acoupleofpunters

When I was five years old, our kitten Died. Actually it was run over by an overly-anxious neighbour who used to tear in and out of the driveway, but us kids weren’t to know. Understandably, Mum used to be terrified for us, but the neighbour apparently slowed her ways after the flat-cat incident.

We dug a hole at the bottom of the garden and made a cross, wrapped the kitten in a rag, placed it in the hole and covered it up. Our father said a few words. We didn’t really understand it but we cried real tears for days. We got a replacement and things moved on.

We didn’t encounter the Death of one of our family until I was 12 – my grandfather. After the service, as well as several days of grief, my grandmother was openly concerned as to what people would think when she didn’t have any tears left to cry at the funeral service ‘What will people think?’.

My father Died when I was 30. Having been to an all-boys school, I was brought up in that strange belief that a man must be strong and not show one’s grief. People said; ‘You mustn’t falter’ and ‘Keep yourself busy’. In retrospect, I took that advice on board, didn’t cry at the funeral, didn’t discuss it openly and as a result kept that grief bottled inside me. It affected me daily until eventually erupting out, several years later.

Bring up the subject of Death today and people will run the other way. ‘Don’t be so macabre!’ they say. ‘Think about the positives’ they sing. ‘She lived for a good old innings’ they cry. ‘I don’t want to discuss it’ is what they really think.

I heard on BBC’s Radio 4 recently that life-insurance policies are based on a fact that every 8 years, your likelihood of Dying increases by 100%.

Today, in the society of NOW, we don’t have time for Death. We need to make that phone call, catch up with that person, buy that item. Death couldn’t possibly happen. However, there is nothing like a good Death to get you thinking again about what really matters.

Three weeks ago, my wife experienced a missed mis-carriage at 20 weeks, way out of her first trimester. We are presently in the process of arranging a funeral service (why is it that funeral directors in South West London are called Wake & Paine?) for our baby that didn’t even see the light of day. My wife is upside down with bereavement, anger, and a complete sense of loss of her plans. I, on the other hand, having only seen the baby at the 12 week scan am not exactly sure as to what has been lost. People aren’t sure whether to brooch the subject which makes it even more difficult for the parents. Learning from earlier lessons about Death, we have found conselling is important and allows us to discuss the Death as much as we are able.

In today’s society, people openly discuss the topic of Sex. However as a topic of discussion, Death seems to be presently taboo. Apparently in Victorian times, the relevance of these two subjects was actually the reverse of today, with Death being openly discussed and a period of mourning openly accepted. Why is that?

A small, wiry looking, man  stands at the bar.

A very large man stands beside him.

The large man elbows the small man in the ribs, hard. Large turns to small and accuses him of bumping him, and spilling his drink.

The small man turns and sizes up the large man, ending with a steady gaze, up, into the large man’s eyes,

“What you need to think about, my friend, is why I don’t feel nervous having this conversation with a big guy like you.”

The gaze continued for a short moment, while large collected his drink and quietly moved elsewhere.

…are to relax, to have a drink regularly, to miss out on going to the gym and more importantly to have a laugh. Oh, and to blog more regularly – how theraputic.

All year long we are pressured to perform – we hear it from our friends and people on the phone on the train. Inflation is at a high again. We go to work for a significant element of the week. When shopping (particularly in London) we queue. We commute for hours on end, and endure endless apologies from train tannoy announcements about lateness. We sit in traffic jams in areas of poor radio. We are polite to our fellow societans. We lie awake at night concerned over how busy we are or what we could have done better.

Rising interest rates, mortgages and loans. Our families are pulled in every direction, with children going to nurseries from the age of 6 months, to primary students doing classes after school until a parent can come home from work. Hoodies packing around like wolves because the older generations can’t be bothered to involve them.

In order to survive, we conform to increasing amounts of pressure. How long can this last without societal meltdown or are we seeing increasing signs of this now? Will government leave each generation with enough pension pooled to cover the growing disorders of stress and unhealthiness?

A friend was on Oxford Street last week and was so amazed at how angry people were in the sales. “So many people with so many ambitions for new year resolutions in one place can’t be good”.

Time for more art, music and comedy. Guess I’ll pay that extra TV license installment and watch BBC2.

I have a concern - why is it in the days of environmental concern that people of the UK needs to chop down 8 million Christmas trees (The Norway Spruce - Picea Abies) for 4 weeks of festivity?!

