ASA gives the right decision

Today came the news that the Advertising Standards Authority passed the Barnados' advert Breaking the Cycle as OK.

I've written before that this advert shouldn't be banned. And although some forum threads have focused on the negative, there have been plenty of posts supporting the ad -- see Barnados twitter page for examples. So goody, goody.

Neighbours for the homeless

I have written already about good humanity and UK's half-heartedness to look after its own. Here is another issue.

I was Christmas shopping in Aberdeen yesterday. Having already decided to keep Christmas spending to the absolute minimum, I was keeping my spirits up quite well even while seeing soaking homeless men sitting on the street, and planning the options of which charitable cause in need of support to put to the family on Christmas Day. And the household finances are not healthy so I kept myself happy in the knowledge that me and my other half have a happy home and enjoyed walking warmly in the rain and closely arm in arm with him, even while we were wondering what could be done for those without a roof 24 hours a day apart from provision in the city: the temperature in Aberdeen yesterday was 4 or 5 degrees warmer than the countryside.

We did actually walk past The Big Issue vendor Stevie Johnson outside Marks and Spencer's, and then wondered why we had. We got out our change, went back to buy a copy and started talking to him. He is desperate to move on and get his place, really fed up with his situation, wants a normal life. He is very wary of now turning to alcohol to relieve the boredom of living on the streets. We wish him luck cos it won't be easy. But Stevie's comments on Aberdeen council's recent changes in its policy for the homelessness make me wonder again about how humane we are in the UK.

Aberdeen council no longer wants homeless people begging on the streets, so they have put up begging boxes for people to put money in, rather than straight into hats on the street. My partner and I didn't see these but let's say they are collecting money that the council can use. But the council has closed homeless shelters, for health and safety reasons, and there are less overnight shelters available in the city.

Any reason that justifies reducing floor space under a roof, so that more people are sleeping under the stars, is better for their health seems rather dubious to me. And also, it raises the question, what is the begging box money providing now?

It seems to me that Aberdeen council would have the homeless having less neighbourly interactions, both in their begging and in their shelters. It only takes some lateral thinking to realise that following an out-of-sight-we'll-be-less-hassled policy can only result in a more dogmatic anti-homeless view. Shame on it.

Please let something be done for Zimbabwe

I received a letter from Zimbabwe recently. It was from the headmaster of the school where I spent nearly 3 years, and came almost exactly 15 years to the day I left. The school, the country, the continent has remained in my heart all this time, so I am really hoping that the events this week mark the lowest point in Zimbabwe's history and that the only way now is upwards and onwards.

I rejoice that the corner may be turning. But it is a shame that it was only yesterday, with the news that cholera is killing Zimbabweans and threatening South Africa, that the regions leaders started talking having to do something.

I rejoice that the UN did pass a resolution in 2005 that they could act against a country's leader if the people are suffering. But why has it taken so long?

I rejoice in the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, advocating military action if necessary. But how has the region allowed Zimbabwe to become a basket case rather than the bread basket of Southern Africa?

What has led up to the current situation is a complex story. Mugabe urged reconciliation, even after his violent putting down of the Bulawayo uprising in the early 1980s, but the white Rhodesians did not play ball. Doris Lessing's 1957 book Going Home sheds much light on what Mugabe had to work with, describing the whites as adolescents, selfish and immature, unable even to see that their attitudes were leading to a poorly educated and less productive workforce. Unfortunately, Mugabe became more entrenched against the whites and the UK to the point of not acting in the best interests of the country: a journalist said as much to me in 1991, by which time Mugabe was sufficiently sensitive to criticisms to close the road passing the presidential palace in Harare overnight.

The story is also compounded by Mugabe being the Father of the country. A teacher said to me in 1992: “The question is, if a family is suffering because of what the father is doing, how does the family tell the father that things need to change?”

There is the problem. In Mugabe's eyes, he is leader still, and, in the face of unrealistic self appraisal, there has been no telling him. The African leaders, this year at least, have talked with him -- man to man, leader to leader, chief to chief -- with no obvious result.

I have to say that I believe another course of action, i.e. military, must be taken if Mugabe does not hand over home affairs to Morgan Tsvangirai very soon. And the Africans need to do it: I was glad to see Saddam Hussain removed from power, but not what happened afterwards. I trust the African leaders to appoint another chief to father the Zimbabweans; I don't want the UN, the USA or the UK to be involved other than to support the African leaders in their decision to step in.

