Petty Annoyances

I know you’ve been missing it, so I thought some more ranting on stuff which riles me might be gently entertaining this week.

For instance, how annoying is the word “sic”? This is a short version of “I know! Imagine spelling / grammar / punctuation this bad. But luckily I noticed, so I’m smugly going to draw your attention to it, knowing full well that if I hadn’t, you almost certainly wouldn’t have noticed it, thus neatly making you feel like a plank of wood..”  And it's a written version of thumbing your nose whilst blowing a raspberry.  I realise of course that this is dangerous ground for me, having ranted long and tedious over bad grammar once upon a time. This means that if I ever in fact did use the word “sic” (in other words if its smugness didn’t irritate me quite so comprehensively and overwhelmingly, for me it would be the equivalent of “Aaarghh!! This person’s grammar / punctuation is horrible!!”) I am confident that my readers would immediately bring it to my attention in a most forthright manner. But I don’t use it. Because it’s annoying. And self-congratulatory. And deeply offensive. And Latin, for heaven’s sake.

People who do not write to say thank you - except new parents who should have some sort of letter-writing amnesty until they have attained at least 4 hours’ uninterrupted sleep in one stretch. If my beautiful 11 year old god-daughter can write me a card from America to thank me for her Christmas present, and my other beautiful god-daughter, aged 14 and having way too much fun at boarding school, and connected to me by all the normal methods of electronic communication, can find a few minutes to write me an actual thank you letter with a real pen on a physical piece of paper, I say anyone can manage it…

Bullies. School playground bullies are bad enough. And since most of us at one time or another in our lives have borne the hideous brunt of some form of bullying, I cannot imagine how people grow up purportedly to adulthood and yet still find it necessary to be a bully. Don’t these people ever grow out of being vile and obnoxious to others?  I will never get it.

People who are of the opinion that only their opinion counts. This is particularly offensive in the world of new parenthood, because it is difficult enough being suddenly responsible for a fragile little life without an instruction manual of any sort, but to have other people question your parenting decisions when you are at your most vulnerable and short of confidence, and just because those decisions don’t match their parenting choices, is downright mean. The world is rife with this sort of behaviour though, it’s not just parenting. Different (or in my case complete lack of) sartorial flair is wrong. Different financial choices are wrong. This latter rankles particularly sorely. It’s our money, we earn every single last penny, so the decision about how to spend that money is ours, and ours alone. Thus it cannot be wrong just because it is different from how others would spend that money. Engineer and I choose to spend our disposable income on our home, our children and shared experiences. Others choose to spend theirs on long haul holidays and designer clothes. Neither choice is wrong, both are equally valid.

Show biz types. I watched the Brit Awards a few weeks ago. Aside from the fact that I recognised virtually none of the nominated acts, which may explain some of my rancour in this regard since clearly that makes me feel ancient and past it, I thought that they all behaved arrogantly and appallingly (with some notable exceptions, for instance Adele, who professed to Kylie that she felt like a “drag queen” beside her – now there’s a singer with talent, humility and normal body weight, so thus we know it is possible to have all three…) In consultation with my friend Glamour Geek, I have established with some relief that I am not alone in holding this opinion. What on earth makes these people think that just because they can sing a bit they are somehow better than everyone else on the planet? What about heart surgeons? Charity workers? Paramedics? Teachers? Explorers? Scientists? Shouldn’t we have a Brit Award for normal people who make a real difference and probably don’t realise it?

And…breathe.

Words which are only words in our family

This week I want to elaborate a little bit on the theme of my crazy family. Amongst all of our foibles and strange ways, there is a full vocabulary of words which have very clear meanings to us but which, when utilised in the wrong company, tend to be met with at best a blank look and at worst a rapid and very jittery reversed exit from the room.

Tiddly Push: a Morris Traveller. Little Vulture and I were despatched to boarding school still under the mistaken impression that everyone knew this. It was a puzzle to us that the words “Tiddly Push” did not appear on the back of our Morris Traveller, but we had concluded that it must have fallen off, much like the events which overtook my parents’ Ford Zephyr which returned from the accident repair workshop in Singapore as a Ford Zerhyp.  Other street cred inhibiting rude awakenings which we received at boarding school include, but are not limited to, the discovery that the words malevolent and benevolent are not pronounced “male-volent” and “been-volent”; the non-existence of Santa Claus; the fact that pigs do not slit their throats when they swim (in fact it transpires that they are very good swimmers, as it happens); and the stark realisation that Granny’s ancient Triumph Herald was seriously uncool, and not a beautiful car as we had previously thought.

