Good…and bad.

I feel like some days I might be two different people in one ragged overweight shell. I feel like some days I’ve been trying to hold two realities in my head at once; both equally true, yet both very different. The personal and the external.

My life is going ok generally. Yes, there is an awful lot of extra stress at the moment from being stuck at home a lot. There is boredom from not being able to see friends and colleagues socially, or to take my kids to the local swimming pool or to the cinema or even to my local for an overpriced mediocre meal. But the rest of it’s going well.

Staying at home isn’t so bad because I’ve managed (with help – still impossible to do without help) to buy a house, and it’s a house that we love. I still have a job when so many others are struggling. I live with my family. You know, I’m not king of the world or a millionaire, but generally things are going well.

As long as I don’t widen that viewpoint, things are fine. If I look up beyond my own personal circumstances things get bleaker. Corruption and dishonesty in plain view from those tasked with governing us both at home and overseas, with a media that instead of holding them to account, spends its time trying to distract us with racist hit-pieces on members of the royal family they don’t like, a collective lack of effort to mitigate the numerous and linked challenges facing us in the near future, decisions made to increase, rather than reduce, the grave imbalance between the ultra-rich and the destitute, still refusing to pay staff on the front lines of this fight against the pandemic what they’re worth, paying them instead with claps.

The existential nature of the fear and the threat of climate change-caused ecological breakdown and how it will affect every part of our lives with increasing extremity, coupled with the fact that those tasked with preparing society to face it are chained to the will of those still profiting from fuelling the breakdown and the way most of us face the situation with apathy.

All of that causes a weird feeling in me some days. The peace I feel at home from the generally positive place I’m in personally feels unearned and somehow disrespectful when the wider view of the world imposes itself on me. Some days I think the cognitive dissonance is enough to make me crumble to dust and just stop doing anything.

It's a strange thing.

Occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post (or more like a lyric I can take out of context and loosely relate to the post):

The Doors: Strange Days: “Strange days have found us, strange days have tracked us down. They’re going to destroy our casual joys.”

Entirely voluntary.

That’s what I want you to remember over the coming months. I hope it goes great, I really really do. I hope that whatever happens, when the safety net of the transition period is swept away next month, things are excellent. But tired of them or not, every expert, every person, think tank or organisation that is in a position to know anything about it is predicting a disaster that nobody is ready for. Supermarkets are being advised to stockpile food. Military boats are going to be guarding fish. Fish! In a win for UK interests (not really) the contract for monitoring the fishing boats was awarded to a French company. That doesn’t bother me too much, but there are still many people that are looking forward to the chance to tell folks with different accents they’re not welcome, so I doubt that went down too well. I read somewhere that our entire fishing industry is worth less than the Warhammer 40K brand. Seems like a strange hill to die on.

Remember how it started. Easy. Millions more for the NHS. Sunlit uplands. Remember how this stonking majority was achieved. Getting it done. Oven ready. Now look where we are. Military police threatening to board boats over fish. Who wants pizza anyway, when we’ve got toast, chips and milk? An international laughing stock, baffling our neighbours near and far, pursuing a course of potentially monstrous self-harm all because we can’t bring ourselves to admit that this is a really bad idea and because too many of us get angry when we hear someone talking in a non-local accent or different language. The press are still behaving abominably – taking a quote from a UK source referring to broken glass and applying it to the country where Kristallnacht is burned forever into the collective consciousness is monstrous.

The ludicrous idea that we, the plucky underdogs are trying our best to be civil, but those villainous Europeans keep changing the goalposts is yet another lie. We’ve spent the time basically demanding as good or better than the terms we currently have as a member assuming if we demand it for long enough, we’ll get it. Of course we’re not going to get it. There are benefits to being a member, duh. Spending all this time treating them as enemies rather than allies and our closest trading partners.

A bad deal or no deal is all that’s left to us and every step that got us here was voluntary. I hope we don’t run short on food or medicine over the coming months, but if we do, the steps that took us here were entirely voluntary. I hope we don’t stop being able to import, and even imports that come through are tied up in days of queues and red tape somewhere in in a parking lot in Kent, but if that happens every step we took to get there was entirely voluntary. I hope it doesn’t come to any of that and I’m worrying for no reason, but if it does, I hope this weird obsession with sovereignty that never was actually a real life problem was worth it. It’ll certainly be worth it to the pukes in the financial world making billions out of it while everyone else loses something precious.

I cannot understand why we are doing this, but more to the point, why we are doing it in quite this way. I really hope everything comes up roses and those sunlit uplands really do appear, but there is nothing that suggests to me that hope is remotely based in reality. 2020 was a real shitter of a year. Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but for our little island, there is no reason that I can see why 2021 won’t also be, for want of a better word, difficult. Still, chin up eh?

The good old days...

Worst single-day death toll in all of Europe. Seems quite possible we’re still weeks away from the peak. The people that caught The Virus from the people that went to Cheltenham and to see the Stereophonics are going to be amongst those dying in the coming weeks. It’s hard not to be freaked out and afraid. Still no sign of the mass testing and tracing that the countries successful at limiting the spread were using from the start. This isn’t going away any time soon it seems.

