Merry Christmas :O)

Grace and Constance.

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Is it just me?

Someone helping to equip a Christmas Refuge for homeless people has asked if I would contribute certain necessities, new underwear, towels, small soaps etc plus 'suitable' Christmas gifts.  The gifts can be anything with just 2 exceptions - cigarettes and alcohol will not be accepted.

 

Now, maybe it's just me but this refusal to allow people to donate cigarettes or alcohol made me quite cross.  I can fully understand that the drinking of alcohol on the premises would not be allowed and that if people are inebriated they wouldn't be allowed to stay.  I also realise, obviously, that smoking is illegal inside enclosed public spaces. 

However, to go so far as to say that people should not even give homeless people a packet of cigarettes or a can of beer, or even give a bottle of spirits to the centre management so that these poor people can have a measured tot at Christmas is an unwarranted imposition of someone else's values on the homeless and on donors.  It reminds me of former times when Christian charities running such relief schemes insisted that recipients of their charity should take part in religious practices and services. 

 

This insistence that people toe the line of someone else's values is symptomatic of the new Puritanism which is pervading society and imo to do it to people who already have far fewer 'rights' than the rest of us stinks.

 

Am I right or am I, as someone has told me, just being difficult?

Stuart said: Some find sheep sexy does that mean we should ban farm animals?

Babies are not sheep Stuart and altho paedophiles are indeed bestial, the occasional shagging of sheep cannot in any way be likened to raping babes in arms.

 

Accessory before and after the fact

A friend of mine who is in the Probation Service once worked at a Category A prison and at one point ran group sessions with convicted serious paedophiles.  As a result she gained more insights into perverted behaviour than she ever wished to have, one being the use put to both still and moving images of tots on TV advertisements.  These images are captured and manipulated by paedophiles to provide sexual excitement and, according to my friend, manufacturers of infant products had been made fully aware of this.

 

Every time I see an advert for baby oils or nappies, or skin creams where babies' naked bottoms are shown, and especially when those adverts show adults kissing babies bottoms it makes me sick to think of these perverts misusing and abusing those images.  That manufacturers approve and pay for the screening of such adverts knowing full well how they'll be used sickens me even further.  The manufacturers and advertising agencies concerned should, imo, be prosecuted in the same way that anyone else providing pictures of adults stroking and kissing the bottoms of infants would be prosecuted.

Not quite the Secret Seven.

 

I've always been in two minds about keeping a journal.  On the one hand, because I keep a copy on my hard drive, it really is the nearest to a diary I've ever managed to maintain for more than the 3 weeks when I got a locked diary for my 8th birthday so in that sense it will I hope be an aide memoire in years to come.  BTW, when I was 8 I tended to say, every day, "went to school, didn't eat my cabbage, it rained" But I also wonder whether having a public journal, even tho I keep fairly quiet about it, isn't actually a bit egocentric.

Lately I've been spending time looking at all the journals on nablopomo and I have read so many entries by the really brave, the really adventurous and the really philosophical that I cannot help but forcefully realise how very dull my blog must be to people who don't know me - and doubtless even more so to those who do! 

I've also read countless entries by people just noting their everyday lives, humdrum domesticity and the doings of families and as their entries mount up I've got a sense of them as personalities.  I've even, in my head, taken sides in their family bickerings tho I have yet to email any of them and put them right  LOL.  

As I read these entries it's occurred to me to give that a try.  So while I have my doubts that any of my select group of regular readers (ie all 5 or 6 of you <g>) will be fascinated to know what I've cooked for dinner, what I've bought in the shops, what my kids have said on the phone, the multifareous ways in which my husband winds me up...  I'm going to give it a go.  But not quite yet.

 

For now I'm going to do what almost everyone in nablopomo is currently doing - giving 7 weird random facts about myself:

 

1. Whenever I see a large weed I am impelled to pull it out.  It doesn't matter where it is, private garden or public planting, or whether people are looking -- if I see a large groundsel or a sycamore seedling or anything else which ought not to be there then out it has to come. 

 

2. I pick the jelly out of pork pies and leave it on my plate.

 

3. My toe nails are always varnished, winter and summer alike.

 

4. My first husband has had a canal barge built and intends to live on it once it's fitted out.

 

5. I can become accustomed to squalor almost at the speed of light.

 

6. My elder brother was killed while riding my new bike.

 

7. I was once engaged to an American.

 

Well, that's it for now.  Tomorrow, or sometime fairly soon, I intend to regale you all with sidesplitting and/or heartrending tales of the daily grind chez nous.  I bet you can't wait! 

The omnipresent eye

After needing specs for 50 years my husband can now, using only the eye which was operated on yesterday, easily read what I'm typing here in comic sans size 10 from a distance of 6'.  It's a good job I never diss him  ;-)

We went into town today to get one of the lenses in his specs changed to plain glass as an interim measure and it was very reminiscent of going to town with Constance.  He needed his hand held descending stairs and kept reading aloud from street signs and shop windows.  I may apply to Children In Need for a Grant.

Eye aye

 

My husband is home after having his cataract surgery this afternoon and all seems to have gone very well.  He's now sitting in his chair with the dog and cat on his lap, and a clear perspex eye guard taped over his left eye.  Aww, bless.   

He has to keep the eyeguard on until tomorrow morning and then wear it over night for the next week and have eyedrops 4 times a day for the next 4 weeks until he gets the all-clear.  Then he'll be arranging to have the other eye done early in the  New Year.  He's been very matter of fact and stoic in the lead up to this which, given that he's not had any surgery since he was a lad, is brilliant I think.  I'd have wittered and needed regular reassurance I suspect.

 

It's a fascinating operation.  The eye and all nerves around it are numbed by anaesthesia and then the sac, which is within the eye and behind the iris, in which the fluid has become opaque is penetrated on 2 sides by a teensy opthalmic pipette.  The murky contents are then 'vacuumed' out and a clear replacement fluid inserted.  It takes about 20 minutes which is an amazingly short time for such a life-changing outcome.

Mind, it's a good job there's not a big soccer match on TV over the next few days else he'd not be a happy or stoic convalescent bunny.