If Rats Could Talk...

Scientists are liable to claim that all animal experiments they conduct are vital for medical research.

How then do they explain the recent news stories about their efforts to disprove life after death by killing rats?

And why would they choose experimental 'models' which they cannot even agree possess a 'consciousness' to vivisect for parapsychological experiments?

How can any creature which is seemingly without a consciousness be any help to medical science whatsoever in this field?

Furthermore why does medical science seek to disprove theories of the afterlife in the first place? To depress humans who like to hope there is something better than this cynical self-seeking world afterwards, to reward them for their long-suffering in putting up with this cynical self-seeking world for a lifetime?

In the event, all these experiments actually proved was that brain activity increases immediately prior to death, which they believe may give rise to 'hallucinations' of the genre reported by humans who have had near-death experiences of travelling at speed through long white tunnels, feelings of overwhelming love and their deceased loved ones waiting to greet them (the most typical type of NDE which has previously been shown to be common to all cultures irrespective of faith or belief systems, age or gender, medication or no medication). Though why they couldn't wire up a willing dying human volunteer to find this out and even ask some useful questions of, I do not understand. There are also many thousands of pre-existing accounts of not just near-death experiences but human beings who were resuscitated or say they 'chose' to come back after up to twenty minutes clinically dead.

I look forward to the rat seance where we get to hear the sequel of this research.

Some metaphysical medical experiments impress me. Such as the one where a Christian group prayed nightly for everyone in one hospital wing but not another hospital wing for a month. So great were the recovery results in the first wing, that they were forced to revise their conscience and start praying for all patients, thus ending the experiment.

Another interesting test was a hospital where terminally-ill patients agreed to be weighed shortly before death and immediately afterwards to establish how much a soul might weigh. 21 grams apparently.

But then they didn't weigh a scientist...

It's Nuts!

On the left is lad's mag Nuts.



















On the right is women's magazine Pick Me Up.

One panders to the red-blooded young male's need for a sexy outlet of bags of silicone covered in skin. One panders to the female's recently discovered (and rather disturbing) need for red blood. Stories about rape, murder, incest and cannibalism among other salacious horrors are apparently what women want as a 'Pick Me Up'

And yet guess which one of this toxic twosome the Co-Operative supermarket have co-operated in removing from its shelves...?

Yes, that's right, the one featuring mock mammaries, come hither looks and articles about which Go Faster stripes boy racers should affix to their cars.

Although not a paid-up feminist by any means, I have long noticed women's magazines becoming increasingly abusive to women, as even if they don't focus on more human horror stories than True Detective magazine, they are encouraging women to believe that they are too fat, too old and not getting enough sex and of the right quality and variety with 'The One'. They seem deliberately designed to undermine the female self-esteem rather than build it as women's magazines of yesteryear believed was their benevolent duty to their readers. They have become one long fest of victimhood and not being good enough. I often wonder what kind of misogynists run these rags, and then, what kind of idiots buy them, but then that might be eroding the idiots', er, sisters' fragile sense of self-esteem, so I'd better not go there...

A male poet friend has even summed up this phenomenon in a frenzied comic poem called 'Fat Sex' which always brings the house down when he performs it.

It's a topsy turvy world we live in and no mistake. But let's not forget that perversion comes in many forms. As does the hypocrisy that invariably accompanies it. So if Nuts is covered up or suffers from premature ejection then the same should apply to other lurid publications unwholesome to the human soul.

On the plus side, Women's Realm seems to have weathered the fashion and has even been known to still give away the odd free knitting pattern. I believe a few Reader's Digest readers are still alive too, gawd bless 'em.

Buzzy, the Helicopter Parent

As anyone who works in University administration will know, there are few phonecalls to make your heart sink like a stone than those which begin; 'I'm phoning to complain on behalf of my son/daughter ____ ____
It's an absolute disgrace that blah blah blah and I demand blah, blah, blah!'

I'm not saying these parents never have a valid complaint and I am always perfectly patient with and polite to them but I invariably have to point out firmly that their Josh or Jocasta will have to contact us directly as THEY are the student/contract holder and not their parents. 'But Josh/Jocasta is far too busy to report this. Have you seen how much coursework he/she has? He/she is on a hospital placement studying 24/7 to be a DOCTOR, I'll have you know!' (God help us, I'm thinking at this point. I hope I am never treated by a doctor incapable of picking up a telephone and reporting a problem or asking a question!)

