Reflections

Facing a blank screen and wondering what to write about is something all Bloggers have to endure. Shall I write about what I have planned in future, or what I have already been doing? No, neither. Why? because when we breath out we don't actually know if we will breath in again, do we? So, whilst I have a lot of past, and it has shaped the me I am today, I can only thank it and not blame it. Oh yes, there are times I could fall into the trap of blaming fate, destiny, others or none. In actual fact, I tend toward the Fate school of thought.

I found how to use Twitter last August, in spite of the fact I had created an account some 2 years before that. I had tried at first, but was completely confused as to how it worked. I was suspicious of the term 'follower and following' as it has connotations I was not comfortable with. Then along came some news article and the word Twitter was being used extensively, so I thought I would take another look.

I followed willy nilly every famous name I came across. I read topics from the 'trending' lists and was horrified at the amount of disgusting language that was being used. In fact, I felt sullied when I had read some of the posts and their totally unnecessary use of the words I still see as disgraceful when used in front of strangers (and most of them were what I had always considered were 'bedroom' terms anyway!)

However, I got hooked. I weeded out every person who didn't ever answer any tweets (that got rid of 99% of the famous names!) and all the people who were so inarticulate that they needed to use expletives the whole time and multiple times in each tweet. I reduced the number I was following significantly with that clean up too.

I sorted out the topics I was most interested in, and then doors really started to creak open. It was wonderful to read other peoples considered opinions - and many unconsidered ones too. It was the interaction with people of similar or diverse opinions that really caught my imagination then.

I started to read some of the sayings I had lived by all my life, and then remembered that I have a rather extensive collection of pithy sayings that I have gathered myself over the long years of reading philosophy and collecting jokes. Distilling the sense of a long diatribe into one short sentence is challenging, but so satisfying when you have done it. The real joy came in sharing those sentences with others on Twitter and even better, seeing people send those same words on to their followers as being worthy of being shared.

I love having laughter around me - who doesn't? What really pleases me is to know that others can read the words and smile, or nod in agreement, or simply store them away for their own enjoyment at a later date. Like the ripples on a pond, we don't know how far those words go, but we can be fairly sure that they will bring some comfort or pleasure or amusement to some other person somewhere in the world - and it doesn't matter where or when. 

There are so many who violently disagree on the subject of God or religion, and I am not the person to try to argue with them. All I know is that I have a deep sense of faith, but not strictly a religious faith. I have faith in my fellow man, that they are inherently good and well meaning. That they would rather help than hinder and for the most part prefer to give than to receive. Of course, there are exceptions to this, but you only have to look at the number of people on Twitter who are happily putting themselves to all manner of challenges to raise money or awareness or both for those less fortunate that the rest of us.  Many of those are ones who would never dream of accepting the very idea of a God of whatever ilk. So long as they live in the way they do, wanting to help others and to not damage the precious world we live on, surely that is all that matters?

We all have things in our lives which test us, but I am so certain that we are not tested beyond what we can do, just to see how strong we can be. Being bitter about events that are past and gone is futile. There is no worse cancer than bitterness, because whilst cancer eats at the physical body, bitterness destroys the most precious part of us, our soul or whatever name you want to use to describe the person we are inside our bodies. If we can't, or don't want to change things, and there are some things I just don't want to change, at least I don't advocate keeping it alive. Let it drop and ignore it.

I feel the same about religions. Why look at the things that divide, when there is a golden thread which runs through every religion in the world. Concentrate on the things that unite and divisions disappear. It matters not a jot who said what - we don't have recordings of anyone to prove one way or the other what was meant, merely someones interpretation of what was said - like Chinese whispers, they are probably not remotely like what was really being meant.

Rather like those people who try to tell us what the artist meant when they painted this or that masterpiece or the composer was attempting to portray in their glorious music. Only the person who created it really knows, so if we can't speak directly to them, we should just accept it as it is, and not try to either put our own interpretation onto it, or even worse, listen to what anyone else considers was meant. Have the strength to believe your own thoughts and stand by them. You will find that the small quiet voice in your head is more often correct than not. Call it conscience, call it instinct, call it anything, but just learn to listen to it and act on it. If you don't act on it, and it was a good idea, you can be sure that before long the same idea will have found fertile ground in someone Else's head and they will be the one who makes it work.

We all have the power within us for good, and we can change the world little by little, but if we never start to do it, it will not change on its own.

School teachers can inspire or conspire

When I was 6 I had a fabulous teacher. Her name was Miss Allott. She always sat in the front pew in Church, and was very tall and slim. From my earliest memories of her, to the last time I saw her when I was about 30, she had never changed at all. Always smiling, always caring. Of course, to me, she didn't have a Christian name, or if she did, it was Miss. It was only after she died that I discovered she was called Rachael.

Her passion was Geography. She would teach us the way round the world, leaving Liverpool, calling in at Dublin and then across to Canada and so round the world. I was obsessed by learning about geography. I could soon recite all the capital cities, what each country exported, what its language was and a myriad other facts about every country. She was a truly inspirational teacher.

