[	Tags	|	inviting children to weddings, weddings	]
[	mood	|	uncomfortable	]

What is it with this emerging phenomenon of happy couples-to-be banishing kids from the wedding guest list? The wording on the invite varies each time, but generally it comes down to the glaring omission of the names of your tiny poppets on the dotted line. We search gleefully amongst the directions, hotel recommendations and wedding list details for the awkward brush-off phrase, usually handwritten to the tune of “we thought you’d enjoy a day off being a parent”. The “you’d” isn’t italicised. There is no emphasis placed on the word whatsoever, thus distracting you from the “we’d” lurking just behind it. We thought we’d enjoy a day of perfect, blissful harmony, unspoilt by even the most muffled “Why does she look like a meringue, Mummy?”, “I need a wee” or other infantine semi-predictibles.

Yes it is their day, yes why would you want those 8 months of fastidious planning, and forming opinions on what wedding favours would precisely sum up your personality, to be scuppered or soiled for eternity by a tot annoyingly tugging at the trailing ivy on the pews, or God forbid in a church of all places, uttering audible words?!

Or is there something more sinister beneath the generous gesture of parental peace? Is it, maybe, that the last thing the bride wants is for some cutesy-pie 6-year-old with real ringlets and a cherubim smile to hog all the limelight and collect the coos?

A wedding is obviously expensive to manifest, and for that amount of money, I can see why people desire perfection. I’m aware that keeping down cost is half of the problem. The pressure is always on the numbers, and let’s face it, you don’t get much return on a child. Their net contribution is minimal, both to the quality of the conversation and to the value of the wedding gift. You’ll still get your present without their presence. But at the end of the night when the alcohol has loosened tongues and old family skeletons re-emerge, that perfection may well wilt a little in some corners of the room. The kids meanwhile will either be dancing avidly, way past bedtime, fuelled up on cake and attention, or sparked out in buggies, dreaming vividly.

I have no way of knowing whether these people who ban children from their weddings share the Venn diagram with those who mutter and groan at our society’s crumbling family values. Well time to wake up. Surely there can be no better beacon for kids to aim for in life than the magical wonder of a blinking good wedding: the pomp and pageantry of the priest in robes; the sumptuously glamorous bride and bridesmaids; the feast, the speeches, the grown-ups laughing; granny dancing in a rather unusual way.

The very first time we were invited sans petits, we did, on just the one occasion, attempt to find a baby-sitter. The odds were slim of friends taking on our brace, one very young, for a whole day and possibly a sleepover, but we endeavoured. Unfortunately, our babysitter bottled it at the last minute and left us unable to attend. It didn’t go down well. We apologised, we sent a cheque but we’ve not spoken since.

Nowadays we make it clear from the start. There are four of us in our family, two of whom are little girls who, if we’re not careful, will end up thinking only princesses and big green trolls get married. If they’re not invited, then none of us are going, and that is that.

[	Tags	|	brighton, crime, language holiday, language students	]
[	mood	|	infuriated	]

Mark Hughes’ article (Independent.co.uk, 23^rd July ‘09), “Exposed: The dark side of ‘liberal’ Brighton” makes for grim reading indeed. It is somehow much more disturbing for me to hear of a crime against tourists coming to the UK from overseas, than if it were another Brit getting clobbered in some late night bar brawl, as I can’t help feeling that we owe a collective duty of care to these young students who have chosen to spend formative time in our towns and cities.

Earlier this year I was followed and assaulted by a 50-something father and his son, in the car park of our local swimming pool. All this happened at 4pm, in full view of my 2 and 6 year-old daughters who were still in the car. Just great. Nice one fellas. Now, every time we go swimming, the kids ask me if the bad men are going to be there. How joyous that their memories of going swimming are always going to be blighted by 30 seconds of mindless thuggery.

You can only guess, then, at the substantially greater psychological damage inflicted on the Uzbek youngsters who, at just 12 and 14 years of age, were pursued to their host family home by aggressive, drunken English grown-ups, and violently attacked when they should have just been having a fantastic language holiday. They would have come, like so many students this year, with their dreams of improving their English, whilst immersing themselves in the uniquely friendly and generally very accepting culture and history of Brighton. Instead they got to end their stay on such a profoundly bad note, one which will stay with them for a long time to come, and ensure that everyone in their entourage opts for a more welcoming English-speaking country in the future, like New Zealand or Australia.

As a crime correspondent, it is of course Hughes’ duty to inform us of these and similar events. There are plenty of them too, of course there are.