'Nevertheless if it's important to him/her, I am sure we will hear from them. Please do encourage them to contact us.' Sometimes the crazier parents will ring every colleague in my office to try and elicit a different response, but bottom line; students are legally adults and should be more than capable of picking up the telephone, dashing off an email or visiting the office all by themselves (we even open late on Wednesdays to assist if they are too busy during the academic day). And even if they are not, we are legally obliged to treat them as adults who are, unless they have advised us they have special needs of some kind, in which case they will be offered the appropriate support.

I get particularly riled by the parent who jumps to the conclusion that we don't care or won't do anything about their progeny's problem, and seeks to escalate it to higher powers almost immediately, without even giving us the chance to investigate or liaise with their son/daughter if it sounds too serious a matter to wait for their call. As for 'updates', these are emailed to the contract holder and it is up to them if they share the information with their parent or not.

It has been noticeable over the course of my sixteen years of university administration how the parental trend has been to grow ever more over-protective of children, to the extent they are effectively refusing to let them grow up in some cases, when their role is surely to guide and equip them to fly the nest and lead successful fulfilling lives (I remember in the late 80s, me and my friends couldn't wait to leave home and start our young lives, even if we had no clue what we were going to do.) It is within living memory that students would attend open days on their OWN, rather than the event being turned into an Ascot of competing mothers' hats and outfits. And yet the most nightmare parent (and we've had a few 'office legends') often turns out to have the nicest, politest son or daughter, who looks deeply embarrassed when standing next to the parent ranting at the front desk as if wishing the floor would swallow all strapping 6'3" of their emasculated selves up, though perhaps it is understandable that a parent might feel more protective of the 18-21 year old who still looks about 12 and we get a few of those as well. Sometimes the student will even contact us to apologise for their parents' behaviour later on, so mortified have they been by being frogmarched to our office when they had no problem from their point of view or it wasn't that important. One mother recently saw fit to rant and rave that we had not made disabled provision for her son. It turned out that her son had not registered himself with us as having a disability and had chosen of his own accord, to live in a house with steep steps to the front door and four storeys high to be with his friends, despite his walking difficulties. Far from being grateful at my offer of a new handrail outside the front door as per his mother's demand for his enhanced health and safety, he was furious that his mother had told us about his disability. I apologised to him and said that I was aware that he had not registered with us as having a disability, but felt obliged to respond to his mother's insistence that he was living in an unsafe environment (we can never ignore potential health and safety issues when flagged up).

Some youngsters decide to switch mobile numbers or not take their parents' calls whilst at university as a response to 'smotherlove', though you get the odd father who is also stricken. Students going incommunicado particularly leads to frantic parental phonecalls, but thanks to the Data Protection Act, we literally cannot hand out new phone numbers or email addresses, nor can we tell parents what their son or daughter's exam results were or whether they turned up to whatever exam, though we are happy to pass a message onto the student that their parents wish them to get in touch, or have them checked on by Student Services if there seems to be a genuine concern over their physical or mental welfare.  Notwithstanding, over-involved 'helicopter' parents have actually been linked to the rise of anxiety and depression in youngsters that our Student Services department has observed in the last few years.

I've even heard of parents turning up at job interviews with their sons and daughters nowadays and then wondering why the would-be boss didn't seem to have any confidence in the youngster's ability to work 'on their own initiative' and offer them the job. Or who telephone ahead of the interview to interrogate the HR department or boss about the terms and conditions and where their precious darling would sit. A sure recipe for having their children tied to their apron strings and financially dependent on them until at least middle-age.

Could this be one of the reasons for the rise of the 'kidult', said to spend at least the first twenty years of their adult lives in the active avoidance of assuming responsbility for themselves and playing either commitment-phobe or co-dependent when it comes to relationships?

Why have parents suddenly become so paranoid and over-protective? Don't they have lives of their own anymore? What are they going to do if their children ever do manage to break free, leave home and become people in their own right?

The most darkly comic aspect of this over-weening attitude is that these same parents who have lavished so much attention and money (if not always time) on their offspring have seldom invested the same attention to detail in teaching their offspring  the Green Cross Code or how to cycle safely so that in a moment, all that investment and obsession could be entirely wasted. The dangers of alcohol and substance abuse might also be a useful topic to educate them in. Where is the over-protection then when it is actually needed? I say 'darkly comic' as it is always an absolute tragedy when a needless death happens in real life and I was emotionally shattered for weeks last time we lost a student to a moment of foolishness involving a bicycle, the nearside of a lorry at a junction and an ipod. It is only the irony that is comic. The reality is anything but. Not that there shouldn't be some inbuilt leeway to accommodate the folly of youth and furnish the opportunity to learn from mistakes  It's just that it helps for a youngster to know the rules before breaking them. Safer too.