I've taken comfort in having proof that the postal service in Zimbabwe was still working in October. The letter itself did not give much information about how things were: it was more of a "Hello, just found you in my old address book. I am still here. It would be nice to know how you are." Whether my friend will get my reply by Christmas I don't know.

We are shown but we don't want to see

Barnardos' new video Breaking the Cycle is shocking. Will it be banned like their 2003 campaign, which featured a cockroach coming out of a baby's mouth? Let us hope not.

The outrage hasn’t started in earnest yet, but it seems certain it will do. There are already angry comments such as "they'll stoop to any level to get money nowadays".

Some parents fear for their children because they might see it while watching X Factor or I'm a Celebrity. My just-turned 13 year old would be uncomfortable but she would not thank me for keeping it from her. She knows what sadnesses there are, in the world, not just in the UK. She has been aware for a long time from my magazines (New Internationalist, Amnesty), radio and family conversations. Now she is well equipped to receive these shocking moving images and maturing all the better for it.

If children are old enough to see others seeking fame and the sarcastic "wit" that the judges are encourage to utter, they are old enough to assess the other types of damage that humans can wreak on other and experience the hurt that comes from it. I suspect that those who don’t see Breaking the Cycle in this way don’t see X Factor or I’m a Celebrity in this way either, and are as self-obsessed as the stereotypes they watch. The comments "one thing raising awareness but another upsetting people" and "if i want to give to a cause, its because i belive in their plight not because i was shocked into it" dismiss that shock comes first, then awareness, then belief. Let's hope that once their shock has dissipated, a true awareness will develop.

Let’s think again about what this video does. It shows a cycle of desperation, punishment, abuse and escape through drugs that then leads to desperation. It is vivid because that IS what is happening to people in some parts of UK society. Another’s comment is "I don't think these type of ads are constructive to be honest and just give people the wrong idea that if they have seen it on tv then it's the norm." This person obviously hasn’t sat on a bus and seen a mother punch her daughter with sovereign rings on her fist -- someone in this household has.

Another comment is "there is enough awareness at the mo especially after Baby P", Victoria Climbie’s death came before Baby P’s, but the horror of her death didn’t prevent his. Shortcomings in social services can only be part of the problem if we believe that there is enough awareness. This is why such a shocking video is needed.

The nation needs to wake up and get its brains and hearts. "A 16y girl from care-home needed shelter, I asked Barnados & NSPCC to put her up” says another comment. How can the UK expect charities to act on behalf of our social responsibilities, expect social services to do their job when we don't press them to do it, expect that keeping only one eye open is enough to prevent These Things happening again and then damn those that would try? With hypocrisy, I imagine.

It will be very bad for us indeed to damn the advert. If we do, we will be more Dickensian than when Dr Barnardo started his charity. He used the media and we responded to it and made the charity successful. Let’s not change our minds now.

One tribe goes to war; one tribe fights the fires

A couple of days ago, I ended a comment to this blog with the words Viva Humanity!

This morning, I was reminded of the nightmare that comes when inhumanity lives and thrives, while listening to Lyn Witheridge* on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live.

Lyn is one of the first people in the UK to prove her case of bullying in the High Court. Her story of the ridiculous professional demands and personal insults is not the whole of it. Nor is it sufficient to recognise the depression and the effect on her family life while she was being bullied.

What tips the balance into a nightmare situation, a nervous breakdown and complete feelings of helplessness is when the legal process goes wrong. In Lyn's case, the tribunal rejected her complaint on the basis that she had bullied her employer, the organisation itself. She called for apparently too many meetings to discuss the issues. This is again a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation. My deepest sympathy to anyone forced into this situation anywhere, at work, at home, with their neighbours.

Lyn's efforts were viewed as bullying itself. The court was used by the bully to further their own actions.

This is where our legal system goes wrong; still even today I believe it is happening.The victim is placed on the same level as the bully, where the implication is that there are "two warring parties". With this, a court gives the bully a voice and places value judgements on the victim's responses to the situation that they have been placed in (remember, they were not looking for it). Hence, the bully's actions are condoned and the bully's effects on the victim are strengthened.

