What Is Happening To This Country?

Jo Cox is dead and I am so sad, and so angry.

I am sad because she was a campaigner, she was passionate, she was one of the few women in Parliament, she was principled, she was genuine. I am sad because she was a mum of two little boys who aren't old enough to know what murder is, nevermind where their mum has gone.

And I am fucking furious, incandescently angry at the media spin on this tragic culmination of weeks of right wing propaganda and hatred.

Yesterday, just hours before she was murdered, Nigel Farage unveiled his latest campaign poster. Behold:

Does it remind you of anything? Does it, perhaps, remind you of this?

via @zcbeaton on twitter

This is a clip of a Nazi propaganda film, giving much the same message in an identical fashion.

Just a week ago, fifty men were murdered at a gay bar in Florida, by a man called Omar Mateen. Because Omar happened to be brown, the massacre was immediately hailed as a terrorist attack

and within twenty four hours, used as Leave propaganda:

Sack your subeditor, Leave. 

Alas for those who would like to blame everything on ISIS that Omar Mateen had no links to them, and wasn't religious. This was an act of terrorism, but it wasn't an act of international, Islam-extremist terrorism. 

Several years ago, Anders Breivik murdered 77 people in Sweden because he hated Islam that much. But, before any information about the terrorist was revealed, The Sun ran this as their front page:

Once it was revealed that Breivik was both white and not a Muslim, the tide quickly turned:

Now, he's just a maniac with extremist links. 

And so it seems in the case of Jo Cox, the same will happen. The murderer is widely reported to have shouted Britain First as he attacked her, while she was running her local constituency surgery. This is a lady who actively campaigned for Syrian refugees and against Islamophobia. She was everything Britain First claim, VOCIFEROUSLY, to despise. And yet...

A crazed loner! Salacious details from The Sun, as you might expect. But no reference to claims that he might have been a British right wing extremist. If she'd been murdered by someone with even the faintest of tans, the headlines would be very different. The media keep spinning us this line that immigrants are terrorists who want to kill us, and then this happens. A left wing member of parliament gets killed at work by someone likely fired up by weeks of increasingly right wing propaganda and lies.

When every time you go to the shop, you're faced with front pages like this:

Plus every single non-weather related frontpage of The Daily Express.

how can the media act shocked that this sort of thing can happen? How can they blame mental illness and look no further? You have to be at least a little bit unstable to murder someone, but normally, when someone is murdered, the papers are quick to splash details about how their upbringing, their religion, their race, their experience with school, their obsession with porn or video games was to blame. Why can they not apply that same logic to being bombarded with hysterical lies about immigrants and Muslims? Britain First, with an irony that would be hilarious in less tragic circumstances, have been quick to distance themselves from Jo Cox's murder, but how can they not see how they might be complicit in driving someone to kill? The Remain and Leave campaigns both stopped yesterday, although for how long, I don't know. But do they, particularly Leave, not see how their constant bewildering panicked lies and half-truths might drive someone to extremism?

As a nation, we cannot take this assassination as a one-off, lone-wolf, freak event. We have to look at the context, because it is a symptom of a much wider disease.

Nobody should be cut down in the street because of their political conviction.
We lost a good woman yesterday, and we should all be sad, regardless of political leaning.

pic.twitter.com/mPOaytowxN

— Brendan Cox (@MrBrendanCox) June 16, 2016

The Widower

I met him going to the post office. A comment about the weather and I was about to carry on, but he blurted out"my wife just died" and I couldn't walk away.

He said he'd been to his allotment, some miles away. I knew the village he mentioned. He had photos in his boot of the village in years past, and we looked at them, there on the pavement with the baby kicking at the buggy, watching us. He hadn't wanted to live in the city. He liked it at the village, but there were no shops and his wife liked shopping so they moved here. And she died.

He asked me once, twice, many times if the people where I lived, barely a street away, talked. And they do, but I know what he meant. People don't often move into this area because they are tied by blood or friendship. They move because it's cheap and central. They keep themselves to themselves. They don't say hello to the old guy next door.

