Is it nearly over yet?

Are the party conferences nearly over yet? I live in hope.

Negative feelings are bad for you but I think I hate the Tories in the present government. When they’re not bribing married people or the rich or pensioners with tax breaks to get them to vote for them, they’re giving the poor, disabled and unemployed a hard time and encouraging the rest of us to blame them for the state we’re in. It’s called divide and conquer and the Tories are good at it. Just listen to how people now talk about ‘immigrants’: they’re all scroungers, this island is overcrowded, etc. Even the vans touring London and the signs up at asylum/immigration centres telling people to ‘go home’ don’t bother us.

Now Osborne is after the ‘long term unemployed’, people out of work for more than three years. How he’s picked that number, I don’t know.  His own civil servants in the Office of National Statistics don’t seem to keep figures for anyone unemployed for more than two years.

Between May and July 2013, according to ONS (last figures available), there were 2,487,000 people unemployed in the UK. 462,000 of them have been unemployed for 24 months or over. I’m sure there are some ‘skivers’ among them but equally sure there are plenty of unemployed people who worked for a long time before losing their jobs, paid tax and national insurance all that time and would love to be back at work.

By the way, it’s interesting that having them sweep the streets is what Tories think would be a humiliating job for the unemployed. Plenty of us would love to see people sweeping our streets. If only the councils could afford to employ them.

The idea of having the long term unemployed clock in at the job centre every day is just laughable. How does that get them a job? And, given how the staffing of job centres is being cut, will there be anybody there to clock them in?

Wouldn't it be better to focus on getting everybody back to work? That way, we could have more tax revenues coming in and so cut our borrowing. And given that we have one of the poorest rates of social security (I refuse to call it by the Americanism ‘welfare’) in the whole of the EU, we might even be able to give people living a decent amount to live on.

Of course, that’s a bit harder to do than picking on the unemployed. 

You bet!

I was driving back with Alex from our stint at Elder Park library last week and as we came down the hill to Cardonald, he said something like: Just drop me off opposite the bookie's. I didn't know there was a betting shop here, said I. Alex laughed: there are three here in the space of a few hundred yards, and that's not counting the other three at Halfway less than a mile along the road that way and maybe two at Hillington Road the other way.

There is obviously some sort of collective madness at work here: in Glasgow, you can get a £60 quid fine for dropping a fag end in the street and be arrested for drinking in a public place, but you can gamble away your and your family's income to your heart's content in any of the many betting outlets and 'amusement' arcades in the city.

I'm guessing the Council is worried about all the empty shops in the city. There are stories going round about landlords renting premises for next to nothing to Betfred and the rest just to be sure some business is occupying the space and bringing people into the area.

I'm not arguing that people shouldn't be allowed to gamble if they want to but, good grief, just switch on your TV and your computer and work out for yourself how much of a hard sell gambling is getting in the UK these days, even without betting shops.

Myself, I'd give a shop to a community group and let them sit in the window singing Kumbaya rather than encourage people to waste more cash on gambling.

Parenthood?

This is 4 year old 'Veronica', the subject of a custody dispute in the USA who has finally been surrendered by her Native American father to the adoptive parents who have raised her since she was a baby.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/23/us/native-american-custody-dispute/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

This story is just about the most awful I've come across in years. If you read up on the background, it's clear this is a political fight. It has been about principle and points of law, not about a child at all.

Is this what we think children are? Property? Chattels? Something to fight over?

This dispute has gone on for most of Veronica's life. Does anyone really think she won't be marked by it? Yes, she is just four but we were reminiscing in my family on Sunday about how much children pick up at that age. It was my nephew's 30th birthday. We sneaked into his house while he and his partner were out for a birthday lunch, put up banners and balloons, set out the fizz and the cake and lay in wait for them to return. Unfortunately, we forgot we'd parked the car across the street. Some of us wondered if he would notice it. As his father reminded us, this was a boy who could at the age of 4 identify any car by make and model, tell you what the numberplate meant and which part of Europe it was probably made in. Anyone want to bet that Veronica has noticed and stored away being shuttled between birth and adoptive parents, trips by plane to different parts of the US to meet carers, lawyers and judges? I'd say start the therapy now. What a terrible way to treat a child.

How do you do that?

The barista in Whole Foods probably has better academic qualifications than I do: it sounds as if he has degrees and diplomas up the wazoo. He's sussed I used to be a secondary teacher (though I've told him I'm all right now) and he knows where our schools are going wrong: apparently they are not preparing young people for the future.

For the life of me I don't know how schools would go about that. Think back to what the world was like 50 years ago, in 1963: no computers, no flatscreen tellies, no remotes, no mobiles, no internet. People who started work then are just coming to the end of their working life, having lived through several workplace revolutions.