Before any parents threaten to sue however, I wish to make it clear that this posting by no means applies to ALL parents. Happily a large number of sane and balanced parents continue to exist, even if they insist on accompanying their sons and daughters to Open Days, but are otherwise thankfully, hands off, respectful of their adult child's need to spread their wings and learn to fly for themselves.

Four Funerals and No Wedding

This year I have attended four funerals so far.

First my father in March, then my partner's 10 year old niece who died tragically, then an ex I dated in my 20s and now my mother's cousin.

It has been a sad yet surreal time amid other big transitions in my life. Blogging has taken a bit of a back seat, though I have no intention of abandoning it. Facebook and Twitter have their uses but you can't write on them. Not properly. In fact  I find Twitter so trivially tedious I seldom log into it at all.

But what I wanted to talk about in this posting was how important I've come to realise funerals are and how badly they are often done.

They are not just a means of paying one's final respects, but of processing what has happened towards attaining some kind of 'closure' as the Americans like to call it. I was therefore shocked when the last funeral I attended lasted but a scant 19 minutes before the curtain closed around the coffin. The officiator seemed to think that wearing a long black velvet coat with a ceremonial-looking scarf excused the fact she mumbled into the microphone, hardly made eye contact with the congregation. didn't inform us what sort of service it was and scarcely had anything to say about the deceased she did not delegate to his unrehearsed family, giving the impression she had not even visited them prior to the funeral to get the measure of the man. To cap it all she had even neglected basic housekeeping announcements so that a mobile phone went off across the Crematorium chapel in the middle! - luckily to be quickly silenced. My own mother almost didn't switch hers off when I reminded her saying 'Oh, no one ever rings me on it anyway.'
I think it was supposed to be some kind of 'alternative' funeral, but apart from the wicker coffin, it was impossible to gauge what genre of send-off it was meant to be. Afterwards the 'officiator' skulked in the corner of the anti-chapel avoiding people's gaze rather than shaking hands with each mourner and thanking them for coming/commiserating on their loss like any other brand of minister would.

Was this the deceased's wishes? Did he really ask for such a brief service where no one seemed to know what they were doing except for perhaps getting his choice of music right and finding a nice poem to go in the middle?

In complete contrast my partner's ten year old niece had an extraordinary funeral and wake which seemed to consist of several days of prayers and blessings prior to the committal. Not coming from a religious background, I didn't know what was going on half the time, but couldn't fail to be intensely moved and comforted by all the Catholic ritual and amazed that the Police closed roads for the cortege to pass through and park along village streets, classmates formed guards of honour and an archbishop performed the church blessing the night before the actual funeral. Nothing was too much trouble for the undertaker and he was in evidence until late each day transporting the coffin to this venue and that and then home each night where Emily lay in repose in the dining room for people to go and talk to her or touch her or leave a little token of love such as a card or a ribbon in her white casket. After the hour and a half long funeral during which her friends took her favourite toys up to the alter and spoke about them, her mother sang a beautiful song about the flowers in May accompanied by her father on the guitar and many prayers and tributes were said, the heavy rain confined itself to all around the village, leaving the pallbearers free to carry the coffin the mile down the road to the Good Shepherd Cemetery in the bright sunshine to be committed to the flower-lined grave. The sympathy and kindness of the whole community was similarly amazing and the  family home was subsequently full of people for weeks rallying round her shattered parents and making sure they didn't have to do a thing for themselves. A child's death is always a big thing in Ireland apparently and Emily's unexpected collapse on a school sports field one Saturday morning as she was warming up to play Canogie made the national headlines and hit a national nerve. People literally came from all over to pay their respects, and a minute's silence was held for her on Canogie fields around Ireland. Emily loved being the centre of attention in life and she couldn't have had more attention in death, so although she was such a tragic loss as the youngest member of my partner's family (and his brother's only child), there was some crumb of comfort in the sheer amazingness of the almost-state funeral she had. I had only recently met her for the first time, but will remember her and how full of life she was for ever as she rode my partner's back round his parents' living room demanding to play horses even longer. She was joy personified and had the energy of three children rolled into one. The last child anyone would suspect of having such a devastating undiagnosed heart defect waiting to strike.