It had been his birthday three days before. He was 74, but said he felt older. He asked me to look in his living room, so I did. A shrine to the wife he loves so much. I asked when she died, expecting him to say last month, last week, but no, last year and still he lives in this gulf of emptiness.
He seemed to plead for forgiveness. He apologised for his shrine, he apologised for keeping me talking, he apologised for his house. I don't know when he'd last had a conversation. When he wakes up, he calls to her, wondering where she is. He told me about his old home, he showed me a picture of him with his wife twenty odd years ago, him unrecognisably bearded and her, beaming. She came from Hebden Bridge. I didn't ask how they met. I didn't have time.

A few days after his wife died, he had fallen on the back step and cried for help for six hours, but nobody came. He finally crawled into the house and called an ambulance to his broken leg. Nobody talks to him. Nobody's a neighbour. They were neighbourly in the village. He knew everyone there. He grew up there. He worked there. His house there caught fire once, when his brother was in bed. He went to church there every week, to the yard where his mum and his dad, his brother were buried. I asked him if he went to the church behind his house. No. Too strange. A betrayal of who he was.
He didn't sleep and when he asked the doctor if it was normal, the doctor said yes. He didn't eat. He had once, and the photo he showed me bore this out, but he had lost five stone since he lost her.
He told me he was going out again. He didn't stay in long. He had come home to get his washing in and now he was going out again. I had to go. He gave me two apples and said goodbye.

A thirty minute window. And I saw his life, his terrible grief for his wife. The love he had for her twisted into sorrow. His fear of hurting himself again and being unable to help himself; of dying on the back step, unnoticed by the whole city. His children, far away, not visiting. Going out to avoid the absence of her. His car was a little living room by the driver's seat, while his living room was a mausoleum. Afraid to be shunned by strangers but desperate to tell someone about her. Lonely, living in a hated, anonymous street because she wanted to go shopping, with a chunk taken from him. Wanting to move, but unable to leave the memory of her.

And what else could I do but listen?

There must be thousands of men like him - women too - aching for a chat, terrified of scaring people away. What else can you do but listen?

Should We Stay or Should We Go?

The EU referendum is, perhaps, the most important political event of my lifetime. You see, I'm 31. Not quite a Millennial, but not old enough to remember Thatcher. Voting in this is far more important than a general election vote, since the consequences will reverberate for many many years. I think it's vital for us to all understand why we are voting to leave or remain. After all, people are going to be disenfranchised if they feel misled into voting one way or the other.

Yesterday, I received a Vote Leave posted with "Five Positive Reasons to Leave" written on it. They are as follows:
1. Spend our money on priorities like the NHS.
OK. This would be fabulous. Except it won't happen. I'm sorry. I've spent five years studying the sociology of health in this country and there is no way, NO WAY, any right wing political party is going to invest all that money into the NHS. Consider the state of the NHS since 2010. Consider the changes made. If you work in the NHS, you've seen this first hand. Remember Big Society? We're all In It Together, as the Conservatives bellowed loudly at both the last general elections? Well, what they mean isn't that we're in it together at all. What they mean is that they want social services (the NHS, libraries, social services, children's centres, school nurses, mental health support, victim support, the police, the fire service, housing, care homes) to be run on an increasingly self funded, privatised, or voluntary basis. WE may be in it together, but THEY, the rich and elite, are most certainly not. Look at your town. Remember it ten years ago. When you could get a doctors appointment without sacrificing your first born. When you could go to the library to use the internet if yours was on the blink. When you didn't have to pay £2000+ a month for your mum to be in a nursing home. When you rang the police and they actually turned up. When the health visitors actually came to see you. When housing was affordable.
We may leave the EU, but we will still have the same government in charge, and they show no willingness at all to invest the money we do have into the NHS, let alone extra.
You'll also note that it is worded 'priorities like the NHS'. I'm sure priorities like Trident would suddenly seem important without the protection of the EU. That's not a promise. That's a similie. Ask your ten year old.

