Friday, October 27, 2006

No Rafting but - Get-together at Tracy's

Just a quick Blog post, to establish the date, because in about half an hour we are off to TJ's for a get-together. It was supposed to follow the rafting but, even with that being postponed, Tracy has decided to continue with the evening as planned. The food will be tiptop as usual (I can't wait) and it will be nice to see the 'raft-crew' plus children, the infirm (of whom there is only me really) and other lovely folks. A good thing about your 70s is that one is always allocated a seat at such gatherings.

In a way the postponement is no bad thing because Steven has a bad cold and David's clavicle is still recovering. Also, as Ray says "It is hissing down at the moment". Nice message from him on the landline answerphone and I've sent him a Jackie Lawson e-card to help settle him into his new house.

Picture 1 is a 'cracker' isn't it? Taken by Steve on their recent London visit and, Y guesses, from the London Eye. I love those diagonals and the shot is so well constructed. It was good to see, from the rest of the piccies, that they didn't let the occasional downpour spoil their fun. It would be nice to share them but Y doesn't like the idea of pictures of the children being 'blogged' and I take her point because there are weirdos about. It would be possible to restrict access to the Blog to named people. But mainly I have no objection to anyone reading it and it is better just to be careful about photographs and too close an identification of names and places.

Bungus's point about my eating my entire Wetherspoon's lunch without complaining (even though it was tepid at best) is semi-valid but it stems from childhood when my mother used to claim that, if we didn't clear our plates, we were "helping Hitler to win the war" and what 5-11yr old could carry that sort of reposibility?

That might be it for today - we shall see.........

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

“Always allocated a seat”, you say? Your family must think more of you than mine do of me! If I leave ‘my’ chair at any time over Christmas I stand no chance of getting back into it and, depending on numbers present, am lucky to get a seat at all. I frequently end up going out for a pint. And nobody notices. Now everybody say “Aaah!”
Following up on a conversation of yesterday, perhaps David’s clavicle needs tuning or even re-stringing? – I understand that catgut has a limited nine lives.

Steve’s photo of London is superb. I can’t believe that such a god-awful place can be made to look so good!

I appreciate that the media have made folk frightened of so many things but I suspect that little has really changed over the years apart from communication, ie, things have always been pretty much the same (child abuse of all sorts was not openly talked about a great deal when I was young – but it happened frequently, as now, inside the family and people outside the family often knew it happened). I’d guess that the chances of a child coming to harm from a paedophile seeing their photo in a blog are no greater than them being struck by lightning and certainly much less than them being hit by a car.

I know other people of my generation who were expected to clear their plates as children, and still do it as adults, so deeply is it ingrained. But it is outside my own experience. My father had been brought up to consider it polite to leave a little food on the plate to show that he had eaten sufficient and I certainly was never expected to carry on eating if I was full, nor yet to eat anything that I didn’t like (eg, marrow, ugh! Or fat!).