Posts

Showing posts from January, 2010

70's music

The news in Britain is so bleak and I am full of cold (again) I thought I'd cheer myself up by reminding me of what I wrote for a school bulletin some years back when I chaired the equivalent of the PTA. This was part of the publicity for our fundraising party, the last and best we've had, with our parents band singing 'live'. You don’t need to go Sailing, Walking on the Moon , to the Mull of Kintyre , the Yellow River , the Mississippi and certainly not the Rivers of Babylon to find Clair, Vincent, Fernando and Maggie . May , some time between January and The Twelfth of Never but after December ‘63 is not a Space Oddity , yet as Night Fever In the Summertime (one of those Seasons in the Sun ) might Knock Three Times before you can put Another Brick in the Wall . Grandad with his Combine Harvester is not a Sad Sweet Dreamer . Don’t Give Up on Us! Don’t Cry for us, Argen. Tina is Three Times a Lady and she can’t live Without You . How Can I Be Sure? She’s go

What? Whose freedom?

Recently on a private (Singapore) forum group someone posted a copy of "A German View of Islam" without comment. (This widely circulated "view" admonishing peace-loving Muslims to speak up against the fanatics or risk having our freedoms curtailed has in fact been traced to a blog post here that had got modified along the way.) There was a quick response from a practising Muslim who noted that she was offended. That kind of sent a chill through the cyber space of this network spanning much of the globe. Two other people (included myself) responded to the original post with what I thought were considered opinions. I didn't mention, though, that my husband was evacuated from the City of London when 9/11 happened following rumours that London would be the next target. Then he went incommunicado till he got home. I remember the overwhelming sense of relief when he did. The first news I heard of the 7/7 bombings was of a bomb at "his" station. Does anyone

Workshop, not Casino

This is a very interesting comment on the state of manufacturing in the UK. The writer says that UK should be 'making things' (workshop) and not pushing bits of paper around in the financial markets which to all intents and purposes makes it a casino. What manufacturing is there in the UK? My Geography lessons at school (admittedly this was rather a long time ago) taught me about the significance of shipbuilding in the UK. Where do you find a shipyard in the UK now? It reminded me of a "blue-sky thinking" piece called Money, manufacturing, farming that I wrote nearly a year ago. Then read it alongside this much earlier article by David Green, Director of Civitas . Tell me what you think. Back to Organic-Ally . Become our fan on Facebook .

A Dangerous Idea

We've been out clearing the snow from our pavement. Actually it was more like ice. I put my shovel into it and removed chunks of snow/ice and thought: what would an Eskimo call this kind of "semi-snow-ice"? (What is the colloidal equivalent to snow/ice?) Is this the type of snow to make an igloo with? Turn on the (24 hour) TV news and you hear constant reports of how people are snowed in and councils are not gritting the smaller roads, etc. etc and it is dangerous, icy, slippery, treacherous, unacceptable, etc. Picture this: it rains, your house is flooded, the rains subside. Do you wait for the government, local council, whatever, to come to clean up the mess? Or do you try to clean your house out? So why, my Singaporean mind wonders, do people complain about pavements and roads not being gritted when they could simply clear their own pavements and even the bit of road in front of their own house? Is this a culture of dependence gone too far? The government has to do thi

Smacked children more successful later in life

Wonders never cease. Saw this report yesterday. What the report does not say is -- as I've said before -- you should only need to smack a child once.