Semi-colon terrorists

Michael Rosen’s latest blog is about the ‘semi-colon terrorism’ from the Department for Education. He is anti-semi-colon. He says the semi-colon is neither ‘fish nor fowl’

He says: “I am utterly convinced that forcing primary school teachers and primary school children – no matter how able  - to spend time on this is really a waste of time.”

Well, I for one would like to take issue with this, as a semi-colon apologist. Probably this will be of no consequence to you whatsoever unless you like punctuation or you like me ranting. Feel free to come back tomorrow when I will have got over this little language issue.

Maybe.

Firstly, ‘terrorism’ is silly. It’s like calling people a Grammar Nazi. I don’t like these terms simply because they’re clichéd and also, all in all, a little mark never hurt anyone. Unless you’ve read Cieran Carson’s amazing poem ‘Belfast Confetti’. I’m not a Nazi because I like grammar and order. I like to break the rules as much as the next man. I make up words and play hard and fast with dialect words and regionalisms and sentence structure. I’m not a Nazi because I think there and their are easy to learn and everyone with a modicum of literacy should know how to use them. And I’m not a terrorist simply because I like a semi-colon from time to time.

Here’s a confession. I once went out with a guy because he used a semi-colon appropriately in a text message.

I lurrrrrve the semi-colon and I don’t agree that it’s neither fish nor fowl. Of course you can get away your whole life without using it, but why would you want to? It’s such a delightful thing.

And its rules are simple.

A semi-colon is a pivot. It sits where a full stop or a coordinating conjunction could go. It’s a beautiful little balance.

Consider this:

Cats are whimsical, independent and somewhat neurotic; dogs are loyal, dependable and sometimes completely crackers.

Yes, it could be a full stop.

Cats are whimsical, independent and somewhat neurotic. Dogs are loyal, dependable and sometimes completely crackers.

Or it could be a conjunction.

Cats are whimsical, independent and somewhat neurotic whereas dogs are loyal, dependable and sometimes completely crackers.

Cats are whimsical, independent and somewhat neurotic, and dogs are loyal, dependable and sometimes completely crackers.

The first alternatives are fine, but too matter-of-fact for me. There’s nothing really that tells you these ideas are connected, other than your own fine head. If you don’t have a fine head, I might want to tell you that there’s a little Alice-in-Wonderland mirror in that semi-colon where one thing is reflected in the second. Let’s face it, we have punctuation to tell people what to do. It says stop. It says go. It says the tone has changed! Does it tell you my mood? It tells you if I’m feeling… uncertain. It tells you that I’m explaining something: punctuation is bossy. It tells you I’m disjointed – or disconnected. It makes sense of things like a man-eating tiger and a man eating tiger. It tells you that somet’ing is missin’ and it tells you how I, the writer, wants to you read something. It can add something (like when you want to put in something extra) to your work. And if we didn’t have punctuation it would make it fairly hard for most of the population who would then have to ponder about where you would want them to stop or go or how you would want them to proceed because sentences are very important and punctuation is the stuff that makes them without them our words are just mushed up mess and we might as well not have anything at all which would make it a lot easier for some people to write but a lot harder for most people to read.

Capiche?

Punctuation was invented for a reason.

It’s bossy and magical.

That’s probably what I like about it.

So why single out the semi-colon?

I suspect it’s because Michael Rosen doesn’t fully appreciate its beauty. And it is beautiful. It’s a ballerina of punctuation marks, pivoting and turning. It’s the point on which the whole sentence pirouettes. It dances; it turns. It allows you to make one point and lead a reader; it allows you to turn and make another. It forms a beautiful bond between two ideas; it marries them and links them forever in ways that a full stop can never do. A semi-colon brings clauses together; a full stop divorces them. A semi-colon is therefore a beautiful wedding of a punctuation mark; do not let what one man has joined be torn asunder. It doesn’t matter if the clause before comes loaded with punctuation marks of its own, like the humble (and almost ungovernable) comma; the semi-colon can cope with a sentence as long as you want beforehand, with as much non-stop punctuation as you care to use.

A semi-colon is mathematical; sometimes I like to ensure the clause before has the same number of words and mathematical cadence as the clause after it. Sometimes I like to use it to be playful in ways that most other punctuation isn’t.

It’s a misunderstood mark. It’s so much easier to use than a comma (and you can see my post on the Oxford comma if you disagree) and it’s so clean and perfect. It makes the reader work to my rhythm.

Kurt Vonnegut said that the only reason to use a semi-colon is to show you’ve been to college. He might be right. But a semi-colon does things that other marks just do not do. No, there aren’t hard-and-fast rules about where it should go (though I’m pretty clear on where it can’t) and yet it’s so easy to use. It makes language dance. It is a beautiful and glorious shift-and-echo.

Consider:

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
(Peter Drucker)

What I don’t like is how Mr Michael Rosen tries to use Dickens to further his argument: “I like to punctuate them [sentences] with full stops and not semi-colons. I got this from a writer I like. His names is Charles Dickens.”

He is obviously forgetting the most beautifully-balanced semi-colon use of all:

“There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France.”

That’d be Dickens.

Now, Michael Rosen needs to think about his strange and misguided approach to this most elegant of punctuation marks. It brings my sentences together in the most marvellous of ways and being told that it makes writing heavy when in fact it can make writing dance and spin, well, that gets my goat. Michael Rosen needs not to bring in punctuation into his argument about why the British government should not have set rules for 11-year olds for grammar.

Plus, if we had no semi-colons, how would I do this?

An online wink is just about the nicest thing to do with a semi-colon. So yah boo, Michael Rosen.

It’s not exactly sex and the city…

Samantha Brick, my favourite love-to-hate ‘journalist’ of the moment has come up with another corker in the Daily Fail. I know why they’re paying her to write it – it must send their hits beyond sky-high – way out in the stratosphere – and from the looks of the comments, it’s not just me who feels this way.

She says French women are predatory man-hunters who are ‘brazen’, ‘hostile and predatory’ and that she hasn’t any French female friends. They won’t come and drink cocktails with her after work and they won’t go on girlie shopping trips. Now, forgive me, because I think this woman lives in deepest, darkest countryside – and even if she didn’t, she’s not living in Paris or Milan or New York.

It made me laugh because even when I worked in London, and the Government or Pearson kindly put me up overnight, we used to finish our meetings and retire to our rooms. Sometimes we’d go out for something to eat – mainly because other people were paying – but mainly, we went and watched telly. We were tired. We worked hard. Plus, cocktails are damned expensive. And here in rural France? Well, I know Izza would give me a beer. Karine would give me a coffee. Caroline would give me some spring water. Céline would give me a coffee as well. I mean they’re not inhospitable, but either they work hard and don’t drink cocktails after work, or they’ve got families. Or both.

Not only that, there are 14 houses where I live. I know who lives in 8 of them. They’re old people. I’m not being mean. They are. We swap fruit and I try to poison them by giving them sugary things, and they give me confits and know important stuff like who the best vets are. All of them – to a woman – wear nylon pinnies – and if I asked them to come on a girlie shopping trip, why I think they’d think I was insane. In the one house I know with younger people in it, I think the husband is an idiot who should be shot. He lets his beautiful dog run wild in the road and said he’d get another one when I said his dog would get run over. Dogs might be two-a-penny to him, but to me, they’re better than their owners for the most part. So I don’t want to drink cocktails with his wife. If she drinks cocktails at all.