The Thing: this is the item of furniture which contained all our stuff when we had a cottage in the Cairngorms. It was discovered in the garage of one of our army houses, unused, having been removed from the kitchen of the same house. It was a strangely-shaped ex-kitchen cabinet, a piece from a fitted kitchen which had been unfitted and had survived. It contained glasses, alcohol, napkins, board games, sellotape, string, ash trays, puzzle books, art material, playing cards, table mats, maps, compasses, scissors, nails, light bulbs, measuring tapes, and an AK47 Russian hunting rifle. Actually, scrap the rifle, it didn’t have one of those. So we called it The Thing. Well, what would you have called it?

La-Di-Da: a game to be played at the dinner table. When people say an occasion was a bit “La-di-da”, Little Vulture and I immediately have visions of frightfully drunk people wearing inappropriate hats and passing a variety of objects, or indeed the hats themselves, around the table to the rhythm of the words “La-di-da! La-di-da! La-di-diddly-da-di-DAH!” and we think it sounds rather fun. Turns out most people have a much more negative view of a la-di-da occasion - who knew? The word la-di-da spawns the noun “da”, meaning the object which you intend to start the game holding (everyone must have a da to pass to their left), and also generates lively discussion regarding the fact that you must not let go of your da during the diddlies. A word to the wise – never play this game with someone who has had a stroke. They were probably rubbish at it before. But they will now blame their stroke on the fact that they are still rubbish at it.

A Grampa Egg: an omelette. Obviously. Well, which other eggs can Grampas cook?

Cherubali: Boxer’s pet name, made up by her big brother. I have no idea where he got it from. She is also variously known as The Baby Cheese and Stinky Malinki. No of course we don’t call her by her actual name, that would be boring.

Bonkers Bankers

So this week we are full of self-righteous (and envious, let’s not deny it) rage about Mr Stephen Hester who was to be awarded 20 years’ salary for a normal person as a wee extra for being a jolly good chap. That is on top of his 20 years’ salary for a normal person that he receives in one year. We are doubly annoyed about this because, as we keep being reminded, we tax payers own his employing bank, so should we not have a say in how our bank’s dwindling resources are deployed?

However, I don’t wish to be drawn into an argument about whether or not Mr Hester deserves his bonus because I know precisely squat about running a bank, and presumably he knows quite a bit about it, so this makes me completely unqualified to offer an opinion one way or the other. For me, this is more about endeavouring to imagine what on earth one could possibly do with all that money. And more than that, who on earth actually needs that kind of money. There are people living in the rich countries of the western world who cannot afford to put food on the table, and then there’s this guy, who could live very comfortably on a tenth of his salary, never mind his bonus.

This is where I get worried. Our politicians are mostly millionaires, born and raised in wealthy families, the original silver spoon brigade. I don’t begrudge them that at all. I was raised in a normal family where the overdraft was well-used, but I wouldn’t have traded my childhood for a silver spoon version because I have witnessed many times the fact that money does not buy happiness. However, it concerns me that our politicians cannot possibly empathise with the very people they have been voted in to government to look out for. They have no idea what it is like to have to make a choice between putting food on the table or money in the electricity meter. Heck, I can’t really imagine what that’s like, so how could they?

I wonder if Messieurs Cameron, Clegg and Osborne sip Darjeeling together in the withdrawing room at 10 Downing Street and wonder what all the fuss is about.

“I mean, it’s under a million pounds! What on earth is wrong with everyone? It’s not as if we’re paying him £100 million! That really would be too much.”

“I know. I mean, the poor man has to have some capital to service his yacht, and that Lear jet can’t be cheap to run, but how else is he to meet all his commitments? We can’t have him using Easyjet like the Great Unwashed.”

These are the same people who are withdrawing / reducing / scrapping benefits for low income families, voluntary sector organisations and public services. This is where the money is really needed. This is where that million pounds could make a real difference to peoples’ lives. That’s why people are so annoyed about it.