2. Take back control over our laws
I'm sorry, did I miss the abolition of Parliament and the House of Lords? Fairly sure we make our own laws. EU laws are of equal status in member countries as national law, so I had a look to see what sort of laws they have made. They are terrible! Awful things like preventing gender discrimination at work and making sure our food is safe. The absolute bastards.
This point goes on to say that we don't get to vote on who makes the laws. This is a lie. We have 73 MEPs. You elected them. Or at least you did if you bothered to go and vote. Bizarrely, a third of our MEPs are UKIP. Do they not WANT a job or something?
There's a strong idea that we can't veto any EU laws. We can. Well, *we* can't, our elected MEPs can, but not if they're in the minority - that's not democratic. For all that the Leave campaign bleat on about democracy, they seem to have a rather odd idea how it works.
And our beloved UKIP MEPs have tried to block laws on things like women's rights in work (either abstaining or voting against them) which really makes me wonder why any women want to support UKIP. Obviously, it's your choice, but why on Earth do you support a party who thinks you're best off in the kitchen?
PS: We can definitely block Turkey from joining the EU and they can't  apply to join until they've fulfilled a great litany of requests, which they are taking their sweet time over, so stop worrying that the people you're quite happy to buy holidays from are going to come over here and steal your job.

3. Regain control over our borders
This is such a load of old toss, I don't even know where to start. The truth is, we have no idea what sort of immigration deal we will have if we leave the EU. Nobody has ever left the EU, only refused to join. The most common argument is that we can have immigration laws like Australia. Australia, if you're unaware, have a complicated and expensive immigration policy, based around your ability to contribute to the economy. You can read about it here. This misses a very important point. Australia is not in Europe. Australia is a fucking great island in the middle of nowhere. Australia is two and a half THOUSAND miles from its nearest neighbour. We sit 50 miles from ours. We are tiny. We have no industry (cheers Tories!), we have insufficient agriculture to feed everyone. We need to trade to survive. We are more like Norway than Australia. Norway is not an EU member. Norway has open borders.
The other problem with leaving the EU, which is less known, is that our border isn't in the UK at all. No, our main border is in France. You know when you go to France, and you sit for a fucking year at Calais waiting for Border Control yet sail through Dover? That's why. There's a reason all those refugees are sat at Calais, and it's not for the astonishing brutalist architecture or beautiful beaches. They have been shunted along through Europe, a few thousand allowed to settle here and there, and now they have hit a sea border and can't be shunted along anymore. I have no doubt that, if our border is pushed back to  Dover, all those refugees will come and sit in Dover instead. It's not their fault. They are running from a terrible, awful, unfightable war. They would not be living in some shitty, muddy tent by the Channel if they didn't have to. But they strike terror into the hearts of the middle classes, terrified that young Adnan will come over here and I dunno, steal their daughter or something.
If we leave the EU, what happens to the EU migrant workers that live here? Do they all get shipped out wholesale? Do they have to apply for work permits? What about the ones that have married and have families? The current draconian immigration rules states that, to live here as a non-EU migrant, you have to be earning over £35k. Consider that the average salary in the UK is around £26.5k, and that a lot of EU migrant workers are working for shit all in factories and on farms, and there's going to be an enormous mass deportation. Which is, apparently, what the Leave campaign wants. But who will fill those jobs? What about EU migrants who have married English people? Do they have to go? Are a lot of kids going to suddenly be in a one parent family? This is not hyperbole. It is people's actual lives.
And what of the British in Spain? This bit of paper informs me that 250000 EU migrant workers came here last year. There are 760000 Brits in Spain. They will FLOOD US. We will be OVERRUN by hypertanned Spanglish people who insist on sleeping half the afternoon! How will we cope???

4. Take back control over security
Apparently, "the European Court controls how we fight terrorism and this is dangerous". I would actually argue the total opposite. I would much rather have the intelligence and security of the entire EU working together against terrorism than just us. Consider this. When the IRA were attacking the British every five fucking minutes, we had well over a hundred terrorist incidents in twenty five years. Since 2001, when the Islamic fundamentalist threat made itself known, we have had one definite organised incident and four lesser incidents. I feel relatively safe from terrorism here.