And do you know what? If I wanted to drink cocktails after work, I’d have moved to New York. And I bet it’s not all like Sex and the City there either.

I also laughed when she said the women are ‘beautifully made-up’. Now, I go to local cities. I’ve been to Bordeaux, Angouleme, Poitiers, Limoges… just not seeing the beautifully made-up women. I saw a lot when we went to a college open day – the teachers were chic. Chic enough and numerous enough (seven of them in one place!) for me to remember it. Because most French women I know are… decidedly ordinary. They don’t have fake boobs or bleached hair. They don’t have orange make-up or fake tans. They don’t wear fancy clothes. A friend says she knows some yummy mummies – mainly because she lived in the city – but I don’t. The mummies round here, well, they’re not very yummy. I love them anyway though.

Samantha Brick says her ‘friendly hello’ has been ignored at the school gate. Really? If I pick Jake up, I fend off bisous from ten or so mums. There are only forty children in the school, so having kisses from the parents whose children don’t get the bus – well, it takes a good ten minutes. Kiss-kiss-kiss-kiss. Hello. How are you? How’s the family? Really?! Oh! Next. Kiss-kiss-kiss-kiss. Hello. How are you? etc.

Everybody says hello.

Ms Brick also points out that our new President, M Hollande, has a ‘lover’ – the ‘rottweiler’ journalist Valerie Trierwaller – and that she – how very dare she! - stole! M Hollande from his former lover Segolene Royal. She stole him! Like he’s a prize jewel.

1. Look at him, then look at her. She’s a looker. Him? Not so much. Except for the power/politics thing. He might be a whizz in the bedroom. Who knows?

2. He’s a person with real, live feelings. Are men so unable to fend off women that they get passed pillar to post, buffeted from one woman to another? No. They’re sometimes idiots who think with hormones rather than brains. They’re men who never married their former lovers, mothers of their four children. They’re men who get bored. They’re men who might be insecure about their wife’s political aspirations. But they’re not objects to be stolen.

3. Valerie Trierwaller probably didn’t – though I can’t be sure – find out what new mum Carla Bruni would be wearing just so she could steal her thunder. From the look of Ms. Bruni’s outfit for the outgoing ceremony, she didn’t care much for how she looked – and she looked fine. A bit tired. A bit like a new mum whose husband has been running a presidential race. Valerie looked fab. She’s got great pins. But then she knows all the other rottweilers in the media world are just waiting for her to have a bad hair day so they can trash her. She’s a journalist. She knows how it works. I’m not entirely sure her ‘first item on her agenda’ was to ‘put Carla Bruni firmly in her place’. I’m not sure how this ‘sisterhood’ works that Ms. Brick speaks of, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve surreptitiously finding out what your defeated counterpart will be wearing and then finding something less attractive just so you don’t upstage them.

Is Ms Trierwaller such a bitch that she was more ‘gleeful’ about upstaging La Bruni than she was about being the First Lady?! I know where my priorities would be – firmly on not making myself look like an idiot when the whole world is looking – and not trying to upstage the main event – my husband. We’re not all Liz Hurley in safety-pin dresses next to a shabbily dressed Hugh Grant. Some of us just want to support, not fight for the limelight.

So do French women have sinister machinations? Not the ones I know.

Do they ‘bond’ over coffee? Not much – but then, most ‘coffee shops’ include the bookies, and are male-only domains – a bit like pubs were in England up to the late 80s. Women didn’t go in pubs on their own or do ‘girlie’ stuff – not when they were past a certain age. Not unless they were tramps looking for younger men. Women go in different coffee shops – yes they do! – but we’re not talking about a Starbucks world here. Costa Coffee it ain’t. We’re talking tiny cafés with four or five tables and an assortment of chairs. And women – true – don’t go in them as often as men do. But that’s not because the sisterhood is unimportant, but because the home is. You’re either at work or with a young family. Or at home. Women here still shop as a family, still go out with the family – why would it be any different where coffee shops are concerned?

Have my French friends ridiculed my French? No. They think it’s marvellous I speak more than one language. They don’t.

Do they weigh me at dinner parties? I think you know the answer to that.

Do they tell me to go home? No. Because they know how much I love it here.

Have they reduced me to tears? No. But then that place is reserved for few people. I don’t cry easily. They’d have to be absolutely evil to do that.

Anyway, the Daily Mail would do well to remember that they are setting this woman up with a global audience of people who generally disagree with her and dislike her arrogant tone without remembering she might have any number of insecurities herself. Usually, I find we accuse others of what we are ourselves. We find in them the qualities we don’t perhaps realise we are guilty of ourselves – and usually worse than they are. They should know better than setting up a target at the stocks just for people to throw rotten tomatoes in her direction. It would be better for all if Ms Brick kept her views to herself.

It only takes one person to believe that this is how ‘French women’ are – and the beginning of a seed of hatred and prejudice is sown. Women are women are women, nationality aside. And we’re all human. So I might scorn, or laugh, but ultimately, I don’t want anyone to believe that her view of life is how France is – not even one single person.

Some days are shitter than others*

* a loose Smiths-based pun

Yesterday, there was a surge of frustration in the air. Nothing seemed to go right and it was as if there were something maliciously poltergeisty in the universal zeitgeist stirring up all the ghosts in the machine. I wrote several things that then ‘disappeared’ into the ether. I completed several tasks that just evaporated and my early diligence was rewarded by having to do things again.

I went to the supermarket. Shut for stocktaking. The Casino supermarket was open, but with things over double the price, it’s not worth doing a weekly shop there. I bought enough for the day and went home.

Steve had gone out and locked the gate. Luckily, I knew where he’d gone. Unluckily, there are several routes back from where he’d gone and he could have been on any of them. I raced off in the car. He wasn’t at Roy’s. I raced back. Luckily, I found him just about to off-road under a bridge. I always knew he was a troll.

I got back for my lesson with minutes to spare.

Then all hell broke loose in the afternoon. I can even begin to say the changes that must unfold as a result, but suffice to say it sent me to bed early.

Lucky for me, I get to wake up with a quince tree outside my window, with a happy cat and a giddy dog and no matter how hard I have to work for it all, I can always find something to bring a smile to my face as I remember just how very lucky I am. Sisters, mums, nanas, friends: I’m a lucky, lucky girl. I only have to look at Tilly to have a smile come to my face. When I wake up in the night, she is always right there, her i.d. tags tinkling and her little tail a-wagging. She is a funny, funny, cute little dog and sometimes, a cute little teddy-bear of a dog is just enough to send me back to sleep with a smile on my face.

I almost can’t look at the papers at the moment. Today, DC is on the front pages doing some kind of ‘I told you so’ dance, telling off the Eurozone for dragging the world into the mire. We’ll say nothing of the USA, the faltering Chinese economy, the massive Japanese debt, daily alerts about Greece, austerity budgets in France.

I said yesterday in relation to another matter that people should get their own house in order before pointing the finger. He who lives in glass houses and all that… but there’s a huge issue in England at the moment that is really stuck in my craw at the moment.

