"Mum, there are 2 people on crutches at school now"
"Really, what's wrong with them?"
"I don't know about one, but the other has an erection"
"SORRY?!"
"An erection, he is wearing a tight black thing"
"Errrrrrr"
Daughter blows nose and clears throat
"He has to wear it for 6 months whilst he has the infection"
"Infection?!"
"Yes, that's what I said"
Just my warped mind then!
Christmas used to be about doing Christmas things together, sharing the growing excitement, taking time to marvel at the lights, to walk around looking at pretty tinsel, and "yes, that is another bit of pretty tinsel dear". I loved it all.
Snuggling up to read our favourite Christmas stories. Enjoying unwrapping the ornaments and greeting them like old friends. 
How hilarious is this?! In my world very!
Considering I am so very happy, thank you for asking. And I've never had it so good. I now find out that if I qualify for child benefit under the new rules, I'm about to rush out on a breeding orgy.
I quote : "We're going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it's jolly expensive. But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that's not very sensible."
Hmmm, for your information Sir, £80 is not the overriding factor when deciding on family planning for the educated middle classes. £900 a year is not going to tip that shall we/shan't we balance. And for Shazza breathlessly conceiving Chels-eh behind the bus shelter as we speak, my guess is she's working out how to get Jeremy Kyle interested in her life, not whether £80 will increase her Primark spending power.
Wouldn't it be interesting to see some of these high class muppets actually come and live in the real world for a while or do they think that watching the first 3 minutes of Eastenders is keeping them in touch with the nation.
Monty Python sum it up here (kicking the beggar tickles me):
I'm off to hibernate until the revolution comes. Actually I think I might have a go at the breeding frenzy...anyone coming!
quite early on a Sunday morning, but just look at the queue a little later. It must drive the locals mad!
So your neighbours are annoying you, but you're just too damn polite to say anything directly. It's time to change your SSID.
I think this is a fantastic idea. Why simply be "orange346" or any of the other boring SSIDs you see stacked up on your iphone. Today I have become "parkoutsideyourownhouse", tomorrow I may well be "yoursecuritylight_isgivingmesunburnatnight".
What a great new game to play!
I'm starting to worry that my religious views are at odds with the Church I am part of...you see, I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible...
....but I believe that your God is my God and my God is your God. A man I work with has gone to Mecca on pilgrimage, I am in awe. It is a 3 week stint of religious learning and renewal. When I go on pilgrimage, I go for 2 days and whilst beautifully renewing and spiritually deepening, it is also very tiring.
Before he left we sat and talked about pilgrimage in general, no question about the difference in faiths and that is really important to me. So many faiths seem to stem from the one maker, they involve prophets, the teaching of God in terms of word interpreted and written down. That word tends to boil down to "let's try to be nice to people for a change".
I've given up on denominational divides, on what we call it. I see myself worshipping in Church as the same as the person in the Mosque. It's a different way of doing the same thing and that's ok because the one God sent the word to be interpreted as fitted, if it was meant to be the same thing for every person then we would have been sent a prewritten manual. Yes, I know Moses came down from the mountain with the Commandments but they pretty much cover off the "look, just stop sleeping around and killing people. Let's be nice and charitable." and that can also be found in the Quran.
So I sit in Church and sometimes hear things said that go completely against my deep down belief that we are all one.
Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks said today: "The good thing about faith is that it builds communities. It takes a lot of 'mes' and turns them into an 'us', the bad news is that it can divide communities into a 'them' and an 'us'."
Next week is Interfaith week, it's time to extend the hand of friendship to someone who is not of your faith.
Just incase you missed The Elephant's Child in the news today:
There has been a lot in the news this week sharing the life of child carers and how much they have to do. This story seems to do the rounds every 5 years or so where it is raised as a massive issue and the dreadful plight of these children is discussed and then nothing is done, be we all go quiet again for a while, having shown our outrage. But what I don't see mentioned is the long term effects it has on the child after the need to care is gone.