This is the nightmare; a war is being fought between an aggressor and a fire fighter, and the fire fighter is damned for his efforts to put out the fire that no one wants but the aggressor. The bully has the Law on their side.

Fortunately, in Lyn's case, her union was funding her case and supported her taking the case to appeal. A nightmare within a nightmare and thank goodness she had her union; it is nigh on impossible for anyone with a private case. Appeals are expensive, transcipts have to be taken of the original hearing; the focus has to be that the original hearing was not conducted properly. And new evidence can only be presented with good reason. If you are forced in to this situation with a civil issue, where you are paying, make sure you get your case clear from the start. All the emotions don't make it easy but get it right first time -- the right to go to appeal is not a matter of course.

The result: Lyn's was worst case of bullying that the judge had ever heard and the tribunal had to be held again.

There are many good people forced on to the back foot by a few. It would serve the world well if the practioners of law were to routinely recognise even just the coarser grains within humanity.

So, Longue Vie à La Bonne Humanitié!

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* Lyn Witheridge's account starts 20 minutes into the programme.

Geohash on a slow Sunday

The latest thing in this household is a new activity, geohashing.* Basically, geohashing is being told where to go in the belief of patient fun and maybe meeting someone, all at random.

It works like this:

(1) Get ready to go -- sandwiches, friends, camera (especially);
(2) Find your part of the world (graticule) on the site's interactive map;
(3) Enter today's date and find out where to go. The randomness comes from an algorithm hashing the Dow Jones Industrial Average is published with the date to create coordinates for every graticule in the world;
(4) Try to get to the geohash point for 1600 hours. GPS and rulers help. Then, either (i) rejoice in your success, (ii) rejoice in your failure. In both cases, have fun and take some interesting pictures of wherever you have ended up.

If you want, you can post a report of your expedition when you get home.

We met no one new, indeed no one at all. But for a random set of coordinates, we stopped at quite an acceptable point of a sandy beach and chuckled to ourselves.

I really do have lots of things to occupy myself with: books, spinning, gardening, blogging. But today's expedition is just what a slow Sunday should be.

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*Geohashing originates from the wkcd web comic. 503 is rather poignant to the geohasher per se, and 162 suitably cross-matches with my slow mood.

Slow stories

Having a blog ID of The Slow Smoulder, I was rather gratified yesterday at an event which talked about Slow-ness.

Indeed, the speakers on Slow Technology gave us a menu of the sections of their talk, which included Slow Technology, the first main course, being "infused over a low fire". Big satisfied smile :D

In fact, one of these speakers had taken the idea of sitting around a fire and designed a heated coffee table, the focus of a social setting in the modern age -- yeahh!

But it was really Glorianna Davenport's description of slow stories in the spectrum of stories in general that really interested me. Slow stories allow time for reflection; they don't follow a plot -- they represent an attitude, emerge out of a need to tell the story and respond to reactions.

She didn't talk about blogs, but it is what The Slow Smoulder is about. Another :D

Another aspect of a slow story is how it can represent real time, either really as real time or as a careful compression of the story. Glorianna reminded us of writings that represent real time in the reading (Shelley, ). She described the worth of having unedited real time footage: sunsets, children learning, creature's activities in a mud flat. But she also described her research with video and sound stories, both in terms of recording the events that happen and in terms of compressing time but keeping information. Food for thought on how the making of history works.

Also, my thinking about news, or fast stories, was ratified: news is a progression of ideas that should generate interest and feedback so that the overall story can continue. Food for thought on how newspapers rarely keep accessible old material on a breaking news item, as mentioned here (thanks to ms_wellwords). This also applies to me as a scientist: updating data while keeping that for old timepoints is essential.

Finally, take a look at myconfectionary.com, a result of Glorianna's work: multimedia slow stories!

Damnation and Hope

A month ago, I praised the skies because Mother was moving closer to me. A positive start to the next era in our lives ...

Now, I am damning the gods because Mother is not committed to her decision. She cannot see past the difficult time of waiting for a house sale and living in my (very large) sitting room to the better times afterwards.

Mother is moving back to her house. She decided this within the week of arriving at my place and I have not been able to stop her slide into damnation of everything about me and my locality.

So, No Change? apart from the loss of about £2000 on a round-trip for her things? It is not as simple as that.

