Organic-Ally

I really cannot understand why parents push their prodigies into university. Let me go on field trip or I'll sue, prodigy, 13, tells college Clearly these brains are so advanced they cannot see that learning something/sitting exams/graduating university earlier does not make them any better/more mature/nicer people. So what if my child is able to sit A Level exams at age eight, ten, or twelve? After that, what? My son was able to read anything he set his eyes on at five. So Dad bought him a whole set of Famous Five books. Why not? Both Mum and Dad enjoyed the Famous Five . Son tried reading one and gave up. He did not have the emotions to cope with that kind of adventure. It frightened him. He read the lot more recently and quite enjoyed them. Age nine is so different from age five when you are under a decade old. Thirteen-year-old boys should do what 13-year-old boys do: get zits and gain an interest in girls. Children and only children once. They should not be deprived of their ...

Do you know someone --anyone -- above the age of 40 who has NEVER coloured her hair? I was researching old people in my mid-30s. It was advantageous to me then to point out that I was already greying and felt much at home with the old people I spent a lot of time with. But they kept telling me I was grey not because I was old (they were in their 70s, 80s and 90s and I was relatively young to them), but that I read too many books. Crunch came when I returned to Singapore to prepare for my wedding. Friends suggested that I might consider colouring my hair, either "just to hide the grey", or sometimes in a more diplomatic way, to give it some 'highlights'. Having seen my mum struggle to keep her hair black when there wasn't that wide array of over-the-counter hair dyes we now have, and having seen how beautiful she looked when she went completely 'silver', I was loath to colour my hair. Some years back one hairdresser had in fact suggested my trying "bur...

In the parent-and-toddler group I help to run we have two fathers from Croatia who bring their daughters. They often chat loudly together during singing time. The lady in charge is afraid to tell them off because it could be viewed as racism. I spoke firmly to these fathers and immediately instead of talking between themselves they sat down with their daughters and did "Row, row, row your boats" etc with them. The young girls were delighted. I can get away with telling these parents most things because I am not-white. So I'm glad that there are people like Mr Sewell who dares tell it as it is: (black) boys need fathers . Check out also earlier post here .

This week the talk has been how to control dangerous "status" dogs owned by young men (usually) who are often simply young people on benefits. They swagger around with their pit bull-like dogs, letting these dogs foul the pavement and often use these dogs to threaten others. Would you, in your right mind, confront one of these if you saw that they were not picking up after their dogs? So our good minister, a certain Mr Johnson, has been talking about making sure that dog owners insure their dogs against their biting innocents. My former band instructor said he came from a school in Singapore called "Holy Innocents". The boys' nickname for their school was "Holy in no sense". Mr Johnson was, in my reckoning, speaking "wholly in no sense". Then there was the news of John Veneables, "one of the Bulger killers", being thrown back into prison. A certain children's "Tsar" (advocate) also said that we are criminalizing our c...

Grrrrr! more like. I wonder if these cold callers know how annoying they are. They call often when I am cooking, trying to get a baking tray out of the hot oven, or stopping something from boiling over. Or in the middle of my lunch which I sometimes forget to eat. You run to the phone, answer it and ... nothing. No one breathes, no music. Pure nothing. Then, I imagine, something clicks or lights up on THEIR machine to indicate that someone has picked up the phone. Then they speak, usually asking for my husband. I have been so fed up recently about these calls I've taken to doing the same thing to them. I pick up the phone and when the silence indicates that it is a cold caller, I'd wait. When they ask to speak with "Mr T" I know it IS a cold caller. I hold my breath for a few seconds, then I hang up. The most hateful ones are those who say, "O! Don't worry! We are not trying to sell you something." Yeah, sure. Did they call to discuss the weather or shal...

Found ourselves reading this comment in the papers: Schools are churning out the unemployable and nodding our heads in agreement. Husband gets sent lots of CVs whether or not he is recruiting. Most of these go straight into the bin. If it's not Oxford, Cambridge or one or two from London University, he does not even bother to look. This article tells us how schools or rather teachers seem fearful to teach. They "facilitate". This morning I heard a trailer on radio of how a young man believes that while in the past teachers were respected purely because they were teachers, these days teachers have to "earn their respect". I'm afraid the schools must have had the management consultants in, paid them a lot of dosh, and then decided to "facilitate". As a former management consultant, I can tell you we are very good at teaching clients how to "facilitate" in the work environment. Assuming that grown-up workers have a basic knowledge, we teach...

Yesterday my son was chuffed to be playing his first rugby match for the school in the afternoon. If you've seen his 'sporting skills', you would understand why this is such a big deal in our household. At breakfast I had to remind him of three things. Can't remember the first two, but the third was about teamwork. Then we moved on to Paul's analogy of the church as the body. Which part do you play? If everyone is an eye, what good is it? Or if everyone was a hand, not any good either. Later on that morning I had the reason to think about this analogy again and almost prayed "Lord, don't make me a bunion."! When I made this remark after dinner, husband laughed and said, "Or verrucca!" Everyone in a church body has a part to play. But sometimes we get to a point when God allows us to go through the darkest of sorrows and deepest of pain. We are tired, we are worn. Everything around us seems to have caved in on us. We cannot take it any more. I...

I am often not sure whether to worry about climate change given all the conflicting evidence, lobbying and mud-slinging. (See earlier post.) But I believe that doing something positive for the earth, to preserve its fertility cannot be bad. After all, the earth "belongs to the Lord". As my son once said when he was six: "There is no right in doing wrong and there is no wrong in doing right." So these two Telegraph articles are interesting: Britain facing food crisis as world's soil 'vanishes in 60 years' and Spend more on food rather than holidays, says organic lobby . When it's gone, it's gone. No soil to farm with. No water to irrigate. No food is to be grown. What good is the ability to buy cheap clothes when you cannot farm food to eat? Can you eat your cheap clothes? We are looking forward to our "holiday" (aka visit to my home country) which we try to do once in two years. My son knows no other "foreign holidays" apar...