My father was always ill, right from childhood. As an adult he was sometimes better than others, but always ill. When he could work, he did nights. This meant he was mostly at home whilst my mother was at work but also because the night time work load was lighter. When I got home from school it was my job to go find him (sometimes in bed, sometimes on the settee and when really, bad sat in a chair next to the fire). I had a permanent fear that I would find him dead, but I didn't share that with anyone. I would make him a cup of tea, take him his tablets and inhalers and plot his breath flow on the chart (I liked that bit!).
I would then put the cooker on, maybe run the meat through the mincer or start to peel the potatoes. Once Dad had got himself into gear he would finish putting tea on and go to fetch mum from work. I would put the hoover over then. It had to be done everyday because of his dust allergies, but because of his headaches, through lack of oxygen, I did it when he went out.
Now I thought that these sort of things were part and parcel of being in a family. From a young age I could use knives, the kettle, iron and even work a heavy petrol lawn mower. Two of my closest friends fathers had already died and I was aware that they also did a lot of things around the house as their mothers worked too.
I never once took a friend home after school for tea, or did after school clubs. I did sit for hours with my father having lovely talks, he used to twizzle my hair whilst my head rested in his lap or I would sit on the floor next to the bed and chatter at him, must of driven him mad!! So my father became my best friend. I missed the extra effort required to forge life time friendships with school friends.
School holidays were the same, we didn't go off for the day to picnics. I hung around at home whilst dad slept, being disturbed by us I guess. 'Us' is an interesting point, my older brother took no responsibility at all...he concentrated on his school work whilst I did the 'looking after'.
Don't get me wrong I had a lovely family, some great holidays and days out and many people would give their eye teeth to have been in my place but my fathers illness and my responsibility to care for him weekdays played heavy on me. I spent many times away from home staying with family, this gave me breaks in the responsibility which was always good.
It is only as I talk to other people about their childhoods, what they remember, what they did, that I realise that mine was different. I sometimes feel quite sad that I missed out on things that many others seem to have done or parent/child support they had in reverse to me. But I have to remind myself that it made me who I am. I can do anything from housewifey cook, clean, iron to DIY, gardening, decorating, anything....because I needed to be more independent from a young age than many.
I am now experiencing some of the things I feel I missed out on through my daughter, so when I do sleepovers for the masses and it's hard work, it is also feeding back to me a little healing on things I feel I missed myself.
My situation was light weight compared to many of the child carers I have been reading about, they need support, they need 'normal' time and they need time to be allowed to be children, allowed to be young. Carrying responsibility from a young age makes for a serious adult....I don't think I ever learned to laugh from the belly...I love to see my daughter do that...I look at her in awe and wish I could, but I am so proud that she knows how.
So she went to the beauty parlour, where they knew exactly how to give her the confidence she needed to stand out in a crowd.
And be happy to have a front row seat. Never again would she disappear unnoticed (although many people would stare at her strangely and wonder what the hell she was advertising!) and the children smile, point and wave and she always waves back.
I get a great sense of pride on Remembrance parade.
I was recently drawn into Jessica Gottlieb's site because of a discussion about posting photographs of your children on the internet. Some very sensible points were made most of which are common sense. I refuse to be drawn into the current mania that the whole world is a den of bad people waiting to pounce on any photo of any child but her website did lead me into another area of interest…my online privacy.
I am a user of all things social mediary and I have been since at least 1996 when I first discovered on-line chat. I have for sometime wondered what my on-line trail of personal information looks like and whether the world could easily find out my bra size if they cared to look.
I decided it was time to wipe away friends reunited where my school and early career history prevailed. How about a wide open linkedin profile, do I mind about that? I have always prided myself on my care with Facebook privacy and then realised if you are a member of your local theatre group or church group then you are starting to be pin point-able. Maybe you follow the local school on twitter, again you have a big flag flying over your locality. How about those bloggy discussion tools used like Disqus or Intense Debate..how have they been registered? Are blog stats wide open for the world to track more information about it?
There is an interesting presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/JessicaGottlieb/blogging-in-public
which is worth a watch.