A Disaster? Mother wants to re-establish her status quo; it will surely be further entrenched. Being based on a behavioural disorder, her status quo is not happy.

I am accused of coercion. Although a month ago I said "the decision was forced by having to book the date with the removal firm", it was actually the time of the decision that was forced. She did have the choice to move within her town so she could get away from her new neighbours rather than move closer to me. Thus, she has rejected me, my attentions to details as well as the bigger picture, my execution of her wishes, and asserted that she herself is "the only one" who knows what she needs. She is confirming what I have long suspected but was hoping I was seeing the end of, a lack of trust in her daughter. No one has yet been able to be her advocate and the shell around her will only be reinforced.

Also a month ago, I was "expecting other instances of uncertainty": I knew she would be anxious about what was going to happen next, and indeed such a major change is fraught with difficulties as well as delight. What happened was that I could not maintain a delightful life for her for sufficient time -- I became a workman in her home, then a mother herself with her children visiting -- and Mother could not maintain her enjoyment -- therein lies the story of her life.

So a potential Disaster? No end to the frantic calls telling her daughter the latest atrocities against her? No end to her fight against the world? No decrease in the risk that she will be upset and fall again (a real possibility which has happened once this year). I wait to see. I have little hope of a new and positive attitude.

Yet I damn the gods mildly. One can only try, and I have lived being damned if I do and damned if I don't. I damn the gods thus:

Mother has “nerves” (also "nerve": her mother told her in no uncertain terms what she thought of her wearing a lime-green suit in the late 1940s and one could postulate that, even then, Mother had no regard for how others saw her). At the age of 13, about 1940, she was put in an institution for some nervous condition for six weeks, at the time not knowing if she would ever come out. Never mind that this was frightening – all types of "not-normal" people have been institutionalised for the rest of their lives -- there was no diagnosis, no follow up, no healing.

Thus, Mother developed coping strategies that have made her really quite dysfunctional. She has emigrated at least three times in her life and regularly wants to make big moves again. She is constantly dissatisfied with people and events, belligerent and obsessively aggressive to the point of upsetting whoever is her target. She defends herself to the hilt by pleading reactions she can't control and by attacking with emotion and little empathy for how others may feel. She complains that she “has to do it all” herself yet trusts no one to be her advocate.

Thus, we have one more person who is difficult to care for in their old age. We have two children, my brother and me, who are still learning how not-normal their mother is and their childhood was (such that my brother was distressed enough to seek counselling). We have a person who has not been able to fulfill their potential in this world.

Mother will return to her house and her frequent visits to the doctor. And here may be the silver lining to this Disaster.

Evidence for better funding for mental health services?

Surely yes! Although Mother may reject seeing a psychiatrist, a treatment already being suggested by her doctor, because she thinks she is doing alright, there are people who want to receive counselling because of a behavioural disorder or mental illness yet cannot because services don't have enough money. Here is a parallel, the non-availability of mental health service provision in the 1940s, which has turned out to be a false economy in Mother's case.

Indeed, I will thank the gods when the English government finally comes up with a holistic and evidence-based Mental Health Act. The Act of 2007 introduced Community Treatment Orders, an extreme treatment that is at risk of being over used.

The next Act must describe a full range of counselling treatments for a broader spectrum of patients and could-be patients, and make it accessible to anyone who wants it.

Scotland is already taking up this challenge, as well as looking at what contributes to good mental health.

Thus I live in hope rather than damnation.

Pit-stop pits

The 11-day DIY-and-pack-to-move franticness at Mother's ended last week with a 400-plus mile journey home (don't we wish that 1000 mph were the norm). Driving time on the car's computer = 7 1/4 hours (average for a straight drive with no hold-ups); total travel time = 10 1/4 hours; food hunting = 4 pitstops.

It seems that Jamie Oliver's efforts for school canteens has not stimulated the motorway service providers and pub restauranteers to think again about what their customers may want or need on their plates at their home from home. I'm talking Whole Food; I'm talking control on ingredients, for my partner who has diabetes and, as the tale will tell, anyone with a food allergy. A tale of a desperate hunt for food on the UK's main trunk roads and of inappropriate business models.