PFI schemes. You won’t know what these are maybe, or how ludicrous they are but when I tell you, you’ll be dumbfounded that anyone could have agreed to them. Put it this way, you might as well have given all your money to Kerry Katona and seen it go up her nose. At least it would have been more entertaining and done less damage.

Here’s the thing. Set up in 1992 under John Major, they snowballed under Brown. Just to get that straight. Conservative idea. Labour misuse. Pigeons come home to roost under Con-Lib government. Nobody is absolved from blame over this.

When you know what PFI schemes are, that’s important, because each and every one of our politicians contributed to the problem, worsened the problem and then we, the people, will suffer.

Basically, the idea is this: in order to build new public buildings when the Treasury coffers are empty, you contract out the buildings. You offer the contracts to developers and building businesses. They build a new hospital or school with their own money, and then they lease it to the people who will be using it. In the case of hospitals, health care trusts. In the case of schools, local authorities on the whole. Thus, you get a shiny new hospital or school for nothing. Yeah, right.

The leases run a bit like mortgages, in principle. The hospitals and schools pay the developer interest and a lease fee and then after 25 years, they get the building. In theory, should things go wrong, it’s like renting: it’s not your problem to fix.

In reality, it’s possibly the world’s most stupid idea. It’s stupid because the lease-back fees are exhorbitant. The interest rates would make loan sharks blush. The pay-back terms aren’t just over 25 years, but sometimes over 60. Things were built that just didn’t need building. I know there’s no reason hospitals and schools shouldn’t have a wonderful atrium and modern art and lots of glass and look totally unlike schools or hospitals.

Lots of studies agree that the very appearance of schools and hospitals puts people off what they’re supposed to be doing there. But when you’re on a budget, you don’t deck your house out in Farrow and Ball, or buy a conservatory. You build a shed and paint with B&Q budget paint. Sure, it doesn’t look as good, but it does what it needs to. More importantly, it doesn’t saddle you with debt for needless changes.

Some people will point to the benefits of PFI schemes like how they have modernised or streamlined things. But at what cost? And couldn’t those benefits have come just from building the same buildings with public funding – always cheaper – than private funding? All we’ve done is lined the pockets of the developers. Sure, we have shiny hospitals and schools and so on, but at what cost?

The cost, of course, was initially soaked up by the people who were paying for the leases – the hospitals themselves. So what happens when you have a high mortgage or repayment rate? You cut other things. You stop having your daily can of coca-cola or you stop paying a man to cut your grass.

This – on a grander scale – is what happened in the PFI hospitals. They cut other things. And the majority of expense is always staff. In a school, about 80% of the budget is staff. I guess it’s a little different in hospitals because of the costs of machinery and so on. But staff are easy to cut. It’s easier to get rid of a nurse – or just fail to reappoint when they move on – and fill their shoes with an auxiliary. Services get stretched thin. Staff get stressed. Terms for repayment get renegotiated and you’re the loser again. You need to find more funds.

You’ve got two choices. You stop paying and default, with all the consequences, or you go cap in hand and ask for more money from the Treasury. Central and local government put you in this position, but they’re now slapping your hands as if you’ve been willingly messing about with your budget. They give you more. But unfortunately, they don’t have bottomless pockets, so that means somewhere else, a cut has to be made.

And guess what? All the hospitals who have been putting up with shit buildings, decrepit units, MRSA-discos-in-the-making, those hospitals and Trusts who’ve been frugal – the Government take from them to give to you. The government robbing the ants to give to the grasshoppers.

Imagine it this way. Your neighbour bought a shiny new car. He bought it on ridiculous finance. You told him other ways to borrow the money, and actually even advised him to save up until he had enough to pay for it, but he ignored you. He bought it on a credit card with 21.9% APR with a 10 year term. It was affordable. They’d pick up the costs if things broke. It seemed sensible, even though he’d be paying thousands of pounds more than it was worth, and thousands of pounds more than he’d have had to pay if he’d have bargained with another credit company, or even if he’d saved up.

Soon, he lost his job and had to downsize. You watched him struggle. Unfortunately, if he defaulted, he’d have legal proceedings to face. He went to the finance company to say ‘take it back’ but they can’t or won’t. They force him to keep paying. In fact, they pass him on to a ‘debt consolidation unit’ who allow him to pay 20% APR over 20 years. It feels less, but it’s much, much more.

But the economy turns for the worse again. Now he can’t afford those payments either. He’s already eating beans on toast every night and now he can’t buy new shoes for his children, so he goes cap in hand to the dole office.

The dole office do this. They see that you’ve got £5,000 saved up. You’ve been putting it aside because you worried something like this would happen. You were saving for your retirement, as you’d been advised to do. You only have debit cards and you never buy anything you can’t pay for outright. You’ve been driving an old banger because you were saving up to buy a new one, and you’ve been making-do and mending as long as you’ve been a grown-up. You do everything right.

The dole office take your £5,000 to pay off some of your neighbour’s new car.

This is in essence what has happened with the health care trusts and the schools. Ridiculous, isn’t it?

This would never be legal on a personal level. You couldn’t just raid your neighbour’s bank account if you were stupid enough to sign up for one of those 1279% APR loans. But this is what the government are doing. Plundering the pockets of the ants who have saved and stored and made-do in order to pay for the shiny atrium in the grasshopper’s house.

It’s so disgusting, I’m personally surprised Bono and Sir Bob aren’t involved in it and we haven’t got Midge Ure trying to get everyone together to raise money and awareness.

And this is what your leaders do whilst you try your best to follow their advice about debt.

“The price tag for repaying PFI firms will reach £8.6 billion next year alone, with the taxpayer owing a total of £121.4 billion on public projects which are worth only £52.9 billion.”

In a way, I don’t blame the organisations like Innisfree who profit from these schemes. I think that they should renegotiate. I think they are unconscionably greedy if they don’t. I think they should do the right and the honest thing. But you can’t blame them for having rock-solid contracts that allow them to double their profits. They’re a business. That’s what businesses do. At least businesses and banks are honest, if not always transparent, in their motivation. Their aim is to make money. Nothing more. Nothing less. They will do so in the ways that make the most, and that means cutting costs, cutting corners, being barely legal. Don’t ever expect more from a business. They are dependable and forthright in their aims. We know what they’re about.

No, it is the government that allowed this to happen. Businesses only exist where there is a need. And businesses should not be above the law and above governance. We’ve got this bizarre system where banks and businesses operate outside the law and are ungovernable. The only way it can work is if they are limited by all governments. For if we don’t limit them in England, they’ll go somewhere like Macau where they can.

But then, who’d want the governments to be in charge of stuff when they’re the idiots who signed us up to this in the first place??! Would we really want these idiots to be in charge of stuff when they can’t see Ponzi schemes for what they are and when they’re too stupid to realise that if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you’re never going to make ends meet. Sooner or later, you’re going to run out of people to rob.

Really, they need me to be in charge and to rip up contracts and say “‘that was a ridiculous, unconscionable deal and we’re not honouring it. You’ve been lucky to have what you’ve had. We’ll pay you 2% above inflation and that’s a good profit. Now fuck off.”

After all, who are they going to complain to?