But how timely that this story should break within less than a week of reports confirming that violent crime is actually down 7% year on year (17^th July ’09, Amol Rajan, Independent.co.uk). Rajan notes that one contributing factor to the discrepancy between actual police statistics, and public perception of crime rates, is the disproportionate media coverage allocated to crime, rather than, say, improvements to policing and successes leading to the falling crime rate. I can appreciate, however, that it would be a perpetual slow news day to cover the instances of crime not happening. But what of the perpetrators in the Brighton story? Any news on whether they’ve been caught? This wasn’t covered. So no happy ending that they were arrested, that this isolated and still rare incident is now less likely to reoccur in the future. No, just more media inspired malaise. Well we do all like a good crime story, don’t we? Just not in our own back yards.

I read with interest Richard Garner's piece Britain's top pupils are shunning language GCSEs (Tuesday, 30 June 2009, Independent online)

And yes, language learning at school can sometimes seem pointless, and the seemingly insurmountable complexity of the task ahead when you’re a teenager can clearly make them think, oh, why bother? But at the end of the day there is a big old world out there, full of people who really do respect and treat you differently when you speak even a handful of words of their language. The question remains of course, when is it best to learn that language?  

I confess to having found language completely fascinating in school for some reason and I persisted through those (then) O-level classes whilst my 20-odd disinterested moron classmates buffooned around. I was clearly in the minority (probably a Billy-no-mates), and I sense still that it’s just really hard for GCSE pupils to see the need to learn the language. Dr Cooper speaks from that comfortable position of being able to express the “they should all speak English (and we should all shout and speak slowly!) opinion” because in fact he does speak languages and had made the effort, but I do hear the “every speaks English” line an awful lot.

We know the Dutch, Scandinavians, and other countries whose languages are not widely spoken or taught abroad, are naturally more influenced by English from an early age, and have to make that effort to speak it. The influx of foreign film and music is such that young people clearly see that need at a time which corresponds to them learning the language at school.

Ironically too, foreign languages are now flooding through the curriculum at Key Stage 2 where I understand they will be compulsory from 2010 – or has that been reversed too? So I’d tend to point the finger at the national curriculum, and government planning of language provision in general, for an example of utterly not-joined-up thinking.

I do agree that if all you are ever planning to do is trot out a few lines to break the ice in a Paris bar, or get a taxi to Las Ramblas, then it does seem a waste of time to suffer 3-5 years of language imprisonment in a class of unmotivated fellow pupils, when you can accumulate the same lingo from a phrase book, or an evening course later in life.

I’ve banged on about the whole Empire thing before, but I think it has definitely embedded in our culture this notion that we no longer need to bother. I suppose by the time that we realise we really ought to be speaking Mandarin, Russian, Hindi, etc. to communicate with the people who own Britain in a few years’ time, it’ll probably be a bit late. But I think it’s going to take that sort of external, absolute obligation and a desperate economic need before the masses return to language learning in school, and our jobs and futures depend on not just “two beers please”, but a high level of language fluency.

[	Tags	|	eco paint, environment, vacuuming	]
[	mood	|	chipper	]

“What are you doing, Daddy?”

It’s the hottest day of the year so far. I’m standing on the edge of the bath, desiccating my inner nostrils with the rising exhaust heat from our vac, as I suck curled flakes of eco paint from the bathroom ceiling.

“No, don’t do that bit” screams my six-year-old. Too late. She sullenly informs me that I’ve just disfigured beyond recognition the dog’s face she’s been imagining in the bare plaster left behind when the last lot of peeling paint was hoovered off.

I’m a self-confessed eco-nerd, and this whole ceiling peeling drama represents one of the very few regrets I have in following my green dreams to their ‘natural’ conclusions. When we moved in about 5 years ago, I was adamant we’d try really hard to only use eco materials in the very necessary tarting up of our apartment. I opted for the eco-paint supplied by a lovely bunch of French guys in Brighton. Even though the price per litre teetered on the brink of  Farrow & Ball fancy stuff, I was seduced by his offer to taste the paint before I bought it. The point being that the oils used are so very non-toxic, that it’s almost a culinary pleasure. The subtle earl grey tones of the bergamot oil convinced me that this was the paint for us. I recommended it to my eco-minded Brightonian mates, and generally sang its praises as I slapped it on joyously.

The argument with traditional paint generally is that it is full of volatile organic compounds, or fairly nasty resins and binders, colouring agents, metal oxides and gawd knows what. Similarly, the greenie’s argument is that paint creates many more litres of waste for each one litre which makes it into the can. So I was smug in the knowledge that the waste from my paint would simply be perfuming the sewers back in Germany where it was made.  I was also informed that the paint was micro-porous, so that it would breathe, and therefore be perfectly suited to the steamy bathroom it was destined for.

If you care to learn lessons from my misfortune, I suspect where I went wrong was in PVAing the plaster before painting. Any road up, within about six months, the two coats had begun to crack. Whilst this initially added to the shabby chic look, when the first bit fell off, the look was more ‘ell’s bells than Elle Deco. And, until recently we had imaginary dogs on the ceiling when viewed from the loo through the eyes of a child. I wouldn’t mind if we had a recognisable image of Jesus Christ, that we could flog to Take a Break for enough prize money to cover the price of a pot of Dulux Azure Fusion chemical nightmare.