One of the things this doesn't cover though is Google caching. I was aware that a linkedin public profile page that I had secured a few months ago was still coming up in a Google search, and there was the precis clear for all to see. Of course, if I followed the link it was dead but the data was still plain as day on the Google search. I have written a separate entry on how to get this removed here.
One of the important things though is how much does it matter that I have an internet footprint. I am not suggesting that you shouldn't have one, after all once on line it's hard to avoid but when I go to the shops I don't walk around holding a placard with my name, address and phone number on it. Hey, if you come and talk to me (and I like you!) I'll probably let you in on who I am and I feel the same way about the internet. I don't really want to have a great big sign of personal information hanging high for all to see, but I am happy knowing if you stop by you will see who my family are and the type of things we do. But I would just prefer it if my phone number doesn't pop up if I search on my name!!
When did you last type your own name into a search engine or your child's for that matter? And that is also an interesting thought. My daughter will need a job one day and maintaining a professional image will mean preserving her online dignity now. So a clear path from her Facebook, to mine, to blog, to humerous potty training stories probably isn't the best move. And that's my point, the potty training antics aren't the problem it's the layers of links to the real her that may present an issue.
For me it's not about being an anonymous person. I just want to remember that a stroll around the blog-o-sphere is the same as a walk around the local supermarket and a chat on Facebook is the same as a chat at a bar of a pub except maybe its not, because that chat at the bar may be overheard but it has past. The chat on Facebook may have been preserved by screenshot. So my school of thought is, if I wouldn't put it on a placard or talk about it on a pub then it probably shouldn't be out on the internet.
I have been trying to clear up the trail of information I have left sprawling behind me and I haven't quite achieved it yet but hopefully I'm now looking less like an unoccupied house on Christmas eve with with a big neon sign over the front door saying "presents ready inside, front door wide open".
I don't agree with everything Jessica Gottlieb says but she has a lot of very useful information about privacy online, if you are interested it is a good starting point.
What is it with yawning? A car drove past me whilst I was running, the driver yawned and then so did I. Why? I wasn't at all tired!
Can you feel that jaw thing happening yet?...you know you want to!
.....if you haven't you can't hold out much longer....go on give it a good Bagpuss stretch.
At Pickham Ridge I can still see the bewilderment and fear on the men's faces when we went over the top. C and D Company was support, A and B had had to go front line. All over the battlefield the wounded were lying down, English and German asking for help. We weren't like the Good Samaritan in the Bible, we were the robbers who passed by and left them. You couldn't help them. I came across a Cornishman, ripped from shoulder to waist with shrapnel, his stomach on the ground beside him in a pool of blood. As I got to him he said, 'Shoot me,' he was beyond all human aid. Before we could even draw a revolver he had died. He just said 'Mother.' I will never forget it.
What if I just dump all the leaves I vac into the trampoline and get the kids outside to enjoy some fresh air....
A while back I cleaned up my LinkedIn profile and made it private. Sometime later, whilst doing a search of myself (you should occasionally) I noticed that the Google search results were still displaying a precis of my profile. This was exactly the information I had wanted to make more private!
The reason it still showed is because of Google Caching
There is a very clear description of what Google caching is here.
In short it means that whilst the web page might have gone, Google will still return results linking to it.
It is easy to get Google to clear the cached entry.
Google have clear instructions on how to request removal.
For removal of personal information from search results follow this link http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164133
Remember you need to be sure first that the page with your information on is no longer actually available and that following the link returns a 404 error or similar. Then use the Google tool to request the removal of the url from the cache:
This weeks Gallery is Season. This is not my entry! But it is on my mind tonight. Ecclesiastes.
This travel complaint did the rounds of the media and email sometime ago and it still has me crying with laughter. Given my recent travel company dealings I was reminded of it. Although, Virgin dealt with this well and probably retained their customer whereas First Choice did not follow Mr Branson's lead. I guess that should help you make a travel company decision.