5. It's safer to vote Leave (see 4) and take back control (see 3) rather than keep sending our money (see 1) to an EU which is costing us more and overruling our law (see 2).
So you couldn't even think of five positive reasons to leave the EU? What child wrote this leaflet?


The thing is, I really hate David Cameron. I hate how he is invisible. George Osborne, IDS when he was in charge, Gove, they all get the blame while Cameron deflects and hides and seems to avoid the criticism he should be receiving. But the EU referendum is a happening under his premiership, and he supports staying in. I don't want to support him, but it's not about him. Leaving isn't about supporting that absolute cuntosaurus liar Johnson or melty-faced sexist racist shitbox Farage. It goes far beyond interparty politics. But it has degenerated into the two sides of the Conservative party essentially blowing raspberries at each other, and I don't trust a word any of them say. Neither should you.
When deciding how to vote, think about what's important to you.

The main reason I'm voting to remain (are you shocked?) is because the EU have done more for working rights than our government would ever do. The government keep trying to gently dismantle working rights - they've already done a fair bit, by making it financially difficult to take employers to a tribunal for example, and encourage zero hour contracts - and left unchecked, they will end up somewhere near the re-institution of serfdom. I understand why a lot of traditional Labour folks end up supporting UKIP, but they don't want to protect you. They don't actually care that you don't have any money and feel like you're surrounded by Europeans at work and that you're struggling to feel like you have a future. They want power, but they don't have social responsibility. They stand as the working man's party, but as they have demonstrated repeatedly at the very parliament they claim to despise, they don't want you to have rights. They don't even care that your rights are being debated.Why would they be any different if they were in power here?

One more thing, that I discovered yesterday. In 1996, Manchester's city centre was bombed by the IRA. The damage cost was estimated at £700 million at the time. The government gave £300000 as hardship relief and £150000 to begin the rebuild: that is less than half a million quid. When asked in parliament why the amount given was so small compared to the total damage, the Minister for the Environment said that the TWENTY ONE AND A HALF MILLION POUNDS given by the EU for rebuilding could be considered "British money" and that having to raise an equivalent sum to meet it by private or public means would be easy. So why didn't they? They are quite happy to take and acknowledge the EU's cash when it suits them. You can read the whole exchange here. Manchester is the current European city of Science.

We don't know what happens next. We don't know whether leaving the EU would be the best thing that ever happened to our country (although, considering the previous global empire, unlikely). We don't know whether it would be the worst. And whatever the Leave or Remain campaign tell you, they don't know either. This has never been done before. You have to trust your gut. And my gut tells me that Farage, Johnson et al do not have my best interests at heart.

Blame the Mother

Last August, I was just about to have a bath when I heard a bang and a scream and my husband yell for help. My middle son, in his effort to somehow FLY into bed, had overshot, bashed his head on his chest of drawers and cut his forehead open. A combination of extremely blonde hair and gushing head wound meant it looked far worse than it was, but after a trip to A+E and some glue, he was fine. No harm done. Accidents happen.

A few years before this, I was making a cup of tea, turned to put something in the sink and my eldest (who would have been around 20 months) pulled a cup of just poured boiling water directly onto his head. I stripped him, put him in the sink under cold water (poor child was baffled, but this is the best thing to do with a scald if ice isn't immediately available) and then went to A+E. He suffered very very minor burns, but otherwise, no harm done. Accidents happen.

Many years ago, when I was five, I fell through a window under the watchful eye of my father and was millimetres from death. The awful injury sustained still gives me a lot of problems. But accidents happen. I'm alive and well, that's the important thing.

In none of these cases was any fault attributed to a parent. They were accepted as accidents, because everyone knows accidents happen with little kids. Little kids are unpredictable. They are not rational. They don't fathom danger, or apply it to themselves. Sometimes, the accident is fucking awful and someone dies. Recently, that someone was a gorilla.

