Get the jag, please!

Every day right now I'm seeing babies and small children on the TV very sick with whooping cough. I also heard today that a former colleague in her 60s has been quite ill all summer with the same illness. So far, 10 babies - 10 - have died of whooping cough in this country this year. That's not just 10 lives lost but 10 families devastated by their loss.

I never thought we'd reach this stage again. When I was a child, Scotland was awash in terrible illnesses: TB was rampant. My own mother in 1940s Glasgow almost died of diphtheria. Even in the 50s - the 1950s, that is! - it was a lottery who got which childhood ailments. There were so many that we all kept a wee NHS card on which our parents had to record what illnesses we'd had - scarlet fever, mumps, measles, German measles, chicken pox, whooping cough - and when we'd had them. I was lucky but my sister got everything. As she got each illness, she  got steadily weaker and thinner. Scarlet fever in particular had the doctor and my parents worried about her heart. It took years for her immune system to build back up. In my 20s, I worked with a woman of about 40 who had had smallpox in her childhood. She was left physically scarred and with her immune system shot to pieces. She got every bug and virus that was going around and was always afraid of contracting another illness like it.

My former colleague who got whooping cough this summer probably wasn't vaccinated against it in her childhood and the babies who died this year were maybe too young to be vaccinated, but there's now a vaccine available for mothers which will protect their babies in the womb. I heard a pregnant woman say on the radio earlier today that she would need to 'do some research' before deciding whether to be vaccinated. What's to research? A quick look on the internet will let you to compare the effects of the vaccine and the truly awful effects of whooping cough.

Why such suspicion of modern medecine? Partly I blame the maniac UK doctor who persuaded a whole generation of parents not to give their children the MMR vaccine, on the grounds that it caused autism. Austism is a very serious condition but, of course, its causes have turned out be much more complex than a simple vaccination. Meanwhile, a generation of children have been left unprotected and a generation of parents have been left suspicious of every vaccination available. I heard today that pregnant women are even refusing the flu jag. If you've ever had the flu - the real flu, not man flu or a bad cold - you'll know how debilitating it is. I know of a young woman who had swine flu about 6 years ago and who recently died of cancer at the age of 39 and I'm sure the flu contributed to her death by damaging her immune system.

So what do I want to tell people? I want to tell young parents especially: protect your unborn and brand new babies. There is nothing more precious. But if you want to be there as they grow up, protect yourselves as well. Have the jag!

Fire! Fire!

Brian Sweeney was - undoubtedly still is - a very good fire chief in Strathclyde. He was entitled to take his retirement when the time came, lift his lump sum, take his pension and go.

What he wasn't entitled to do was 'co-author' (that is, write) a report on his own pension, which presented only one business plan, the one that allowed him to retire, take his money.....and go straight back to work a month later on the same salary to the same job, this time on a fixed contract.

I don't hold him responsible for this shocking bit of sleight of hand. I'm sure somebody suggested he was the best person to write a report on his own pension and instructed him to do so. No, I blame the local councillors who allowed this to happen and the Audit Commission and the Scottish Government who have the overview of this ridiculous arrangement and have so far done nothing to get back the roughly £350,000 this has cost us - council tax payers - yep, taken for mugs as usual.

If you want to protest, do what I'm doing: write to the papers, to your councillor, to your MSP and your MP. If we don't protest, then we really are mugs.

Art for art's sake

I've said before jokingly I wish I'd been born with the money-making gene, but really I wish it had been the art gene I'd been given. I am so in awe of people like this! Thank you for doing what you do!

Robyn McLean Jewellery

Derek Robertson

This is not romance...

She's a 15 year old schoolgirl, described as quite childlike and trusting.
He's a 30 year old teacher in her school.
They have run away to France together.

Don't tell me this is lurve. One or both is a fantasist.

He's about to kiss his career goodbye and could face charges of having sex with an under-age girl. It's called abuse of trust. Hell whack it into him.

Independence and all that

Here's the thing: I haven't made up my mind about independence for Scotland, unlike most of my friends who are either telling me we'll have a better future without the rest of the UK or we have no future without the rest of the UK.