Pitstop 1: a service station that my partner and I rarely use but placed at the right distance from our last pitstop and at dinner time. The menu did not seem to offer anything Partner could eat without detailed discussion and so we moved on without trying. Little did we know that this would be the tale for the next NN miles.

Pitstop 2: a popular service station. The only thing on the menu for Partner was the mixed grill -- but could he have extra salad instead of chips? No. The only salad they had was for the burgers, which they needed to keep so they could put a large pinch in each burger. They could give a whole tomato instead of a half, and an extra fried egg: they tried their best. Partner is not on a no-veg diet but said OK, only to find the last mixed grill had just been sold, and the only other option was to have an entire protein meal (ham and eggs).

No problem we thought, there is always ------ services, 40 miles down the road.

Pitstop 3: no options at all. The chicken was battered (flour alone in batter exceeds the daily intake of carbs), the fish was battered, the sausages had unknown rusk content, and all other meals had pasta, potatoes or rice as a main constituent of the recipe. The staff were thoughtful but could not help, other than to point us down the road to a restaurant.

Pitstop 4: the restaurant, a pub-chain restaurant, and our previous experiences with motorway service stations showed this type in a slightly more favourable light (we could actually eat here -- a choice of any number of steaks or chicken with a dipping sauce (no chips or sauce please)), but still illustrate a contrast with whole-ingredient cooking and the eating-out-with-economy culture in the UK.

So what happened here, in this haven of edible food, that makes this tale go on?

(a) Partner discusses with till operator about wanting extra salad (which he can have) and no sauce (he can have olive oil instead to stop the chicken being so dry). When the meal comes, the salad looks (and feels, so I'm told) like it was prepared for yesterday's night's dinner) and while our main waiter goes to fetch the olive oil, another waiter tells us that there is none in the kitchen.

(b) Another customer is also in intricate discussion at the other till while Partner is ordering: his wife has an allergy to wheat, so: Which dishes do not have wheat? The reply: The chefs won't know what's in the meals. Though we are not surprised, read our reaction as !!!!?? (used especially well in the Peanuts comic stip, and illustrated here in the second strip down for those Not In The Know). The customer continues discussion with the ever-helpful-in this-situation assistant, who does have a chart of the suitability of dishes for different allergies/intolerances (nut, milk, etc), but susceptibility to wheat is not listed, not are specific ingredients, so it is still a guess as to what the wife will be eating ...

(c) Mother is having fish. At Pitstop 2, the fish is panga, from Finland. At Pitstop 4, the fish is panga, from Vietnam. Highly recommended at both pitstops. "Hmm," we think, "sounds like the same fish, is it really caught in coldwaters and tropical waters, a worldwide catch?" It seems not. The name panga is used for more than one type of fish but it's highly likely that the fish on the UK convenience eat-out scene is from Indo-Asian waters. Now is not the time to linger on the demise of the British fishing industry, the transportation of pangas to Europe, the state of pollution of the waters of their provenance, or the farming techniques and poison concentration within the fishes' flesh. The point is that we had lost trust in what we were being told.

Will we go back there again? No, not to any of them. We are not persuaded to part with our money again (and there are no plans for Mother to make this journey by car again, which is the only reason why we stopped at all for food).

When will food providers learn that there are (and will be) an increasing number of people who want to control what they eat. They want to say "I don't want that, I'd like that instead".

Top management will have to change how they serve food so staff and customer can know what they are serving or eating.

Yet still, Partner and I have been to a "top" restaurant whose chef understood why "no chips", or so we though, but still served meat with a honey glaze. It's still back to school for some chefs.

Note:
Partner chose a low carb diet 4 years ago to enable him to better manage the consequences of his pancreas no longer producing insulin (Type 1 diabetes) after 20 years of struggling with the protocol advocated by this country's health system. After these years of searching, he found the research of Richard Bernstein, a medic from a engineering perspective.

Partner keeps his carbohydrate intake very low, to about 20--30 g carbohydrate for the whole day.

Before he changed his diet, his blood sugar levels were very variable. He experienced extreme hyperglycaemia (high blood sugar), which leads to glycosylation (sugar binding) of nerves, tendons and blood vessels, to name just a few parts of the body affected, which can lead with time to numbness, blindness, high blood pressure, stroke and heart disease, impotence, depression. He experienced extreme hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar), which starves the brains and muscles of sugar, and at best made him shaky, unable to concentrate, unable to stand, and at worst put him in hospital. His insulin intake was high, to control the effects of relatively large amounts of carbs, and as well as this contributing to the cycle of hypers so take more insulin, then hypos so take more glucose (simple carbohydrate), and so on, insulin has its own detrimental effects on the body.