First off, much loved family dogs have been known to murder children so I don't know why people are surprised a gorilla might be hostile to an invader. Gorillas have some genetic similarities to us, and a lot of people have said he was protecting the toddler. How would you react if a large, unknown mammal suddenly fell into your house? How about it a great crowd of similar mammals bellowed at you about it? I'm guessing you might feel intimidated, and afraid, and probably defend yourself in the way you do when a spider runs across your bare feet in the night. Stop anthropomorphising a gorilla. Gorillas are dangerous. There's a reason they aren't given free rein in a zoo.

Second, it is a mystery to me why the enclosure wasn't properly blocked off. I dislike zoos at the best of times, and I would much rather have a huge electrified fence protecting me from the big animals than have them in a moated hole. In fact, I would much rather have the big animals living in their natural environment, not locked up in some faux-forest-clearing in Cincinnati, but that's just me. The safety of the enclosure seems to be in doubt.

So, a four year old got into the enclosure. Four year olds are not wise beings who can gauge danger. Four year olds are very much of the age when they see a gorilla, want a gorilla, and go to see the gorilla. Only a few months ago, I had to rescue my idiot then-four year old from a huge pile of masonry in Ludlow Castle where he had taken up residence. Four year olds do not think about the consequences of their actions. The four year old's life was endangered by the gorilla. The zoo did the only thing they could reasonably do in the circumstances and killed the gorilla. Poor Harambe. The little boy survived.

And now his mother is being absolutely ripped to fucking shreds by social media. People have called for child protection to investigate her for neglect. People want her head, mainly because of the death of the gorilla I think, rather than any real concern for the child.
Just the mother, you'll note. As is so common in these sort of cases, the father of the child is just a blameless simpleton who couldn't possibly be expected to share in the management and safety of his children. This is an extraordinarily common narrative in any story castigating a feckless mother, and it is both misogynistic and generally damaging to the state of fatherhood. Surely we have progressed from the 1950s, where Father has a flat cap, a pint of ale, and the stub of a rollie and doesn't know his children's names, let alone where they are at any given moment?! I wonder what the narrative would be had the child been in the sole company of his father, perhaps on a weekend-daddy-day? I'm sure the mother would still be blamed somehow, probably with a headline like "HARAMBE BOY'S MOTHER DRUNK WHEN HE GOT INTO THE ENCLOSURE".

So, the mother is at fault, because honestly, who expects a zoo to be safe in this day and age? Surely they just let the animals roam about freely and you have to dodge out of the way of marauding lions and whatnot!? My main concerns when taking my boys to the zoo are losing them, traffic if it unexpectedly turns out to be covered in roads (Whipsnade, I am looking at you), and Jim having a meltdown. The idea that they might be able to actually get into an enclosure wouldn't occur to me. Does this make me stupid, that I assume a zoo has taken sufficient safety measures to stop my kids being mauled? This isn't like the case where the man deliberately climbed in with some lions in an elaborate suicide.. That child should not have been able to get into the enclosure. I think it is reasonable to expect a zoo to be safe, even if the safety measures are invisible. Compare this with the Smiler accident at Alton Towers last year. Nobody was screaming that the people on the ride should have known better than to go on such a clearly dangerous ride, or tried to blame their parents for allowing them to go to a theme park unaccompanied. There are expectations of safety from public attractions.

But still, definitely the mother's fault. She should have been watching him! Well, yes, and I know this is a foreign concept to the childless, but you do OCCASIONALLY have to look at OTHER THINGS when you have children. Like, where you are going, checking other people in the vicinity to make sure nobody's being abducted, other people if they start a conversation, your phone if you get a call, your camera to 'make memories' (urgggh that phrase), or even your other children. I can think of literally thousands of reasons to stop looking at your child for ten seconds, and as any parent knows, a child can cause absolute chaos in ten seconds.
Now, imagine watching your child being mauled by a gorilla. Most parents really do love their children, even if they never post a meme to tell you how much. Social media animal behaviour experts seem much more willing to attribute a gorilla with mammalian emotions of love and protection than the child's own mother. I can't even imagine what the hell went through her mind (or the boy's dad's mind, or his siblings for that matter) seeing her son so in danger. That is punishment enough.

