World gone mad

Do you remember when you were a child? Playing on your scooter, push-bike or strap-on roller skates outside the house? Round and round you'd go for hours. Mum and Dad had told you where you could go to and you daren't go beyond those limits.

My brother and I were allowed to go over to the woods. A small crop of trees on the edge of a playing field across the road from our house. He was allowed to go into the field with his friends and play football while I was to stay in the woods, climb trees (yes, I climbed tress) or made Mud Pies.

We would be out of sight of Muv and/or Dad for hours. Muv would be inside cooking up a storm or out in the back garden tending the veggies, while Dad would be servicing the taxi.

Just to prove how crazy the world has become a woman, Tammy Cooper, has been arrested for letting her children (aged 6 and 9) play in the cul-de-sac outside her house unsupervised. Shock horror!

I wouldn't want to be the neighbour that reported her to the police for abandonment.

Is the world really such an awful place now that a mother can't watch her children from the kitchen or the comfort of a lawn chair? Do we really have stand over our children 24/7?

I'm so glad I was given the chance:

- to play in the mud without being told, 'get out.'

- to learn the hard way that sticks do not make good imitation cigarettes. I fell over and landed on the stick injuring the back of my throat.

- to learn, never borrow a bike from a kid you just met and ride it really fast down a hill, because the brakes may not work. Cue fat lip, grazed knuckles and scabs covering the right side of the face.

- Stinging nettles hurt a lot when you fall from a tree into a patch.

- and don't jump into the deep end of the pool when you can't swim, it get really ugly real quick until that 10 year old saves you.

Kids have to learn lessons. They only get some lessons when they go out into the world. The front garden and safety of the cul-de-sac you live in is the very edge of the world and needs to be explored when you're in running while crying distance from home.

The police need to question the intentions of the neighbour and how they reacted. Surely when the woman you've come to arrest approaches you because she's seen you arrive it's clear she hasn't abandoned her children in her own front garden.

Charges have been dropped and Tammy is going after the police by suing them. Only in America?






Picture borrowed from here, I had nothing to do with creating it!

Karma?

I’ve grown up hearing the names Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. Their images are instantly recognizable to me, just as I could tell you who Pope John Paul II, Clint Eastwood and James Cagney are.
They are famous, or should I say infamous, murderers and rapists from 1960s England.

Like all people of infamy they have been glamourised by some, but for the most part vilified as they rightly deserve. Between them they sexual assaulted and tortured five children (that they admitted and where convicted of, but unofficial numbers are higher) between July 1963 and October 1965. They were convicted in 1966. Before I was even born, but their names often popped up.

In the mid 80s they gained a tremendous amount of press when they returned to scene of their crime to find the graves of their victim, but could only find one.

In 1995, Hindley was in the news again, but this time for her mugshot being used as the basis for a portrait painted by Marcus Harvey using children sized hand prints.

Hindley died at the age of 60 in 2002 in jail.
Today I saw the name Ian Brady in the paper and though, surely he’s dead now, but apparently not.

I read this story and felt hope for the family of Keith Bennett.

It was the last line of the story was what caught my eye and brought out a very rare, extreme, non-humane reaction from me.

‘The tribunal was to consider Brady's application to be transferred to a Scottish prison and be allowed to die. He has been tube-fed since refusing food 12 years ago.’

My immediate reaction to this was ‘Let the f*cker suffer!’
Then I reconsidered.  At 72, is it right that he be allowed to die or should he be forced to continue to suffer?  Does that make his captors as bad as he?

I know say, let him die and maybe, just maybe his name will cease to reoccur in our lives to remind us of the evil he and his girlfriend perpetrated forty odd years ago.

    NOTE: the image was taken form here and the copyright belongs to them, not me.

Let the Games Begin

This week I spent the Monday and Tuesday in Melbourne. I’ve drove down because I have an intense dislike of the airports, plus I like to prepare myself for the onslaught of family related stuff. I also like to reflect.

Actually, with the assistance of C, the guy that sits next to me in the office, I already have started. This time about the games we played, and didn’t play, as a child.

Operation: As kids we were never allowed to had one of these, despite it appearing on the Christmas and Birthday for a few years running. It needed to batteries you see, and batteries were and are expensive. But Paul, yes the same Paul for this entry, had Operation and would bring it with him on occasion when he came to play. I loved it, I was rubbish at it. My hands are steadier now. The buzzer and red light in his nose were squeal worthy.