My ex Don's funeral was a modest affair and not as well attended as it should have been owing to the fact he had lived a life in three chapters encompassing three quite different areas of the country. Rather embarrassingly, few of the congregation seemed to know the words, even to 'All Things Bright and Beautiful, so that I almost felt like a soloist at times. However the service was at least unrushed and in the safe hands of a confident Mancunian everyman's minister, evidently well-used to the role, who performed a rare feat in delivering a warm, witty and very human tribute to all the best qualities of a man he had never met with a decidedly roguish side, going so far as to say he wished he had met Don as he felt they would have enjoyed a pint together. The Nottingham football anthem played Don in and Mungo Jerry played him out, but it was 'very Don'. The sun shone on the surprisingly pleasant Mansfield crematorium and his ex-wife hosted a 'wake' of afternoon tea on her garden lawn several miles away after.

My father's funeral was a deliberately humanist affair, further complicated by the fact he had no time for music or poetry either. Though considering he would never even acknowledge the fact he might ever die in life, his wishes were necessarily largely guesswork. My sister and I composed the eulogy with inserts from the Humanist Minister who visited our family twice and couldn't do enough. He even managed to talk my sister out of some weird excerpts from sci-fi books she wanted to insert into the service for no apparent reason. The day itself was as awkward as my father was - blowing an unfeasibly snowy gale in mid-March so that half the would-be congregation were snowed in their hillside farms (not an excuse, it made the TV news). Nevertheless we had a half-full Chapel and the service was expertly delivered by the minister, with a couple of non-religious readings finally agreed on and performed by my sister and myself. Music-wise since our father was a big fan of The Onedin Line TV series, we opted for the moving tones of Khachaturian's Spartacus. At the end we inserted a CD of Glenn Miller (the only music artiste he had ever said he could abide) cued up to play 'Moonlight Sonata',  but surprise, surprise, the CD player refused to budge despite five minutes of frantic fumbling so his willow coffin was forced to depart the chapel to silence and a long drive to the snow-blown cemetery on the outskirts of town where the gale carried on howling a blizzard around the walls, but inside restricted itself to intense arctic cold. After a few well-chosen words by the minister, his body was committed to the ground by grave diggers who evidently couldn't wait to get away and we fled to the modest reception at a historic water mill in the village where my mother had arranged vegetarian catering (a first for the local bakery, but they did us proud). Once again technology failed us as we tried to play a DVD of my father talking about his historic conservation work and how he was responsible for 'Best Kept Village' judging in Northern Ireland in a TV production from 1994, yet later back home the DVD played with no problem, as indeed did Glenn Miller's 'Moonlight Sonata' track.

Ultimately I have concluded that apart from attending a funeral, striving to be true to the person whose life is being celebrated is the most important thing as organiser of the onerous duty (though even afterwards, the argument with my mother and sister over the 'Fred Flintstone' style gravestone they favour for my father rumbles on as I point out quite rightly, that it wasn't his style and it is in fact my sister who is the archaeologist and amateur druid in the family).

Maybe those of us who can (ie adults) should all make a separate will purely for our send-off to ensure it is not a haphazard or naff package affair and that our final wishes and favourite pieces of music are in no need of guesswork or the imposition of others' notions of what we want, which often seem to have more to do with what they want.

Meantime, I have been making tentative enquiries about training to become a celebrant as I reckon I'd be pretty good at it and it seems to be the way things are going in England. Though I certainly wouldn't be seeking to put the 'fun' into funeral if I went down that road, rather re-inject the professionalism where it is lacking.

Amidst awaiting my next wedding invitation to balance the sad events out a bit, that is.

Don

I saw him in the distance, rangy and muscular under his blue plaid shirt and stonewashed jeans, his dark hair streaked with silver ruffling in the breeze, his eyes twinkling as only they could, a healthy glow to his skin. He returned my spreading grin and walked quickly towards me. We hugged the hug of old friends absent for far too long. I smelled the once-familiar scent of Embassy cigarettes on his breath and clothes.

'I suppose this means the cremation's off then?' I quipped.

'No, I've come to say goodbye Laura' he replied before seeming to vanish before my eyes.

I woke up, shocked that there was no escape from the news, even in my dreams, yet feeling oddly comforted at the same time.

Today I attended Don's funeral.

We should never have been an item. It was a fluke. A moment of weakness on my newly-dumped part. Young at heart as he was, Don was 19 years older for one thing, patently not the marrying kind, and wait for it, he had an ex-wife and five children to prove it.

But Don knew how to overcome all such misgivings. He knew how to make a girl laugh and feel good about herself, and perhaps even more importantly how to make a girl laugh at the world, and even herself and her silly habit of taking the world far too seriously. In short, he could make you forget yourself and actually notice the birdsong and the beauty of a sunset once more.