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...

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...

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 .

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...

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.

I was just walking along minding my own business going over in my mind my plans for the rest of the day when I noticed something being dropped from a window across the road. Little boy had thrown a toy out from his first floor window. The ground was strewn with soft toys and books. Next a framed photograph was hurled out. I thought his mum is not going to like that. Maybe she does not know that this is happening. So I crossed the road and rang the bell, and knocked. It was a house that had been converted into two flats so maybe no one heard me. I asked the boy in blue pyjamas where his mum was, was she asleep, was she not well, etc. He attempted to give answers but they were not very coherent. Maybe she's lying unconscious and needed help. The boy indicated that he wanted back something he had thrown out. The window was not secured at all and there was every possibility that he would climb out. Immediately my training on child protection, etc. kicked in. I told him to stay where he...

We were very late in getting our accounts to the accountant for tax purposes this year, largely due to husband's drawn-out illness. I really hate the time of year when we have to do the trial balance for the business. As my friend, who's really more into these matters than I, says they don't call it a TRIAL balance for nothing. One item that came up was "Repairs and Renewals". It got me thinking as we've had so many this year in the house. Son tore a large-ish hole in his pyjamas, "But they are my favourite!" So Mum (ie me) ended up mending (ie repairing) it. There was one week several items of textile (I can't remember what now) needed either repairs or buttons sewn back on, etc. I was actually quite proud of myself: instead of chucking these items out, we (ie I) repaired those. The washing machine went wonky. Do we buy a new one or have it repaired? It turned out that husband has bought insurance cover on its repair. Great! One phonecall was a...

Recently I received some information from Janne, founder of Tabitha, and read this story. I'm copying and pasting the lot to show how we can make a real difference in the lives of those, often far away from us, who only want a chance to help themselves. ============ November 2009 Dear friends and partners, This week marks the end of the first UN held Khmer Rouge trial of Duch – the infamous head of Toul Sleng – a torture and death chamber of more than 14,000 Khmers. Duch has said he is guilty and he has said he is sorry, but these words have little meaning for the survivors for he also says “I was just following orders”. There is no remorse. When I started Tabitha Cambodia back in October of 1994, the wounds of this brutal regime were still open and raw. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were still active in many parts of the country. People were struggling to make sense out of their losses – losses which included family, homes, education and their very fabric of society, their faith. We...

Husband was back at work yesterday, the first time in five weeks. He had taken two weeks off to coincide with son's half-term break so that we could do all sorts. A visit to granny had to be cancelled because I had put my back out two weeks before, and granny herself had had her wrist in a cast. OK, so we booked tickets for the special exhibition at the British Museum. Of course son had to manifest another cold on that Wednesday morning. He recovered after a couple of days of rest, as usual. But husband copped it. Friday he struggled to get to the hospital for his ultra-sound scan because his consultants wanted to be sure that his liver was OK. He came home exhausted. Ironically liver was OK but he was exhausted from the cold symptoms. He was in bed most of the weekend. Monday, we thought his cold was over. Tuesday it was my turn to get this cold. Wednesday husband was at the clinic because his cough was bad, his temperature was fluctuating and he was not in very good nick. Pleuris...

Chatting with husband at lunch (still recovering ever so slowly from pneumonia) it transpired that our son had been smacked not once -- as I thought -- but twice. Husband recounted how he had to smack son when he was much younger after doing exactly what he had been warned not to do. It's like, "You do that one more time and you will be smacked." Son did it one more time and immediately -- smacking is only effective if it's immediate -- and was smacked on the back of his hand. "I had to do it only once. Never had to do it again," he said. And of course there is this other thing about "always carry out your threat". It must have been something quite serious to warrant a smack. Back to Organic-Ally . Become our fan on Facebook .

This morning at breakfast, husband still off sick, asked son due for a History exam this morning: "What is the middle name of Alexander the Great?" Son: Uh, uhm, "the"! So delightful he is now. Yet there was a time before he was out of nappies when he would keep pushing the boundaries. Well, he still does, actually. For reasons I cannot remember he was told he was not to cross the line between the hall and the living room. Maybe it's the staircase that we thought could pose some danger. What did our young man do? He walked up to the line/boundary and threw his toy into the forbidden area. Would Mum let me go out there to retrieve my toy? He looked at us and waited for a reaction from us. Can't remember what we did, probably ignored him. And he learned when mum and dad set boundaries, those remain as boundaries. Once while he was still toddling he took to biting, purely out of mischief. He was told off sternly, "Do not bite!" And every time he appro...

I stole this from The Telegraph . I've found myself saying to my husband what joy our silly-stage nine-year-old is bringing us. Every day. The proof of the pudding is when he turns 13, 15, etc, really. Meanwhile I am finding great joy in watching him grow up slowly but surely in learning to be more and more independent and learning greater responsibility with each passing day. This article reminded me of "the cane". When growing up in Singapore, "the cane" was ubiquitous in households with young children. This was usually hung up high on a hook on a wall in the living room. Do/Did parents use the cane? Of course. But only once. The cane, when properly used, needs to be used only once, if at all, in the life-time of a child. Before that, parents and carers would point and say, if you misbehave, disobey or did something that might endanger yourself or someone else, the cane will be used. After it had been used -- once, if at all -- parents point at the cane and s...