Not only is it the chopping-down that annoys me, but it is also the carbon spent by the distribution of those 8 million trees to people’s homes, and then those same 8,000,000 trees being picked-up from people’s homes! I realise the importance of algae in the oceans for oxygen, however we also depend upon plants (and the 8million Picea Abies) for their ability to produce oxygen. Chopped down, this isn’t helping anyone.

Does a dead morsol of a tree in the front room truly symbolize festivity? What about a “fridge-magnet Christmas tree”? What about a tree that is kept in a pot in the garden all year long and then simply wheeled into the living room, and decorated with tinsel and lights for the Christmas period. Looks like another new year’s resolution coming on…

There is a scene in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian where a group of women are watching a stoning. Only men are allowed to watch stonings in The Life of Brian so the women wear robes and fake beards. An official suspects something is amiss, and asks if any of the attendees is actually a woman.

The women reply in high falsettos before suddenly realising that they have to be men, and feigning gruff manly rumbles.

One of the scandals du jour in London is that Mustaf Jama, public enemy number one for allegedly shooting PC Sharon Beshenivsky , escaped from the UK by dressing in his sister’s niqab and using her passport to flee to Somalia. The police have suggested that he covered himself in ladies modesty clothes and padded unnoticed through the airport along with everyone else travelling between Christmas and New Year.

For all the sensible media, the scandal of all this is that an arch criminal (21 criminal convictions) could evade capture using the old dress as a girl and leave by the front gate trick. But for me, it’s the sense of ridiculousness of the whole thing.

Do you think he had to feign a girlie voice at check-in - or did his sister check-in for him.

Did he have to feign a girlie voice at passport control?

Did he borrow her luggage too - a macho thug turning up in a brutal part of Somalia carrying a pink bag with flowers on it.

Did the ruse run as far as reading women’s magazines on the plane?

Did he remember to use the ladies toilets?

Did he maintain the girlie falsetto for the whole flight, or did he ditch the niqab after boarding?
Where did he find ladies’ shoes in his size, and did he wear stockings? Because if something is going to give you away in a niqab it’s the ankles and feet…

…And hands. Do you think he waxed his forearms and the backs of his hands for authenticity?

Did he shave his beard off, lest its shape show through the veil?

Did he have to practice walking like a girl - I can see him now, doing laps of his lounge room in ladies shoes and stockings, trying to get his hips swinging.

I can see him at the beautician’s now, having his eyebrows threaded and his nails manicured. Can you imagine the conversation?

“Are you doing this for a special occasion?”

“Oh yes - I am going to see family in Somalia and I want to look my best. Do you have anything that can soften these calouses?”

The Cheerful One mentioned in a post that she got herself embroiled in Cochlear implant debate at a recent Christmas party.

I started posting a comment on her post, but my anger ran away with me, so I moved it here instead of turning her comments box into a debating zone.

I respect the views of the anti-implant debate, and I sympathise with their fears that “curing” deafness - which implants don’t do by any means - will destroy their culture. But personally I think the deaf culture is far stronger than that. But their tactics make me furious. The worst story I have heard is of non-implanted children slapping implanted children in the side of the head in the playground in an attempt to destroy their implant. (Don’t - you will dent the child before the implant.)

The victims of these assaults are children who are not wearing their speech processors - the devices that send the sounds to the implant - implant because they’re at deaf school, trying to participate in deaf culture. Can you imagine anything more likely to turn a child against the deaf culture than bullying it out of a school for the deaf - can you imagine anything more likely to attach negative connotations to signing?

One of my colleagues was deaf (without an implant) and, naturally, attended events with lots of other deaf people. He refused to put a company parking sticker on his car because he was afraid of the car being vandalised when he attended events with lots of other deaf people who didn’t know him.

Children need to learn to hear and understand speech as separate from background noise and their ability to learn this skill is direct correlation to how soon they can be implanted. The main anti-implant argument is that children should be able to make an informed decision about whether they want to be part of the hearing culture, or the deaf one (as if it’s an all or nothing choice) and thus should wait until they are around 12 years of age before being offered an implant.

But at that age their ability to learn to hear speech, and speak themselves, is severely compromised. However, if the child is implanted in its first year of life, and grows up signing, hearing and speaking, they are able to make an informed decision by either wearing or not wearing their implant. Not implanting them until later in life is taking away their right to learn to hear and understand speech.

And honestly, if they had met some of the amazing implantees that I have met, the anti-implant lobby would not be so anti.