We met at the party of a friend-of-a-friend in Coventry where neither of us knew anyone and owing to a logjam in the kitchen we ended up sitting on the stairs together. I believe an invitation to the cinema ensued. I had no other invitations at the time so didn't turn him down.

Things progressed swiftly. His lovemaking was fast and furious but any customer service complaints were met with a roar of laughter. Here was a man totally secure in himself if somewhat selfish. We started meeting for the odd weekend on the Kent coast where he now lived, first in a rambling Victorian commune full of amiable middle-aged hippies near Ashford. Then eventually Don got himself a rented terraced house by the sea with no furniture in it and chatting on the stairs featured again. Every time I visited the sun seemed to be shining and we had lovely weekends walking around Dover, Folkestone and Hastings. I also accompanied Don on a couple of 'booze cruises' to France (popular at the time) to supplement his income as a recently-separated man and a memorable hovercraft trip to Calais (like being in a washing machine) where we sat on Calais beach eating warm bread, fresh tomatoes and camembert before the trip home again. We traipsed around various museums and had a highly amusing afternoon one frosty February when we came upon a group of male nudists perilously frying sausages on our descent to a secluded beach.

We enjoyed many trips in Don's £800 gold Renault car (an auction gamble) and he took me to all the local pubs and to see various down-on-their luck friends of his with whom he traded booze and cigarettes. In car boot sales and second hand shops he was ever on the hunt for overlooked Ming vases or books telling him how to spot an overlooked Ming vase (his get rich quick plan). His car was awash with language tapes (he was always trying to learn a new language) and the inevitable overflowing ash tray. I still cherish the white summer canvas bag he bought me one afternoon in old Hastings.

I always knew it wouldn't last between us and often wondered what he saw in a non-smoking, vegetarian, teetotaller with bad skin and that twentysomething judgmentalism that made me somewhat appalled that he could leave a wife and five children, though apparently she had thrown him out, having discovered a sizeable Sainsburys receipt in his pocket with another woman's shopping on it! As per life's great ironies, the young woman concerned had gone on to have three different children with three different fathers without ever once sleeping with Don. And he had it bad where *Mary was concerned. She was one of the few who had really gotten under his skin. Though according to his friends and relations this was far from the only instance of bad-boydom on his part.

I certainly didn't kid myself that I was his one and only and for the first time in my life that was fine with me. In fact I expected half the chapel to be full of weeping women with brightly coloured handkerchiefs, but actually it was just me and a pretty blonde solicitor and former colleague he had once cheered up by whisking her to Paris upon learning of her recent divorce trauma. Another friendship he had kept up as she turned out to be the last one to visit him in hospital before his unexpected death. No sign then of the mysterious French millionairess he regularly visited on Eurostar who begged him to decamp to France to live with her full-time. He described this woman as 'my soulmate' but said he could never accept her offer and become a kept man. In addition he was devoted to his five children in England whom he saw and took on holidays regularly, not to mention his octogenarian mum.

I surveyed those five children today on the sun-dappled lawn - three strapping twentysomething lads in their funeral suits, the youngest looking startlingly like Don, though they all share his mischievous ready smile, his two girls tall and elegant, one dark and one (the one expecting the first grandchild he will never see) fair. Their mother sits next to them with the elegance and grace of a woman who has long forgiven the past and is just grateful to have five happy, healthy young adults before her. A job well done. On the patio Don's mother (now 93, but elegant as a dowager and sharp as a pin) flicks through photo albums exclaiming more than once 'What did the silly bugger have to go and die for?' She's right. No mother should have to bury their child and that thought brought a frog-sized lump to my throat at the start of the service as she hobbled in, almost as large as the one I had when the curtains closed around the coffin at the end. Nearby the daughter who hasn't seen her for seventeen years tries to lurk in the shadows fearing the flick of her mother's critical tongue, the reason she left home at 14 and dodges attempts at family photographs. Even in death, she has her doubts she can ever compete with 'golden boy' Don. She is flanked by her two engaging thirtysomething daughters who annoyingly have no such problem with their indomitable nan and happily laugh along with her through the lens of generational distance. I talk to Don's mum's 'toyboy' the eightysomething *Jack, a fixture of the family for years, yet seemingly still a fish out of water in terms of the family dynamics.

The whole family together, evidently for the first time in years. Don would have loved this sunny afternoon laden with drinks and buffet sandwiches in his honour. What a shame it has taken his death to bring it about.

