Catch Up

Isn't the Christmas period absolutely frenetic for Mums?  At long last all my gifts have been wrapped and either delivered or en route via the cross-country family network.  The major gifts for our girls are all home-made but I'll say no more yet because at least one of them has this url in her faves. It's worked out really well tho and I'm already planning something similar for next year. 

The food is prepared and in the freezer for the Boxing Day family feeding of the 5000,  well, 19 actually but they eat like 5000.

 

Today my hub had his check-up appointment with his opthalmic surgeon who was very chuffed with the result of his last operation and arranged to do the other cataract on January 2nd.  Hopefully if the 2nd eye turns out as well as the 1st then it'll be a fantastic beginning to the new year for my hub.

 

I recently rediscovered a school photograph of my class and scanned it.  When I was a small girl I stammered, was so shy I could almost make myself disappear in broad daylight and could have blushed for England.  Can you tell which is me?

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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.