The aim then was for teachers to equip young people with basic language and maths skills so they could join the workforce, where employers would give them the skills they needed for work. Teachers then couldn't have predicted how technology would change the working world - and they certainly can't now, when the pace of change in technology is so much faster.

What's changed mainly is that now a lot of employers don't invest so much in their workforce: they expect schools, colleges and universities to send them young people ready for work. Employers offer gey few apprenticeships, not that much training and as for refresher courses - if workers need refreshed, mostly they have to do it for themselves these days. The curriculum is overloaded: teachers in schools are trying to hit a whole range of targets in a whole range of subjects and have less and less time to do it. I swear I will strike the next person who says: the schools should be dealing with that - whether it be breast-feeding or mortgage education or media training or the safe use of car seats ffs. Learning is cut up into chunks and testing reigns supreme. Not a methodology that suits subjects where you need time to absorb the content and master each stage before you proceed to the next.

I remember meeting with academics at Glasgow University 25 years ago on the subject of German. They lamented that we (the schools) were sending them students who couldn't handle German grammar. We were supposed to train learners in grammar so the university could take over and do the clever stuff: literature. What on earth would these academics make of the situation now?

German is just about dead in Scottish schools, despite the fact that Germany is a major trading partner of Scotland's. In fact, almost all languages are dead or dying in Scottish schools. Russian's just about gone, as is Italian. French and Spanish are hanging on there, but against the wishes of some headteachers with their eye on their school exam results. No point telling them the results for languages are in fact better than for most subjects. They think learning languages is hard work - and they are right.

On that basis, any subject that is 'content-heavy' looks to me to be doomed in our schools: history, geography, languages, even computer programming. Even Maths and English, unless they are of the 'applied' kind are less and less popular at Further and Higher Ed levels.

Maybe it's time to agree what we want our schools to do and decide what it's possible for them to do in the time available. We could also work out what we think is important to our society. Personally, I think certain currently unfashionable school subjects would be right up there:
- history: if you don't know where you came from, you're ill-equipped to plan where you're going
- geography: if you don't understand the world, you can't protect it for future generations
- computer programming: if you don't know how the technology works, all you're doing is staring at a screen
- languages: it's not just about learning words - it's about communication, appreciating other people's cultures, understanding how language works.

Above all, I want us to think about the old evaluation of education: it's about educating the whole person, not just about training for work.

What are they shouting for?

In just about every TV news clip from Syria you'll hear people shouting the phrase: 'Allah hu akbar.' It means 'God is great.'  'Allah hu akbar' is heard when a rocket is launched into some innocent suburb of Damascus or Aleppo, on its way to kill young and old alike. I wonder how many people I've offended so far just by quoting it.

Not as many as will be offended by the next bit, I'll bet. I'm never sure who is saying 'Allah hu akbar'  or why. Is it the people firing the rocket - Basher's army or the 'rebels' or some faction of Al-Qaeda, now active in Syria apparently - willing the rocket on its way to deliver more murder and mayhem? Or is it the poor people watching it fly and waiting for the crump of the rocket landing, knowing the attempt to blast their home into oblivion is continuing?

Whoever is saying it, it seems to be me to be hypocrisy to quote 'Allah hu akbar' in these circumstances. Allah is not responsible for the wicked actions of the people of all parties currently blowing Syria and each other to bits, and it is just evil for any of them to claim to have Allah on their side, as I think some of them do.

My grandfather used to relate how the 'boys' in the trenches in World War I would spend part of every Sunday morning at a church service. As they sang and prayed, they could hear the men in the German trenches doing the same. The realisation that the two armies were praying to the same God and for the same thing - their lives - just in a different language gave afiercely anti-religious bent to my grandfather's life from then on.

Myself, I feel strongly about responsibility rather than religion. I reckon if you want to commit murder and mayhem in order to hold on to or take over a country, the least you can do is accept your share of the blame in the suffering of the innocent people caught in the gunfire. Don't do it in the name of God.

A few wee rants

Feeling quite curmudgeonly today for some reason. Reader, at this point, you're supposed to say: You, curmudgeonly? That's not like you! But there are days when so many things irritate me, I hardly know where to start my rant.

Let's begin with the Hair to the Throne. What if we'd taken all the cash spent on his training as a helicopter pilot and trained someone else, say some bright kid from Tower Hamlets or the Falls Road or Castlemilk. Do you suppose we might have got a better return than the 7 year career Prince William had before he moved on to other things? I would recommend trying this. I would certainly recommend not wasting public money on people like Wills and Harry who have plenty of their own, having shared their mother's estate amounting, I've read, to 20 million quid.