Apart from being annoyed by her second class treatment growing up (illustrated by how few photographs of her there seem to be in the family albums), Don's sister *Anita feels Don was slightly unhinged by his insistence on attending an approved city boarding school many miles from Coventry after their father walked out, now known for its high throughput of depressives, alcoholics and devil-may-cares. On the other hand it probably propelled him into further education and the eventual degree that hatched the first solicitor in their working class district. I remember Don was always terribly proud of having bettered himself against the odds (single mum in a council house in the 1950s/60s), though curiously went out of his way to socialise in working class pubs with out of work fishermen and ferrymen, often preferring this to the company of the chattering classes he had been so eager to aspire to.

But then Don's strong social conscience was always the most admirable thing about him, apart from his sense of humour. His career as a solicitor specialised in defending mostly hopeless cases, going where angels feared to tread, but someone had to do the unglamorous side of legal work in the name of British justice. In the last couple of years Don also rose to become leader of his local Labour party, despite or perhaps because of his cheap suits, campaigning for new work and opportunities for the deprived areas of Kent before having to step down owing to ill health. In a cruel twist of fate, he died not of the throat cancer he had contracted (and which he was making a good recovery from) but from a pulmonary embolism which formed in his leg and travelled up to his heart.

It was I who called time on our alliance. Having invited me to Lewes for Bonfire night and the weekend, I then didn't hear from Don until the next invitation, some weeks after said bonfire night, no reference to the previous. I told him firmly but politely. 'No. I'm not going to be messed about, even if it isn't terribly serious.' So that's where we left things, aside from the odd drink over the years, Christmas cards and Facebook contact. It was my most painless relationship, and more to the point, painless relationship break-up ever, and for that I thank him. I also thank Don for the courage he gave my younger and more unconfident self to just go out there, do things and enjoy life. Don loved life and I have learned to love life too. He was also not afraid to make trouble when circumstances dictated, though I am more moderate in that I try not to be the originator of any trouble in my life - just steel myself not to be afraid to finish it. Finally I thank Don for the lifetime's free legal advice he offered me as a parting gift. Sadly he being a criminal lawyer (and me not being a criminal), I never had cause to utilise this generous offer.

Moreover I never did collaborate on that autobiography Don threatened to write and asked me to help him with but I'm sure it would have made a rattling good read!

RIP o' restless Don and here's to you with a large lemonade! If you hadn't existed, someone would have had to invent you! Fond memories always. Lxx

Nanford Guest House - Britain's Worst Hotel used by Child Sex Ring

News that Nanford Guest House on Oxford's Iffley Road was a frequent venue for the 'Bullfinch' child sex ring, currently being sentenced, brought to mind that this same local guest house was also voted Britain's worst hotel by TripAdvisor in 2008, prompting various national journalists to book an overnight stay and write newspaper articles confirming how awful it was, one reporting that she had been awoken by what sounded like a body being dragged down the stairs at around 2am. She had wedged her door shut with an old fridge as the lock was dodgy and cowered under the covers for the remainder of the night.

Yet, if she truly suspected a body was being dragged down the stairs, why did she not phone the Police? It seems strange noises, dodgy characters, death traps and environmental health issues (including a resident's lounge smelling of urine) abounded back in 2008, yet no one apparently saw fit to call either the Police or the  local Environmental Health department to have the place investigated. Why not? What does it take before a supposedly intelligent  individual suspects that something very wrong is going on, possibly criminal? Not least a trained newshound ever in want of the next big scoop?

More than one Trip Advisor review advised 'Do not stay here alone' and not to stay at all unless you were desperate for accommodation.

The sex ring had been operating since 2004, four years before the Nanford won the accolade of Britain's Worst Hotel. There is more to this than meets the eye is my feeling about it.

Update 15/05/13: According to today's Oxford Mail, the emergency services tape of a rape being reported at the Nanford by a guest in the next room actually dates back to 2006, which potentially means the gang could have been caught seven years ago! Which begs the question, what have the Police been doing all this time? Did they really decide to bury their hands in the sand about investigating what was going on?

Death of a PM

I was most put out that Margaret Thatcher died the other week. As a friend pointed out; 'What are you going to do Laura? She was your only impression!' So, career over, I thought I would pen a poem. Not exactly a tribute but...

'You’ve Never Had It So Good’

The lady wasn’t for turning

Or helping other women off the sticky floor, through the glass ceiling

Thatcherism offered no sisterhood, ran no women’s support groups

Nor did she care for minors

Thatcher, thatcher, milk snatcher

Or miners

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out

Or trade unionists

Never mind strike, get on your bike.