After diet change, his blood sugar levels are very much more stable. His blood sugar levels rarely rise above 8 mmol/l (up to 20 mmol/l before diet change) and the severity of hypos is reduced. Insulin intake is reduced by at least half. Stiffness and numbness of fingers has been reversed and the deterioration in his eye has been halted .

His blood sugar levels remain at the mercy of the rate of digestion and the rate of insulin absorption from the injection point, both of which are difficult to control in themselves and need tweaking with carefully measured amounts of insulin and glucose.

Going faster during the slow-down

Richard Noble and Andy Green, who achieved the world landspeed record in 1997, last week announced that they want to go even faster: 1000 mph in fact. We can expect to see this in 2011.

The BBC announced this news on the same day that Governor of the Bank of England uttered "Recession" on Radio Four's Today programme.

Breaking the LSR to an extent of 1000 mph will be utterly awesome if it faces anything like the challenges presented on the fly during the last project, which achieved the still-standing record of 763 mph. And it will indeed be awesome. Engineering will again be at the edge of its limit: the record stands for over 10 years, and 1000 mph is faster than the record for a low-altitude aircraft. Already, the plan is to change the jet when turning around for the return trip. The team is now looking for a 15-mile stretch of flat stone-free desert, and it is justified in doing this considering the footage of route walking and incidence analysis that it went through last time (The Mission: Supersonic Dreams [not playable online]). This project has the experience to fulfill its goal, regardless of a recession.

It makes me wonder whether it is that the big ideas will keep succeeding while every other is put on ice, and whether the big ideas will be kickstarting those that have stalled whenever there is a return of Confidence.

If so, I hope that the big ideas pushing through to the end will belong to a New Economics (sales of Das Kapital have risen 300% in Germany this year), that they will recognise the value of a producer's labour above that of materials, which is the way that Richard Noble approached his last project.

He operated on a shoestring, not knowing if a sponsor would come forward with his fuel costs, and even, towards the end of the season, with the vagaries of climate (quite ironically considering the stock markets' volatilite reactions to the economic climate); he succeeded because of the dedication of his people. Now he helps teams become more effective using his Transformation Dynamics model.

The concomitant announcements of the LSR and a putative recession could be prescient with my first-hand experiences on the same day (I'll give the wry details another day, suffice to say that I'll be talking about the food industry within the UK motorway service and pub restaurant chains), but it is just that I am looking for such connections and choose to interpret my observations. Staff can be hindered from serving a business's customers or the converse, staff can be empowered and make profits when there are less people prepared to part with their money.

Businesses with the big R on their minds have a choice: do business better for the same price (in this instance, invest in staff and they will be more inspired in their work) or do business worse for cheaper (cut investment in staff and offer nothing special). The difference in choice reflects the dogma, with which I happen to agree even while I don't like it, that selling for cheaper doesn't work in a recession: that is, when money is tight, sell to those want to pay more simply because they are the ones who can afford to make the decision to spend. Are China's toy and textile industries suffering simply because they serve the lower income market?

Taking a long-term view, businesses should follow the first option, maintain and improve standards and operations, and even more so in a recession so they can be ready to take opportunities when they present themselves again.

In fact, the supersonic car website says much the same thing in terms of education. Go faster, Andy, go faster!

Decisions with Mother

Only one link in this post, but here you will get up to speed on a personal situation that I am sure is close to many of our hearts: looking after our ageing parents. This is the start of a series examining other facets of adult childhoodship.

I am entering into a phase where Mother needs my support.

This statement alone will seem strange to those from cultures that keep close to their family. And I agonise over the fact that it is not part of my family culture -- my nuclear family culture at least. Talking with my Mother's sister, who stayed in her home town along with her brother and who was around more for her mother in her working life and old age, I know that the distance between my Mother and I till now is not generational behaviour. But my Mother being who she is, I have had to keep my distance. Indeed, she has often (always? still?) had an emotional wall that I've had to avoid bumping against. Yet this seems to have yielded with recent events, contracting and developing large holes through which my love and attention can reach.