The letter was to Richard Branson, the head of Virgin Atlantic. I understand he phoned our complainer directly. It was first published here, I recreate it for you:
Dear Mr Branson,
REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008
I love the Virgin brand, I really do which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.
Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at the hands of your corporation.
Look at this Richard. Just look at it:
Just in case the search engines didn't pick it up first time. First Choice are absolutely diabolical. That is the Travel company First Choice.
My first experience with them was about 5 years ago when it took them 36 hours to get me to Cyprus. Never again I said (not Cyprus - it is lovely there - never again with First Choice).
HWMBO said he'd found the holiday we were after. A 5 star luxury all inclusive in Turkey, with swim up junior suite. This means you have your own veranda on the pool, jucuzzi...all sounded lovely ...except it was with First Choice. What the hell, we said, throwing caution to the wind, it will be fine and booked it.
When the confirmation came through I noticed that just under my daughters age (12) it said "children under 16 are not allowed in this room". WTF?!
So hubby rang them..."not to worry sir, it's an old rule, it doesn't apply now"
He rang the hotel, they had no problem with under 16's in those rooms nor do many travel companies.
He range First Choice again "It's to do with our insurance and being as you use your own insurance it'll be fine"
I said "sounds like you've been fobbed off, best get it in writing" and here the troubled started.
This time he was told (by the same department) "No, it's a current rule, it is not related to insurance, we do not allow under 16s in those rooms"
"Oooook, what can we do?"
"you can have a standard room."
"we don't want that, we want a swim up suite"
"you can't have that"
"That's what we booked with you, your system let us book it even when we entered our child's age"
"yes, it does that"
"but we can't have it?"
"no"
"can we have our money back?"
"no"
"Sorry?"
"No you will lose your deposit if you cancel"
"We don't want to cancel! We want to go on the holiday we paid for"
"you can't do that"
"and we can't have our money back"
"no, you can book another holiday with us and transfer the money"
"but you won't let us have the holiday we want"
"did we mention the £400 cancellation fee"
"WTF!"
So, it took several layers of management, a disputed payment transaction from the credit card company and a stoic and patient HWMBO to finally get our deposit back and not be charged a cancellation fee for being sold a holiday they would not let us go on.
Guess what?....we are still waiting for our apology!!!
So my advice before you log onto First Choice or pootle into their shop is walk right on by and try someone else because First Choice are one of the most unhelpful, uncustomer orientated companies we have ever had the displeasure of dealing with.
And my final word of advice to companies is be careful who you annoy because sometimes losing that customer is going to cost you more than you think. This guy was treated poorly by an airline and bang goes the company account.!
I don't often talk about work, so indulge me! Today was the first day I offed on the train since the London debacle but I survived dignity intact.
I enjoy a good geeky get together. Today was the Quest User Conference in Birmingham. The brief said 'Smart Casual'. What does this mean to a DBA? Well it used to mean "wear clothes that cover all offending parts" but I was surprised at the number of suits. It must show the current state of the job market.
The day started with a sql statement to set the level:
Husbands Query:Please don't leave comments tell me the failings of the procedure, it's a joke guys, it doesn't have to be syntactically correct...no it doesn't....shoo geek!
CREATE PROCEDURE MyMarriage (
BrideGroom Male (25) ,
Bride Female(20) )
AS
BEGIN
SELECT Bride FROM india_ Brides
WHERE FatherInLaw = 'Millionaire'
AND Count(Car) > 20 AND HouseStatus ='ThreeStoreyed'
AND BrideEduStatus IN (B.TECH ,BE ,Degree ,MCA ,MiBA) AND Having Brothers= Null
AND Sisters =Null
SELECT Gold ,Cash,Car,BankBalance
FROM FatherInLaw
UPDATE MyBankAccout
SETMyBal = MyBal + FatherInLawBal
UPDATEMyLocker
SET MyLockerContents = MyLockerContents + FatherInLawGold
INSERT INTOMyCarShed VALUES('BMW')
END
GO
Then the wife writes the below query:
DROP HUSBAND;
Commit;
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