Mugabe-style bosses and on working hard

This time, 10 years ago, I was preparing to go through threshold. This is performance-related pay for teachers. It’s shite because I’ve never known anyone fail it, even if they later end up on competency procedures. Not sure how you can be incompetent yet performing well.

At the time, I was working for one of the nastiest bullies I’ve ever had the misfortune to work for, and her lacky. She was a misogynistic un-Christian mealy-mouthed bully, which is funny considering she was a former head of RE and a reported church-goer and a lesbian to boot.

I should have known during the interview that she was not cut out to be a head teacher (or to interact with ANY people in ANY way… or animals… in fact, some kind of relationship-less lab was probably waiting for her) when during the interview she looked at her watch. Repeatedly. And very obviously. Manners?!

I got no welcome. I started in at the deep end and was given more and more responsibility. I worked SO hard. Everybody in the department did. It was a lovely department on the whole, with some of the loveliest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with.

I should also have known that this wasn’t a cohesive school when I saw that nobody went in the staffroom. It was deserted. People were afraid of going in because the head would notoriously come in and tell you off for laziness. Even if it was your dinner break. This from the woman who took five days of ‘home’ leave either side of school holidays so she could jet off early on her travels.

I learned a lot from her about how bullies operate and how to deal with them. Unfortunately, what I learned is that you can’t beat them unless you have a good employment lawyer.

Now I am a hard worker. I was at that school from 7:45 til gone 6:00 most days. I worked and worked and worked. I got good results. I shifted KS3 results with the aid of this amazing team of teachers and we doubled the amount of kids getting better than average results. 60 more children went from being ‘average’ at 13 to being ‘good’. GCSE results went up. We invigorated a department that had been doing the same stuff for 15 years. It’s my one regret that the time I had with Andy was very little because I worked so hard here.

But a small incident occurred with the threshold application. I still have the note attached to it. In fact, I still have the comment etched in my head.

The first thing was that she had pinned a deadline for something or other up in the staffroom. I read it and made note of the date. Then she asked me for the thing we were supposed to hand in. It was a week before it was due in. I told her I hadn’t done it and that the deadline wasn’t until seven days hence.

“No it isn’t.” she snapped. “It was three days ago.”

I marched to the staffroom and took down her HANDWRITTEN sheet with the deadline on it. Before I could go and challenge her about it (since I had actual teaching to do!) I got a missive. I used to love her missives. They were always written on paper with a cat border, as if she were an animal lover. In fact, the cat loving was more of a sign of being in league with Satan and having his familiars hang about. The missive said: “I am very annoyed that you missed the deadline. I would have thought you would have considered it more important, especially when your threshold application is pending.”

Two things. In the 13-page document, no mention of deadlines or timekeeping is made. Thus, it’s not an assessed quality for performance-related pay. Second: I hadn’t missed the deadline.

I marched to her office.

“Glynne… what is this?” I had yet to learn better. “Are you really threatening my threshold application because you think I missed a deadline?”

She actually blushed. I think it was with anger, though.

“And I didn’t miss any deadline. HERE’S the memo.” I put it on her desk. “How did I miss a deadline that’s not happened yet?”

“I changed the deadline…”

“When? Am I supposed to guess that you’ve done that?”

“I did it in briefing.”

I dug out my detailed briefing notes. I’m not stupid enough to work for a tyrant and not keep detailed notes.

“What day?”

“Tuesday.”

The day before the supposed deadline??! I looked at my notes. I said:

“On Tuesday, you told us about this pupil’s health issues, a visit from an SEN inspector and a maths competition that we’d won. Besides, that was a day before you wanted the document.”

I handed the document over anyway. I’d done it a week early, because that’s how I roll.

“Here.”

You don’t catch me with my pants down.

This woman was pathologically unable to say either ‘Sorry’ or ‘Thanks’. Literally. She used to get her lacky to do it. I left it at that.  I walked back to class feeling smug and virtuous. I pinned the note to my wall in my office.

I passed threshold with flying colours. I was the only one she asked to evidence things. I was asked to evidence all 13 pages. I did. All it proved was she was a thuggish bully and I was very good at my job. Like I said, I worked hard.

Unfortunately, she had no way to get out of this. She knew I’d go above her if she failed me. Like I said, nobody fails. Especially not people who work hard.

So she wrote on the bottom of my application:

“Miss L is an excellent teacher. Unfortunately she needs to learn some humility.”

Oh, right!

You make me prove how good I am and then I need to be humble. I felt like asking for lessons. Besides, PRP needs to be evidence-based. If you’re going to set a target of ‘be more ‘umble’ then it needs to have assessment criteria.

How will I know when I’ve become more humble?

How does one become more humble?

Are there courses you can go on to learn humility?

What assessment scale was she using for judging my humility?

In her role as RE teacher, could she have taught me some humility?

p.s. I still haven’t learnt. That reflects on her ability to develop my personal skills. I still have had no humility training to this day, nor seen any assessment criteria for it.

The only thing I learned was that it was pointless to argue with her. When we were awarded lead department and that brought a small grant, she refused to give it to the department, even though we were cash-strapped. I complained about that.

One afternoon, she sent her lacky to pull me up on something. It got heated. It was four hours of being nagged by the lacky, including her asking if I felt ‘threatened’ by a newly qualified teacher. I was so outraged I told her I was going to be out of there at the next available opportunity. I applied for a job the next day and within a week, I’d been appointed. I went on to work for the best boss I ever had, Dot.

You might think I got off lightly. I didn’t. She constantly pestered me to pull someone up in my department – whether it was someone who’d had one day off sick (her first in two years) – or a guy whose cleanliness of shoe was a concern for her. She’d come and say:

“Can you talk to such-and-such about the fact he’s been wearing the same jumper for three days?”

“Yes, Glynne.”

And I never would. Unfortunately for her, her school was filled with retarded teachers who would wear the same jumper for three days and she needed to bully them as well. What we learned is that hiding is good, saying yes and never doing it was a quick way to get out of it and that you should expect her to send you two or three cat-bordered missives a week if you were in a management position.

She is nothing – NOTHING – on the boss of a friend of mine. We call him Mugabe. He is the one reason to me why academies fail. He is a power-hungry idiot who has risen up through the ranks on the back of Nu-Lab’s desire for change. Unfortunately, where a head teacher is also chair of governors and they don’t answer to a local authority, in academies where union laws do not apply, you are creating a nice little niche for tin-pot dictators to act with total impunity. I’d tell you what this one ordered and you’d be dumb-struck that a) he could even mention doing what he ordered and b) he’s still in a job.

The only joy – and it is the ONLY joy – is that most employers breach employment law every minute of their opening hours. From breach of contract to breach of care of duty, there are thousands of ways to hang them. My Uncle Paul picks off just one. He calls that the sniper approach. I have what he calls the blunderbuss approach. I would prefer it if he called it the ‘bludgeon them to death with the Employment Rights Act 1996 and 2008 approach’ but either way, whether you decide to get out of the kitchen or whether you decide to fight, there’s some moral virtue in knowing you’ve got rights.

Things that make me go Grrrrr

Late last night, I got into an argument on an ex-pat forum with a woman who was trying to sell her horse. That bit was okay, except she was trying to do it without papers. The horse has no legal recognition in France. Its identity is not known to Haras Nationaux or the IFCE. Its owner is not registered.

