A lot of modern life
gives me a headache. I don’t think I am alone. I found exactly what I wanted online, filled out the forms including safe (it had better be) credit card details but no copy of invoice, no notification and though I wrote immediately to the contact indicated, it’s been a week – and nada.
I went into my bank to ask to arrange an ISA and was told they couldn’t do it, would I please do it on line ? The teller I asked to transfer some money was so exhausted that when she had ploughed it for the third time, I asked if the money had gone through ? She said no so I took the details back from her to try again at another branch next week. A young man in Boots told me not to be embarrassed about asking for help with the machines, “they are always going wrong.”
I found a top I liked in the paper today but it is nowhere on the impenetrable website. Clothes for sale without saying what they are made of ? While Denning remains fascinated by calls referring to the Amazon account he has never had.
On a bus last week we sat, a woman roughly my age and me, and listened to two children (I didn’t turn round and clock their ages) create merry hell unchecked while the mothers spoke on the phone and to each other. I looked at my companion and said “What a cogent argument for birth control.”
She nodded feelingly, “Not that you can say that in a lot of places !”
But the former shadow chancellor John McConnell is pressing the new government to scrap the two-child benefit cap. Which will cost the earth and send the message that anybody can do anything, having a child is a right. But it isn’t – it is a privilege. Family planning was abandoned long ago to the NHS, sidelining commitment, expertise and the very helpful Balint groups (look them up). Not everybody thinks or is responsible. They go with the flow, without thought of the overcrowding of this relatively small country.
Don’t have children if you don’t want them and if you are in a partnership where one person’s mind changes, that is for negotiation, not pregnancy. I am biased. Much of my professional life was spent around people who were (or had) children they accepted as a norm but weren’t particularly keen on. It is not a good start.
Having a child is the most altruistic thing many of us will ever do and when everybody is through being sentimental about families, every child is an only child, a one off, an original.
Parenthood makes terrific demands and if you’re lucky, there may be terrific rewards. But it’s a chunk of time, you need money in backup for dentistry, extra tuition, a new football – and if you have the brains God gave a turnip, you as the adult will learn, learn and learn again, hopefully only minimally on the child.
This is the era of mixed messages: anybody can do anything – but they can’t. Sold on the idea that health care should be free, however you get it, it costs the earth (and listening to what a chronically ill friend of mine goes through to fill prescriptions is most unsettling.) Building programmes can’t begin until there is a comprehensive census of vacant properties. I did one of my first programme on this 50 years ago and we haven’t got very far. There is endless promotion soft and hard of AI, algorithms, computer, machines – but where are the people going whose jobs are superceded by the rise of the machine – bearing in mind that the insatiable demand for men and women for basic often badly paid soul destroying repetitive tasks doesn’t make for a happy healthy future and opens the door to a shaming form of neocolonialism ie come here and mop up after us .
Right, blessing counting- relative health and strength, beautiful scenery in a rather effective new Australian cop mystery (BBC1 ), some support for the beginning of a new parliament, a new government and so, on we go ….
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Annalog 