Black is the new stupidity

It’s just natural to want to be able to find stuff, isn’t it?

We live in such a modern, clever world. So much thought goes into the design of absolutely everything that you’d think it would all work so smoothly by now, wouldn’t you?  But fashion always gets in the way of function. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the desire to make everything around us black. Sorry, that should read make everything around us BLACK!

Here’s just one example. I was cycling home from a delightful day out around the High Peak and Tissington Trails in Derbyshire the other evening. Nights were still long, so by 4.30pm it was starting to get dark. And it was also beginning to rain. For easy routes I carry all my stuff in a mountain bike pannier as I hate rucksacks unless its going to be a really rough day of off-roading on the mountain bike.

My shiny new black and white Specialized bike is fitted with a removable Topeak pannier. It’s black, of course, both inside and out. It has silly zips with the grippers fixed to a short length of cord. These invariably get caught inside the zip and so are hard to find when the light is fading because they’re black. But once inside I’m quick to pull out my Altura Night Vision overtrousers. They’re black of course, with a little bits of reflective fabric down the side. Let’s ignore the fact that after just a few months they let in water and soak your legs. Let’s  focus on the colour needed for night vision. Black with shiny bits. Great.

Deep inside the black-lined pannier is my super multi-tool inside its lovely black cover. At least I think it’s there – I’ve not seen it for weeks. But if I need it I’ve got my Petzl Tikka XP headtorch. Lovely bit of kit, but why is it black? It’s a torch. You know? . . .for use in the dark.

This ageing blogger is getting older by the second, and eyesight is fading. No longer is my sight as acute as it once was.  But nothing is helped by this infatuation with everything being black. I could go on, but I’d probably start feeling the urge to write this in black text on a black background – just to be fashionable.

Not in front of the children

Man crying

I’ve been trying not to cry recently.  Well, not in front of the kids, anyway.

For 25 years I’ve worked for my local council. I’ve loved the work, thrown hundreds of hours of my own time into the job each year because I love it. And now they’re throwing me away.

More accurately, they’re saying I have to compete with two other people for one post. Meanwhile, other staff who have been employed with external funding (ie non-local authority money) seem to have been added to the payroll in these new plans, whilst my older colleagues are for the chop.

I know we can all say we work hard, and that we deserve fairer treatment in these times of public sector cuts. I know all that. Because I prefer to stay anonymous on this blog at the moment  I can’t tell you about the all the stuff I’ve done. Awards, innovations, imagination, massive web presence and so on. That’d be blowing my own trumpet. . . it goes deeper than that. I came into my particular area of public sector work because I care. I’ve given my all, working long in to the night and at weekends.

And there’s the problem. I ddn’t realise that my work didn’t care about me. So today I could be facing the axe, just as I did 10 years or so ago. Back then quite  a lot of people campaigned for the retention of my post and, after 12 months, it was retained. I even received an apology from our council for the distress caused.

But things are different now. Everyone is cutting. Everyone is going. No-one can care about individual losses in the public sector because so many people are being shed. Everywhere. There are some amazingly poignant blogs being written by public sector workers who have or are being made redundant. And maybe I’ll be joining them soon, I don’t know.

I remember the shock of seeing my father cry when, decades ago, his employer, The Express Lift Company, made him redundant.  My young boy asked me what was wrong the other day – why do you look so worried, daddy? It was hard not to let out the tears and tell him why.  Fathers shouldn’t cry, should they?

This one does. But for now, and for as long as I can manage,  it’s not in front of the children.

Photo credit: Creative commons Dr Case

Let’s be honest

My young son came home from school recently with a letter. “Your boy is not very confident in maths”, it said, “so we’re arranging some lunchtime booster sessions for him.”

Oh, what caring staff, I thought.

Actually, my boy does pretty well at school – usually around the top in most things – though numeracy is certainly one of his weaknesses. So when I went to talk to his teacher I expected to hear their concern about his education, and how they could help.

But it soon became clear this was about the school, not the child. SATs tests are coming up in May – and I think these are compulsory lunchtime sessions to help the school do well in the league tables, not help my child do well in numeracy.

I’d welcome him having the extra sessions, but please call it what it is.
Dear school – you’re  not trying to boost my son’s performance – you’re boosting yours!

Picture credit: Creative commons image from Touija Elementary School.