I lived the furthest away from school, and had to get a bus there at 8am each morning, which meant I was at school with the cleaners. I could not get a bus home until 5pm, and as in those days school finished at 4pm, it meant another hour with the cleaners. I loved that time. I adored poetry, and would spend a lot of those hours learning new poems to recite when I got home. I had been reading since I was 3, and as my siblings were 8 and 10 years older than me, we really had nothing in common, so, since I lived in a big house and there were no children nearby to play with after school, reading became my big love.

We moved house when I was 10, and so as I am an August child, I went to the new High School 2 bus rides away. Only 2 other boys passed from my school, and since this was a single sex school, I no longer saw anyone I had known at junior school.

I was lucky. It was a brand new school and I was in the first first year there. It was 1953. Coronation Year. It had happened in the June, so all celebrations were well forgotten by then.

I had a new set of teachers, and the georgraphy teacher was not a patch on Miss Allott. She was not interested in Capital Cities or exports or pretty much anything that we had learned before. She was all graphs of population and crop growing. Nothing interesting like the Taj Mahal, or Ayres Rock, or the Grand Canyon. Fortunately, the seed was well planted by Miss Allott, and it grew of its own accord.

I did have a fantastic English teacher though. Miss Wainwright. Again, no Christian name. Just Miss. She was small, with untidy hair and her black gown (all our teachers wore their hoods and gowns every day to teach), flapped around her. At the end of her lessons, which she always managed to make incredibly interesting - even clauses and phrases - she would stand, wrap her gown tightly around her, and rest her bottom on the edge of her desk. She would then tell us classic stories. One which made a huge impression on me was the story of Svengali from the book Trilby. We were the most silent during the telling of these stories than at any other time of the week in school, such was her skill at story telling. She was like every Best Actress rolled into one. The voices, the actions, and facial expressions, they were all there. She became the person she was telling us about. Extraordinary gift that is. I only found out three years ago that her name was Mary.

Then there was the other side of the coin. The Maths teacher. Horrible woman who delighted in belittling any girl who made an error, no matter how small. Not one of us liked maths after have had her for 5 years. Yes, a true martinet. Not an inkling of human interest in children learning anything. She inhabited her own planet, and we were just one long pain to her. the same with the art teacher. I can't even remember her name (all our teachers were females). What I do remember though is that we had one very gifted girl in our class, and the rest of us could go and knit fog as far as the art teacher was concerned. She said that it really didn't matter what any of us did, because we were all, with that one shining exception, rubbish at art. So, art was something to be suffered and dropped if possible. I never picked up another paintbrush until I was 54!<

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There lots of Ann's, Pat's, Jean's and Julie's in my year. I was the only Phyllis. The sole other bearer of this awful name was the headmistress. Miss Cater. That woman had the most devastating effect on my life it was possible to have.

I had been the innocent victim in a court case, and when I knew that it would mean I had to go to court to give evidence I went to see her to tell her what was happening. Nothing was said. Not a word of comfort or support. The day came, and I went to court and endured something no girl has to face these days. I had to stand in a courtroom, look around and actually point out the defendent who had attacked me. Once it was over, I thought that was the end of the matter. I went to school as usual on the following Monday, and was happily cooking in the Domestic Science class when the school secretary came in and ordered me to the headmistress's office.

Shaking I went in. She had a sheaf of newspaper cuttings in her hand, and my mother was sitting in the corner. There was to be a school trip to the Channel Islands the following Whit, and I was daft enough to think my mum had brought the money up to school to pay for my place on it.

Waving the papers at me, this angry woman said that since I had been in court over such a matter, I was no longer fit to mix with 'nice' girls, and that I was to go home with my mother and never come back. I was not even 16 until the August and this was March. I had shone at my mock GCEs and had been expected to get 8 or 9 good grades. Now all that was out of the window.

My ambition had been, since a little girl, to be a nurse and a missionary nurse at that. I was numb. I sat at home with my parents, who were both very angry, but of the generation who did not, ever, question anyone in authority like a Headmistress. My father asked me what I wanted to do. He said I need never work, that I could happily stay at home with my mother, and just be a lady, or I could do whatever I felt right for me. I wanted to work. I got a job as a Vet's surgery nurse until I could get into Nursing School the following September.

The Nursing was my dream job. I loved every moment spent learning and caring. I would often be found telling jokes to patients (particularly when I was on a male ward), and my nickname was Smiler in those days. I passed my exams with ease. I felt I was on the right path for me. Then one day, just before I was 18, I got a message to go to the Matron's office. I had always got on well with all the Sisters and even with Matron (godess though she was in the hospital in those days)!

Wondering what it was all about, I went to the office. The moment I went in my heart sank. There was Miss Cater. Matron simply said that according to information she had just been given by Miss Cater, I was not to be allowed to nurse male patients again. To say I was devastated was the understatment of my life, let alone that year! Here was history repeating itself. If I was to be banned from nursing men, then there was clearly no future in nursing for me. Full stop. End of.