This is fortunate and I thank serendipity for it: Mother needs support now and I have dedicated the last month to engender this emotional movement. It is awesome how she has grasped this nettle (oh yes, it is a nettle indeed when it involves a physical movement of 450 miles from a place after 35 years).

Until 4 weeks ago, I had a very laissez faire attitude with my mum: after all, she is/was physically and mentally active, making (or trying to make) decisions, being independent. Even after the whole of this year of telephone calls, when she has told me what she has done, how she has been thwarted, or ignored, or unsupported, or put down, or her letters blandly noted or actioned to no beneficial effect to her (and hardly pausing to even contemplate that I might have news, being so involved in her own life), and desperately wanting to move away from her new neighbours, I was planning to simply help her to sort things out rather than to engineer her relocation.

She had to wait for me to get to her: I had contact time with my children and then a conference to attend, all booked and waiting to happen. I could not get to her before the middle of September without exhausting myself; she waited for me for 2 months.

In the week before I reached her, it became clear that her moving away from her neighbours had to be a positive move (no bygone arguments or stress rumbling on) and a committed move (no lingering to desires to move away from the area completely, which has also been rumbling on for years with no lasting decision). This was the point of my Decision 1, made rather selfishly. The fact is that my Mother's daughter's worklife suddenly needed a massive commitment; either that or she needed to put her career on hold. Indeed, I had even made a decision this summer to curtail my business activities because Mother had become more needy. So, in the week before my long-awaited arrival, I phoned her and was candid. I explained to Mother my position, that her daughter had a choice, that I wanted to not have to feel that I had to drop whatever I was doing when she phoned, that I could know that I would not have to cancel work commitments because of new situations arising -- and she responded, praise the skies! "You should be able to live your life, I've had mine [not as negatively said as it reads]". And there we created a common goal, to organise her house sale, accommodation and other matters and to limit future disruption to my life.

Decision 2 was still to come. Even on my arrival, I thought it was a case of helping her to move asap within her locality (though I really wished she would move closer to me). But her incapabilities became clear very quickly. She was struggling to cope with the intricacies of everyday life, unable to have tenacity in whatever she needed to organise, unable to communicate effectively with the world at large, unable to do little, save shop for food and clothes: in the week before I arrived, she was too busy shopping for winter boots to make appointments for me to attend with her. I find her inability to cope very sad: sad because she has not understood the world for a long time, because she has a nervous condition for years that has not been recognised, and it is this that has disabled her. Physical incapabilities too: her managing the stairs with arthritis is exactly that, a deliberate management of the actions required to move up and down 9 feet of height lots of times a day. I was now concerned and decided that I had to keep her close to me.

So the scene was set for this 40-year-old woman to spring into action with tempered determination. We spent 10 days at her place looking into finances, local housing (private and Council/housing association options), house maintenance before sale, with daily meetings on what we had found out, what we thought, what needed to be done next (I can still hear her exclaim "Do we have to have another meeting? Now?") and oh so carefully broaching the option of changing location. Then I brought her to my place, so she wouldn't be left alone with "them next door", so I could use the tickets I'd booked for a night with Dylan Moran, so she could have a holiday and to see what it is like here, get balls rolling with the Council/housing associations and removal firms, before making a decision.

Tomorrow, after 2 weeks here, we head back to her place, to finish the house and move her out within the next 2 weeks (my partner is now involved on the project, which is an understatement). And we have Decision 3, which is Mother's.

Mother has decided to move closer to me. A long-awaited and fantastic result. Mother--daughter partnerships, huh? In the end, the decision was forced by having to book the date with the removal firm and I am expecting other instances of uncertainty. But here's hoping this one is on a roll from here on in. Even if the first part of this moving closer involves her sleeping in my living room. TBC.

(Note 08/11/08: To continue this as a series is now impossible as mother reversed her decision. See my second and last entry on this story to read the conclusion.)

Clichés? Let's use them

Last week, the Guardian published a series on "How to write", which included "The Guardian Book of English Language" (read " .. of Guardian style". The Guardian's style includes the proscription of certain phrases, clichés. I disagree: I truly appreciate the image of a business "haemorrhaging cash" if they really are losing money hand over fist. Clichés are powerful. They get an idea across straight away. They may avoid the use of thought. But that is no reason to dogmatically refuse to use them: writers just have to make sure that they are using the right idea.