Yes. it's a tragedy that Harambe had to die so a boy could live. Yes, there are lessons to be learnt. But it's not the mother's fault, unless she pitched the kid into the enclosure herself. Sometimes, there is nobody to blame, and that's what really gets on everyone's tits. 

Revision

I hate revising. I hate it so much that the only way I can do it is to approach it systematically. I generally do well in exams, though whether this is because I work better under pressure or because my revision method is foolproof or just luck, I know not.

About three weeks before the exam, I begin to panic. It doesn't help that the further into OU study you get, the less time you get between your last TMA and your exam. This year, it's three weeks. At level 2, it was around a month. At level 1, it was around six weeks. I usually have at least a week off after submitting a TMA, so it takes a bit of adjustment to get on with it. Getting on with it is the only cure for panic, I'm afraid.

First, get hold of some past papers. You will get one 'free' with your module, and you can download more from the OUSA. Now, study that paper. Not the questions; the structure. How many questions are you expected to answer? Do the questions refer to the whole module or specific blocks of study? Basically, do you have to revise everything?
I have not yet had an exam where I have had to revise everything. Now, sometimes tutors will advise you to revise everything anyway, but balls to that. Personally, I think it's better to have really in depth knowledge of a few things than a broad knowledge of everything. You might have more choice in answering questions, but you're not going to get good marks if you only skim revised. Where there's a choice, I choose to revise the blocks I liked best. If you REALLY HATED the block on law, for example, you're not going to enjoy revising it.  The chances are, you studied the blocks you enjoyed best the most thoroughly, and revision will be a refresher rather than a re-do.

So, now you have an idea of what you need to revise, and you can make a plan. How long do you have? A month? A week? Three days? Well, you must work with what you have. Divvy up what you need to revise into manageable chunks. Honestly, I cannot endorse revising until you crack up and go blank in the exam. You need to aim for a few hours a day, broken up into chunks. Currently, I'm revising for four hours a day, in half hour segments, with a big break for lunch. The very nature of OU study means you have other stuff to do, so make your revision plan realistic. If you've got children at home every day, or a full time job, or whatever other commitments, you are not going to be able to productively revise for eight hours a day.
But don't go too far the other way. Yeah, it might be fun to go and binge watch the whole of Peaky Blinders, but you're not gonna get any work done if you do. That is classic displacement activity. Recognise it. Shun it (she says, writing her second blog in two days).

Now get on with it. I don't know how you revise. Some people favour mind maps. Some people like flash cards. Some people like to tell their children all about what they're studying while the children stare blankly back. My preferred method is to summarise each unit onto one sheet of A4, then summarise those A4 sheets onto record cards, then get my husband to test me on them. I save the testing element for the last couple of days before the exam, because nothing new is going to go in at that late stage.
I also do practice papers, but rather than write out whole essays, I just write bullet point answers. If you're doing sociology, psychology or history, linking up theories across the module is usually fairly important, so try to connect up all the theories in your head. Practice papers are useful for this. If you've not done exams for ages, do a few full length answers under the time limit allotted by the exam, to get you used to writing quickly and concisely.

Don't worry too much about perfect answers. If you can clearly remember a theory, but don't know who said it, then writing "One theory suggests" is valid. It's not a TMA: you're not expected to know everything. Of course, if you DO remember, then put it in. Don't let forgetting things in revision prey on your mind - of course you don't remember everything. It's what you DO remember that's important.

Remember the person who is marking your exam needs to be able to read it. If you're very out of practice handwriting, practice. I have nerve damage in my writing wrist/hand which means I have to do physio for a good month before the exam to stop it clawing up (it does anyway).