Don’t get me wrong, I recognise that we live in a capitalist world and I am perfectly ok with that. I realise that to redistribute wealth forcibly is to suppress ambition and potentially to reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator, which wouldn’t be good for anyone. We have to be allowed to make choices. But trying to squeeze money out of people who don’t have any (people on benefits getting less benefits, people on low and middle incomes paying more tax, etc) is no way to address the situation we find ourselves in. People who take a job which involves a bonus are perfectly entitled to take that bonus, of course they are. It’s not about entitlement. It’s about doing what’s right for society. Most people have to budget because that’s the only way to make their disposable income stretch to cover everything it needs to cover. Why shouldn’t everyone have to budget?

Things I Like

As promised, after last week’s doom-and-gloom-laden blog, I have put all my moans behind me, put a smile on my face, and song in my heart and I eagerly await the bank putting some money in my pocket, but I won’t be holding my breath…MAN January goes on forever! But enough of things I hate, I covered all that last week.

I like wind farms. I realise this statement may place me at risk of drowning in a deluge of tree huggers and the noise pollution brigade helpfully expressing opposite points of view, so can I please quickly point out that I don’t like wind farms because they are going to save the planet - indeed, the futurologist recently interviewed by the BBC stated that he did not expect wind farms to feature much in the planet’s energy generation systems in the year 2112, and since he is a guy who was clearly born with a crystal ball in his hand, who am I to argue? I mean, it’s not like he makes stuff up by guessing what’s going to happen in 100 years’ time. He’s paid to be a futurologist, so he either has a crystal ball or a time machine, and either way I’m not about to argue with the man. I just like wind farms because they are big, white and beautiful, and they stand tall on windy desolate moorland where no other idiot would go. I also love the fact that they have to be shut down when it’s too windy. I like a field full of wind turbines. Engineer likes a field full of round hay bales (dispersed neatly at regular intervals). We are the Weird Family.

I like my Brie rock hard. Not many people know, but there are 4 versions of Brie: Break-the-wall, bounce-off-the-wall, stick-to-the-wall and run-down-the-wall. Well of course you didn’t know. You have to be a cheese connoisseur to know. Of course I didn’t make it up. Mine has to be break the wall hard.

I like junk food. It grieves me that junk food is so bad for you. This raises the philosophical question, do I love junk food because I know it’s bad for me? Would I love carrots if they were classified as junk food? Don’t get me wrong, I like carrots. But I wouldn’t stagger out of bed with a hangover and head out to get hold of some carrots. I would do that with a Big Mac Meal though, or a multipack of salt and vinegar crisps and a boat load of Twirls.

I like the fact that people who send me spam messages actually believe that I am stupid enough to send my banking details to them so that they can help themselves to whatever is in my bank account. I had a message recently purportedly from Paypal and it was addressed “Dear Valued Costumer”. A dyslexic thief! You couldn’t make it up.

I like people who are under the misguided illusion that because their child walked / talked / spelled / read / wrote / counted / potty-trained early, they will be a rocket scientist in later life. These people are optimistically delusional and we should cherish them as an important and colourful ingredient in the fabric of society. There’s time enough for them to become realists, and when that time arrives, when their rocket scientist child who could count to a hundred aged 2 struggles with bastarding derivatives or ballistics aged 17, we should all be there to support them. Boxer climbed out of her cot aged 18 months and spoke a full, grammatically correct sentence: “Mummy, I want to see Daddy”. All this means is that she is extremely determined and resourceful, a total Daddy’s girl, and a right royal pain in the tonsils. I’m not naïve enough to believe that this somehow makes her a child prodigy. Judge says the six times table is a sod. I say that equips him well for A Level Maths, most of which is a sod.

Off to get a packet of salt and vinegar crisps.

Things I Hate

So this might sound like a slightly pessimistic post, but, unusually for me, I’m in a pessimistic frame of mind. It’s not like me, and it’ll pass, but hopefully a small blog-sized rant will aid the process of self-healing.

