Litter

Is it my imagination or is there much less litter around since the smoking ban was introduced?

The prediction was for us all to be wading knee deep through discarded fag ends. But then there are a lot more street ash trays around which encourage people to dispose of them properly now

That doesnt really explain why people should have stopped dropping food wrappers, till receipts, drink cans & cartons though

Could it be that discarded cigarette ends used to encourage people to think that their own bit of litter wouldnt matter, wouldnt make any difference?

Although I am a smoker I have always been careful not to drop my butts on the ground. Or at least since a visit to West Berlin in 1979. There the streets were so pristine that I would not have dared

Is it too much to hope that gum chewers will now get the message?

Guinness is good for you

I read that sales of Guinness are on the slide

Imagine the shock! horror! reaction if someone today proposed that Guinness should be available on NHS prescription

And yet it used to be. Recommended for those who needed building up. Poor people who struggled to provide themselves with an adequate diet, or for those with illness-induce poor appetite

Including, if memory serves, nursing mothers. No doubt to be drunk while the poor little baby was alone outside in the garden

An elderly gentleman with mobility problems occupied a flat below us when we lived in Kensal Rise in the 1960s. Happily the bay window in his living room looked out across the road to the off licence. So he was able to put a sign in his window when he had a new prescription. The Guinness, in 1/4 or 1/3 pint cans was then delivered to his door

Other food stuffs could also be prescribed. I seem to remember that baked beans were on the list.

Its not that many years ago that I read the practice had been finally discontinued. Now they prescribe very expensive nutrition drinks instead

Tryfan

A sad story in the papers the other day about a boy who died on Tryfan. What surprised me about the coverage was the very firm statement that There are no easy routes up Tryfan

Well obviously, it depends on what you mean by easy, & it is certainly a good idea to discourage inexperienced walkers from having a go

I went to the summit for the first time when I was 8. My father took me. He was very experienced, I was no complete novice, used to living in the Peak District & family holidays in Snowdonia

I had a little secret dream as we climbed. A boy had been featured in Granpas Daily Express because he had climbed Snowdon at the age of 12. I could beat that, in a way, though perhaps Tryfan didnt count because it wasnt the tallest

I may actually have been conceived on Tryfan - my parents spent their war time honeymoon cycling round Snowdonia & my mother always spoke particularly fondly of Tryfan

By coincidence another recent story took me back to those hill walking days. A warning never to drink untreated water, even from a fast-flowing mountain stream. Apparently e.coli is everywhere now. My father taught me never to drink from a stream below a certain point, in case there was a dead sheep higher up. After that, you were OK

Rations for a days climb usually consisted of a block of dried dates, cheddar cheese & chocolate. We had a little aluminium pan in which to boil water using some kind of white block which could be lit to provide heat

Cartoons

Equal opportunities

A bundle of cartoons fell out of an old commonplace book. From the date of the book they ought to be all over 10 years old, though I cant be sure.

Its amazing how topical some of them still seem. Or maybe we just have a lot of the same obsessions

Art of our times

Shops generally have not put up NO SMOKING signs for years now. Everybody knew it wasnt allowed. Now everywhere has to show them. Next the law might catch up with what shop owners (especially of clothes shops) have known for years now; they need to put up signs saying NO FOOD OR DRINK

Safety of medicine

Because if MRSA doesnt get you the bacon sandwiches will

University of life

Despite all this governments efforts to widen participation

National Trust membership drive

This one really is topical all over again

Enoch Powell

No comment needed

What do we know?

Poor soul, in this thy flesh what dost thou know?


Thou knowst thyself so little, as thou knowst not,
How thou didst die, nor how thou wast begot.
Thou neither knowst, how thou at first camst in,
Nor how thou tookst the poison of mans sin.
Nor dost thou, (though thou knowst, thou art so)
By what way thou art made immortal, know.


Thou art too narrow, wretch, to comprehend
Even thyself; yea though thou wouldst but bend
To know thy body.


Have not all souls thought
For many ages, that our body is wrought
Of air, & fire, & other elements?
And now they think of new ingredients,
And one soul thinks one, & another way
Another thinks,
& tis an even lay.


Knowst thou but how the stone doth enter in
The bladders cave, & never breaks the skin?
Knowst thou how blood, which to the heart doth flow,
Doth from one ventricle to th'other go?
And for the putrid stuff, which thou dost spit,
Knowst thou how thy lungs have attracted it?
There are no passages, so that there is
(For aught thou knowst) piercing of substances.