My friends are usually pretty sensible. If I said to them: I'm going to talk to you about abortion or euthenasia or the death penalty and I'll keep right on talking at you till you come round to my point of view, they'd say - rightly - haud oan, you know you're not going to make up my mind for me in a hundred years unless you give me more information.

Independence is no different. People will have to be in a position to weigh the pros and cons. Maybe consider what will be best for coming generations, although one friend has already told me she doesn't give a shit about coming generations since she won't be around to worry about it. I'd like us to be more inclusive myself.

There are a few issues, in my opinion:

1 We're in a state of total ignorance right now, where nobody seems to know what independence will mean to our membership of the EU, the Commonwealth, the UN, NATO, etc. We get what I think are threats from the No campaign and vague promises from the Yes people.

2 The money situation isn't clear. Not to mention passports, borders, taxes. Would it in fact be better to keep pushing for great devolution of taxing and spending powers? Some hard facts would go down well - again, not threats from the Nos and not vague promises from the Yeses.

3 There are too many people without a vote on this matter: students, people who haven't registered to vote, immigrant workers, kids of 16+ whose lives will be directly affected by the independence vote. How do we include them - has anyone even considered them?

What I most want is clarity. Then I'll decide for myself. No knee-jerk reactions, please. End of.

Here we go again.....

The front page of today's Herald tells me - again - that young people hate us oldies because we are bleeding the country dry with all the handouts we get. We have apparently made oodles of cash from work, pensions and 'property' (what I call my house) and left nothing but massive debts for the next generation.

So I've decided I'll do a deal with these young people: give me back all the money I have paid in income tax, vat, national insurance and council tax over nigh on 50 years, which this society spent on child benefit, widows' pensions, old age pensions, social housing, education, health care, etc, for other people's families. In return, I'll give back my fuel allowance (250 quid a year) and my bus pass.

I'm not tired...

...so I'm having one of my 'still awake at 4am' sessions. I should really switch off the tv when this happens, because I know I'll end up ranting.....

There's a guy on Sky News talking about 'research' into the 'marriage' of Jesus. Apparently, it's quite possible he was married. Nothing in the gospels suggests he couldn't be. There's even a bit of evidence he was.

BUT

According to a pundit trotted out in front of the cameras, it would undermine the teachings of the church to suggest he could have been married. In other words, normal. Explain that to me, please, somebody - anybody!

There's crime and then there's the inconceivable

I'm assuming that Dale Cregan did kill two police officers in Greater Manchester today and handed himself in to police and public prosecutors to avoid being shot on sight by the rest of the police force, suitably tooled up.

Now we'll probably never know :

.....how he ended up thinking two unarmed police officers were a suitable target for a man with a gun and a hand grenade

.....where he got a hand grenade - a hand grenade, ffs - to use in an ambush

.....why he set up an ambush for these two police officers - if he did - but if it wasn't him, who was it?

.....what Greater Manchester Police who knew he was in Mottram did to track him down beforehand.

But whatever questions are asked in 'interviews', we will never hear how he ended up so depraved and deprived of human feeling that he thought it was okay to kill people.

Poverty Porn

I've never watched anything involving Ross Kemp before, so I wasn't sure what to expect from his programme on Sky 1. I couldn't watch it right through. I had to stop at every ad break so I could have a walk about and a swear.

As always, I was angry at first. Why pick on Glasgow? Then I realised he's probably working his way round the UK showing us the alleged underbelly of our society. And why show us Neil, who lived in utter squalor - dear gawd, imagine that as your neighbour - you can be poor but do you really have to live in filth like that? - who had apparently pulled his own toes off and seemed to feel he was not responsible for his situation?

My first reaction once I'd calmed down was that Ross Kemp could have been in any city in the developed world. Not the third world - they don't have 'welfare' systems there. I've met a man on a garage forecourt in Chile who was flogging trinkets in hopes of getting enough money to pay for his next cancer treatment. I've also been faced with people with the most awful disabilities in India, Africa and Russia who had no option but to beg.

But I hate the word 'welfare' as it's used in the UK these days. It's been imported from the USA in the past ten years and every time it's used, it suggests people are getting something for nothing, whereas we know that a lot of folk who get jobseeker's allowance, carer's allowance, disability benefit, etc are folk who for years have worked and contributed through taxes and national insurance and are entitled to claim.