As for your three day week, you’re making Britain weak

Don’t you see those other countries coming up the rear

Tooled up to the nines, shiny new factories in gear

To compete against us while you have another fag break

Foreigners can keep their lights on, bury their dead. Collect their rubbish.

Why can’t we?

Yes, crank out another rust bucket Friday Special at British Leyland

While making out you’re doing a favour for England

But you don’t fool Maggie

Determined to break your stranglehold on the economy

Like some sociopath to socialists.

She sold the working man his council house for a few bob, then closed down his pit job.

Using the Police as her own private security force to protect the scabs

Creating scabs that would never heal

And men ungrateful for longer lives of unclogged lungs

Who didn’t care for shiftlessness.

Then she hit you with the poll tax

And you bit back with a poleaxe

More frightening than the Falklands

And finally the lady was for turning.

She tore the heart out of coal and cars and ships and steel

But offered instead no Roosevelt New Deal

Just the inexorable rise of privatisation and its fees

Until forced to devise Corporate Responsibility

To infer they don’t rob customers without environmental reason

Successive governments changed little of what Thatcher put in place

Except to embrace the EU and open the immigration floodgates

The messing with our NHS and education go on

Until the day can dawn when all tax-funded services are gone.

Those who did well under Thatcher love her

Those whose communities she destroyed loathe her

She divided to rule and she loved opposition

She would never have agreed to a coalition

She would never have fiddled her expenses either

Yes, she had a few qualities as a leader

And her ism will live on long after she’s gone.

But her greatest legacy was surely as a figure of controversy

For love or hate, she provoked debate

With her ‘don’t care got nowhere’ mantra

And sober single-minded agenda

She was the enemy of political apathy

A woman who defied what a woman should be

She made people care about politics like few others did

As she opened a pandora’s box without a resealable lid.

©LS King 2013

Originally I looked up Margaret Thatcher quotes and intended to cobble a poem together using those, but things went in a completely different direction as they often do in writing. I did find some of the sayings unintentionally amusing though (Mrs Thatcher was known for having very little sense of humour and never getting jokes). Could that be one of the reasons she was so embarrassingly awful in her cameo on  'Yes Minister' which she insisted they write for her...?

• 'Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.'
• 'When I’m out of politics, I’m going to run a business. It’ll be called ‘Rent-a-Spine’
• ‘Politics used to be about trying to do something. Now it’s about trying to be someone.’
• 'We are a grandmother'
• 'I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.'
• 'You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it'
• 'I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air'
• 'There is no such thing as society, there are men and women and there are families.'
• 'To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.'
• 'What we think, we become. My father always said that... and I think I am fine.'
• 'Don’t follow the crowd. Let the crowd follow you.'

Brian Gunn-King 1933-2013

Since I have been so taken up lately with advising all the societies, workplaces and clubs my father was involved with of his recent death, I thought I would share a tribute on this blog. It is of course far from the full story of my father, but his death is naturally about him, not me. And for all his faults as a father and general eccentricities, he was at heart a well-meaning man who achieved much in his life. Something else quite surprising was the realisation of just how many remarkable men I had met in my childhood via my father's involvements - many of whom were friends of his - Richard St Barbe Baker (founder of an international organisation now responsible for the planting of some 23 trillion trees worldwide), Lord Dowding (commander of Bomber Command) Dr Gordon Latto (an eminent Reading physician credited with saving Sir Francis Chichester from cancer prior to his circumnavigation of the world, Gurudev Shree Chitrabhanu (Indian spiritual leader of the Jains, whose handshake was like an electric shock), Professsor Scott Nearing (a pioneer of self-sufficiency long before The Good Life was thought of) and Wilfred Capper (founder of the 560-mile Ulster Way to rival the famous Pennine Way in England). Then there were the videos my father featured in which we watched after the funeral and made him seem like a David Attenborough of architecture and conservation (completely different to how he was at home!) I will end with said tribute...

'It is with sadness I advise of the death of Brian Gunn-King on 18^th March 2013 in his eightieth year, following a long neurological illness, bravely borne. Brian became a vegetarian during his teens and devoted the rest of his life to spreading the word about vegetarianism, veganism and the environment.

Brian was primarily involved with the International Vegetarian Union of which he was for many years, Honorary General Secretary, helping to organise several international congresses and working closely with the then-President of the IVU, the late Dr Gordon Latto, winning the Mankar memorial award for services to vegetarianism (see photo) in 1977.