School for Scandal

Right now the media is full of stories of Britain’s arctic weather. Questions are being asked about how and why our country grinds to a halt every time it snows.

The obvious answer is that we’re simply not used to it, and that the investment in infrastructure needed to cope with these brief cold snaps just can’t be justified because they happen so rarely. And this may be a fair point. We can’t stop the weather.

But it never fails to amaze me how schools up and down the country close their doors at the drop of a hat – or should I say “at the drop of a snow flake”? It was worse in 2009 when no-one had experienced a cold winter in England for the last ten years or so. But again in 2010 huge numbers of schools in low-lying or flat areas all shut their doors on the first day of snow. Why?

My local radio station spent all its time reading out lists of hundreds of schools that were closed. Parents who were fully expecting to struggle in to work suddenlyfound they had to stay at home to care for children, and the knock-on effect must be considerable. If that parent is a health-worker, a train driver or a myriad of other essential services, is it any wonder the country grinds to a halt? Even some teachers were forced to stay at home because their own children (who go to a different school) couldn’t go  in because that school had closed.

The domino effect on the entire country is massive. Should we not all urge for schools to be forced to make contingency plans for cold weather? Can’t we plan ahead and identify parents who would be willing to help out in such an emergency? If CRB checks are an issue, let”s get those sorted in advance, or call upon those existing provider of after-school activities to help out. And even pay them? I’ve offered my own services to our local headteacher either before or after normal school hours. I’m no teacher, but I am CRB-cleared.  And I can easily make sandwiches for my kids in the morning if they’re worried about feeding them. I can’t be the only one to think this way.

It appalled me last year to walk the kids to school, only to find a staff member standing at the gates to tell us that the school was closed. So we walked home again, and I had to explain to my young kids how I was upset at the example their teachers were setting to our kids, and that I wouldn’t want them to think this was really an OK thing to do. I wasn’t upset because I had to take a day off school. I’m lucky – I can usually get my boss to agree to allow me to work from home if I have to look after the kids. Quite honestly, I was actually looking forward to cycling in to work, and disappointed when I couldn’t.

Follow the link on the picture below to see some more reasoned arguments about school closures.

I wouldn’t expect normal classes to be run during snowy weather. Songs and games in the school hall would be just fine by me. Or a film. Or stories. In many cases it would probably only need to be for an hour or two. Enough teachers would eventually manage to get their way in to school, just as the rest of us arrive late for work in these conditions, too.  But arrive we damned well do. So let’s show our kids that we don’t give up, or that it’s not OK to have a day off to go sledging because the footpaths are a bit slippery, or because the normal contingent of staff can’t be guaranteed to be on-site by 8.30am. One local headteacher said he’d had to close the school because he could only guarantee four teaching staff being present for 200 junior school children. But what about the huge pool of local parents? Couldn’t we call on some of them to assist? Have we even thought about asking them?

We need an Emergency Plan – call it a Snow Plan – but one that could equally well serve us under other unusual situations. Build it, test it, revise it – then use it!

I don’t expect schools to operate normally. But I do expect the majority of them to operate in some form. I firmly believe it’s their social responsibility to do this. And, in its turn, this country would operate so much better too.

OK, you’ll tell me that I don’t understand the issues involved in child-care, health and safety, local government regulations and so forth. Well, when our country freezes over a bit, quite frankly I don’t, and I don’t care. I know it’s different in hilly country, especially in the north. But I’m here in the Midlands, where every other employer expects its staff to make the effort to come in to work. I simply ask why shouldn’t we expect this of our schools, who have the greatest social responsibility of all to keep going and to not let the country grind to a halt?

And why can’t we, as parents, help them achieve this?

Not quite a Hoopoe

It’s just natural to want to see interesting wildlife in your garden, isn’t it?

Woodcock in a Derby garden

Many years ago a friend of mine had said that she would die happy if she managed to have a Hoopoe visit their UK garden. Well, it’s never happened, of course, but last week I think she achieved a good second-best.

It’s been pretty cold and snowy here in England for the last week. Our own garden was visited by a female pheasant, but my friend beat that hand’s-down. She emailed to say that she had a Woodcock in her suburban Derby garden. It seemed pretty unlikely, but then she sent me the photo. Yep, woodcock it was, for sure.

