Well I may be a bit thin on expressing an opinion via the old blog these days, but for Shark, Squirrel and Tiger the onslaught is relentless. Take, for example, IDS - not the irritable bowel syndrome, but our Secretary of State for Work and Pensions - and that's enough of a reason for you to pity Shark, Squirrel and Tiger.
Because IDS - not the irritating bowel syndrome - is in fine sneering fettle. Here he is, patronising geology graduates seeking to work in a professional museum environment via their volunteer work.
Warning of what's coming next
I apologise in advance. I am not yet grown up enough to refrain from sarcasm, personal
invective and juvenile name calling.
Think of it all as my character weakness, and my inability to
turn my failings into any productive action. (Unless you count marching round this house spitting venom at IDS as a positive outcome. At which point you can feel sorry for the little grits all over again.)
Volunteering in a Museum? Wot's that then, thinks IDS. Deposit of Culture? A place where communicative skills are needed in an environment where thoughtful interpretive skills are valued along with all-round perspectives of how society, artefact, history, geology and study combine. WTF is that? A place holding history and future in its hands? Museums and libraries, the distinguishing triumphs of civilised, thinking, caring societies?
PAH!
What's the bleeding value of toiling in a poxy museum in exchange for your dole payout, hoping to turn your professional training and your 27,000 pounds educational debt into a fulfilling career where you can bring your expensively-acquired knowledge to the enrichment of all society?
Look here love, you could be spending your time usefully, clocking up your Poundland hours in a corporate high-street monolith, functioning entirely for someone else's profit and making a financial return to our corporate investors. Yes, you could be another powerless, mindless pawn pushed about in a labour market we contract and expand as market conditions dictate or as we can opportunistically stitch up behind the scenes with our donors to transfer your public money into our private hands.
Now here's your measly dole payment, payable only if you shut your mouth. Be bloody grateful for it. Who needs you gravel shovelling geologists anyway? Unless it's to build us a new road through an SSSI, sink us an oil pipeline across Africa or blow up the ice caps.
(Phew! As I said, I apologise. But I'm sure you'll be happy to know that, thanks to the presence of my blog, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are off the hook.)
Showing posts with label Becoming unstable and erratic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Becoming unstable and erratic. Show all posts
Monday, 18 February 2013
Sunday, 25 March 2012
The reason for any forthcoming silence
Oh look! Dig has brought a new gadget into the house. Tsk. It's all the same with him. Gadget this and gadget that. I bet you! It'll be on the shelf, abandoned, within two months. Just like the micro computer, palm-held doodah, and rubber keyboard.
Uhuh? It's an ipad. Okaaay. It's only a gadget and won't make my brain go funny. Nothing bad will happen. I'll just have a little look.
So yes. I can sort of see why people like their ipads! I mean, it does this and this and this. And it's so easy to use!
What did Dig say? Did he say it was his ipad? I don't think he should have it all to himself. I mean, he has a rubber keyboard.
My brain is starting to turn funny.
Did you go near my ipad? DID YOU? DON'T TOUCH MY IPAD.
THE IPAD IS ALL MINE IPADIPADIPADIPAD I LOVE YOU. Let me marry you, and fondle you and stroke you with my fingers. Look! You have a little button! Let me press your little button and together we can explore all the universe!
I am no longer in control of my brain.
I have nailed up the bedroom door and now it is just ME AND MY IPAD and if anyone touches MY IPAD then they DIE.
I think that it all for today, and possibly forever.
Uhuh? It's an ipad. Okaaay. It's only a gadget and won't make my brain go funny. Nothing bad will happen. I'll just have a little look.
So yes. I can sort of see why people like their ipads! I mean, it does this and this and this. And it's so easy to use!
What did Dig say? Did he say it was his ipad? I don't think he should have it all to himself. I mean, he has a rubber keyboard.
My brain is starting to turn funny.
Did you go near my ipad? DID YOU? DON'T TOUCH MY IPAD.
THE IPAD IS ALL MINE IPADIPADIPADIPAD I LOVE YOU. Let me marry you, and fondle you and stroke you with my fingers. Look! You have a little button! Let me press your little button and together we can explore all the universe!
I am no longer in control of my brain.
I have nailed up the bedroom door and now it is just ME AND MY IPAD and if anyone touches MY IPAD then they DIE.
I think that it all for today, and possibly forever.
Sunday, 26 February 2012
Whatever they can do, I can do better
Dig has left me and flown to Brazil. He says he has that other job.
I have my suspicions. That it is not as claimed, but that his secret occupation there is pimp and racketeer.
What else could it be?