So you see, wonderful teachers inspired me to see the world and to be able to express myself in good English and to admire beautifully written works and love poetry and prose in equal measure, but another teacher ensured that I became almost innumerate (though not completely), and finally the one who should have been caring of a rape victim was the ultimate devastation. I thank heaven that such events can no longer happen, because now girls such as myself are cared about and protected. I had to fight my own way through, but I suppose I am who I am because of the events of that time.

Life goes on and still lessons have to be learned

I recently had a couple of weeks where I thought life had improved immeasurably. Then, out of the blue, it came falling in on me again. It hurt like hell for a while, but then I did what I always do. Picked myself up, re-built a bridge so that bitterness could not get a firm hold, and now I have a friendship that I think we will both value in time to come. I am so blessed, because I have a wonderful circle of friends who laugh with me, but also don't mind comforting me when the tears flow - and yes, they do, try hard as I might to suppress them. I know this other person does not have such a fantastic support network, so holding out a hand of friendship was, if very difficult at first after such rejection and hurt, a cathartic thing to do.

I read a lot, and always have done, and since childhood have read books that lots of adults have never read - philosophy has always been a passion of mine, as has poetry, so I have a wonderful fund of quotations and pithy sayings from others, and many that I have put together myself.

A few months ago I discovered Twitter. I had registered about 3 years ago, but never understood what it was really all about. Once I had a couple of spare hours to experiment, I really got into it. I have found that, whilst at first I just randomly 'followed' mainly well known people or politicians, I soon discovered that they are only on Twitter to self-aggrandise. They never follow back (or very few do) and only tweet something when they want a bit of extra ego massage. Gradually I found that I would find really interesting people by reading their tweets before I decide to follow. It takes a little time, because I do not want to follow people who use expletives every second word. If I want to hear dreadful language, I can go outside any school these days and hear all I want - and frankly, I don't. I am not a prude, and yes, I swear from time to time - but only if I really want to draw attention to a point that exasperates me to despair, not just for a shock effect. Those words have lost their shock effect these days, in the mouths of people who use them as frequently as 'the' and 'and'.

I now have a wonderful band of Twitter friends. I have time for those who think of others, and those who support worthy causes, and support their friends if they are in need of a friendly word. It costs nothing, but if someone lives alone, and spends their time shouting at the TV when there is something contentious on it, twitter is the perfect place to let off that bit of excess steam! There is always someone with an opposing opinion, but many who will agree, so it can be a comfort to know that there are others 'out there' who feel the same.

This morning there was a discussion about the Human Rights Act, and someone tweeted that it really should be a matter of Common Sense.

Years ago I put this little thing into my files, so this morning it was dusted off, and posted on Twitter. It is very heartening to see how many people agree about it - I know that because it has been re-tweeted so many times. So, I thought I would put it on here, so that if anyone wants to read it in future, it is accessible.


Obituary

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, by the name of Common Sense.
Common Sense lived a long life but died in the United States from heart failure
at the beginning of the new millennium.
No one really knows how old he was, since his birth records long ago were lost in bureaucratic red tape.
He selflessly devoted his life to service in schools, hospitals, homes, factories, helping folks get jobs done without fanfare and foolishness.

For decades, petty rules, silly laws, and frivolous lawsuits held no power over Common Sense. He was credited with cultivating such valued lessons as to know when to come in out of the rain, why the early bird gets the worm, and that life isn't always fair.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you earn), reliable parenting strategies (the adults are in charge, not the kids), and it's okay to come in second.

A veteran of the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, and the Technological
Revolution, Common Sense survived cultural and educational trends including body piercing, multi-language ballots, and "new math."

Alas, his health declined when he became infected with the "If-it-makes-you-feel-good-do-it"
virus. In recent decades, his waning strength proved no match for the ravages of well intentioned, but overbearing regulations. He watched in pain as good people became ruled by self-seeking
lawyers.

His health rapidly deteriorated when schools implemented endless zero-tolerance policies. Reports of a six-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate, a teenager suspended for taking a swig of mouthwash after lunch, and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student only worsened his condition.

It declined even further when schools had to get parental consent to administer aspirin to a student, but could not inform the parents when a female student was pregnant or wanted an abortion.

Finally, Common Sense lost his will to live as the Ten Commandments became contraband,
Churches became businesses, criminals received better treatment than their victims, and Federal judges stuck their noses in everything from the Boy Scouts to professional sports.

Finally, when a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot, she was awarded a huge settlement, and Common Sense threw in the towel.

As his end neared, Common Sense drifted in and out of logic, but was kept informed of developments regarding questionable regulations such as those for low flow toilets, rocking chairs, and stepladders.

Common Sense was preceded in death by his parents, Truth and Trust; his wife, Discretion; his daughter, Responsibility; and his son, Reason. He is survived by two stepbrothers: My Rights and Ima Whiner. Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone.

We can all wish for a better world, but the only way it will happen is if we ourselves change first.