It stayed around for over 24 hours, lurking under a beech hedge and emerging from time to time to probe for worms with its long bill in the soft soil of her lawn. It really made her day, and she watched it through binoculars from the comfort of her living room sofa. She told me that she watched time and time again as it did a sort of dance, shifting onto one foot and then the other, whilst at the same time waggling its tail like a celebrity dancer from Strictly Come Dancing (Ann Widdecombe?) Presumably this was designed to disturb any worms in the soil which would come closer to the surface, only to be gobbled up by this most unusual of garden visitors.

It’s likely that the bird hadn’t come into the surban garden from nearby woodland, but was a migrant  – a new arrival, escaping even colder conditions on the continent. Perhaps exhausted, it dropped down after its long journey northwards to rest and find food before continuing onwards for a more suitable – or even respectable – habitat for a woodcock. Sadly the bird took flight after a neighbour popped round to see her unusual visitor. In his enthusiasm to take his own picture, he moved too suddenly, and the woodcock took fright immediately, and flew off strongly over the hedges and houses. Let’s hope it found a good place to stay for the winter, and that neither the local cats nor a nearby pair of peregrine falcons get it.

All in all, it’s just another hole in the wall.

Having moved house a few years ago from a solid, brick built Victorian terrace to a relatively new home built with modern materials, I’ve found the simple task of fixing things to the wall really quite a challenge.

Whilst plasterboard and hollow moulded doors posed a challenge to start with, it was the Thermalite blocks on the inside of the house that really caused a problem.  How do you fix a screw into it? Drilling the hole was child’s play, but getting a wall plug to stay still and take a screw was nigh on impossible. I used to call them breeze-blocks, but that’s actually quite a strong material. Aerated block is another term for Thermalite block, I gather, and that may give you a clue as to its nature. . .

. . It’s soft. It’s Very soft.

Even the largest, chunkiest of wall plugs that I had lying around the garage simply   wouldn’t do it. The moment a wall plug lost its grip, it rotated in its hole, enlarging it and eventually falling out.  Putting up shelves, or fixing a bracket to hold a ladder seemed like an impossible dream.

And then, just as they say in the adverts, “My life changed when  I discovered product X“. But this was almost true when I tried Plasplugs Thermal Block fixings. As you can see from the image taken from Plasplug’s own website, they come with a screw thread for biting into the soft wall material. And they are fitted using a tool fixed to an electric drill on low speed to drive them home.

The bite they have is so much better than anything else I’ve found. And even if you make a hash of it as I did once when I failed to drill the guide hole deep enough, things can still be rescued. On trying to remove the half-inserted fixing, I broke the surrounding block material. The resulting hole was like a like a gaping chasm, mocking my incompetence. So after some careful thought I mixed up some Polyfilla powder with water, filled the hole with it and also covered one of the plastic fittings with the same wet paste. This was then gently “screwed” by hand into the polyfilla filled hole, the excess wiped away,  and simply left to set. Two days later I had my ladder bracket firmly and solidly fixed in place. Three quid on eBay very well spent!

So well done Plasplugs – you’ve really changed my life (sad person that I am).

Its Just Natural

Finding a good name for a new blog can be quite a challenge. The title not only has to sit comfortably with the content one envisages posting, but the address also has to be free and available. So for the last few weeks I wanted to make a start on creating a new blog, but simply couldn’t find a name that would fit.

Then, as I sat watching the BBC Autumnwatch presenters on TV a while ago discussing some horrendous way that a certain species of parasitic fly (a Phorid)  manages to kill its prey, one of them finished the piece with the remark that “It’s only natural”.  Something about those words struck a chord with me immediately. What a great name for a blog! Maybe a little bit about one of my loves – the natural world and the outdoors, and maybe more on the way that things simply happen in life, how they either fall into place, or how they go pear-shaped, and the ways we naturally react to these events.

After all, it’s only natural to want to express oneself.

And it’s only natural to be annoyed to then discover that two perfect blog post titles had already been created a few years ago, yet never used by their creators, both on Blogger and WordPress.

So a minor name change later, and here we are: Its Just Natural.

Let’s hope you won’t be reading this as a one off post on a long-forgotten and abandoned blog, and fuming about how much you’d like to get your hands on this title yourself! I guess its just natural (You’d better post a comment if you are!)