My second impression was that Kemp was being quite positive: he showed us three young men who'd been in the drugs business and a young woman dragged into addiction by a relative who was abusing her. All turning their lives around. No longer homeless. Maybe not contributing to society yet but at least not a drag on the rest of us through thieving and prostitution.

But my final thought is less positive: what do Kemp's producers hope to achieve by making programmes like this? Do they imagine David Cameron is sitting in his jammies in Number 10 on a Monday night tutting or weeping over these lost souls?

We know there are abuses of the 'welfare' system. Now that Kemp has got some of the populace riled up or indignant about them, has he got any ideas for what to do? No, I didn't think so. So this is after all just poverty porn: we're only doing what Derek Cooper, the food guru, was once accused of doing: looking into the lives of the poor and sneering.

 

 

Jezza by name.....

Is it the name? The Jeremys of this world are doing my head in.

Paxman is more and more condescending by the day. Even when he ends up looking like a complete eejit - have a look on Youtube at his interview with a Welsh politico/economist) - he keeps right on arguing about things he knows nothing about.

Clarkson is a total and utter tw*t. I've got so I can't even switch on the telly when he's on just in case I put my foot through it. Well, it cost a lot of money and I didn't spend it so I could watch an ego on legs showing off to his mates.

As for Vine, what can I say? It's a shame he's more famous than Tim - at least his brother's sometimes funny. I heard Jezza Vine on R2 just before my sis and I left for lunch today. He was asking his listeners if they thought 'Kate' had brought the latest front page of Closer on herself by sunbathing topless. In a private chateau. In Provence. Miles (or should that be kilometres) from anywhere. Like they would know. No, Jeremy, you don't understand how the media work: mags like Closer invent news and R2 phone-ins like yours encourage the daft and demented to get excited about nothing.

If you do nothing else, Jeremy, how about stopping the dumbing down of the BBC by taking yourself off the air once and for all.

Capitalism won, Us lost

Let's see if I've got this right.

To have a life in this country, you need to have a job. Forget the part-time job or the temporary job or the self-employed job or the short-term contract. It has to be a proper full-time permanent job. Without that, you'll probably find it hard to borrow the money to buy a car, let alone a house. You can probably get credit, but you probably also can't afford to pay it back and your credit rating will be a worry for you all your working life. 

If you've just left school or college or university, it's likely you have no money. You probably also have a whole lot of debt, either to your parents or to the student loans people who are just waiting till your wages go up high enough for their repayments to kick in. I mean, the student loans people are waiting, since your parents have long since given up all hope of getting any money back from you. They'll just settle for you not taking any more money off them since they are meant to be saving towards their retirement.

Of the few jobs available right now, almost none are permanent and/or full-time. So for most young people today, the future consists of short-term contracts, part-time working and wages topped up with tax credits from the tax payer. I hear about folk with PhDs, doctors, researchers, teachers, engineers - folk who have invested up to 9 years in their education from the age of 18 - being put on to 4 month contracts. They not only can't plan their future - can't get married, can't have kids - they can't even make the rent some months.

Have a look around the world. Apart from in China, North Korea and Cuba, communism is dead. Capitalism in the only game in town. And as far as I can see capitalism has failed. The 'free' market doesn't work. Even where we - the tax payers - own the means of making money - that is, the banks - we still aren't getting anything like the support we need for businesses, industry, commerce. In other words, instead of hoarding their cash, we need to get the banks investing. If you think about it, the banks have no future if they have no customers and their future customers are our young people.

Branson Pickle

When I was working for a local council (till 4 years ago), one of the best bits of my job was to send lucky people - students, teachers - to exciting places on international study visits. Some went off to China. Others went to Singapore, Canada, the US or Oz. I raised the cash for their visits but myself tended not to go too far from my desk. Well, somebody had to take the calls from people who'd got to Madrid but whose luggage was still at Heathrow.