Plan exam day. Where's your exam centre? How are you getting there? What do you need (it says in the examination arrangements booklet)? What ID are you taking with you? What snacks? I always take polos and a bottle of lemon water, because that is my Exam Survival Kit and I'm not changing it now. Make sure you give yourself time for breakfast, and aim to be at the exam centre about half an hour before kick off. At my exam centre (Peterborough), we all mill about in the café until the OU moderators come and round us up around twenty minutes before the exam. I have arrived after this round-up before, and it's totally thrown me, arriving to an empty room.

Plan a treat for after your exam. A series of books you've been dying to read for ages? A video game? The spa? Getting absolutely bungalowed? A holiday? The cinema? ALL THE FUCKING FOOD IN MARKS? Yes, you will need a treat afterwards. Eyes on the prize.

Now go and revise and stop procrastinating!

Education. Not employment.

When I was a child, my dad was obliged to work for most of August, which meant our family holidays generally took place in May or June. We were pulled out of school en masse (there's seven of us), and returned, slightly sunburnt, a week later. The school probably complained a bit to my parents, but gave us consent to go and we didn't suffer for it. Quite the opposite, in fact. My childhood holidays are some of my happiest and most vivid memories, moreso against the backdrop of my primary school experiences.

Now, of course, this is forbidden BY LAW and also THE COUNCIL. If you take your children out of school in term time, you and their other parent can be expected to be fined £60 each per child. In my family's case, that would have meant a £840 fine, doubling to £1680 if my parents hadn't paid within three weeks. Most people don't have seven children, so for an average family with two children in school, that's a £240 fine.

Compare that to the cost of a holiday in term time vs a holiday in August. Here's a handy price comparison for a week's holiday, for a family of four. The first price is the second week of June. The second price is the second week of August. 

CENTREPARCS ELVEDEN:  £1138 vs £1878

STATIC CARAVAN IN YARMOUTH:  £173 vs £599

BUTLINS SKEGNESS: £382 vs £1234

PRIVATE COTTAGE IN ST IVES, CORNWALL: £464 vs £769

CARAVAN IN SOUTH OF FRANCE: £190 vs £1081

MAJORCA WITH THOMAS COOK INC FLIGHTS: £1506 vs £3142

LEGOLAND RESORT (two nights, midweek) : £889 vs £1121

DISNEYWORLD FLORIDA INC FLIGHTS: £2550 vs £4114 

(Prices correct on 18th May 2016, identical accommodation compared)

Suddenly, that £240 fine seems a fair price to pay for an affordable holiday. Or a tax on parenthood. Whichever.

The government have become obsessed with attendance in schools. My eldest son got sent home from school yesterday and isn't allowed to go back in until Friday because he had a small episode of diarrhoea and is now absolutely fine (and driving me mad). But every week, the newsletter tells us to send our kids to school even when they're ill, because apparently teachers will send them home if they're not well. It shouldn't be a teachers' responsibility to either judge the severity of a child's illness or to have to shepherd a load of unwell children through the day. More to the point, it should be a parent's prerogative to decide when their child is too poorly for school.

Primary schools do not employ children, yet the rules of employment seem to apply more and more to kids. Too much sickness: BAD. Too much holiday: BAD. They can't SACK the children for persistent absence, but they can persecute the parents, fine the parents, make the parents harass doctors, and take the parents to court. 

The jargon of the board room is even filtering down to the taught content. I flicked through the sample KS2 English SATs paper earlier. What is the relative clause of a sentence? What is a prepositional phrase? I don't know and I studied English Language at A Level. Do 11 year olds need to know what an antonym is? What's wrong with saying opposite? What's the active voice? What's a determiner? 

I was stunned last year when my six year old told me about split digraphs. He meant 'magic E' as taught by Wordy and Look and Read. I suppose Magic E is too rave culture for the modern Department of Education. 

