheduled for surgery until the Friday, and then there seemed to be some sort of hold up relating to the drip kit for theatre... I overheard one of the nurses say that the system was that they had to turn in the old one to get a new one, and no one knew where it was... the anaesthetist was becoming concerned that my husband wasn't in a fit state for surgery and I was becoming concerned about her cancelling the operation, because I knew he would die without it, and so I disclosed to the anaesthetist what was going on and she obtained the necessary theatre kit.
He had his operation and was fortunate enough to go into the high dependency unit as they had a spare bed, instead of back onto the ward. They removed necrotic tissue that no laxative would have shifted, and he was sewn back up. Unfortunately I watched him deteriorate over the next 24 hours, and eventually watched as his blood pressure dropped to an impossibly low level. The nurse was simply recording the numbers, and I asked why nothing was being done about it. He said that the machinery must be faulty because he would be dead with such low numbers. As a tactic, I had hysterics to draw attention to my husband...something I have never done before and hope never to have to do again.
It turned out that the machinery was right. They began to push blood into him to compensate for the low blood pressure, and warned me that things looked bad. My family gathered in the waiting room alongside the intensive care unit, and I went to see them, just as one of the surgeons happened along. He met John's brother and made some throwaway comment like... "of course your brother is a much bigger man than you...", at which we both looked a question at him and said..."no, they're about the same stature and build" at which point the surgeon rushed away. John was bleeding into the stomach and had an emergency operation to fix the nick in his testicular artery.
He had been so dehydrated during the first operation that when the surgeon nicked his artery, he didn't bleed. Once he had been hydrated again, he began to bleed internally. I began to wonder if anyone in the hospital ever used logic to solve problems... obviously the blood that was being pumped into him at regular intervals was going somewhere, and there was a reason why his blood pressure remained dangerously low.
Over the next two weeks that my husband was in hospital, I talked to a lot of people. I talked to surgeons, to nurses, to health care assistants, to porters. No one in the hospital felt that they had the power to change the things that needed changing. Nearly all of them recognised the things that were wrong with the hospital, none of them felt that there were ways of feeding that information to the people who took decisions... in fact, my experience since then with hospitals has led me to feel that the whole management system of the NHS is designed to prevent the information that the workers know from getting to the people who matter. The hierarchy is there to give people a feeling of prestige and status, but it acts as a wall to information coming from below. The middle management hear the complaints of both the workers and the management and absorb both instead of conveying information - in fact they more or less see that as their responsibility, to protect the management from the staff, and the staff from the management.
An example of this was when my husband returned to hospital to have his colostomy reversed. When he came out of surgery, he was put into a private room, and I was told that he ought to have oxygen, but that they were short of the little disposible widgets which are required to be able to fit the oxygen mask to the equipment and so could I please pinch him from time to time to ensure he was breathing enough to keep his oxygen intake up. When, despite my pinching, the alarm kept sounding for low oxygen, their solution was to turn off the alarm.
I went to the board meeting of the hospital, and reported this event to them. They expressed shock and horror. They had invested a huge amount of money to be able to pipe oxygen to each of the rooms and wards in the hospital, what was the point of that investment if patients weren't reaping the benefit, all because of a £3 widget? I was asked to talk to one of the staff about it. I duly rang up and talked to someone in the administration... and the first thing they told me was that they also worked as an agency nurse in the hospital and they were fully aware of the problem. Fully aware, doing nothing about it.
I have come across this time and time again, in hospitals, that people are fully aware of the problems which are putting patients lives at risk, and yet do nothing about it because it isn't their responsibility - they don't feel responsibility, or any power to change what is happening.In that case it was all about budgets: the wards hd a budget for the widgets, and if they exceeded the budget they ran out of widgets, QED.
After my husband was released from hospital I talked to people in the community, his GP, the local community health council, all sorts of people, to see if any of them felt that they had the power to change things. None of them did. Most especially the local GPs who felt that they had to maintain a good relationship with their local hospital in order to best serve the majority of their patients, even when they could see things going wrong.
This is at the heart of the problem... you can't expect other NHS organisations and practices to complain and report problems, because they fear that the good relationship they have with the institution will be destroyed. That's human nature.
I have since had similarly awful experiences with Great Ormond Street, one of the most famous hospitals in the world, but by that time the Community Health Councils had been disbanded, and there was a Patient advocacy and liaison service in the hospital. I had the greatest difficulty in getting hold of them, and despite many emails, no satisfaction. It wasn't that I wanted to be compensated financially in either case. My aim was that I wanted to prevent another patient from suffering the way we had. I failed in that aim, on both occasions.
My belief is that the only way to ensure that problem hospitals like the Stafford Hospital come to the attention of the authorities in good time, is to set up a truly independent inspection service made up of both doctors and laypeople. They should inspect hospitals outside their own area, where there is no possibility of damage to the relationships which doctors rely on, and they should be briefed not to establish a relationship of any sort with the hospital they are inspecting. One of the problems with the Community Health Councils was that the people inspecting hospitals had a stronger and closer relationship with the people they were inspecting than with the community they were there to represent.