Many of the trips I did make for work were full of suspense. Is this the day I'll fly to Islay, circle in the Islay Mist for an hour and then fly right back? Is this when we get to Inverness to find our Stornoway connection is stuck in Orkney? If I manage to get to Tiree, will we be diverted on the way back and end up at Prestwick instead of Glasgow? Not a problem, except my car was always at Glasgow.

But train journeys were the worst. I took the train between Glasgow and Edinburgh more often than was good for my nerves. Trains cancelled while you're sitting on them. Coos on the line at Linlithgow. A drunk on the line threatening to throw herself under your train outside Polmont - probably a passenger pushed beyond endurance. Or the Glasgow train is on another platform at Waverley and leaves in two minutes and there are 200 of you waiting to board.

Worst of all were train journeys south of the border. If you ever have a few hours to kill, try booking yourself a return ticket to Barnsley from Glasgow. This is when you discover that the UK has the worst rail system in the whole of western Europe. You'll certainly need to make 3 changes - maybe even 4 - in each direction. You may want to travel on a Tuesday for a Wednesday meeting returning that evening. (It was usually union business I was on and I didn't like to push my luck with the boss). The chances are you'll arrive at your destination in time to turn around and come straight back. All the stations you change at will be manky and badly signposted. Staff will be hard to find. You've probably got about 12 minutes between changes 2 and 3 - and if you miss that, you might as well go home now - if you can get on a train. Once you're on the train, all the seats will be pre-booked but empty. Have these folk decided not to travel? Gawd knows, who could blame them? Or is this some scam by the 'train operator' to persuade the rail regulator the trains are full?

And on my TV this evening there is Richard Branson. He wants to run the trains - yes, the trains I think from my experience are a total fkn shambles. So what's in it for Branson? Well, this is the west coast line, the busiest rail line in the UK. Plus, he stands to gain the billions you and I donate to train companies through our taxes every year, of course, as well as the cash we contribute via our tickets. Plus, he's a man who doesn't like not getting his own way. He has bid in competition with another company for the westcoast line - and has lost. But let's not give up on the idea of competitive tendering: let's allow Branson and his rivals to bid for this contract again, but this time they have to agree to targets set by passengers: trains will run on time, seats will be available on those trains, ticket prices will rise no more than the rate of inflation, stations will be comfortable and welcoming. And if they fail to meet the targets? We set up stocks in all mainline stations and let passengers throw eggs and tomatoes at the contractors. I think that's fair - about as fair as the way the trains are currently operating.

 Let's start as if this was an AA meeting: my name is Jean and I'm a member of the Labour Party. Somebody has to do it and I've been doing it on and off since 1966. I don't always vote Labour: in local government elections, I vote Lib Dem to keep the Tory out. In the independence referendum, I've no idea how I'll vote. But my basic loyalty lies with Labour.

Up till now I've had a handle on the different Labour party leaders because I understood their backgrounds. Blair: popular with the English mercantile class because he was one of them - an entrepreneur to his fingertips with a bit too much of a liking for money. Brown: a decent man but a nightmare to work with or for, micro-managing the government with total insensitivity to anyone else's views or feelings.

But I have no understanding of Ed Milliband: how he thinks, what he thinks, what his ambitions are. He's alien territory to me. He's from London, from a family of academics. He went from uni to politics without even a short pause in a real job, which I think is essential for any politician: getting up to show up in every weather and in every state of health and work for people who don't give a rat's arse about you and will lay you off with a click of their fingers. So I was pleased to see an in-depth profile of Ed Milliband in this week's New Statesman. I think I have a clearer view now of  what he's like and what he's aiming to do,

His 'project' starts from the basis that people are 'out of love' with uncontrolled capitalism but are uneasy about the power of the state. Although it seems clear to me his ideas are still 'in development', I like it that he favours a green economy, devolution of power, local government, finding a mechanism to tax the rich rather than the middle or the poor. He knows there will have to be cuts but at least equality is on his agenda.

And he certainly seems to understand the Coalition. It looks as if the Lib Dems have - sadly - hitched themselves to a bunch of Tory incompetents, whose plan for recovery has failed and who can't think their way round it, no matter how much their Lib Dem colleagues push them, because they have the extreme right of the Tory party on their back. And I've seen and heard for myself that Milliband has got the measure of Cameron and Osborne in Parliament.

