This Bloody Rain

As a teacher I enjoy a fairly long summer break. The only attraction of the job in lots of ways, as the pay is crap. I am nearly 50, have three degrees, and have taught for 25 years but my salary has yet to reach £30K. I think I do a more important job than a reserve team Premier League player. They earn on average £40K a week.

The holidays are very precious to me. I have got up every day for weeks now  in anticipation of a nice day to be sorely disappointed! This has got to be the worst summer for weather I can remember. It’s rained, been dull or extremely windy practically every day in Hurlford. This morning we had rain that looked suspiciously like sleet! It’s been cold enough for Caroline to turn the central heating back on. What a drag.

Bad weather can really get you down. Psychology calls it Seasonal Affective Disorder, which comes to a lot of people during the winter. They aren’t getting enough rays, and consequently become depressed. The solution is fairly simple. You buy yourself the biggest wattage bulb you can find and bung it in a lamp. I am thinking of trying this, but knowing my luck I’d fuse the house or something!

My catharsis is to write. When my fingers fly around a keyboard, my spirits lift. Dunno why? But it always makes me feel good. It’s also good to have time to tease my daughter Toni, who’s on holiday from school. She is 13 and never ceases to make me laugh. Consciously or unconsciously. This morning she attracted my attention to a repeat episode of Big Brother. She knows I can’t stand it, and uses it to wind me up. She pointed to this guy and said, ‘That’s Stewart and he’s a psychology student.’ I went ‘Oh, is that a fact’ to which she responded, ‘He’s a big chube!’

Then it was off to the bowling for the afternoon with her friend Leanne. No doubt a rendezvous with the latest boys they fancy has been arranged. Her mum and me were watching the news this morning when it was reported that the average pocket money for 7-15 year olds in the UK is £7.60 a week. We both looked at each other and burst out laughing. The bold Tone in a good week can extract ten times this from us to keep her in the style to which she has grown accustomed.

So if the weather is getting you down. Interact with your weans. But it’ll cost you!!

Tony’s Phoneys

The Westminister Parliament breaks up this week for its long summer recess. They have worked hard this year, haven’t they!
 
For a start there have been all those Inquires to wiggle out of. Four in total, where our Prime Minister has been shown up for what he is. Politicians are generally sleekit bastards, but this one takes the biscuit. He took our county to war on a ‘false prospectus’, using white, grey and black propaganda and is still unrepentant. And for what? Thousands dead, tens of thousands maimed and injured, and hundreds of thousands displaced and homeless. As a consequence it is only a matter of time before an unparalleled attack occurs somewhere in the UK. Reason being that millions in the world hate us.
 
To avert our eyes from these shenanigans Blair et al. are now concentrating on domestic policy. And what a policy that is! Gordon Brown recently announced 60 000 redundancies in the Civil Service. The Civil Service Unions tell us that the real figure will be nearer the 100 000 mark. He offers those to be put out of a job nothing. This is worse than Thatcher’s annihilation of the miners in the 1980’s. I stood with Brown supporting the miners during those terrible times. We both realised the devastating effects of such wholesale redundancies on the individuals concerned, their families and their communities. But like all the rest in his Cabinet he’s now a poacher turned gamekeeper, which sees behaviours of the worst kind visited on those you once called ‘comrade’. Pass me the sick bag.
 
Then there is the Ministry of Defence. What are they, or more accurately Geoff Hoon up to? You’ve guessed it, more redundancies! Hoon this week will announce the biggest cull of UK armed forces in a generation. Cutbacks of around 10,000 are expected from the Royal Air Force and the Navy, while the Army is set to lose as many as 12,000. This is appalling, notwithstanding that since 1997 Blair has launched operations in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq with 45,000 personnel was the biggest deployment since Korea of 50 years ago. Everyone from Private to Chief of the General Staff must be outraged at this reward for services rendered!
 
In all cases we are talking about peoples livelihoods, taken away from them by the mis-called Labour Government.
 
What’s going on here, and what are folk going to do about it?
 
Nothing probably as we are all watching Big Brother. The wrong one. 
 