Then there's the 'liquitabs' scandal. For some reason, in the west of Scotland, nine small children have been poisoned by eating these in recent years. Now RoSPA is handing out cupboard catches. Not fitting them. Just handing them out to all parents of 4 month old babies whether they need them or not, whether they use them or not. I say: if parents are so feckless they leave detergent capsules within reach of their small children. prosecute them. It'll only take a few court cases for neglect and some threats of investigation by the Social Work department for parents to realise they have to put these out of the reach of their offspring.

And then there's the eejit Ian Black. The even bigger eejit SFA have banned him for 10 games (but worry not, he'll really only miss 3) and he has to pay a fine of £7,500. For gambling on matches he was sometimes playing in. With the implication always there that match-throwing could have been a possibility. What the hell is the point of this punishment? He sits out 3 games but still get paid silly money. And the fine is nothing to him. I take it the SFA knows how much these guys earn? My sentence - if anybody had asked me - would be to make him coach a team of 12 year olds in a Glasgow secondary school for a year. Turn up for practices of an evening and for matches on Saturday mornings. He needs to connect with the real world and working with weans is always the best way to do that. Can I now expect abuse from Rangers fans like poor Jim Spence? Boy, I thought Neil Lennon was touchy!

Anyhow I'm off to have my home made spag bol. That's bound to cheer me up.

Feminist? Qui, moi?

I'm a feminist but one of those unreconstructed ones that want women to be educated to earn their own living but are also amazed that some women can't sew or knit. If you're in the latter group - sorry.

Feminism was 'in' in the 1960s and the early 1970s. I was a feminist then. I didn't burn my bra (though some did) or turn lesbian for the sake of it (though some did). I just did my own thing: got an education, got a job, worked my way up the career ladder, complained about the lack of opportunities open to women .

Some women - not that many - got out of the house along with me, went to university or college and got decent jobs that met their ambitions.

Then it was presented to women that with the arrival of the contraceptive pill, tights and working, feminism was no longer needed. And feminism went out of fashion in the 1980s.

What had actually happened, according to a friend of mine, was that the 'interim' generation of women had taken over. Our mothers, born in the 1930s, frankly got taken for mugs: they worked and looked after the kids, kept house and did the shopping. In fact, every woman had two jobs. The men kept right on doing what they had always done: they just worked. One job. Whatever it was, it was much more important than anything a woman did.

The 'interim' generation of women also worked and gradually manoeuvred their men into a sharing role. Damned hard work, all that manipulating - and many a woman ended up knackered long before retiring age.

There's a new generation in town now. Women who work and expect their partners to share the burden of child-raising and housekeeping with them. They have nights out with their girlfriends and without their men. I notice when they come to a family night with partners and children, they don't even pretend to be 'on duty': parenthood is a joint responsibility and they expect their partners to step up.

At times, I resent these new women. They are feminists who don't realise the work earlier generations have done to allow them to be liberated. They scoff at the word feminism. But to an extent I understand what they are saying: why on earth should they be grateful to be in the position they are in? They work to be there. It's their right.

Most of all, I wish this new generation luck: they are the women who will take over the workplace and the boardroom any day now. They won't, as a friend of mine puts it, 'see the useless men in their road.'

Stacey and the body beautiful

My hairdresser, Stacey, is a very attractive mid-20s woman, with long dark hair always in perfect condition and beautifully cut; she is also fairly tall, has a lovely complexion and a good figure. Personality shines out of her eyes. She's also a good hairdresser. When I arrived last week, she'd just spent her lunch break going over the intricacies of putting ladies' hair up - apparently that's in fashion right now.

Stacey's a Pollok lassie who tells a good story. Let's just say if her family is half as dysfunctional as she says, the rest of us have nothing to worry about. Her mad auntie deserves a blog entry of her own. She also takes an interest in her clients. On my second ever visit to the salon, she told me 'You taught my mother.' She'd got out of me that I'd once been a teacher in Pollok and asked her mother if she remembered me. She also remembered my two pals. I reckon everybody in Pollok in the latter half of the 20th century was taught by either me or my two pals.

But Stacey is not happy. She hates her nose because it has a bump in it. She also hates her fat thighs and would love liposuction on her belly. I argue she's not fat by anybody's definition and a bump in her nose hasn't held back Davina McCall's career. But no. It's only shortage of money that stops Stacey having plastic surgery on her bits. This only came up because I told her about a friend who had an accident and had to have her nose reset. I made the point the operation was horrible. It took my friend a week to get over the general anaesthetic and she's still bruised from eyebrows to chin after three weeks. Stacey wasn't bothered: it would be worth it. She'd be so happy with the results. I asked her what her partner thinks. He's against it. According to him, she's perfect as she is. Lovely man. He's a keeper, Stacey. They're also saving up to buy a house and plastic surgery is not on the list as even a remote possibility.