On a local level in his adopted Northern Ireland (he was born in Coventry), Brian and his Iyengar yoga teacher wife Margaret arranged many events and cookery demonstrations via the Vegetarian Society of Ulster of which Brian was for some years the president. Brian also served as the president for the Ulster Society for the Preservation of the Countryside working alongside the late founder Wilfred Capper who, inspired by the foundation of the 250-mile Pennine Way in England, founded his own  560-mile ‘Ulster Way’ in Northern Ireland, saving many areas of outstanding natural beauty across six counties from ruinous development.

In his professional life as a town and country planning chief, Brian also did much to protect and conserve both beautiful architecture and beautiful scenery, successfully advocating responsible landscaping and greater tree-planting in a number of new and rejuvenated areas. One village Brian worked on – Gracehill – won 15 environmental awards as a direct result of his input and Brian featured in a number of books, papers and documentaries on the environment and architecture of Northern Ireland. In addition Brian served as judge for Ulster’s ‘Best Kept Village’ competition for many years.

Brian was a lifelong member of Men of the Trees promoting the planting of millions of trees worldwide in addition to a number of architectural societies. When not campaigning for healthier lifestyles, animal welfare and the saving of heritage and the environment, Brian enjoyed veganic gardening, philately, photography, coin and postcard collecting, rambling, travelling and relaxing with his beloved cats in front of detective dramas.

An avowed atheist, Brian was buried in Northern Ireland following a humanist service, in accordance with his wishes. Regrettably no green cemetery was available in the area, though the family managed to source a handsome willow casket of which Brian would have thoroughly approved. Brian leaves a wife Margaret, and two daughters, Sita-Laura and Venetia.'

Horsegate (what would Mr Ed say?)

                                                                                          

Where’s the Beef?

A horse is a horse of course of course

Unless it’s a Findus Lasagne of course

It’s not always a steady course

Talk to those misled.

‘Meat is murder’ sang the Smiths

Meat is 29% according to Aldi

So should you feel 71% less guilty

Like that smug vegetarian?

Who can look Dobbin in the eye?

Enjoying the view from the moral high ground

As lesser mortals they decry?

Will you remain a demi-vegetarian by proxy,

Or are you game for something foxy?

When price drives demand roadkill

To keep down that weekly food bill

And Heston’s produced a tasty badger roulade

As an alternative to the remains of a knacker’s yard

With prickly hedgehog fool for dessert

Or will the deceit of your receipt

 Incite you to put your money where your mouth is

In favour of farm-fresh, free-range, organic, well-bred breast-fed, university-educated rare-breed animals

You’ve known since they were hatched and on first name terms

Paying the price for food to be what it says on the can

Reading between the labels, we should delete this food spam

Let’s send the kebab van packing and the burger too

Say no to hors for our h'ouevre

Demand the truth about marscapone

Drink milk from the UK not the Ukraine

And support British farmers and fishermen again. 

 ©LS King 2013

Suicide by Duress

A stroke recoverer friend in his 60s recently visited a new GP for the first time.

‘Have you ever considered suicide?’ she asked as she went through his notes.

‘No’, he replied.

‘Why not?’ she asked.

He was so thrown by her question (and having lost his ability to react spontaneously anyway through stroke damage) that he did not reply.

I suggested to him that he should complain to the surgery and get to the bottom of whether this was professional misconduct or she simply didn’t explain herself properly.

However he has so many battles to fight on a daily basis, he has to choose them carefully and is thinking of just requesting a different doctor in future.

It set me thinking about how not so long ago suicide was considered ‘a sin’ to the point that a suicide could not be buried in consecrated ground, yet somehow suicide has now become socially acceptable and even touted as ‘a human right’.

I particularly find it disturbing that this is bound to affect and influence those who might have challenging lives or health issues but who don’t necessarily want to die – they just want proper compassionate care and to be able to trust their health professionals to provide it.

To read that NHS hospitals got a ‘bonus’ for each patient they put onto the ‘Liverpool Care Pathway’ to bring their lives to an end (even if their lives were nowhere near their natural end) is frankly chilling. Some patients on the LCP have not even been old but cancer sufferers in their 40s and 50s and many it now transpires were being placed on the LCP without their consent or their next of kin’s consent.

Moreover, since when did food and fluids come to be termed ‘treatment’ to be withdrawn, rather than basic sustenance required as an essential human right?

What next? A posthumous award to Dr Harold Shipman for his humanitarian works? It seems to me there is little difference between what he was doing and what the Liverpool Care Pathway has been doing.

If we have an over-population problem, there must surely be better ways of solving it than manslaughter at worst and societal coercion for those who've served their economic purpose at best.