 
How paint is made:

http://www.waitakere.govt.nz/abtcit/ec/bldsus/pdf/materials/paint.pdf

[	Tags	|	brambles, dog poo, environment, political correctness, sussex, trees	]
[	mood	|	crappy	]

Ahh, the fresh Sussex countryside. Nothing like a brisk walk through the crisp spring air as Easter approaches. But wait – it looks like someone’s decorated the tree ahead. How lovely. Ah, hang on. Strike that. What I’m seeing on closer inspection is the latest manifestation of post-consumer, post-health & safety, dog-walker madness. The phenomenon of the knotted plastic bag of dog poo, which has been thrown towards the undergrowth adjacent to the path, only to be suspended in the branch of a tree. Bloody fantastic.

However much respite the walk has afforded me, the image which resides in my head once I get back home is the sight of these poo-bags, the feeling, one of utter incredulity at the state of the nation.

As a child I recall my aging great aunt who lived in a lovely old cottage in the middle of Highcliffe, Dorset. The house bordered onto a sizeable triangle of common land overgrown with a tangle of bracken,bramble and gorse. Every morning she would let her poodle out to do its business, and sedately follow the yapping creature along the path, trowel in hand, ready to catapult any offending poop deep into the undergrowth, to rot away peacefully and out of sight. As you might imagine, over the years of this dog’s life, she’d developed quite a turd-twanging technique. It amused my 7-or-so-year-old  self to see dog’s business flying harmlessly but rapidly through the air.

So 30-odd years later what has gone wrong? Why now does this same stuff get bagged up like supermarket plums AND SUSPENDED IN TREES? Have we all gone completely mad?

It really does seem that we've got a long way to go before environmental enlightenment rallies sufficiently to overwhelm our health-and-safety-gone-mad consumerist collective conscience. Do dogs fit anywhere into the permaculture model? I can't remember.

Does anyone have any ideas?

[	Tags	|	brits, english, foreign, foreign workers, jobs, language, local, poland, polish, uk, workers	]
[	mood	|	listless	]

I read with interest today how Poland is concerned that its retracting expat workforce now faces competition for Polish jobs back home in the form of foreign workers from Belorussia and Ukraine. These incoming workers are already accepting lower wages than those which your average mobile Pole has grown accustomed to. As Brits, of course, with our world class wit, we’re smugly enjoying the beautiful irony of it all.

Whilst the macro economics document the ebb and flow of foreign workers, figures like “up to five hundred thousand Poles took up work in the UK at the peak of the boom” (Metro, 16^th March 09), the consideration of whether a worker is foreign or not, at the local micro level, comes down to much softer, qualitative assessments.

Consider a young Polish couple who moved in next door to us about 6 years ago. I seem to remember they spoke utterly fluent English from the start, to the level that allowed us to smirk together (nationalistically) through Sir Wogan’s Eurovision commentary.  They’d taken up work in local insurance and financial support call centres, and were promoted quickly to positions of responsibility, thanks to their multilingualism, tenacity and diligence.

With the language on their side, these people brought us fresh news from the Continent, and respite from the usual conversational permutations of middle-class angst. Once we could understand each other, we got some rapport going . From that point, the whole ‘foreigner’ bit started to pale away. Gradually too, our heavy questioning about their early lives under communist rule 70s Poland also receded into the usual chit-chat about life, saving for a house deposit, and, well, middle class angst. That was it. For us, they were integrated, part of the community, and great friends with a 'British' sense of humour to boot.

As I work in language training, I’m possibly going to dwell on the fact that their English was exquisite, and that this was the catalyst to them being friends ahead of being Polish and Polish ahead of being macro-economic 'foreign workers'. I can’t help thinking if more of us spoke the language of our “foreign counterparts” and more of our foreign workers really worked hard on their English, then that scraping movement of labour within Europe could be lubricated somewhat, for the enrichment of people at home or abroad. Too whimsical? Probably. OK here’s some grit to end on. We need to get our fingers out and get to grips with language. That way, when the pound devalues to the point when it suddenly becomes attractive enough for half a million Brits to travel to the euro zone in search of jobs, we’ll integrate half as effortlessly as most foreign workers have done in the UK. Provided we can lose a dot of that smugness first, that is.

Which reminds me of another irony I enjoy. That's the middle section of the Venn diagram which contains the overlap between two groups of people: those who spend their working lives bemoaning the presence of foreigners in the UK who don't integrate or speak the language properly, and those people who chose to retire abroad, without speaking the language properly, and who end up living in an English-speaking bubble enclave! Still, the exchange rate has probably curbed that particular exodus for a while.

Further info on Polish lessons