One bubbly, vibrant explosion of a woman who went deaf overnight in a nightclub, in her fifties, describes her implant as a lifesaving device. She lives to talk and interact with other people - she is 100% extrovert. She became suicidal after a week of the loneliness of not hearing, and spent a month in deep depression before her implant restored some semblance of hearing.

Another woman in advanced old age (in Australia) had been going progressively deaf over the years. She was implanted and within a week of returning from hospital (that’s a ridiculously fast recovery - it’s usually longer) was able to ring her oldest friend in the UK - a woman who she had not been able to speak to for seven years, and who she had given up on ever being able to speak to again, because their respective ages made travel difficult. Once the crying was over they talked for three hours, and when I met her, were talking weekly.

How can someone deny that sort of miracle to a person?

It must be great to be impotent.
It must also be great to have a tiny penis.

I say this, because I am constantly emailed by people enquiring about the state of my potency, and the size of my potentate. There must be millions of people out there who genuinely want to help me, and are only thwarted by the fact that my bishop stands unaided, and performs on cue.

On my lonely days, however, I wish things were not quote so functional. On those days I could reply to the emails by saying, “Actually, things aren’t so great in the pants department. Can you help me?”

I would be immediately surrounded by love and joy as these thousands of people rush to my aid with sidenafil citrate, pumps, patches and plungers. There would be a mass laying on of hands - it would be like a group hug from the centipede family. It would be lovely.

But alas, by gusset filler functions perfectly normally so I will go on my lonely way, wishing for a little pop gun that only shoots blanks.

In my last post I mentioned, in passing, that Israel had invaded Lebanon. Of course in the Orwellian doublespeak that is the dialogue of modern warfare it was not called an invasion - euphemisms like “conflict”, and “proportional response” were bandied about - even when the Israelis blew up a UN observation post that had been there for eighteen years - not months, years. Eighteen years!

The term that most offended me was “proportional response”. The response was not proportional, it was paranoid, reactionary and totally out of proportion, as the coffin counter shows.

However, the claims that the Israelis are not targeting civillians surprises me to. I have seen footage of Israeli asassins destroying one single apartment in an apartment block in order to eliminate a military target without taking out any civillians. At that time the world was caught-up on the legalities of Israeli military helicopters going into Palestine (or Jordan, depending on your politics) and destroying said single apartment. Whatever the legalities, it proved, beyond doubt, the surgical precision that Israeli agents are able to achieve when they want to. Which is why the scenes of entire streets blown to pieces makes me think that the Israelis wanted that to happen. If a group that can destroy individual cars on the road, and individual rooms in buildings suddenly destroys a neighbourhood, it is disingenuous for that group to expect us to believe them when they say that it was unintentional.

If this is how Israel responds to eighty casualties, I would hate to see how it responds to its road toll.

The main trick to negotiating with someone is to get as much information as you can about them, and their situation, their pressure points and their pleasure points. Armed with this knowledge you can push towards a satisfactory resolution for both parties.

If you think your negotiation will end in an unbalanced resolution, where the other party may not be entirely satisfied with their lot, you also need to consider your own pressure points once the negotiation is over, because an opponent with nothing to lose will see only up-side in attacking you - and suddenly the negotiation is not over.

If you have been paying any attention to the blogsphere, or the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Times or CNN in the last week you will know that Israel has invaded Lebanon and that Petite Anglaise was fired from her job for bringing disrepute on her employer. Petite’s account indicates that her employer spent a weekend reading her blog. She says quite thoroughly, though I suspect he just clicked the “working girl” category to read the work posts - a great example of poor preparation, and an indirect cause of the subsequent media storm.

You see, if you read Petite thoroughly, looking at the profiles and blogs of those who post comments, you will discover that Petite is read widely by media types. She would be within six degrees of separation from almost every Newspaper editor in the English speaking world. Being her boss you would also have noticed that she is articulate in two languages, intelligent, very good looking, and a single mum. Having read her blog you would know that she writes beautifully, and sensitively, about her daughter - you are not firing Petite, you are firing Tadpole’s mum - and has ambitions beyond the secretarial. Having seen the book covers in her right sidebar, you would know that she admires bloggers turned authors, and you could assume that she wants to join their ranks. And if you fire her, she will have a lot of time on her hands. She is, in short, a media darling in waiting, willing and able to step up to the plate.