There is no perfect system, but some hospitals do better at this than others, and the ones which do well ought to be teaching the ones who do badly. Where things go wrong, they should be looked at, and somehow patients, and consultants and nurses and administators and GPs and everyone involved needs to feel that if there is a problem it is everyone's responsibility, not no-one's.
I still have flashbacks to the two incidents which involved my nearest and dearest, and both of them survived. I can't imagine how awful it must be, how much guilt and grief the surviving family members must have about the people who died needlessly at the Stafford Hospital. But I do now that it is possible to change this, and that we all have a part to play. The contact I have had with Americans in the course of my work in virtual worlds has led me to value the NHS and the services it provides. It is a wonderful thing, even if parts of it need overhauling. It would be possible, I do believe, to nurture it in such a way that we keep the things which make it such a unique institution, and change the things which let it down.
I have met some wonderful people in the course of my life, working for the NHS. Dedicated, caring, clever, and committed. Systems that let those people down and make them feel powerless, need to be changed, and I hope the inquiry at Stafford will help to do that. It would be good to make those relatives feel that something positive can emerge from their losses.
Whenever anyone says anything like that, I am transported back ten years, to a time when my husband was admitted to hospital with an abdominal obstruction. He was seen in the Accident and Emergency department by a junior member of a team of doctors who weren't from the Gastroenterology department, and admitted to one of the wards in Hillingdon Hospital.
There he was literally used as a guinea pig by several junior doctors from that team. At one point they planned to give him an explosive laxative to try to shift the obstruction, and it was only when I asked them what would happen to my husband if the obstruction was not to be shifted by the use of laxatives that they decided to abort that procedure.
He was put on conservative treatment, which meant nil by mouth and drip only for fluid. I frequently found that his drip had run out and no one had replaced it... something which gradually increased the pain from his stomach. I would try to insist on the drip being replaced rapidly because he is a patient who "tissues up" very quickly... if a drip is left unused for more than half an hour, it become unusable. Thus often the simple job of replacing the fluid turned into a lengthy fight for him to have a new drip inserted and the bag replaced - often there wasn't a doctor available to redo the drip, and he waited hours to have it inserted... and then the fluid wasn't increased to take account of the fact that he had had none at all for several hours.
I complained about his treatment, and had one nurse tell me that she often didn't drink all day and it didn't do her any harm... and another nurse tell me that the nurses were fed up with me complaining because they had some "really sick" patients on the same ward.
I watched my husband deteriorate day by day, and called in all the friends and family with any experience of nursing or medicine to see if anything would make a difference. By the time he had been in hospital a week, he was vomiting faeces, weak, dehydrated and deteriorating before my eyes.
I wont go into the gory details, but there were many incidents... my husband was screaming in agony one day when all the nurses were in handover meeting and ignoring the bells, and so all the men in the cubicle of the ward, threw things and shouted until someone came. The man across the ward was constantly complaining about pain, and the nurses laughed at him and told him to use his morphine pump... he complained that it wasn't working and they ignored him... only realising when the hadn't had to change the syringe after three days that it hadn't ever worked at all.
The low point was when I was sent with John in a wheelchair to the X-Ray department and the X-ray staff were so kind that it made me cry... they realised he should never have been made to get into a wheelchair, and his drip should not have been disconnected for the journey.
A doctor came in to see him and when I said I was very concerned about his condition, said: "Mrs Berry, are YOU a doctor? I can see him, he doesn't seem that ill to me." I turned to him and said that I didn't need to be a doctor to see that he was deteriorating day by day... and that looking at him from the end of the bed was not the same as examining him.
He examined him and suddenly, he was an emergency. It seemed that even though they were seriously concerned about his condition, he wasn't scheduled for surgery until the Friday, and then there seemed to be some sort of hold up relating to the drip kit for theatre... I overheard one of the nurses say that the system was that they had to turn in the old one to get a new one, and no one knew where it was... the anaesthetist was becoming concerned that my husband wasn't in a fit state for surgery and I was becoming concerned about her cancelling the operation, because I knew he would die without it, and so I disclosed to the anaesthetist what was going on and she obtained the necessary theatre kit.
He had his operation and was fortunate enough to go into the high dependency unit as they had a spare bed, instead of back onto the ward. They removed necrotic tissue that no laxative would have shifted, and he was sewn back up. Unfortunately I watched him deteriorate over the next 24 hours, and eventually watched as his blood pressure dropped to an impossibly low level. The nurse was simply recording the numbers, and I asked why nothing was being done about it. He said that the machinery must be faulty because he would be dead with such low numbers. As a tactic, I had hysterics to draw attention to my husband...something I have never done before and hope never to have to do again.
It turned out that the machinery was right. They began to push blood into him to compensate for the low blood pressure, and warned me that things looked bad. My family gathered in the waiting room alongside the intensive care unit, and I went to see them, just as one of the surgeons happened along. He met John's brother and made some throwaway comment like... "of course your brother is a much bigger man than you...", at which we both looked a question at him and said..."no, they're about the same stature and build" at which point the surgeon rushed away. John was bleeding into the stomach and had an emergency operation to fix the nick in his testicular artery.
