Today we look forward, as always, to the visit of our domestic help who is always a source of good housekeeping advice as well as a good friend. With her, I can discuss the cleaning and drying of the faux fur throw which I successfully completed over the last few days and am shortly to bring into use. This morning, I managed to get the front lawns cut whilst we had a burst of sunshine. Our domestic help (with some some assistance from her husband as well) had baked us a cottage pie. We ate it with some fresh runner beans, kindly donated by our neighbour yesterday and topped off with a little garlic and herb sauce to make the beans even more delicious. Yesterday on our walk back from town, it was delightful to bump into our Italian friend with whom we always exchange pleasant words. I also received a telephone call from our friends in South Oxfordshire that we used to visit regularly but which is now beyond us. He explained to us what a wonderful few days he had just experienced in Southern Spain zigzagging across from Malaga to Ronda to Cadiz. I would not be very surprised if eventually our friends might sell up and relocate to Spain as they evidently enjoy the culture so much. In fact, I well remember that when our friends joined us for some 50th wedding anniversary celebrations in Spain and I has asked the waitresses to supply us with Cava whenever we ran out, my friend exclaimed that he thought the whole trip was organised in such a way so that I could embrace as many young Spanish women (waitresses) as I could. But there again Spain has a much more tactile culture than in the UK even though things are changing here somewhat.
A story has come to light recently about which I have some fairly strong views but the exact reasons why will become apparent at the end of my piece. The story relates to the 15 year old son (not far short of his 16th birthday, actually) who interrailed across Europe with a sixteen year old friend. An anonymous caller had phoned social services who had opened a file on the case suspecting a case of neglect. Then Alsopp demanded that the file be deleted, the social services department replied that it had to be kept open in case a further case of 'neglect' was reported. To make matters worse, the law requires that the file be kept until the young person is 25 years of age. Allsopp is furious beyond belief because no law had been broken and she argued that in other cultures e.g. in Japan, youngsters are encouraged to make journeys of their own. Now we come to my own story. At the age of 11, I started to attend a boarding school in Bolton in Lancashire whilst my mother went off to train to be a teacher. I hasten to add that this was not a boarding school in the traditional sense but a boarding unit of some 40 pupils attached to a 600 intake grammar school. At the time we lived in a suburb of Harrogate in Yorkshire. The journey to school consisted of me walking to the local suburban station and catching a diesel train into Harrogate. Here I caught a train to a station in Leeds called 'Holbeck High Level' station from which I caught an LMS train that took me to Rochdale. On Rochdale station I caught another train (leaving from more or less the same platform) that took me onto Bolton. When I Bolton, I then caught a bus for a journey of some 2-3 miles after which I alighted and then walked the best part of a mile to the school. I was shown this journey by an existing pupil on one occasion but from then on from the ages of 11-14, I undertake the journey there (and evidently back at half term and end of term breaks) completely on my own. Judged by the standards applied in the Allsopp case, this would nowadays be a cause of evident neglect or child abuse but certainly not in 1956. Of course, the environment was so much safer in those days as the trains always turned up on time and I do not remember a single delay in the journeys I made across a three year period. But having said all of that, I do not think that if I had an 11-year child today, I would allow them to undertake a journey like that and nor would it be necessary. How the other boys arrived at their school destination completely escapes me but I do not remember cars turning up to collect their offspring. Even at school, I think that once I had entered the second year I was allowed to go down into town to do some shopping completely on my own and unsupervised. Now I do appreciate that it is impossible to be completely definitive about these issues and the environment of today is full of dangers and risks that were not present in 1956. But at the age of 10, I raided the local municipal tip for some empty oil drums which we then strapped onto a kind of platform before carrying it across the moors surrounding Beckwithshaw in Yorkshire where we then lived and then sitting on this raft whilst we paddled up the river. This I describe as a 'Swallows and Amazons' style of experience and I am not sure that my mother, who was at work at the time, ever knew of the experiences in which we engaged. I now return to the Alsopp case. I will follow the media to see what the reaction of other parents is to this story. From what I have been able to gauge so far, opinion seems to be fairly evenly divided between those who wish to encourage independence and initiative and those who feel that the Alsopp case represents a step too far. The point is made, with which I concur, that one has to distinguish between a 15 year old boy and a 15 year old girl. A further point is that youngsters may now be reliant upon their mobile phones as the answer to everything if they ran into difficulties but there are certain life skills (e.g. managing to interpret a bus timetable) which may prove troublesome for adolescents and probably many older people as well.
A high rise building in Dagenham, East London, went up in flames overnight but it appears that no one had dies or been seriously injured. More than seven years after the fatal Grenfell Tower fire in west London, it cannot be clearly explained why a building less than 20 miles away was still covered in unsafe materials. In the Grenfell case, various parties to the construction are still arguing like rats in a sack about who should bear the ultimate responsibility. If and when the official enquiry into this disaster reports, I wonder if we shall ever know how many critical documents held in the filing systems of the construction firms or even the planning departments of local authorities mysteriously have gone missing i.e. probably been shredded so that an evidence trail of blame cannot be established.
© Mike Hart [2024]