Battleships: on paper, yes. Electronic, batteries. In later life I played Battleships, but with a twist. It’s rather fun to play Strip Battleships.

Pick-Up Sticks: I remember Muv getting me a set (I still have them). I was confused by why it was considered fun to throw coloured sticks onto the carpet and then pick them up again without moving any. I suppose in the Middle Ages when the game was invented by some poor bugger that dropped his firewood into a mud bath it was fun, but I needed batteries.

Tiddley Winks: Muv had a set made from Bakerlite in her jewellery box. The base that held the tokens in red, yellow, white, and powder blue and was divided into five segments where you score points. I loved playing this, but mainly because it was a rare treat to be allowed near the set as it had been her GrandMother’s. I have the set now.

Ker-Plunk!: No batteries required, therefore we were allowed it, but because it was noisy, we were only allowed t play a certain times. I enjoyed playing this so much, that I have a set now. With extra marbles :-)

Top of the Pops: This wasn’t a game persay, but when ‘Down Under’ by Men at Work was number one in the UK charts, my brother G and I bet each other 1p that’d they’d be number one again next week. He never paid up the 8p he owed me.

10 Card Brag and Bastard Brag: Cards on a Sunday night for 2p a hand. I’ll never forget Muv putting down two pairs of Kings and losing instead of four Kings and taking the pot.

Othello: A friend of Muv had this, a green felt board with black and white counters. Lillian would play it with me and carry on a conversation and still win. The other day I was in Borders during their closing-down sale and there was a set for $15. It’s mine now.

At the most we may get in a few hands of cards this week...maybe I should pick up a few bags of 5c pieces from the bank?

The Stick

With Muv’s birthday only a few days away I thought I’d tell you a story from my childhood. This may even be one of the reasons why I have been an anti-smoker. I’ll let you decide.

I was maybe six year and it was summer. I know it was summer because I was outside playing in the back garden of Bushy Hill Drive with my hand-me-down pram and doll. I was near the fruit trees and I found a stick. The stick was perhaps a foot long (30cm) and pretty straight, so I decided it would be a perfect cigarette. Being from a family of smokers I’d seen how it was done; hold the cigarette between the index and middle finger and place it between your lips. Remove from between the lips, pucker your lips to release the smoke, and then repeat until the cigarette was gone.
Being a stick, it didn’t burn down.

So, as I walked around the garden I put the stick between my teeth to hold it in place. Muv was in the kitchen doing something. Preparing dinner at a guess, or baking a YumYum Pie.

Anyway, here I was, walking around the garden, pushing a pram and pretending to smoke a stick. Then I tripped.

The stick hit the ground first and slammed into the back of my throat. I screamed.
Muv came running out of the house to find me jumping up and down holding my neck, crying with blood pouring out of my nose.

She asked me what I’d done.

I couldn’t speak. I remember pain burning the insides.

It all turned out well. I don’t really remember much of the aftermath, except being told to sip cool water. I know I didn’t go to the doctors or hospital. I’m pretty sure the pointing at the stick and then my neck and the hand movements of smoking explained what had happened and it was deemed a minor mishap.

I do remember hearing Muv recount the story some years later to a family friend though.

‘I didn’t understand why she was holding her neck when her nose was bleeding. Then I realised what she’d been doing. I told her that bad things happen when you smoke and not to do it again.’
I know I never put a stick in my mouth again.



PS. If you Google images ‘stick’ you get allsorts of stuff except for a stick :-)

Kids!

A few of my friends are mothers of the two legged varity of child. One such child had his first fisty-cuff at kindergarten today and has a bit of a black eye to prove it. In the photo he looks a bit happy about it all, a bit cuffed with his war wound.

Mum, Dad, Aunties, Uncles and friends of the family are incensed. Nearly all want to lynch the other fighting party, even though he's also only three or four years old. The comments on Facebook under the picture stretch to a few pages. My comment of 'Any ideas what started it all?' seems to have gone ignored.

I'm confused by this. I understand that Mum and Dad are upset, that needs no explaination but I don't understand the idea of the intense ill will toward the other child from those away from the situation. I understand that other family members are protective the child.

How is it that such venom can be directed at a child that seems to have been involved in a playground scuffle regardless of their role in starting it all?

Muppet Mad!

Whilst looking at Wikipedia today I happened upon a link to the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while, except ice cubes and the condensation on a champagne bottle of course.

Kermit T. Frog has got a myspace page!

Gotta love the green one.