She admitted in her first post that it was going cheap because it had no paperwork. Therefore, she realised that not having paperwork was something she really should have. If she had spent 40€ to get the paperwork, her horse would have got double that she was asking for it.

This drives me up the wall. It’s 40€. That’s all. It’s just cheap. I’d have paid it to get her horse registered if she’d have asked for charity. If she can’t pay because she’s too poor and that’s why she’s selling the horse, why the hell did she arrive here 5 months ago with several horses? When you have animals or kids, they have got to be your first responsibility. They HAVE GOT TO BE because they depend on you. No matter how poor we get, the boy, the chickens, the dogs and the cat come first. I’d have the internet cut off first.

It brings me to two questions. Why are people so reckless when they decide to move? And why are people mad at you when you’re right, coming out with the most ludicrous arguments?

As to the first, this woman can’t possibly have checked out the regulations in France. This means one of several things. Either she’s too lazy and irresponsible, or she can’t read French. I take it to be the first because even Google Translate makes a fair job of translating the right pages and takes one click. In fact, Google Chrome’s extension will do this automatically for you. And still on the recklessness, though she says she’s been here five months, she can’t have (and she admitted this) seen a vet.

Her logic for this when I challenged her was that she ‘knows’ horses. Really? I asked if she was a vet. No, she said. Just a keen horsewoman. Really! I work with people every single day and I’m not a doctor. But because I know people and I’m a keen student of the human form (well, Sean Bean’s, anyway) does that make me qualified to know whether the boy is ill or down in the mouth? Am I able to decide whether his tummy ache is appendicitis or wind? Obviously, according to her logic, I am.

Not only that, but the boy can talk. Or grunt. If he’s sick, he tells me. Animals don’t. The first thing I did when we got Tilly and Saffy was take them to the vet. Unfortunately, with Saffy I wasn’t quick enough to get her to the vet and that’s something I’ll always regret. Even with Tilly, her ears smelt a bit manky and I took her to the vet. It was a ‘catastrophe!’ according to him. She wasn’t bothered by them. She wasn’t itching or rubbing them. She’d seen him in December and again in February about them. By May they were really bad.

Now I’m not saying that this woman’s horses are ill. What I am saying is that you need a vet’s opinion of things and diagnosis shouldn’t be just done by someone who has no training. In all fairness, the horses in her care could be like Molly who is rarely ill. She just needs her jabs (done) and flea treatment. Also, in fairness, you CAN tell SOMETIMES when an animal is ill. But like Tilly, sometimes you can’t tell when something has gone from fairly normal in spaniels to being a ‘catastrophe!’

I’m also saying that a horse is a bit more than a dog and needs more specialised care. And if I’d brought a horse over a thousand miles, I’d want to know it was okay and I’d probably ask a vet to come out and have a once over. All of these things are expensive, which is why I don’t have a horse, though I’d really, really love one. I’d also love more dogs and more cats and more chickens and goats and sheep but I can’t afford to feed them and have them checked out.

I think the combination of lack of vet care and lack of simple fact checking means that I’d – perhaps erroneously – put her into the ‘lazy’ and ‘reckless’ category.

I pointed out (to my disadvantage, because I got really insulted!) that horse registration is compulsory because it protects the owner, the buyer and the horse itself. More importantly, it creates a way for the French bean counters to estimate stuff and work out what to tax and so on – but that’s by the by.

For an owner, the transfer of paperwork means you know where your horse is going. I still can’t believe there are people who don’t check out the homes their animals are going to, but that’s perhaps just me. The cats’ previous owner was sooo concerned about where they’d be living and how, and wanted to see photos. I’d be the same. Tilly’s owner couldn’t have given a stuff. We could have been a vivisection laboratory and she wouldn’t have cared or bothered to find out. I could have been a psychotic taxidermist looking for new subjects. It also means you know your horse is still in the system and that should something happen, the new owner can be prosecuted for it. A horse without papers can be sitting in a field, ill, and should the SPA come and enquire, its new owner can deny everything.

For a buyer, it means you know you aren’t buying a stolen horse. Would you buy a car without a VIN and without the paperwork??! You just KNOW there’s no good reason for a car not to have a VIN and not to have any paperwork. If there were no paperwork, I could sell any horse in a field and run off with the money. It’d be a great way to make a few thousand quid.

But it was her reaction that really got to me. She’s doing something she knows isn’t right – otherwise, she wouldn’t have said ‘it’s got no paperwork, hence the low price’ and when I say it’s illegal to buy a horse without paperwork, she says I’m rude and have a tone.

Her post said this: “however since him coming over to France I haven’t obtained French papers for him, hence I’m asking a fair price for him to go to a loving home. Price: 400 Euros” – so she knows she’s supposed to have French papers – that such things exist.

I said: ” I suggest you get him registered. It’s illegal to sell a horse in France without registration.”

She then asked if she could give him away… I kind of think money worries are at the heart of this, which makes me feel for the three other horses she still has.

Someone else added:

“

You can’t legally give him away either, as you can’t complete the ‘change of ownership’ papers, if you aren’t the registered owner in the first place!

It is a legal requirement for all equids in france to be micro-chipped and registered with the HN – and for every horse ‘keeper’ to be registered as such as well. When an equid is sold (or given away…) the relevant change of ownership forms should be completed and sent to the HN, in order for them to update their records. Every registered ‘keeper’ of equids (which is a seperate registration and that person may not necessarily be the owner) has an on-line account with the NH, where information as to the location of each animal is recorded – this information must also be updated if the animal is moved and kept elsewhere.”

But then we were both accused of being unhelpful and that our comments were ‘useless’ – and that she was looking for advice. Well, excuse me for pointing out that someone trying to SELL a horse, not someone looking for advice, is doing so illegally. I’d pointed her in the direction of IFCE and HN and she said she wanted more ‘hand-holding’. I’m sorry that someone who trades in illegal horses wants their hand holding. Shame the horse hasn’t got someone who cares enough about it to find out what the situation is. Hence why they NEED registration.

What really got my goat was the ‘well I didn’t know’ line of argument. And the line of argument that said ‘I didn’t need to do this in Holland’.

Oh, I’m sorry! I’ll start selling marijuana on the site then, shall I? After all, it’s fine in Amsterdam. What about selling cars with no VIN? How about guns?

You might think I’m being melodramatic. I probably am. In the eyes of the law, though, illegal horse trading is the same as illegal weapons trading or illegal vehicle trading. They’re all ILLEGAL and punishable, if not by fines and restrictions, then by prison.

FFS. Where the hell is common sense when you come down to it?? It really, really gets my goat when someone acts all hard-done-to when they’re in the wrong and someone else points it out. Oh poor me. Hold my hand.

Fin.

Here’s to being Cassandra all over again…

What I said would happen yesterday with the promotion of bad history as an argument about David Starkey was well born out yesterday. It fell into a black and white argument with both sides being absolutely and utterly deluded, racist, small-minded and pathetic – reason had no place in it at all. Well done DS and well done Nabil Abdul Rashid. You both pushed black/white tensions up a notch.