He had been so dehydrated during the first operation that when the surgeon nicked his artery, he didn't bleed. Once he had been hydrated again, he began to bleed internally. I began to wonder if anyone in the hospital ever used logic to solve problems... obviously the blood that was being pumped into him at regular intervals was going somewhere, and there was a reason why his blood pressure remained dangerously low.
Over the next two weeks that my husband was in hospital, I talked to a lot of people. I talked to surgeons, to nurses, to health care assistants, to porters. No one in the hospital felt that they had the power to change the things that needed changing. Nearly all of them recognised the things that were wrong with the hospital, none of them felt that there were ways of feeding that information to the people who took decisions... in fact, my experience since then with hospitals has led me to feel that the whole management system of the NHS is designed to prevent the information that the workers know from getting to the people who matter. The hierarchy is there to give people a feeling of prestige and status, but it acts as a wall to information coming from below. The middle management hear the complaints of both the workers and the management and absorb both instead of conveying information - in fact they more or less see that as their responsibility, to protect the management from the staff, and the staff from the management.
An example of this was when my husband returned to hospital to have his colostomy reversed. When he came out of surgery, he was put into a private room, and I was told that he ought to have oxygen, but that they were short of the little disposible widgets which are required to be able to fit the oxygen mask to the equipment and so could I please pinch him from time to time to ensure he was breathing enough to keep his oxygen intake up. When, despite my pinching, the alarm kept sounding for low oxygen, their solution was to turn off the alarm.
I went to the board meeting of the hospital, and reported this event to them. They expressed shock and horror. They had invested a huge amount of money to be able to pipe oxygen to each of the rooms and wards in the hospital, what was the point of that investment if patients weren't reaping the benefit, all because of a £3 widget? I was asked to talk to one of the staff about it. I duly rang up and talked to someone in the administration... and the first thing they told me was that they also worked as an agency nurse in the hospital and they were fully aware of the problem. Fully aware, doing nothing about it.
I have come across this time and time again, in hospitals, that people are fully aware of the problems which are putting patients lives at risk, and yet do nothing about it because it isn't their responsibility - they don't feel responsibility, or any power to change what is happening.In that case it was all about budgets: the wards hd a budget for the widgets, and if they exceeded the budget they ran out of widgets, QED.
After my husband was released from hospital I talked to people in the community, his GP, the local community health council, all sorts of people, to see if any of them felt that they had the power to change things. None of them did. Most especially the local GPs who felt that they had to maintain a good relationship with their local hospital in order to best serve the majority of their patients, even when they could see things going wrong.
This is at the heart of the problem... you can't expect other NHS organisations and practices to complain and report problems, because they fear that the good relationship they have with the institution will be destroyed. That's human nature.
I have since had similarly awful experiences with Great Ormond Street, one of the most famous hospitals in the world, but by that time the Community Health Councils had been disbanded, and there was a Patient advocacy and liaison service in the hospital. I had the greatest difficulty in getting hold of them, and despite many emails, no satisfaction. It wasn't that I wanted to be compensated financially in either case. My aim was that I wanted to prevent another patient from suffering the way we had. I failed in that aim, on both occasions.
My belief is that the only way to ensure that problem hospitals like the Stafford Hospital come to the attention of the authorities in good time, is to set up a truly independent inspection service made up of both doctors and laypeople. They should inspect hospitals outside their own area, where there is no possibility of damage to the relationships which doctors rely on, and they should be briefed not to establish a relationship of any sort with the hospital they are inspecting. One of the problems with the Community Health Councils was that the people inspecting hospitals had a stronger and closer relationship with the people they were inspecting than with the community they were there to represent.
There is no perfect system, but some hospitals do better at this than others, and the ones which do well ought to be teaching the ones who do badly. Where things go wrong, they should be looked at, and somehow patients, and consultants and nurses and administators and GPs and everyone involved needs to feel that if there is a problem it is everyone's responsibility, not no-one's.
I still have flashbacks to the two incidents which involved my nearest and dearest, and both of them survived. I can't imagine how awful it must be, how much guilt and grief the surviving family members must have about the people who died needlessly at the Stafford Hospital. But I do now that it is possible to change this, and that we all have a part to play. The contact I have had with Americans in the course of my work in virtual worlds has led me to value the NHS and the services it provides. It is a wonderful thing, even if parts of it need overhauling. It would be possible, I do believe, to nurture it in such a way that we keep the things which make it such a unique institution, and change the things which let it down.
I have met some wonderful people in the course of my life, working for the NHS. Dedicated, caring, clever, and committed. Systems that let those people down and make them feel powerless, need to be changed, and I hope the inquiry at Stafford will help to do that. It would be good to make those relatives feel that something positive can emerge from their losses.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
What's a twitter newspaper?
That would be this. Looks a whole lot more interesting and less doom and gloom than a traditional newspaper!
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