Welcome to my
blog which today will be driving to Birmingham to attend my grandson’s tenth birthday
party. It will be a day off from putting little ticks by my lists to infer that
something useful has been done. As time flies past it’d be nice to think that
things are being achieved, that the event is taking form but whether we are any
closer to the goal than we were a week ago, I don’t know. It is a while now
since I consulted my books and rectified my thoughts. What thoughts would be
helpful?
All is going to plan
Is that the
best thought I can come up with?
Everything that can be done, has been done.
There’s something
not very inspiring about these thoughts. Maybe as I dash up North, I’d be best
conjuring up a bit of panache to inspire myself, if no-one else.
Meanwhile…meanwhile
what? Meanwhile, I can’t think of anything else to write about so I might as
well get ready for the journey.
…
It is
difficult to judge at this stage what my failings have been. Probably the reliance on email rather than
the phone, coupled with a reluctance to go out and meet people, has let me
down. What I’ve caught myself saying to myself is that ‘there have been no nice
surprises’, no donation out of the blue, no surprising encouragement from an
unexpected source, no relieving letter on the floor, no big name volunteering
themselves for free. This feeling of
wanting something like that to happen isn’t new…always wanting a publisher to
contact me, to win a prize, to receive unexpected confirmation. I guess this
pattern began in childhood and maybe then, through the grace of a grandparent
or a birthday, my desire for magical solutions was satisfied.
…
Back home; no
emails, no post, nothing on facebook, no phonecalls.
---
My grandson
was lovely and his friends enjoyed the party; ten year old boys having the
greatest funding jumping on balloons. He has known most of these kids at school
for five, even six, years. They are used to each other. Whether Steiner
education is theoretically sound, I’ve no idea; certainly it could seem to do
with some modernization; however, for my grandson it has been nourishing and
successful. What happens as secondary school approaches remains to be seen. The
parents have to make a choice; to stay with Steiner or transfer to a ‘normal’
school. My daughter is tempted to move him because she doesn’t want him to be
disadvantaged academically. The danger is that it will mess him up socially and
the state of comparative innocence that exudes from him will become disturbed
if not destroyed. A year or two ago, I would have supported a move but now,
with my communistic hippy values to the fore, I tend to think the further away
he is from mainstream culture the better.
…
It was sad to
see my daughter’s mother still being ripped apart by her husband’s death
earlier this year. When you’ve got so used to being two, being one can never
feel right. For someone with a career or a strong sense of purpose, then maybe
there is something to fall back on. For her, who has usually reacted to situations
rather than having a plan, then this a life-crisis on many levels. How she can
get out of this, I don’t know. Really she has to start all over by finding a
new way to see herself and for this she needs either revelation or to expose
herself to a damn good teacher – a Byron Katie perhaps. Although she’s the same
age as me, I’d guess that all being well she’ll outlive me by ten or twenty
years. It’ll be a hard hard road unless she finds a spiritual answer.
…
The story of
a 31 year old teacher running away to France with a 15 year old girl titillated
the media this week, alongside a much darker story of the organized sexual
abuse of young white girls by Pakistani men in the North of England.
Clearly the
teacher has erred badly and until one hears his excuse, there is no excuse for
him. As a man myself, I can hardly pretend that being susceptible to perceived
Lolitas is extraordinary or even unusual or, for that matter, morally wrong. It
is, however, undoubtedly legally, socially and professionally wrong and I
imagine he’ll pay a high price for it.
A woman I
know, who was sexually abused for a number of years from 11 onwards, has frequently
tried to explain to me the guilt she feels for her complicity. Once the initial
abuse took place, she sought it out and made it happen. Much of it she enjoyed
in the moment though clearly there was much she didn’t enjoy. She cannot free
herself of this guilt. She understand in her mind that she did no wrong but
inside that isn’t how she sees it and that makes the abuse even worse.
And this was
often the problem with the girls in the North of England. They were addicted to
their abusers so at the same time they complained they got on the bus and went
back for more. Many referred to the men as their boyfriends. The attention they
had from these men was the only attention they got and attention makes you real
to yourself.
As for these
men…well, they are men. Moslem culture makes their women unavailable so they
take their frustration out on the girls. Stupid men, stupid religion, stupid
culture, stupid stupid world.
Or maybe it’s
just me.
Send a call
out for Mr Positive.
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