I feel defensive of being white – I always have. I feel the weight of my white ancestors on my shoulders. Luckily I’m a woman and this makes me feel a little better, because my type have been a persecuted minority, and continue to be so. Heaven forbid I should a white man. I’m suddenly responsible for everything after the outbursts yesterday online. This is what I said about skeletons falling out of the closet. 500 years worth of skeletons about slavery and racism and mistreatment and black holocausts and hideous crimes perpetrated in the name of expansion all fell out of that closet. Boom boom boom boom boom. All rattling their bones and providing visions of Christmas future if we don’t deal with our sins. The problem is, when a person of any colour starts dragging the skeletons out of the closet, the other colours go to their closet and drag a few out, until all that happens is a big tumbling pile of bones of ancestors is on the floor and we’re all using them to hit each other with.

Yesterday, I saw vile and nasty racism from white trash who should know better. I laughed when some of the black champions of history mentioned white advancement, because it sure as hell doesn’t seem like we’ve advanced very far. Do they watch Jeremy Kyle? Most of his clients are one colour, and it’s not black or Asian. We’ve all got the rednecks, the white trash, the trailer trash, the racaille, and it’s vile and ugly because it’s like a nasty cliché of how we’ve failed as people.

But then I heard just some of the most outrageous statements I’ve ever heard about black history – which made me laugh out loud and then stupidly try to challenge. Maybe I could have patronised these people, continued to let them believe nonsense and silliness, treated them like Jake when he gets argumentative or like Steve treats me when I get argumentative and just gone ‘Okay’. But I can’t. Because every misunderstanding spreads a little lie that sits on the racist cracker. And let’s get this straight. Very few people in England believe it was one race or another. Nobody’s saying it’s white or black. I’ve not seen many statistics, and the ones I have seen are that it’s poverty that’s the over-riding factor. I don’t want to get into the causes – manifold as they may be – of that poverty – but that’s the uniting factor. And race shouldn’t be the dividing factor.

Despite this, I heard sub-Saharan Africans say many, many times that the Moors were black. This was a really big fallacy spread by the response. And I know about the Moors. I know a lot about the Moors because I’ve got 20,000 words of my own research I wrote about them sitting waiting for me to get my arse in gear and write a story about Sigilmassa. I know about the Maghreb. I know about the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians and the Imazighen and the Arab settlers and the spread of the Moorish dynasties and then their decline. I also have some great Moroccan friends whose roots are bedouin Imazighen of many varieties. They had fun teaching me ‘berber’ words and Arabic words and I walked with them through the Atlas mountains and they told me their view of the Maghreb, on the Arabic world, on Morocco, on life. We spent three days just walking and talking. I’m a curious girl. I ask lots of questions. I want to know stuff.

Let’s take Zinedine Zidane as an example, since he’s one of the most famous ‘Berber’ faces. I hate that word, but he is an example of your typical ‘Moor’. He’s an Algerian Kabyle. Now excuse me for stating the obvious, but nothing makes Zidane black, unless he goes for a little make-up. If he said ‘Is it because I is black?’ like Ali G, we’d all laugh, just like we do at Ali G, because like Ali G, he’s not black. In fact, he shares more of an appearance with Ali G than he does with Nelson Mandela.

But yesterday, sub-Saharan Africans are getting all their knickers in a twist about the Moors, feeling forced to say they were black. That’s news to all the Alis I met who weren’t black in the slightest. And yes, there were black skinned people as part of this ‘Non-Homogeneous’ group (I pointed this out a million times yesterday) but the Moors looked to Mecca. Their towns were built on Islamic principles. Their language is Arabic. Their scholars weren’t African in view or belief, they were Persian, Middle Eastern, Arab – call it what you will. Their names are Arabic and their whole world was Eastern looking, not Southern looking. If not in skin colour, in culture, in belief and in society – they were Arabic.

I am willing to accept that Islam and Arabic unite some north African countries with some sub-Saharan African countries. There are large Muslim populations in many Eastern African countries. But the Maghreb people – the Moors – have more in common with their Persian relatives than the Somalis, genetically speaking. The only things that unite a Moroccan with a Somali is religion and language, not skin colour. And yet there are hundreds – and I’m not kidding – of comments from black people yesterday, all militant about the Moors being black. And not a bit black. All black.

This kind of skewed history comes from white mouths, Asian mouths, black mouths – anyone who wants to twist history to suit their view. And yes, blacks, like women, were repressed for a long time (blacks less than women, by about 3,000 years, but I digress…) and their contribution to history has been both written out and white-washed – and didn’t exist in the first place – just like peasant history doesn’t exist and women’s history doesn’t exist – because we were too busy living  and being repressed to go round contributing to art and literature, music and philosophy. No offence to any one other than white intellectual men, but by and large your achievements are minimal. Blacks, women and poor people didn’t create a Beethoven or a Michelangelo or a Leonardo or a Shakespeare because we were too busy being repressed, and just because I can find some semi-okay poetry from someone in a skirt in the Seventeenth Century doesn’t mean it’s as good as Donne or Shelley. I can’t champion it because it’s rather pedestrian. Jane Austen is funny, but she isn’t Shakespeare or Shelley because her experience was ‘the drawing room’ – and as much as I’d like to, I can’t go around saying Shakespeare was a woman or that Shelley was a black because they weren’t, and it just makes me look like an idiot with an agenda if I try.

Yet this is what was happening yesterday. I totally get that blacks have a right to be angry. 500 years of subjugation will do that to a person. Let’s talk about the patriarchs who deliberately wrote women out of religion and law, shall we? That started 3,500 years ago and we’re still suffering. Don’t you men know it!

But all these skeletons were just coming and coming as people dragged them out of the cupboard. For your Hitler and Stalin, I give you one Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe. I give you Pol Pot and Chairman Mao (let’s not spare the far east, hey, as we’re dragging out the skeletons?!) For your slavery I give you Darfur and civil war and Rwanda and Chad and South Western Sahara. For your slavery, I give you female circumcision. Ad infinitum in a universal tit-for-tat. Ironic considering the original poster said he didn’t want that….

But unfortunately, that’s what happens. My main concern was that the video would go viral. Luckily, it didn’t (or hasn’t so far) and therefore hasn’t attracted the bigots from either end of the spectrum all trotting out myths and lies about history and social demographics to suit their argument.

It’s so ironic that ‘we’ ‘get rid’ of Al Qaida – Bin Laden is assassinated and the alleged kingpins in the Al Qaida network disintegrate – Muslims are killed on the streets in the riots and show England how to truly do community and belief and came out to defend their England – and as the universal racist zeitgeist turns from Islam, DS seems to a little inadvertently and possibly very consciously, spearhead the new racist zeitgeist – black against white. Ironic, because these are the two communities most poor and most troubled. Poor White working class boys and African-Caribbean boys are the two most underachieving groups in Britain. Interested to know who achieves the best? Why Far Eastern boys of course. The Chinese, the Malaysians, the Koreans – their achievement outstrips everybody else’s, followed by Indian boys whose achievement is not far behind. The only way we can all aspire is if we end the tit-for-tat blame game and the blind allegiance to racism from whatever side we come from. People of all colours do shite things to each other. For every high achieving Chinese boy, there’s one who runs up massive debts or falls in with Chinese gangs – for every Indian who becomes a surgeon, there’s one who’ll steal a car from his family in B&Q. People are people, as Depeche Mode once said, and the more we try to categorise ourselves, the more damage we do.

