Tuesday 24 November 2015

The innocence of youth - and of an older gent

I’m still not really sure what came over me the other day. There I was, driving along the narrow country roads near our home, squinting through the windscreen as the rain came lashing down.
And then I saw him – a young guy trudging, head down, against the wind and precipitation. Now I’m no expert but it did seem he was not brilliantly clothed up for the inclement weather. Perhaps he’d seen a different weather forecast then me. You know, on one of those satellite thingy channels.
Only one thought came into my head – offer the poor, soaking wet chap a lift. After all, judging by the place we both found ourselves in, he must have been walking for quite a while.
So I slowed down, edged up beside him and wound down the passenger window. “Are you alright there?” I enquired. “Want a lift to the village shop?" Not sure why I said the shop as I had no idea where he was heading but it seemed better than saying Woodbridge, some 35 miles away where I was heading, or the local hospital.
“Naw, I’m alright” he said, refusing to make face-to-face contact with me. Then the penny dropped. Here was a 61-year old man with long grey hair and dressed all in black, as is my want, asking a young lad if he wanted a lift in my car. I might just as well have offered him a sweetie.
I muttered OK and then raced off, mumbling things like “silly sod” and “idiot”. That’s two descriptions of me, by the way. Because I KNOW you never offer lifts to strangers nowadays.
We are not in the heady days of the 70s anymore, when teenagers like me hitched lifts around the county in order to save money to buy my next pack of 10 Players No.6. My older reader will remember them.
They were the ones with the coupons inside – smoke enough of the brand and you could eventually get a snazzy pair of multi-coloured swimming shorts. I’ve still got them. Can’t get into them, mind.
And those were also the days when drivers, predominantly upstanding citizens, felt duty bound to take any long-haired, flares-wearing, clog-clad young person to the nearest town/ bus stop/ station.
Then Stranger Danger came along and we were told that everyone who stops to give a hitchhiker a lift is a paedo sex maniac. Oh the innocence of youth. And the innocence of an old git. I won’t be stopping for any strangers again.
I just hope the rain was heavy enough to stop him clocking my car registration.

Thursday 12 November 2015

Spending cutbacks always hit those in need

As you know, I don’t get out much but once a week I do venture into our brave new world to meet up with my friend Sidney.
Sidney, which is not his real name, suffers from a mental health issue and I have been “linked” with him for almost a year now through a befriending charity.
He lives independently and although he receives good support from members of his immediate family, he does spend most of the time on his own.
Although it may not seem a big deal, our weekly get-together for a chat and a coffee (and sometimes a slice of cake – but don’t tell SWMBO) seems to brighten his day. Maybe I’m the only other person in the world who likes rock music as much as he does.
Just recently, though, Sidney has been bemoaning the fact that he does not see his community mental health worker as often as he used to.
Sebastian (again, not his real name) would meet up with Sidney at least once a week, to check he’s OK, chat through any issues, make sure he was taking the correct medication and generally just having a bit of one-to-one with someone who is lonely and needs support.
So, why has Sebastian cut back, or been forced to cutback, on his face-to-faces with Sidney?
Maybe the team he is a member of is short-staffed and the remaining mental health workers are stretched, meaning they cannot spend so much time with individuals?
Perhaps the much publicised spending cuts in mental health services could have led to leavers not being replaced.  A new report from the influential King's Fund think tank has warned that cash-strapped mental health services may be putting patients at risk due to “swingeing cuts”.
Or is the team taking advantage of a volunteer who is proactive and who they know will contact them if concerned about anything? Are they using volunteers to do the work of professional mental health workers?
We’ve really got to start getting our priorities right. The NHS, councils etc. need to start prioritising a bit better.
And we all need to bite the bullet and realise that if we want those less fortunate than us to have some sort of decent life we must start paying a bit more in taxes, be it income, council or other.
After all, people like Sidney didn’t ask to be born different.

Monday 9 November 2015

Aren’t school holidays for holidays?

Is it just me or are you, my reader, also slightly incensed that so many schoolchildren are stranded in Sharm el-Sheik?
Obviously I am concerned about their safety but I’d like to pose a question – what were they doing on holiday when schools had already re-started after the half-term break?
Our newspapers and TV news broadcasts were red hot in the middle of last week with reports that flights back to the UK were suspended following the downing of a Russian holiday jet over the Sinai Peninsula.
Since then we have seen and read about many, many Brits lambasting just about everyone from the UK Ambassador to Egypt to the travel companies for the situation while clutching assorted school-age children.
But shouldn’t they have flown back over the weekend of October 31/ November 1 so that little Chardonnay or Quentin could return to school? A simple question, asked without malice but with a definite slice of frustration.
The cost of breaks in school holiday time has been a bugbear for years and parents have always been quick to take children out of school for a cheaper holiday. Even a fine of, say £100, imposed by the school is small potatoes compared with the savings to be made on the cost of the holiday.
Or, as some would put it, the educational visit. Just how much of an education they get from a purpose-built resort on the beach is not clear.
Mind you, those parents who are not too bothered about children missing school and who are more concerned about saving a few bob might fancy an all-inclusive week, departing this weekend, for £373 – a 49% discount says Thomas Cook.
But anyone tempted by such last-minute deals could find themselves touching down at an airport that thousands of British passengers are trying to leave.
SWMBO is a teacher so we have had almost 40 years of paying top dollar for our holidays. We’ve never complained – we’ve just got on with it, knowing that that’s the way the cookie crumbles when you chose a career in education.
I wonder how parents would react if Chardonnay or Quentin came home from school on the first day of the new term/ half-term and said they’d had a lovely day playing and reading unsupervised as their teacher was still sunning herself/ himself on a Mediterranean beach?

Wednesday 4 November 2015

Big Brother really will be watching you

So, internet firms will have to store details of every website visited by UK citizens in the past 12 months under planned new surveillance laws.
Apparently such data would consist of a basic domain address and not a full browsing history of pages within that site or search terms entered.
For example, police could see that someone visited mikealmond.blogspot.co.uk
- but not the individual pages of brilliant prose that they viewed.
Comfortingly, the police and security services will have to get permission to access the content - and councils will be banned from trawling the records.
Home Secretary Theresa May insists the powers are needed to fight terrorism and promises tough safeguards. The government recently dropped plans to give the authorities full access to everyone's internet browsing history amid fears it would not get through Parliament.
It is also set to give judges the power to block spying operations authorised by the home secretary. At the moment the home secretary and other senior ministers sign warrants allowing the security services to hack the computers of suspected terrorists and criminals - more than 2,700 were signed last year.
Under the new system, it is thought that a panel of 10 or more judges will have to review the warrants and have the power to overrule ministers.
I’m in two minds about all this. On the one hand I hate the infringement of my liberties that this will usher in. Why should the Government have the right to see which websites I have visited? It’s none of their business.
Then, on the other hand, I want our country to be as safe and secure as possible and there can be no doubt that serious plots have been halted in their tracks thanks to the country’s official snoopers.
My biggest concern is the Government. By that I mean the following – this legislation may come into force when we have a fairly stable and sensible party in power but imagine the scenario if we had some fundamentalist, wacky people running the country. Where would the surveillance stop?
Finally, I have to ask what we, the people, thought would happen when the wonders of the worldwide web became available to us all. It was always clear that the internet would be used as much for bad as for good.
So I guess we have to accept that some “bad” is needed to keep us good.