The View From The Building Site!

Blogging is taking a bit of a back seat at the moment – not through lack of enthusiasm but rather lack of real opportunity. We are in the middle of a number of major house renovations – new kitchen, downstairs shower room and office. We have  been waiting  for some months for the builders to start and they did so ten days ago, so I am wiring this amid drilling, hammering, piles of bricks and enough dust to make Sahara  dust storm look mediocre! Pat and I are living on one room and we are warned that tonight we may have no heating – the new central heating boiler is being fitted. In this context, blogging has had to take its place in between emptying cupboards, making endless cups of tea for the builders generally surviving in a  waste land!

In truth it is going very well – although cold, the weather has been good and by the end of this week we should be moving away from the demolition and bricklaying stage and more into the cosmetic and construction stage – or so we are told. Actually, we are very fortunate; our builder is a friend who we know well and who makes every effort to make things easy and work with the minimum of disruption to everyday life.

But, whilst all this has been going on there have been a number of things which I have come across and which have made me think – sadly, all rather negative thoughts – and which, in a small way, had a common thread.

The first is something which many will disagree with but is an issue which increasingly saddens me at a number of levels. Over breakfast on Saturday morning I settled down to read my Guardian. Having flicked through the headlines -  as usual pretty depressing stuff – I looked at the Guardian “Family” section. The cover story was entitled “Man about the house” and concerned the role of men in the family  and especially as parents. What saddened me was a report of a comment on Mumsnet: "It has just dawned on me that my husband has absolutely no idea how hard I work looking after three kids under four whilst running my own business. I want to punch the useless twat!" The rights and wrongs of the particular issue (i.e. the role of the man in the house) was not my concern but rather the venom and unpleasant language used by this woman – and the fact that she felt it acceptable and appropriate to express herself in these terms to the whole world. My immediate reaction was well, if she is a business woman I hope that I never do business with her. I quickly followed that up by thinking what on earth is she doing writing on “Mumsnet” – I would have thought that the invective, aggression, venom and foul language in the comment would be a bit of a contradiction with the term “Mum”. But, having got over those initial, male chauvinist pig, knee jerk reactions I felt overwhelmingly sad – what a lot of anger there is in the world, I thought. What poor personal judgement  people show in how they portray themselves. And do they not realise that in making aggressive, unpleasant comments such as that they are displaying their lack of ability to put forward a reasoned and sensible argument of their case. We all know this, of course, we see it on our city streets, on the sports fields, on our TV sets – but to read it in a “family section” of a respected newspaper was not what I expected. The woman concerned probably had a very valid point about her husband – I’m sure that she did – my own feeling was that perhaps she ought to examine her own role and mode of expression. Of course, this is not new – read the posts on any newspaper web site and one will see similar aggressive  unpleasant comments masquerading  as reasoned argument when in fact they are just aggressive and angry outbursts in just the same way that  the drunk on the street or the Premiership footballer might lash out in angry frustration. 

The erudite, bizarre and totally out
 of touch Michael Gove

My second  commentary on the past week’s events is the absolutely appalling and ill considered suggestion by Michael Gove that the nation should give the Queen a new royal yacht to mark her jubilee. Gove is known for his bizarre ideas and his attachment to royalty but in this he has surpassed himself and  seems to show an incredible lack of awareness of ordinary people in these economically austere times. This lack of awareness makes me think that anyone as insensitive and unaware as this really ought not to be holding public office – it reminds me of the some of the more way out candidates of the US Republican Party that we read about in our newspapers.  Gove’s ministerial responsibility is the education of our children and it is a depressing thought that someone as far removed from reality and as insensitive as he is can make decisions that can affect the life and welfare of the young.

US Marines "make a stupid mistake"

And finally, and following my reference to the US Republican party, I was more than a little sad to see over the weekend the picture of four US Marines allegedly urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. I wonder what sort of mind would do this? How could anyone commit such an act? What made it even worse was that comments from various bizarre and totally out of touch Republican politicians who seemed to suggest that it was no big deal and within the realms of the acceptable. Rick Perry said the marines involved should be reprimanded but not prosecuted on criminal charge: "Obviously, 18 and 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often. And that's what's occurred here.” Errr, no - if these young men are capable of making  “mistakes” of this nature then they should not be wearing a uniform that makes them representative of their country. I was rather more cheered by the comment of a senior US army spokesman who posed the question “Have we really reached such a low ebb that we have to run a  course to explain why we do not urinate on dead people?” Sadly the answer to that rhetorical question seems to be "yes".

Rick Perry - the  truly frightening
thing is that, like Michael Gove,
people like him actually wield
influence and might one day
  gain power

And this is the common thread that links all my examples. I’m sure that many will totally disagree  with what I have written but for me it is dispiriting to find that so many people today appear totally unaware of what is acceptable and appropriate. Why would anyone want to advertise the fact that they use foul language and speak of their husband, their life partner, the father of their children in the manner that this woman does? What might the children think if they read it - to hear their mother speak like this and to hear their father described thus? What do the grandparents think? If I read that my daughter had openly described her husband in such terms I would be mortified - what does it say about how I have brought her up? Does no one have any shame? Why would anyone make comments that are so insensitive to many others that they become  offensive? What can society do for young men who, in their eighteen or nineteen years on the planet have not assimilated basic codes of human behaviour and humanity? If they haven't got them by now then when will they? What did their parents think? As the US spokesman said “do we have to run a  course?” 

Implicit in all these examples is the truth that each of the people involved is totally unaware of others and of appropriate action. In the words of a children’s hymn that we used to sing regularly at school:

May they learn from this great story
All the arts of friendliness;
Truthful speech and honest action,
Courage, patience, steadfastness;
How to master self and temper,
How to make their conduct fair;
When to speak and when be silent,
When to do and when forbear.

Put in modern terms – think before speaking or acting. It’s called self control.

Some time ago I read an article aimed at young people applying for jobs or applying for university and amongst the many tips given was “clean up your social networking sites”. In other words make sure that what you write on sites like Facebook or Twitter  (or, in the case of the woman in my  example above, Mumsnet) presents the sort of picture that you want to present about yourself to would be employers. It was good advice. Having acted in recent years as an admissions tutor for people applying for a place on a teacher training course, a quick visit to Facebook would soon present a very different – and perhaps more honest - picture of an applicant than did their application form. It frequently raised the question “Is this the sort of person who possesses the sort of judgement and personal values that we require?”  And that is what I would suggest in the examples I’ve quoted – they’re all about personal judgement, personal values, appropriateness..........perhaps  rather old fashioned ideas in this modern, thrusting, aggressive, transparent,  accountable world in which we live. Politicians, business leaders, shakers and movers of all persuasions never tire of telling us that “accountability” is the thing. We must be “transparent” and open in our actions – well, I’m sure that we would all sign up to that. But the corollary is that if we are “transparent” – and we happily urinate on corpses on camera, if we freely show aggression and use expletives in our internet posts etc., if we make totally insensitive comments as does Michael Gove then we must also be accountable and ultimately judged for our actions and bear the resulting consequences.