A little hope for the morning from Mr Bob:

I think I’m having a survivalist panic…

… I’ve been inflamed by several things recently – including rising oil prices, estimates about peak oil production and decline (check out peak oil  and then tell me you aren’t planning on getting your bike out!)

What started it off was the price of chicken food. It’s gone up 70c to 2€ 70. Not a big thing in itself, but a reminder about several other things: wheat failure in Russia and China, rising food costs, inflation. Then Prince Charles, rightly, is telling people to eat less beef. Beef is a hugely hungry food crop – and rearing cattle is costing the planet dear. Something has to give. Either we have to have a drop in the population – probably enforced because of starvation – or we have to eat less-consuming products. Or both. As it is, rising food costs are telling us that we can’t keep going on forever. Not only that, but the people being priced out of the market are the poorest.

Then I read a little something posted by Mark from hed(pe) on Facebook, linking from survivalblog about spotting potential domestic terrorists. And I realise I fit the bill in so many ways.

I have libertarian philosophies!

I am trying to be self-sufficient!

I am afraid of economic collapse! Nothing is too big to fall. If you don’t believe me, ask a dinosaur.

I hate big government!

I would like to add, I don’t have second-amendment issues and think we should all be carrying weapons. I’m leaving protecting the property to Jake in the event of cataclysmic collapse. I’d also like to add I’m not a religious zealot or think the end is nigh. I would like to pass a little of the blame onto the Cold War instigators and also to the makers of Threads - a film about the aftermath of nuclear war. All that fuss about nuclear weapons and enemies and iron curtains and Communism just deflected us from bigger problems: we’re outgrowing the planet and nothing is more likely to spark revolution than hunger. Just ask Marie-Antoinette.

And it’s not just all about what us human ants are up to. Mother Nature has a good way of warning us that she’s still more powerful than all of us. It doesn’t matter that economies are strong, or societies are cohesive if she’s going to throw a hurricane Katrina your way, or a tsunami, or a fukushima-scale disaster.

However, I took a leaf out of the ‘worrying is as effective as solving an algebra problem by chewing gum’ book and decided that my panic was a little premature and I shouldn’t start stockpiling just yet. If the world wants to know how it is without petrol or enough electricity, or with limited resources, it should look to Cuba.

In the interim period before deals with Venezuela and after the Soviet empire collapsed, in the so-called ‘special’ period, Cuba had nothing. All the oil-based goods sank to a minimum. Petrol came in at 10% of its former levels. Imagine having only 10% of the petrol we have! Food was scarce. And I think this would be my ‘look to and learn’ country for how we can avert peak oil problems and food shortages.

Firstly, everybody shares a car. If you have a car, you maintain it and you learn about engines. You realise you can put a lada engine in a huge American behemoth. You travel by any means necessary. If you have a tractor, you hook a cart to it and shift people. And then you are forced to say ‘to hell with travel’ because you can’t get around anyway. No petrol means no petrochemicals and this means no tyres. No tyres means you’re not going anywhere even if you do have petrol or bio-diesel. So you get a bike. If we’re lucky, we’ll soon see the sense in keeping more bike tyres than you need as spares for the future.

And if you can’t get a bike because resources mean there are none, have a horse or a pony, a mule or a donkey. We forget it’s only 200 years since these modes of transport were de rigeur. 

I bet it has a Russian engine under the hood!

Another thing about Cuba: consumerism is dead. There are shops, but they have nothing in them. We went in a shoe shop looking for a pair of sandals for Pete. We found some flip-flops – that was all – and they were so crap they broke within days. But you realise people can get along without ‘stuff’. If you don’t have CDs, make your own music. If you have finished a book, pass it on. If you don’t have a computer, meh, write a letter. Second-hand markets are not just ‘vintage’ and kitsch, but essential!

If you haven't got new stuff, make do with old

In the state-controlled hotels, the food was dire. Clearly there were food shortages and whilst people equate rations with not getting what you need, it also ensures what there is can be shared equally. I like that idea. Not only that, but most people supplement what they get with what they can grow. Chicks were everywhere, as were ducks and geese. Hens are great. Not only do they eat a lot of scraps and insects, but they also provide you with an egg. A vegetable garden and a hen and you have enough to supplement your basic food.

Medical supplies also became incredibly hard to source or pay for – so all those herbal remedies the EU directive banned as from April 2011 would have to come back into play.

Not only did petrol imports drop off, so mechanical aids were useless – no point in having a tractor if you can’t fuel it – but fossil fuels too – so brown-outs became the norm. And then you realise you can live without so much electricity. Street-lights are the first thing to go (and I like the fact our streetlights here go out around midnight and come back on about six in the morning… that’s six hours of electricity less than the lights outside my house in Bolton) and you cut back on all non-essential electricity. All those fancy porch lights and path markers and so on become expensive and pointless.

Oxen are the new black

But petro-chemicals also supply the pesticide and fertiliser trade – so you have go back to organic methods, like nettle feed and horse manure. And you get out all your old horse or oxen ploughs and very soon, by force rather than middle-class white-girl westernised liberalism, you’re organic and petrol-free. Because industry relies on raw materials like steel and fossil fuels, industry drops off and agriculture becomes the main employer once again. People fish to supplement their income. No motor boats means no intensive fishing, so fish thrive. I ate the best lobster ever in Cuba, spear-fished by a guy who used the lobster to supplement his diet – but not having diesel-powered boats meant the waters are clear, clean and those lobster, not over-caught, were huge and delicious.

Diet changes too. Meat and dairy – so expensive in terms of how much it costs to raise, both financially and environmentally – become part of the past, and vegetables and grains take over. People become accidentally healthier – forced into healthy eating. You can’t afford to smoke or take drugs. So health improves although medicine is less available. Ironic. Diabetes, heart disease and early mortality all dropped – albeit in highly unfortunate, imposed circumstances.

So… I’ve decided we should all make our drop in the ocean – although bigger changes are needed to avert major disaster – and not for us, for people in the poorest communities, the most fragile of society, the old, the young, the weak. The death rate amongst pensioners went up 20% in the Special Period in Cuba – not amongst other groups. We owe it to each other. We owe it to our future selves.

Unfortunately, change is often powered by necessity rather than altruism. Drive less, consume less, grow more. Switch things off. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Maybe I should start breeding oxen and cart horses!!

Just as a parting shot, I’d like to say we 30-somethings with dread in our soul are a product of our societies’ upbringing. I watched Threads in school about nuclear disaster. I remember the gravestone-AIDS-ads. Nuclear threat, epidemics and Greenpeace all contributed to this survivalist panic. But no matter what, the media can’t disguise the fact that inflation is up because of two things: rises in food costs and rises in petrol. If you want my money on the future, these two will be the driving force behind change. You can keep your nuclear war and your hazmat suits. We’re only three meals from revolution. And heaven forfend we have to give up our beloved motor vehicles!

Trump and Berlusconi…

… must be two of the most repugnant men on the planet. I’m still getting over Sarah Palin, and then comb-over Trump links up to the Republican party and I’m astonished once more. Is it me, or are the Republicans having a serious crisis?? If you can’t find anyone better than Palin and Trump, you’re looking like a floundering dinosaur flailing about in its death throes – and this is both comical, because Palin and Trump are jokes, and alarming, because Republican Americans might vote them into power at some point.