Gardening And Israel

I was up and washed and dressed early this morning, which is unusual during my summer hols. Reason being that a friend of mine was due to arrive to take me to a garden centre in Dundonald. She duly did, and off we went in her flashy 2-door silver Merc. My neighbours curtains were twitching up and down the street!

Excellent it was. Good coffee in Fraser's tearoom, good chat and then a wander round picking up this and that to try to give the garden a bit of a finished look before the season gets any older. As women can get carried away shopping, retail therapy my geographer friend Iris Law calls it, I can get carried away in garden centres. I usually forget my specs and the prices of things become very blurred! I buy on the basis of like rather than necessity. Came back with a bootload of stuff and a smashing stone Winnie The Pooh as a garden ornament for our Toni. She was delighted. As was I of course, as it makes me laugh everytime I see it.

The afternoon was spent putting in my new plants and tarting up some pots. Amazing how knackering planting is! All that bending I guess. Appreciated the weather as well. First nice day we have had since college broke up almost a fortnight ago. And it might be the only one, with my luck! I blame our crazy weather entirely on the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. This was when a nuclear power plant in the Ukraine suffered a meltdown in one of their reactors resulting in 2,500 deaths, birth deformities, and cancers. What was chucked up into our stratosphere I am certain has influenced our weather ever since.

The news today was interesting. The International Court of Justice in The Hague found Israel guilty regards the security wall they have built in the occupied territories in Palestine. They say it should be torn down and the land returned to its owners. The Palestinians. Not that they give a stuff, nor will do anything about it. Says it stops suicide bombers getting into their country. I doubt this and question whether it will stop the carnage they claim.

I used to have great sympathy for Israel, and all that it stood for. Defended it in the 1970's when it was most unfashionable in student politics to do so. Main reason was my next door neighbour, a Mr Anson for whom I had immense respect. He managed to get out of Germany in the nick of time and came to Scotland in the 1930's. He spent the war years getting loads of other Jewish people to safety when many others turned their back on their plight. He died a few months ago in his nineties. At his funeral the congregation was told that many alive in Scotland today would not be if it weren't for Martin. What a hero he was.

He had been in a concentration camp as a teenager not much older than me the day I noticed the strange tattoo on his arm, and asked him what it was. Even as a 13 year old I realised he had seen things I could never contemplate. I went off and read Mila 18 and Exodus by Leon Uris. That made me even more sympathetic to the victims of the Holocaust and what a shit deal Jewish people have had ever since Moses. The Israeli's want to read those books I did. Remind them where they, and all downtrodden peoples are coming from.

Get out of Palestine please, its not yours! Be true to your own heritage and support the plight of a people fighting for their own independence and sovereignty.

There's A Psychological Story In Balamory

Last night on TV the children's programme Balamory figured in the news. The weather was rubbish today and that gave me a chance to check it out to see what all the fuss is about.

Folks, if you haven't seen it before and are interested in developmental psychology tune in immediately! It is brilliant in conception, and absolutely first class from a psychological pouint of view. Plus it is a must see by every under 5 in Scotland at the minute!

Featuring PC Plum, Archie, Edie McCredie, Miss Hoolie, Josie Jump, Suzie Sweet and Penny Pockert it hits the button at all sorts of levels. It encourages the wee ones to read stories, play games, make things and find things to do. It is entirely appropriate to their wee lives.

Miss Hoolie works in a nursery for example. Having such a diddy character as PC Plum encourages them to trust the police! Not a bad thing in this scary world. One of actors who works in the Sweetie Shop (get it?)is in a wheelchair. Their use of colour in the real world is great as well. They use the coloured houses on the Tobermory harbour front on Mull where most of the series is shot. In the episode I saw today the weans were playing with plasticine, making shapes etc. And all on camera. Eat your heart out Jean Piaget. They also helped decide what the best biscuit is to eat. That encourages social participation in later life. It just gets better and better.

Do yourself a favour and have a look at Balamory if you can. You will get a brilliant laugh! But also learn a thing or two as well highly relevant to psychology and early childhood development.