Jargon is most commonly used as a signifier of special knowledge, to exclude others and exalt the group who understand it above others. A good example is medical jargon, frequently used to talk about patients without them understanding it, as well as to give status to the medical profession. After all, a fracture of the 5th metatarsal sounds a lot more interesting than a broken little toe. Jargon is frequently used in office conversation to try and improve the status of relentless administrative meetings. "Let's touch base, yeah, before the close of play" sounds like something interesting, something...productive, unlike "we need a meeting before you go home". Jargon is endemic in academia, which is perhaps part of the problem.

English is now taught to little kids in linguistic jargon. Now, there's some stuff like synonyms that don't really have a simpler form. Verbs and nouns are just that. But the present perfect tense? When parents - well educated parents with relevant qualifications - don't have a fucking clue what children are being taught anymore, then perhaps it's time to have a rethink and stop treating children like they're in higher education, or work, already.  

Where History Is Annoying

I love history. It is a weekly regret that I didn't do a history degree, although I have done a history module. I'm seriously considering doing either an MA or a postgrad certificate in history next year, depending on funding/grades/confidence. In the mean time, I am voraciously reading primary sources and history books. I think the census, for example, is one of the most beautiful resources our country has, particularly the 1881. God I love the 1881. This makes me strange, allegedly. I also have a penchant for royal history and biography, chiefly because the sources are such good quality. 

But there are a few things that really HACK ME OFF. I'm a total amateur, and may be entirely wrong, but bear with me here.

1. Ye is NOT A FUCKING WORD.

There were extra letters in the Old English alphabet. One of them was thorn, which was shaped like this: Þ. Thorn was pronounced 'th', like in thick and they and THE. In Middle English, which was pronounced very similarly to modern English, despite looking like gibberish, thorn was retained in some dialects, and on into early modern English. However, it began to be written more like a y than a Þ. It looked like this (apologies for teeny tiny picture)

Doesn't that look just like a y? WELL IT BLOODY ISN'T and the amount of times PROPER HISTORIANS translate it as ye instead of the makes my BLOOD BOIL.

So think on, Ye Olde Tea Shoppe.

2. Life Expectancy Is Unrelated to Biological Ageing

In 1900, the average life expectancy of a man was 50. In the middle ages, it was around 35. For women, it was a little less. Some people have taken this information and conflated it to mean that a 35 year old man in 1500 was absolutely WITHERED with age. This is bollocks. A natural lifespan, without accident, severe illness or birth defect, has always been around 65-70. Modern medicine, better midwifery, and improved living conditions means our present life expectancy is around 81.

The biggest factor in the difference between life expectancy and natural lifespan is infant mortality. When you have one in five babies dying in infancy, that drags the life expectancy right down. When you add to that the very high childbirth mortality (one in ten) for women, and then the lack of safe working conditions, monotonous and vitamin-strapped diets, no antibiotics, frequent battles, poor heating and inadequate medical care after injury, it's not surprising a lot of people died in their prime. But plenty of them did not. Edward III lived to be 64 in 1377. His mother lived to 62. These were impressive ages for the time, but mainly because of the vast amount of things that could kill you then. 

3. Fertility and Childbirth Were As Complex Then As Now

I recently read a biography of Isabella of France that stated that she had no more children because she was too old at 34. NO. WRONG. The same book (by Alison Weird) makes the assumption that Isabella and her husband, the much derided Edward II, had infrequent sex because Isabella only had four known children. Fertility, as many women know, is a capricious beast. In my opinion, Isabella was not a terrifically fertile woman who is known to have suffered a slow recovery from the birth of her last child. It is far more likely that she suffered some sort of birth injury that compromised her fertility than she went through the menopause at 28. Fertility is linked to living circumstances - menarche happens earlier in well-nourished women, and menopause a little later - and the menopause certainly didn't happen nearly two decades earlier in the middle ages. Isabella's daughter in law Phillippa had her last child in her 40s, as did Eleanor of Aquitane (who lived to the exceedingly ripe age of 81, in the twelfth century), Eleanor of Castile, and Elizabeth Woodville. Except where women were widowed, infertile, or died young, this seems to be the rule rather than exception. 

No, you've got PMT.