Trump reminds me of Berlusconi, and maybe Republicans and Americans should take heed.

1. Both have hair issues – Trump with that weird combover, and Berlusconi with his hair plugs. Instantly laughable. This leads me to the second and linked point.

2. Both are too vain to age gracefully. And vanity is not an admirable quality in a leader. Especially when vanity has made them look ten times worse than they’d look if they aged gracefully.

3. Neither of them have much by way of dignity. If you have hair that looks like that, you obviously don’t care what the world thinks of you, either. And if you can’t age gracefully, it’s just undignified.

4. Both are a funny colour. Can you trust a man whose skin looks like it was sprayed on?

5. Both have bleached teeth. And I despise a man who spends more time worrying about whether his teeth are sparkly white than whether their political views are in order.

6. Both are homophobic. What’s wrong with gay marriage, for a start? Berlusconi saying being a pedophile is better than being gay… what’s with that?

7. Both seem to see women as being little more than entertainment. Trump is the man behind several ‘beauty’ pageants, having had several ‘model’ wives with big boobs. I don’t even need to say anything about bunga-bunga parties or teenage prostitutes where Berlusconi is concerned.

8. Both have more money than sense. And that’s never a good thing.

9. Both made a lot of money out of property and are ‘businessmen’ with a bent on making money and not giving much back: charity isn’t really a word these men know.

10. Both make Obama even more rational, sensible and effective, simply by being idiots. Berlusconi’s comments about Obama’s ‘tan’, and Trump’s obsession with Obama’s birth certificate make them look like idiots who couldn’t get into a good political argy-bargy with Obama over anything sensible. Men of little brain, I’m afraid.

11. Both are laughable ‘playboys’ who think affairs are acceptable and yet say family values are important: hypocrites, the pair of them, who want the world to live by ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

12. Both make cringeworthy ‘jokes’ – my favourite is Berlusconi’s about communists boiling babies to fertilise the fields – and yet both fail to realise that they themselves are the joke. The world laughs at them, not with them.

13. Both have too much testosterone. Five kids, really??!

14. Both are ‘pro-life’. Anyone who is pro-life (as I was as a teenager, I confess) should read the works of Marie Stopes. Being able to control birth, pregnancy and break free of the constraints of being at the mercy of pregnancy were the real forces behind breaking women out of poverty and ignorance. Women could study, could work, could build without interruption, could make choices about their health. More women died in childbirth than of disease in the past. Taking away women’s choice to have a child means you are effectively enslaving them and keeping them submissive. Give a woman birth control and she can control her choices and her destiny, her future and her life. Abortion, I confess, is a different issue, but related. When men force women to have no option than to bring an unwanted child into the world they are doing little other than taking away their choices and I find that deplorable.

15. Both show that being rich can buy you a prostitute wife several years your junior and that even ugly, perma-tanned, bleached-teeth racist homophobes with hair issues can buy find love with beautiful, big-haired, big-breasted women young enough to be their daughters. As Caroline Ahearne once asked Debbie McGhee, ‘so what attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?’ – it’s amazing how having a billion in the bank can make you attractive to a wide range of supposedly brainless bimbos willing to take advantage of your generosity.

16. Both reveal themselves to be complete racists in their behaviour towards Obama. I’m completely dumbstruck by Trump’s comments that he heard Obama was ‘terrible’ at school and didn’t deserve a place at Columbia or Harvard – thus suggesting the only reason he got in was because he was black. Not entirely sure how someone who is ‘terrible’ goes on to graduate magna cum laude, but there you go.

17. Both seem to shake off controversy and grow fat in its wake.

18. Both seem utterly invincible.

19. Both remind me of the Emperor in the Emperor’s New Clothes – completely obsessed with their own power and invincibility and without any sense of how foolish they really are.

20. Both have suspicious links made to organised crime. Berlusconi’s are well-documented. Anyone who hasn’t heard stories of how he is hand-in-hand with the Mafia hasn’t been reading the papers much. However, some American sources are pointing to links between Trump’s ex-colleagues and organised crime.

I can’t, however, see Trump trying to play hide-and-seek with the very dour Angela Merkel. I can’t see him making jokes about natural disasters in America and saying it’s a good opportunity for people who have lost their homes to enjoy camping. Any man who can annoy the Queen – married to the famously politically incorrect Philip – by shouting to get Barack Obama’s attention – is an imbecile. Berlusconi’s comments about Finland seem more on a par with Sarah Palin than Donald Trump – though both seem to reveal themselves as idiots the more they say. Anyone who refers to himself in the third person, as Trump does, doesn’t deserve Lady Justine’s time. That’s for sure.

Not only that, but Trump’s criticism of Obama isn’t his own idea. It’s Huckabee’s. He can’t even be racist or idiotic with his own ideas. A man who’s been on the verge of bankruptcy and has distinctly questionable financial behaviours leading the country upon whose economic success the whole world’s fortunes rest? I don’t think so! A man who gives a speech in a room in which there is a huge ice statue of himself is not someone I want to be the man in charge of the USA.

As the old adage said: “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.” Both Trump and Berlusconi could learn from that. Unfortunately, to quote another: “A fool and his money are soon elected.”

Let’s hope Trump’s posturing is nothing more than a fairground distraction. Unfortunately, Berlusconi is the main attraction and the ringmaster of the fool’s carnival that Italian politics seems to be right now.

Things I love today…

Loving The Bird and The Fox, who play all day long. Fox has caught two mice today and no birds. Both of them have played underneath the sofa for at least an hour, climbing under the throw.

Loving the long evenings

Loving the fact my Mum will be here on Friday

Loving having my Dad over here too

Loving my turnips which are coming on great guns

Loving the garden

Loving the Tilly Flop when she skip-dances and when she skips back to the door, her ears flapping

Loving the Moll and her random energy bursts where she races about

Loving being in my comfy bed

Loving having  a bedroom that’s now 16 degrees at night

Loving having a posse of boys wave at me and call me Madame Lee

Loving how gorgeously made-up Marine, one of my Bac students, is – subtlety and style – no thick make-up that I went for when I was too young and dumb to realise what perfect skin I had.

Loving Deb and Joanne: how lovely it is to have some sensible company beyond my family

Loving cauliflower cheese and hoping that my cauliflowers grow into big ones

Loving finding photos of Dylan I’d forgotten I’d taken

And loving Jake, who is very sweet and very funny. I hope he knows he’s fantastic.

He came in after school and asked me what a ‘tire-bouchon’ was. I didn’t know. I know a bouchon is a cork or a traffic jam, a bottle neck. And I know tirer is to take. So ‘take-cork’??! Corkscrew of course. Not only did he have to read in class, but he handled it with aplomb. I’m so proud of him. Later, I was uncorking a bottle of wine for Steve and I said to Jake: “What’s this?” as I brandished the corkscrew.

“It’s a C-O-R-K-S-C-R-E-W…” he said, totally deadpan. “God, Emma, you’re so clever, but you don’t even know that??!”

And not loving??

Death threats

Sore ankles and feet from being on my feet all day

Tilly jingling all night last night. Back to the crate

How some people spend less time on their kids than I do with my plants. 81 minutes a week, say the stats. How can you justify that??