Politicians: What were we thinking, electing a bunch of old Etonian millionaires to run the country, a task which includes but is not restricted to passing us non-millionaires advice about how to manage our finances? I say “we”, I really mean “you”, since I bear absolutely no responsibility for their election, but someone must have voted for them. This is like having a swimming teacher advise us how to hang glide. For Mr Cameron and his cronies, it must be like having an extra-large Monopoly set to play with, except that only they can afford to purchase any properties on Mayfair or Park Lane. Apparently the easiest way to deal with this period of economic difficulty is to “just pay off our credit cards”. Well thanks Mr Cameron, why didn’t I think of that.

Childless or expectant parents advising actual parents on how to rear their children: No one’s perfect, and I know my parenting skills could do with a brush up, but having someone who doesn’t actually have any experience in it passing me tips can be hard to take, even from a health visitor or medical professional. Actually, the people who are least likely to give out parenting advice are parents themselves, because we are wise to the fact that we will be trying to outwit children until the end of time, and we will never succeed, no matter how many self-help books we read. The cantankerous little sods remain one step ahead of us at all times.

Herbal or holistic remedies: You know what, if it’s your last resort, nothing else has worked, and you’re prepared to give anything a go, then fair enough. Fill your boots with all the holistic mumbo jumbo you can lay your hands on. But seriously, what manner of an eejit would rather have colonic irrigation that a simple course of antibiotics?

Corporate or school playground bullies: Rule of thumb – if you wouldn’t treat your family and friends that way, it’s probably not acceptable to treat anyone like that. Life is so much more pleasant if you are respectful and polite to everyone, but I believe that for some reason this is a lesson we don’t learn until quite late on in life, around the time that we develop empathy, and some people entirely fail to learn it at all. A good celebrity example is Jeremy Clarkson. He’s ever so funny, until you find yourself being the butt of his jokes.

Reality TV: I will never understand the attraction of watching people sleep on live TV. Or watching people humiliate themselves on live TV. Or watching people be humiliated by a large audience on live TV because some cruel “friend” has told them they can sing – “seriously dude, you should go on X Factor…”. Those people who know me will know that Engineer and I have a secret X Factor habit though, but I have to watch the initial auditions through my fingers and I leave the room if there’s a cringe-invoking moment.

Always getting the weirdo on an early morning flight: Nothing is more offensive than having to sit beside someone who has partaken of a goodly quantity of Vodka for breakfast, except perhaps having to sit beside someone who considers toothpaste, deodorant and soap as nice-to-haves. Red eyes are bad enough. Malodorous red eyes are a step too far.  

Ah, that feels much better. I’ll do a piece on “Things I Like” next week, just to balance out the positive / negative pendulum, I promise.

2011: What a year that was…

Many notable things happened in 2011. I do like to have a few moments of mature reflection when the old year turns into the new one, followed closely by a good helping of immature reflection. I thought you might enjoy the latter more.

I got addicted to Angry Birds. This is a shame for Little Vulture and Bear, since I do not have an iPhone and they both do. This means that whenever I see either of them I am less interested in communicating with them, and infinitely more interested in feeding my addiction. This is not good for our familial relations, nor the battery life of their devices. As with most addictions, this one took hold surreptitiously and with frightening speed. One moment, I was vaguely aware of the existence of the game but completely disconnected from the reality of it, due to the simple fact that my employer favours Blackberry over iPhone (and I now see why – imagine the hours lost to Angry Birds in the typical workplace…). The next moment, BANG. Hopeless addiction. Cold turkey is the only way forward. Conquering my addiction is particularly important since my pleasure is diminished when I play it with the sound off, even though the noise of unscathed pigs chortling is almost more than I can bear. It must be a pain / pleasure thing.

I realised that Engineer and I can no longer laugh at what Boxer says when we are within her earshot because she gets mightily offended. This is because she is no longer a baby. So when she, on watching a football game, made reference to the guy in the black shirt being “The Janitor”, and Engineer, Judge and myself almost fell off the sofa laughing at the sheer appropriateness of this comment, she shut herself in her room in a huff and refused to speak to any of us for a whole day. When on earth, exactly, did she stop being a baby, and why wasn’t I consulted?

I came to terms with the fact that I do not understand what the Large Hadron Collider does, nor what the discovery of a sub-atomic particle will do for me. I realise of course that both of these items are of significant scientific importance. I still read newspaper articles about them. I am merely resigned to the fact that I will never be able to explain either of them to my children. I look forward to the day when they can explain them to me.