And still he fired her. According to Petite’s timeline he read the blog on the weekend and she was out by the end of the week. It looks to me like a hasty decision, made without considering all the angles. A more cunning person would have discussed the matter with Petite, given her a written warning, and requested that she not identify her workplace or use company facilities for blogging. A wise person would have given her the warning, then moved her into corporate communications. By firing Petite they have given her no option but to take her plight public. It is simply the path of least resistance - she has no job, nothing to lose by publishing, and 3000 readers per day who she habitually uses as confidants. What else would she do?

The employer’s subsequent media management has been even more short-sighted. So far it has been media relations by “No comment” and not returning phone calls; giving Petite complete control over the story without, surprisingly, ever mentioning the name of the company. The company appears utterly discredited, either by its unfair treatment of a staff member, or the inadequacy of its HR policies in the face of such a challenge. (May large, conservative companies now require staff to sign a contract prohibiting them from blogging, or blogging about work). The company’s cold, unsophisticated and reactionary media strategy - so favoured by the archly conservative end of British society - was utterly discredited by its disastrous impact on the British royal family’s reputation following the death of Princess Diana. A more evolved organisation would have put its own side of the story, stating why it believes it behaved rationally and reasonably. And if it cannot come up with a plausible explanation, it should recognise that it is in an indefensible position and begin remediation before the media storm becomes a tornado.

Media relations aside; the most potentially damaging fallout for the employer will occur if it wins against Petite at the industrial relations tribunal. Because all Petite did was talk, abstractly, about work in a public forum, a victory would set the precedent that discussing work in a public forum not controlled by your workplace - regardless of whether you identify your employer - brings discredit on your employer.

This would prevent anybody from discussing their job at after work drinks with friends; it would prevent students from discussing their work during continuing education - as is required to become a chartered accountant; and it would ultimately mean that the man who fired Petite should lose his own job for his presentation at the meeting of the International Tax Planning Association in Lausanne last month, or at least for any comments he made about work between sessions.

[Petite and her erstwhile employer have been invited to comment.]

In the wee small hours this morning, somewhere between the alarm going off and waking up, I was listening to the radio. The BBC man and his reporter were discussing a new report into parking in London and three facts leaped out of the burble at me:

1. That one in five parking tickets is challenged successfully
2. That one in three parking officers is assaulted - some with baseball bats and other weapons
3. They are thinking of increasing parking fines in some places to £160

This, in turn, inspired three thought streams:

1. So what they are actually saying is that one in five parking tickets is an extortion attempt that fails. Given the number of dodgy parking tickets that people don’t bother fighting, the proportion of fraudulent parking tickets must be immense.
2. People are violently objecting to parking officers illegally ticketing their cars. Or parking officers are violently objecting to people who try to stop them illegally ticketing their cars. I mention this flipside, because the violence is not always one-way. Our porter challenged the parking inspector in our street and the parking inspector hit him with his parking ticket machine. So the parking inspector took a weapon to a concerned citizen who pointed out that he had not waited the statutory five minutes before writing the ticket, and that he would act as a witness. It ended happily though. About a nanosecond after the parking inspector hit our porter, he discovered - the hard way - that our porter is a retired middleweight boxer. I bet it wasn’t written up that way in the inspector’s log though.
3. It costs more to park illegally than it does to speed, or to drive through a stop sign

Even in my slightly befuddled sleepy state, having had these thoughts, I had a revelation. An epiphany even.

Perhaps less of 1 will lead to less 2.

I was wondering if anyone else shared my revelation when, outside Bayswater Tube this morning, I saw a parking inspector hiding behind a phone box on Queensway while she typed a car’s details into her computer. The car was in the side street, driver in the driving seat, engine running, while the passenger hopped out to catch the tube. The passenger didn’t take more than a moment to get out, so really the car was stopped at a stop sign and the alighting passenger was a coincidence. Essentially, the parking officer was about to fine a driver for stopping at a stop sign. (Which makes sense, given that the fines tell us that it is more important to park properly than drive properly.)

So I smacked her head into the side of the phone box.

[Actually, I didn’t. I stopped walking, did a double take, walked into the station, walked back out again to see if I actually saw what I thought I saw, then someone approached her to ask a question and the car drove away.]

A MILITARY investigation into the suicides of three inmates at Guantanamo Bay was under way yesterday as American officials sought to counter international condemnation over the deaths, dismissing them as a “PR stunt” aimed at discrediting the US.

It worked.

The US now looks ridiculous and insecure. It’s pathetic.

Or perhaps I’m being heavy handed here. It seems that modern warfare is all about PR and I might be hopelessly out of fashion when I see tragedy in a person so tormented that death looks like their best option.