This idea that plastic surgery will make her happy isn't coming from Stacey's family or her workplace. Interestingly, her boss has given the staff a range of very simple 'uniforms' - black jeans or leggings and white t shirts - because she was fed up with the range of fashion accidents worn by her staff. So where is Stacey getting this from? Magazines. The salon is full of them. And TV. Stacey's partner works away a lot and she admits she watches all these gruesome medical documentaries on C4 and makeover shows that routinely now seem to offer plastic surgery.

I wish we could persuade women that plastic surgery is not 'aspirational'. Getting a house of your own, that's aspirational. Getting your partner a job in Glasgow so he doesn't have to go and work in the building trade in London to build up your savings, yes, definitely aspirational.

But maybe plastic surgery is just a passing fashion and will go the same way as the Victorian corset. I hope so.

Casey's Cafe

Alex and I decided to try out the new cafe at Elder Park today. It's called Casey's. Lovely place, although I did notice a sign on the door informing us "Party's catered for." Nice decor, matching tables and chairs, photos on the walls, a big telly, proper napkins, friendly staff, not a sign of lino on the floor or waxcloth on the tables. Definitely a step up from Tina's where nothing matches and kitchen towel does very well as a napkin.

But: same menu, same prices...same clientele.

Workies demolishing burgers and mugs of coffee for £2.75 on their break from repairing potholes in the roads. Students scoffing 2 rolls 'n' gammon with tea for £2. A drunk woman who ordered mac 'n' cheese and then couldn't eat it. "Ah'm no very well, hen," she told the waitress. She took it with her in a polystyrene box, Josie huckling her out the door, hand under her elbow, saying sweetly: "You take care o yersel, pet," as she shut the door firmly in her face.

And best of all, the LOUDEST woman you have ever heard. Young, cheery, accompanied by two wee boys who had obviously learned the only to get her attention was to shout even louder. Her voice bounced off the walls, drowning out all conversation and the telly. A small child in a buggy was so scared, she burst into tears. "It's me - it's because Ah'm loud - sorry, sweetheart!" said the loud woman loudly, leaning over the buggy and scaring the child so her bottom lip trembled for ages. I wondered if the loud woman realised she still had her iPod buds in her ears but didn't dare say so.

The secret to eating in cafes in Govan is never to meet anyone's eye, not even the waitress's. Never pass remarks, even in a whisper. Keep them for the car.

But I love Govan - all human life is here. Sometimes even a wee bit too much.

Farewell then, David Frost

I'm old enough to remember David Frost when he first appeared on TV in That Was The Week That Was (TW3 we called it) in the early 60s.

That programme launched the careers of many TV personalities and finished the careers of a few politicians and others. It's amazing to see how many famous names got their start on TW3: Bernard Levin, Kenneth Cope, Roy Kinnear, Willie Rushton, Frankie Howerd, Millicent Martin. The scriptwriters were just as famous: John Betjeman, John Bird, Graham Chapman, John Cleese,Peter Cook, Roald Dahl, Richard Ingrams, Gerald Kaufman, Frank Muir, Denis Norden, Bill Oddie, Dennis Potter, Eric Sykes, Kenneth Tynan, Keith Waterhouse. Mind you, it's worth remembering all this was happening in the age of women's lib and all that. There's not much sign of female input in these programmes.

This was the first TV satire programme and boy, could Frost dish the dirt. My parents' generation were shocked and delighted when he beamed into their livingroom on a Saturday night. Things they had suspected were going on were exposed live on TV - and on the BBC. Crooks like Savundra and Rachmann thought they could bluff their way through interviews with Frost and lived to regret their decision to appear. Maybe the biggest scandal exposed by TW3 was the Profumo Affair. The film Scandal is based on this and is well worth a look. 

I lost interest in Frost after the Frost-Nixon interviews, when he moved from political analysis to seeing himself as the most important star in his political programmes and then started fronting daft programmes like Through The Keyhole. In the end, his ego was bigger than his career and it wasn't really surprising when Breakfast With Frost programme was taken off the air.

But we owe a great debt, if not to Frost, then certainly to TW3: it changed the BBC - Auntie cast off her Victorian corset for good; it encouraged TV programmes like Spitting Image and magazines like Private Eye; and most of all, it allowed the public to start questioning what went on in Westminster and in the financial world. It's just a pity satire is out of fashion. We could do with it now.