I submit evidence. He arranges these trips in short notice, departs in haste, and returns with any one of the following: a pimp shirt; a crumpled envelope stuffed with used Brazilian banknotes; a photograph of himself wearing snorkeling gear while surrounded by bikini clad women; and the statement, 'I always feel a sense of place with the first Caipirinha'.
Well, I'm sure I can match anything the bikini-clad babes of Brazil can offer. After all, I am a woman of not inconsiderable talents and resources.
I can do the bikini, if I take off my glasses and you peer through half-closed eyes; I can do the big bosom if I shove under my bra top something to wedge them up a bit - I don't know, I have a couple of Parmesan pots here, they should do the trick; and I could even have a go at that trendy vajazelling business with the stick-on jewels from the kiddy craft box. The Caipirinha in my hand I cannot do, but I have an old gin bottle and can fill it with vinegar, which might pass, no? And I am sure we have some reais in the drawer; I could strap those to my thigh and the image would be complete.
Now what sane man would chose a tour of Brazil, compared to me?
I have my suspicions. That it is not as claimed, but that his secret occupation there is pimp and racketeer.
What else could it be?
I submit evidence. He arranges these trips in short notice, departs in haste, and returns with any one of the following: a pimp shirt; a crumpled envelope stuffed with used Brazilian banknotes; a photograph of himself wearing snorkeling gear while surrounded by bikini clad women; and the statement, 'I always feel a sense of place with the first Caipirinha'.
Well, I'm sure I can match anything the bikini-clad babes of Brazil can offer. After all, I am a woman of not inconsiderable talents and resources.
I can do the bikini, if I take off my glasses and you peer through half-closed eyes; I can do the big bosom if I shove under my bra top something to wedge them up a bit - I don't know, I have a couple of Parmesan pots here, they should do the trick; and I could even have a go at that trendy vajazelling business with the stick-on jewels from the kiddy craft box. The Caipirinha in my hand I cannot do, but I have an old gin bottle and can fill it with vinegar, which might pass, no? And I am sure we have some reais in the drawer; I could strap those to my thigh and the image would be complete.
Now what sane man would chose a tour of Brazil, compared to me?
Thursday, 15 September 2011
Swimming soaked my brain
ALRIGHT THEN. DAMN. I ADMIT IT.
Hong Kong sometimes does stuff better than England.
dammitdammitdammit. England, why oh why did you do this to me? What did you do with your swimming pools? You crapped on your outdoor lido heritage, then ripped up all the fun pools for miles around and bashed them all into institutional, attainment targeted, no-fun rectangles, made for tedious machine-drilled school swimming lessons!
But you should take a lesson from the Kowloon Park Public Swimming Pool. This place is something. Imagine two indoor pools for lane swimming, add professional dive pool, plus three large, super curvy outdoor leisure pools; the outdoor pools on three split levels, with paddling, shallows, water walks, islands, sitting areas and columns and waterfalls and everything. Except slides. Big fail on the water slides. But super clean changing rooms, open designs, great facilities and four of us get in for less than a fiver.
Even misery grit goes swimming. THAT'S HOW GOOD IT IS.
Hong Kong sometimes does stuff better than England.
dammitdammitdammit. England, why oh why did you do this to me? What did you do with your swimming pools? You crapped on your outdoor lido heritage, then ripped up all the fun pools for miles around and bashed them all into institutional, attainment targeted, no-fun rectangles, made for tedious machine-drilled school swimming lessons!
But you should take a lesson from the Kowloon Park Public Swimming Pool. This place is something. Imagine two indoor pools for lane swimming, add professional dive pool, plus three large, super curvy outdoor leisure pools; the outdoor pools on three split levels, with paddling, shallows, water walks, islands, sitting areas and columns and waterfalls and everything. Except slides. Big fail on the water slides. But super clean changing rooms, open designs, great facilities and four of us get in for less than a fiver.
Even misery grit goes swimming. THAT'S HOW GOOD IT IS.
Thursday, 24 September 2009
I'm trapped in a nightmare and I can't wake up
Grit is thrashing around suffering from maladies. Her head is become a rotten cabbage of a place, swilling about with all manner of fevers and maggoty rubbish.
She imagined, for example, in the midst of her delusions, that Ed Balls said how whole swathes of experienced teachers, like deputy heads, were no longer needed. Now schools can be run by executive superheads, zipping up and down the expressways of England, managing their institutions like giant corporations.
And we will watch and we will like this future. TV programmes will fawningly follow those bullish management styles, we will delight in producers lickspittling behind flyaway managers who, with reforming zeal, sweep away ancient rules, staffrooms, and worn out teachers.