I now acknowledge that there is a place in the world for the Kindle. Just not in my world. I reserve the right for this stance to change in the future though (for reference, see my attitude to the iPod and CDs back in the day. You could be forgiven for imagining that I had had a job in HMV’s marketing department. “Downloading? It’ll never catch on.”). I’m just not an Early Adopter in the change cycle, quite frankly, as the paragraph below will confirm.

This final item will no doubt make me sound like I just arrived from 1985 in a time-travelling Dolorean with a bad perm and shoulder pads, but How Good Is Skype?!? This has been a video-conferencing Christmas – how amazing to be able to see my brother-in-law in Canada, and 2 of my Glasgow in-laws, all on the screen at the same time, all chatting away like we’re in the same room rather than hundreds / thousands of miles apart! And best of all, it’s FREE! I never could resist a bargain.

Happy 2012 to all my lovely friends.

Kids these days have it easy...don’t they?

With Christmas approaching, my Christmas tree is up and dropping needles everywhere, all my shopping is done, my Christmas cards are written and sent, my house is looking festive, stockings are up, I have carols on in the car, sing carols to the kids at bed time and generally have gone carols-crazy, and all the presents are wrapped. So inevitably my thoughts turn to Christmasses past, and how different it was for us back then. My kids can consider themselves to be fortunate – they have a stable home (stable as in constant, rather than stable in the context of where Jesus was born, obviously…because that might not be considered to be “fortunate”, as such, in this era of triple-glazed, centrally-heated domestic luxury), a loving family, a comfortable income, and parents who go OTT at Christmas time even though they have spoken sternly to each other about this year NOT buying the children quite such a pile of presents. And then they each go off and buy the children a huge pile of presents.

Now then, my 8 year old self might have thought that my 8 year old son has it easy. But does he actually? As life moves on, society evolves, and all that happens is that children gain a whole new set of anxieties which I as a child never had to concern myself about.

·         Internet grooming. In our youth, the people one associated with one could either physically see, or actually hear through the medium of the telephone. We didn’t have these worries about weird 50 year old men posing as 8 year old boys in order strike up a friendship, and consequently we didn’t have to suffer the hypothetical ignominy of our mothers reading us the riot act every time we dared to set a virtual foot on the internet, rigorously vetting our friends list and loading net nanny on to our laptops so that every time we innocently googled the word “cock” we got a virtual slap on the wrist.

·         Sometimes less is more. Kids have so much these days that they find it hard to place a value on their stuff. If it’s broken, by and large they get a new one. We are no longer a “make-do-and-mend” society. When we were kids, if you needed it for school, you sometimes got it (or in my case you got your big sister’s one with the relevant, highly visible, often very embarrassing alterations made). If you didn’t actually need it, you waited until Christmas. Life was so simple.

·         At Christmas, we got one present from our parents, a stocking filled with small toys and a Satsuma. Sometimes we got something from a non-defective godparent or grandparent. Nowadays, children must experience a certain level of rising panic (although clearly they would never be able to identify it as such) when faced with the sheer volume of presents piled up under the tree. Or maybe they don’t care, and they just rip all the wrapping off without a second thought, and it’s just me who experiences rising panic at the number of thank you letters I’m going to have to persuade them to write.

·         Technology. We had pen and paper, and one of those phones with a dial which, if you dropped it, broke your toe rather than itself. They have (separate) remote controls for the TV, the stereo, the set top box, the DVD player and sometimes even the garage door. They have to understand how to work mobiles, androids, laptops, PCs, tablets, iPhones and iPods. If the TV didn’t work when I was a child, you held the aerial up and walked slowly around the room, leaping up and down and cursing occasionally like some sort of ballet dancer with Tourette’s, until the snowstorm on the screen receded and you could see the picture again. If the TV doesn’t work nowadays, they need to work out if it’s the TV, the aerial, the set top box or the broadband connection, switch everything off and back on again, and then get a man in to fix it.

Perhaps modern technology and modern living has actually made our kids’ lives more complicated. Mind you, on the plus side at least in the age of Google we don’t have door-to-door Encyclopaedia Britannica salesmen pestering us any more.