That leaves his personality. It's good that he rates his family as number one in his life, rather than his job. It's good he's bold (you'd have to be bold to shaft your brother the way he did in the leadership contest), that he has managed to hold the LP together in opposition (it hasn't often happened) and that he's a good manager of people.

But right in the middle of this profile there is the phrase: 'unbreakable self-belief.' Don't get me wrong: self-belief is good. You don't get to do what you aim to do in life without that quality. It's the word 'unbreakable' I've a problem with. It suggests to me a 'my way or no way' attitude. It suggests a refusal to compromise. I've worked with and for people with that kind of self-belief and I've encountered them in clubs and voluntary organisations. And it's not just the male of the species that takes this attitude.

Personally, I like compromise. Compromise is the quality you find in most people's family life. No black and white, just shades of grey (but not 50!) in people's dealings with each other. Room for everyone's views. A bit of tolerance. At least a willingness to listen.

 I hope the writer of Milliband's profile is wrong to use this word. We'll see.

 

Blog on, folks!

I noticed the Old Bag's Blog has had 1965 page views and decided to have a quick swatch at the stats for the first time. I have a few questions for my faithful viewers and lurkers:

Are Safari and Firefox gradually catching up with Internet Explorer (which is crap, btw) as search engines or do I just have very discerning viewers?

Do I really have 10 people in Russia viewing this - or is it the same person who has looked in 10 times? Maybe Vlad The Putin is onto me.....And who is the lone Norwegian viewer? I imagine him in his log cabin in the woods, sweating over a hot sauna (do they even have these in Norway?) and chortling away. Either that or he's lining me up for a part as a dead body in the next Scandinavian Noir series.....

Finally, I've read the blogger page about how to make money out of this. It involves 'targeted advertising'. I reckon we've all had a bellyful of that on Facebook. It seriously creeps me out when I post a FB message saying I've just bought knickers in M&S and immediately find an ad for Tena Ladies on the right hand side of the page.

I've no idea if 1965 views in 3 months is good, but I'm enjoying myself immensely and would still write my nonsense even if you were not there. But thank you anyway, guys and gals. for being there. I now know you a lot better from your comments and that's what it's all about, n'est-ce pas?

It's FB, ffs!

A few moans about Facebook: not the website but some of the people who use it.....

1 Stop posting messages warning that FB are going to pass your personal details to advertisers. That's how FB make their money. If you don't like it, close your account,

2 Stop moaning about the FB timeline. It is what it is. Again, you can close your account or just wait till the Wunderkinder at FB come up with a new design, which you probably won't like either!

3 Stop inviting me to turn FB pink - or any other colour - in support of people with cancer. Your post will not raise a single brass penny for cancer research - and that's where your energies should be directed. Here's to the folk who have realised that and run or walk for a good cause - and here's to their mates who support their efforts through Justgiving!

4 Stop putting up message of condolence for departed celebrities. Your message won't reach their families, who are the only people who matter in this situation. If you know what the people died of, feel free to make a donation to a charity to support research into their illness.

5 Ffs, remember the rules of texting do not apply on FB. Write in sentences and try - try! - TRY! - to spell and punctuate correctly!

Stuff the stats...

Another week, another survey by the Office of National Statistics, this time indicating it costs 90,000 quid to raise a child to the age of 11.

This comes into the statistical category of the blindingly bleedin obvious. Of course you need money to raise kids. It was ever thus and the expense hasn't put people off having offspring so far. I also don't hear many requests from parents to hand their little darlings back once they work out what Snuggies and baby food are going to cost them on a weekly basis.

It's different once the weans get to the teenage years. I suspect there's many a parent would like to do what a secondary teacher once suggested: have them raised by wolves from the age of 10 to 18, since wolves can give them a sharp nip when they need to be kept in order, which is more than parents are allowed to do these days.

Anyway, what children are we talking about in this survey? Ordinary - heaven help me - 'normal' kids? Maybe the Office of National Statistics could now work out what it costs to raise a child with a physical or learning disability. I'll bet it's a lot more than 90,000. If we had this information, we could target financial support at families with a disabled child. It would be great if we could no longer say: disabled child = disabled family.