Look! The superhead drops in from a helicopter, barks results and flies away again! Proof to all citizens in the Great Leap Forward! Schools are the best new corporates, advancing annual reports, balance sheets, profit and loss, investment opportunities, dividends for the achievers, the intellectual supertop who wave paper passes to prove it all! You too could aspire for your child to become the new super elite!
Now, in Grit's diseased brain, there aren't people in these places at all. They are just input/output corridors, linked to exits and entrances by conveyor belts. Products pass to be neatly corporately branded and packaged; they're stamped on the forehead; certificates pasted on their backs.
These strange delusions and imaginings in the Grit brain are not in anyway softened by the fantasy that a real, live, person emerges - worse, a feeling person with emotions and a face and a heart that speaks to her real moving hands and thinking brain - and says, Heck! A child beaten up! I'm going to stop that!
Of course the system must react! Of course this person must have Failed an Assessment Qualification. What has gone wrong? She cannot have been reeducated on the training course! If she had successfully phased through that system, with the approval of her superiors, she would have made the automatic deference to the institutional hierarchy with the line Must report all visual incidences to line manager for appropriate handling and publicity requirements.
There is no alternative. There are policies in place to deal with human behaviour. In the great endeavour of the new corporates she must be excluded. She must lose her job, she must be cast out of all enterprises requiring complete submission.
Because we must not forget that schools are now corporate institutions. Staff are hierarchised to become delivery components. Each job is allocated specific descriptions and responsibilities to streamline the effective management system. Any item not allocated a place within the appropriate order in the delivery system must be passed to another human-type unit who is trained and qualified.
And more. We must not forget the image is now all important, and more important then any individual child; we must enforce brand loyalty, brand identity and maintain that brand value at all costs.
And what is this thing called community? What world is that? The Grit brain is in a mangled place now where it knows the Labour government has put into place all procedures by which schools must adopt corporate identities and deliver the output with league tables, performance targets, national curriculum tests. There is no such thing as community. There are institutions and there are whistleblowers - a word once used for people who informed on secret controlling institutions but who now are people who step away from the designated mark to simply say what is happening to children.
Children? Children? Who mentioned them? In the Grit brain all is awry and gone bonkers. Because children are messy, scruffy, inquisitive, demanding, objectionable, rampaging, delightful, spontaneous, creative, irritating, unpredictable.
But these are not allowed! The input/output institution might crash to the ground if it has to deal with these creatures! The corporate state cannot effectively deliver the product if it is dealing with maverick creations like this. They must be eliminated.
Well the Grit brain is well and truly malfunctioning now, so she is going to lie down in a dark room and hope that when she wakes up, it is all gone away.
Because it cannot be true. Soon I will wake up. If I do not, next I might dream this Labour government is in charge of when I am conscious and when I am not.
She imagined, for example, in the midst of her delusions, that Ed Balls said how whole swathes of experienced teachers, like deputy heads, were no longer needed. Now schools can be run by executive superheads, zipping up and down the expressways of England, managing their institutions like giant corporations.
And we will watch and we will like this future. TV programmes will fawningly follow those bullish management styles, we will delight in producers lickspittling behind flyaway managers who, with reforming zeal, sweep away ancient rules, staffrooms, and worn out teachers.
Look! The superhead drops in from a helicopter, barks results and flies away again! Proof to all citizens in the Great Leap Forward! Schools are the best new corporates, advancing annual reports, balance sheets, profit and loss, investment opportunities, dividends for the achievers, the intellectual supertop who wave paper passes to prove it all! You too could aspire for your child to become the new super elite!
Now, in Grit's diseased brain, there aren't people in these places at all. They are just input/output corridors, linked to exits and entrances by conveyor belts. Products pass to be neatly corporately branded and packaged; they're stamped on the forehead; certificates pasted on their backs.
These strange delusions and imaginings in the Grit brain are not in anyway softened by the fantasy that a real, live, person emerges - worse, a feeling person with emotions and a face and a heart that speaks to her real moving hands and thinking brain - and says, Heck! A child beaten up! I'm going to stop that!
Of course the system must react! Of course this person must have Failed an Assessment Qualification. What has gone wrong? She cannot have been reeducated on the training course! If she had successfully phased through that system, with the approval of her superiors, she would have made the automatic deference to the institutional hierarchy with the line Must report all visual incidences to line manager for appropriate handling and publicity requirements.
There is no alternative. There are policies in place to deal with human behaviour. In the great endeavour of the new corporates she must be excluded. She must lose her job, she must be cast out of all enterprises requiring complete submission.