The Oxford Shorter Dictionary lists "cliché" as "a stereotyped, expression, a hackneyed phrase or opinion" and the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors as "unoriginal phrase". Therein lies the sometime nature of the beast: negative, careless and wrong. "Cliché" first appeared in the English language in 1892, according to RW Burchfield: this is about the time that publishers had become established and were beginning to put their own style, their own choices, their own dictats on what they published. The style of "avoiding clichés" must come from this time. One definition of a cliché includes "overused to the point that its sole function is to mark its user as a lazy thinker". Hmm, so using a cliché reflects badly on the writer, which can only be when the cliché has become popular enough to become a cliché? It's a good example of a circular argument, which it seems is the best way to tackle any discussion of clichés: Stephen Fry wrote in his book Moab Is My Washpot, "It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then, like most clichés, that cliché is untrue." It seems that it is very difficult to talk positively about clichés and Burchfield himself wrote of them that they are "always reminding us of the repetitiveness of things, the humdrumness that lies beyond and within the doorstep if one's imagination should weaken or one's sense of humour runs out". Oh help, how do we get away from such dogma about what is often a non-issue?

Clichés are metaphors, dead metaphors, those that we know so well that we don't have to think about to understand. People use idioms, analogies, colloquialisms because they are useful in their quirkiness. It is as simple as that. Idioms, I note, are OK: there is even a dictionary of English idioms. Phrases such as "like a fish out of water", "a feather in his cap", "Hobson's choice" have a historical and cultural basis, and refusing to use them risks losing the diversity in the English language.

Yes, there is a caveat: clichés can be misused for didactic purposes. They are familiar, instantly recognisable, and therefore dangerously powerful, and the message becomes subliminal, one that enters the mind yet only skims the surface of conciousness. This is just what is very handy about them, to get the message over, but lazy readers, that is lazy thinkers, may be more likely to accept a point that they otherwise wouldn't. Well, good writing should make reading easy, but writers can't and shouldn't second guess their style to accommodate potential laziness in their readers. Let's use the English language as it is given to us.

Are non-native English speakers put at a disadvantage when a cliché is used? Is the material made inaccessible to them? On the down side, reading has to stop until the meaning has been researched. On the up side, there is going to be no slipping fast ones past these readers, they aren't lazy. And the nuances of the language that are otherwise so difficult for non-native speakers to access are made available. Spoon-feeding (my choice of phrase) non-native readers, like spoon-feeding in general, does not allow development.

Finally, I am reminded of a colleague's comments when our supervisor was interviewing candidates for a post-doctoral position within our research group. " Oh her, that one. She was nothing but clichés. They can't appoint her." Well, "that one" got the job. And brilliant she is, the longest standing member of the group bar the supervisor himself. Not that I always agree with her, and she has views on a lot of things. Indeed, I relish the challenge of keeping on my toes in conversation with her and making sure that I don't just allow her latest point of view to slip in unnoticed, to flavour the rest of the conversation with a premise that I don't agree with. She doesn't second guess me; she trusts in my intelligence.

Talk until you are tired

"Talk until you are tired" is the translation of the words printed on a kanga I was buying in Dar es Salaam in 1989: Mtasema mtachoka. With many of the kangas in East Africa having a jina, they were clearly important for communication. I didn't want to be in ignorance; I asked the shop assistant.

She paused and laughed, clearly having difficulty. She explained: "It means that you keep talking about things that matter to you, whether it is a certain problem or just things. It is very important to talk as much as you can. You have to keep talking until you cannot talk anymore because you need to sleep."

Talking until you are tired is a way of life. It is the only way to sort things out. I spent 3 years in Africa, where women talk all the time as they walk, wash clothes in the river, wait by the bus stop. Men sit in groups in the evenings and talk. Great efforts are made to talk to the right people: in a country without a fit-for-purpose telephone system, people made long journeys, over the hill on foot, by bus or by train, and I am sure they still do.

Now, I'm blogging until I am tired. There is much to talk about. I'm writing from a UK perspective and I'm hoping, not least because the seed of this blog's attitude originates in Africa, that the blog will generate a collection of world views simply because there are issues that affect us all.