And of those many opinions, which men raise
Of nails & hairs, dost thou know which to praise?
What hope have we to know ourselves, when we
Know not the least things, which for our use to be?

John Donne The Second Anniversary 254-280

Imagine not knowing what hair & nails are made of. Having the media filled with people arguing the point, calling their opponents ignorant or stupid.

Although it is easy to feel quite smug about how much more 'we' know these days, I often wonder if it is possible to say whether an individual can know more than did someone like Donne? OK, a lot of what he knew was wrong (we think) but theres also an awful lot 'we' have forgotten because it is not much use to us in our daily lives

Shoulders

Another non-modern picture of a woman with sloping shoulders. Will they ever come back into fashion again?

Not if the modern models amazingly horizontal collar bones are any guide

Lies, damn lies, and Florence Nightingale

There is probably no department of human inquiry in which the art of cooking statistics is unknown, & there are sceptics who have substituted 'statistics' for 'expert witness' in the well known saying about classes of false statements
Sir Edward Cook : Life of Florence Nightingale 1913

This sounds like the source for the saying about lies, damn lies etc.

Not Disraeli after all. More like a judicial joke

Feeding baby

Libby Purves mentioned in her column the other day that the Truby King insistence on regular 4-hourly feeds stemmed from research on calves

Funny that. The edition of Dr Spock which I used said that the idea came from incompletely or inadequately controlled clinical trials on human babies.

Gastro-enteritis etc used to be major killers, evn in the developed world. Trials of methods which involved scrupulous sterilisation somehow also introduced a rigid time table. The death rate was cut dramatically

I suppose that makes sense in a way - if feeding times are erratic & unpredictable it gets harder to ensure sterilisation

It took time to establish that a rigid feeding timetable in itself had no independent effect on the risk of disease

There are eternal lessons here. Make sure that you have thought about all the confounding variables.

And why do we have to keep on re-learning the message about cleanliness?

Link

Verity, I say unto you: trust the mums Libby Purves - Times Online

Fear

Fear is by definition irrational since it is caused by, is a reaction to, something which has not happened yet

Fear in itself is not necessarily irrational – sensible mice are fearful of cats -Peter Brooker

Exformation

Exformation: That part of communication which doesnt have to be uttered because it is a shared understanding between speaker & listener

Can exformation travel faster than information?

And what do scientists mean by information anyway? Where is the knowledge, to coin a phrase

The pram in the hall

I think Cyril Connolly would have approved of putting baby out in the garden



It would have got the pram out of the hall for an hour or two



Left you space to get on with the masterpiece



Or the housework

Lifes span

Given that life is finite for the individual, one can argue:

(a) every extra day is worth a lot

(b) it is so short in relation to the infinity of time that it does not really signify if we live for 40 or 80 or any other number of years

Nappies

If theres one aspect of modern child-rearing theory which gets my grumpy old goat it is the idea that a child can NOT control its excretory functions until well beyond its 2nd birthday

PHOOEY. RUBBISH. As any mother who had to cope with terry nappies without a washing machine could tell you

The idea of a 3-year old walking round with a loaded nappy? EEEEUGH

At least the government doesnt have a policy on this

Though on second thoughts, if were all supposed to mind each others business now ...

Advice to all parents

Trust your instincts

Just remember that, whatever you do, they will end up Larkined

Or at least they will think they are

Link

This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin (read by Larkin)

Leaving your baby alone

The business of giving babies an 'airing' is still preoccupying sections of the press



And again there is horror at the idea that they were left alone. Well they were asleep, usually. Though even when awake babies are often more than able to amuse themselves

Another element of baby care then which has of course more or less completely disappeared is the use of older siblings or neighbourhood children to keep an eye on baby

In the the age of 2-children-3-years apart families of course there wont be any siblings old enough to take any such responsibility

One of the, to me, most disconcerting facts about modern parenting is that, for many people, the first baby they ever hold is their own

The worst danger to babies sleeping in the garden in fact came from cats, who were well known (allegedly) to be in the habit of jumping into the pram & scratching the babys face, or even suffocating it

But the 1950s equivalent of Mothercare could provide special nets to fix over the hood to avert this

Trust the British to hide even their babies behind net curtains