Because we must not forget that schools are now corporate institutions. Staff are hierarchised to become delivery components. Each job is allocated specific descriptions and responsibilities to streamline the effective management system. Any item not allocated a place within the appropriate order in the delivery system must be passed to another human-type unit who is trained and qualified.
And more. We must not forget the image is now all important, and more important then any individual child; we must enforce brand loyalty, brand identity and maintain that brand value at all costs.
And what is this thing called community? What world is that? The Grit brain is in a mangled place now where it knows the Labour government has put into place all procedures by which schools must adopt corporate identities and deliver the output with league tables, performance targets, national curriculum tests. There is no such thing as community. There are institutions and there are whistleblowers - a word once used for people who informed on secret controlling institutions but who now are people who step away from the designated mark to simply say what is happening to children.
Children? Children? Who mentioned them? In the Grit brain all is awry and gone bonkers. Because children are messy, scruffy, inquisitive, demanding, objectionable, rampaging, delightful, spontaneous, creative, irritating, unpredictable.
But these are not allowed! The input/output institution might crash to the ground if it has to deal with these creatures! The corporate state cannot effectively deliver the product if it is dealing with maverick creations like this. They must be eliminated.
Well the Grit brain is well and truly malfunctioning now, so she is going to lie down in a dark room and hope that when she wakes up, it is all gone away.
Because it cannot be true. Soon I will wake up. If I do not, next I might dream this Labour government is in charge of when I am conscious and when I am not.
Friday, 24 July 2009
Grit is time poor
Thanks to having organised, at the last minute, a week's holiday.
The holiday is to be locked up in a concrete bunker with two kids on the Isle of Wight, England's smallest county. I will be unable to get off the island during peak holiday season and a swine flu pandemic. Come Tuesday I see myself weeping, holding an ear thermometer, a bottle of Calpol and the swine flu hotline number. Dig will be at home preparing to leave for India. The other misplaced kid is abandoned somewhere en route at the back of a horse with a pot of glitter.
It's all less exciting than it sounds.
And a week's holiday with two of my offspring WILL BE a lot of FUN.
I have gritted my teeth in preparation and packed the portable DVD player. By Wednesday, forgive me if I am drinking heavily, kicking myself, and effing and blinding, and the latter no longer under my breath.
Because why and how I have contrived this absurd set of circumstances I am not sure. It is one of those happenings that made perfect logical sense while it is all unfolding and in retrospect now feels like a bad script that I can't get out of, but in the next Act, there appears a burned out Volvo, three snakes and a pygmy. Perhaps then, the Dyson will drive us home.
But while I am making love to the Dyson, tackling the fire, trapping the snakes and defeating the pygmy, I will be internetless and out of communication.
On the bright side, I have made time for a holiday haircut. This is not at the local salon with Kylie, but is upstairs in the disused bathroom with Grit, thrashing around hacking at her head with a pair of scissors, because life is just too short to fit everything in.
And I will leave you with this delightful scrap of almost-conversation which passes for tenderness in our household.
Grit: (Big Burp)
Shark: Mummy! You are not blaming me for that again.
The holiday is to be locked up in a concrete bunker with two kids on the Isle of Wight, England's smallest county. I will be unable to get off the island during peak holiday season and a swine flu pandemic. Come Tuesday I see myself weeping, holding an ear thermometer, a bottle of Calpol and the swine flu hotline number. Dig will be at home preparing to leave for India. The other misplaced kid is abandoned somewhere en route at the back of a horse with a pot of glitter.
It's all less exciting than it sounds.
And a week's holiday with two of my offspring WILL BE a lot of FUN.
I have gritted my teeth in preparation and packed the portable DVD player. By Wednesday, forgive me if I am drinking heavily, kicking myself, and effing and blinding, and the latter no longer under my breath.
Because why and how I have contrived this absurd set of circumstances I am not sure. It is one of those happenings that made perfect logical sense while it is all unfolding and in retrospect now feels like a bad script that I can't get out of, but in the next Act, there appears a burned out Volvo, three snakes and a pygmy. Perhaps then, the Dyson will drive us home.
But while I am making love to the Dyson, tackling the fire, trapping the snakes and defeating the pygmy, I will be internetless and out of communication.
On the bright side, I have made time for a holiday haircut. This is not at the local salon with Kylie, but is upstairs in the disused bathroom with Grit, thrashing around hacking at her head with a pair of scissors, because life is just too short to fit everything in.
And I will leave you with this delightful scrap of almost-conversation which passes for tenderness in our household.
Grit: (Big Burp)
Shark: Mummy! You are not blaming me for that again.
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