And don't start me on surveys about the 'cost' of looking after the elderly (that was last week's blindingly bleedin obvious survey). I think it's a mark of the contempt felt for the elderly and our western obsession with youth that we feel we can ignore the contribution of older people, deny them a living pension, take them out of their homes and park them in death's waiting rooms, aka old folks' homes.

Which society do we most want to copy: the old Inuit society which left their elderly to die on an ice floe? Or the ancient Greeks? Remember Aeneas fleeing Troy with his old father on his back? If you need a clue: Aeneas went on to found Rome. I like to think that was the gods rewarding his family loyalty. Call it karma. 

Is this a celebrity I see before me?

It took me a wee while to work out that my FB friends meant Celebrity Big Brother when they mentioned CBB, not some weird adult version of CBeeBies.....I know it's been on TV for decades but I've never watched it, although I've seen George Galloway in a bodysuit pretending to be a cat more often than is probably good for my mental health. So I decided to take a squint.

I may need a course of antibiotics to get rid of the infection I feel I've picked up just by viewing for those 30 minutes, but I've learned a few things.

You don't need to be a celebrity to be on Celebrity Big Brother. In fact, if you were a celebrity your agent would have warned you off it years ago.

You should preferably come from a disfunctional family so you can cope with the nagging, shouting, crying and name-calling that go on.

You should have no shame but be possessed of a level of over-confidence previously only seen in people like Hitler, Napoleon and Margaret Thatcher at her worst.

You probably shouldn't know who any of the people in the sentence above are.

Your grasp of the English language should be loose. That is, words will mean what you want them to mean. But since the only people still watching are probably asleep on the settee after a hard day's work, the chances are nobody will be expecting you to produce a sound-bite.

Mind you, I think I got off lightly by only watching for half an hour. Think what it must be like to actually work on CBB or have to introduce it.....

Pardon my grammar...

New Statesman this week gives a page and half to Graham Brady, a Conservative MP who wants not just to defend the grammar schools that still exist in England but to open more. He wants to do this in order to get schools back to offering an education 'of the highest academic standards.' I'm just guessing here but since he's an ex-grammar schoolboy himself, these would be the education he got 20 or 30 years ago.

As far as I make out, the new grammar schools would be for the most able young people. Brady talks about a 'selective' education for the rest of the school population but he doesn't give any details of what that would look like.

It's difficult to persuade people that education isn't a fixed idea. Grammar schools - or academies as they were often called in Scotland - were introduced ( in the early 19th century) in order to break free of the rigid classical (Latin, Greek, logic) education that young people had been offered before that and to make sure that the new-fangled studies of science, engineering and technology got their rightful place in schools. I'll bet there were many people in the 1840s who thought grammar schools were turning out a bunch of semi-literates, just as people from the grammar schools and academies in the 1940s were probably dismayed at the changes made by the education acts of that time.

Can you imagine us now trying to turn the clock back to the glory days of the grammar school: kicking out the technology, bringing back Latin, getting kids to learn screeds of the Bible by heart, doing hour upon boring hour of general analysis and parsing in English lessons? The world has moved on!

The trouble is, it's hard to persuade adults that the changes to education since they left school are necessary if young people are to be prepared for working life 20 or 30 years in the future. It's something teachers are always aware of: they are preparing young people for a workplace that doesn't yet exist and will probably look totally different from anything we know now. Well, would you have known 20 years ago about call centres or working from home on your iPad?

What teachers have to do is make sure that learners have good basic skills, that they are adaptable, sociable and confident - and that they leave with qualifications that will take them on to the next stage of their lives, whatever it may be. The 19th century notion that a lot of people wouldn't need an education because they would be field hands, servants and cannon fodder is out once and for all. Everybody needs skills these days - even in Mcjobs.

The other problem I have with Brady's article is that he claims he owes his career as an MP to his grammar school education. I tend to think he owes it to having 2 parents, both in work, one an accountant and one a clerical worker, living in a settled and peaceful community and going to a well-staffed school. Every bit of Brady's life set him up for success. It's a pity he can't see the need to offer that background to people who aren't so lucky.