Seems the magic money tree did exist after all. It seems inevitable that this will cause a change in the way this and other countries are run, doesn’t it? Seems like all those important jobs like, I dunno, hedge fund speculation, can all be done at home, or even not done at all, and the ones that don’t pay enough to live on are the jobs that are actually important, doesn’t it? Seems like this minor trial run of the climate change-led catastrophe-laden future that is already underway might make folks think twice about continuing on this path, doesn’t it?

If I might offer a brief cold shower? The propaganda shat out by the press and social media trolls and bots have successfully caused us to lurch further and further to the right-wing, destroying, piece by piece, the very institutions we are all now reliant on for our lives and the lives of our loved ones. Truth means nothing. Sensationalist journalism and viral social media has made absolutely sure of that.

When the daily death toll in Italy was going up to 700, 800, 900 it was reported like the disastrous tragedy is was. It took us a couple of weeks longer to put similar (but less effective) measures in place, and now when our own death toll has exceeded Italy’s worst day, The Sun declared it really was Good Friday, focusing only on the fortunes of one man. As the Prime Minister, it’s quite an important man whether you voted for him or not to be fair, but the uplifting positivity in the face of all that potentially preventable tragedy is exactly what The Sun and papers like it do. Nearly a thousand people dead in one day, and it’s framed like a good news story.

I’m afraid, therefore, I don’t think this inevitable sea change that others see is necessarily on the cards. I’m afraid, I can see all too clearly all that’s happened being left behind for the continued quest for a Britain of the past that never really existed. It's currently 'not the time' to question or criticise apparently. But then it'll be 'why bring up the past? Move on' when questions are asked afterwards. They’ll continue to lead us ever onwards, telling us burning all of our relationships with Europe (like, I don’t know, telling them to piss off when they offered to help us source desperately-needed ventilators) will bring back the good old days.

Let’s hope I’m full of shit. Let’s hope the worst is behind us, The Virus is defeated and we actually put in place decent pay for nursing staff and think about how amazing all these places around the world look without smog and put in place all the technology that already exists and build an infrastructure that isn’t built on making people rich at the expense of, well, absolutely everything.

But let’s not kid ourselves that it’s an inevitability, because The Sun (and others) are going make damn sure we continue on our path into headlong destruction.

Occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post (or more like a lyric I can take out of context and loosely relate to the post):

The Libertines: Good Old Days: “It chars my heart to always hear you calling, calling for the good old days. ‘Cause there were no good old days.”

Hubris. It’s what’s for dinner.

It seems we, the Great Britannia, don’t have to follow the advice of actual experts in contagious disease. Actual virologists. Image being the cause of passing a virus to someone with a compromised immune system, leading to their death, because you went to a Stereophonics gig. Or Lewis Capaldi.

No, I’m not that worried for myself. But that doesn’t mean I ought to be an arsehole about it. Based on the advice we’ve been given, we could be excused for not knowing what the hell to do, but we do seem to have more in common with the Trump approach than pretty much everyone else (not that we’re that bad yet – we haven’t refused the test provided and decided to make our own unreliable version, we haven’t refused to test in large numbers in case it hurts chances of re-election (although it does seem we’re not testing anywhere near enough), and we certainly haven’t tried to bribe scientists for an exclusive vaccine. Seriously, the guy is such a maggot).

Even if it ‘only’ kills 1% of the infected (at best – more like 3-4 at worst), it seems a little callus to immediately write that 1% off without even trying to prevent it. Doesn’t seem that difficult. Stay away from people if you can, especially those more at risk. Wash your hands more often, for longer (regular ordinary soap kills this thing in approximately 20 seconds, breaking down the protective barrier the virusy bastard has evolved for itself). Even if you don’t want to sing Happy Birthday twice over, just find something else (for sci-fi nerd me, it’s the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, spoken slowly).

I doubt there’s no cause for alarm at all like some muppets are saying (step forward, again, Ms Hopkins), but we do seem to be panicking in an entirely unhelpful way. It seems to be either one extreme or the other – either a ‘meh, who gives a shit’ or a ‘pandemonium! Sell, sell, sell! Tell your clients to invest everything in canned food and shotguns and get to the bunker!’ when neither approach seems sensible. Not that I actually know, of course. All I can really do is my best to keep myself un-infectious.

Oh, and if you’re sitting on a years’ worth of bog paper or hand sanitiser for no other reason than you are every man for himselfing or thinking you can sell it on at an increased price, may you be cursed with everyone always remembering what a selfish prick you were when this thing passes. When the much worse consequences of unchecked climate change bite, you’ll be begging for the good old days of pandemics.

This weird thing of us all thinking because we’re British we can just carry on regardless is actual insanity, and is born of repeated nonsense spewed out over years and is the same reason we’re doing that whole leave the EU thing. The Sunday Times spaffed out an opinion piece: ‘I’m 83. I survived rationing. The coronavirus doesn’t scare me.’ These things are not related. I’m 40. I survived Alton Towers. Getting eaten by rabid lambs doesn’t scare me.

Then there’s the data that suggests that during the peak of the outbreak in China, total mortality rates actually went down because day-to-day living and working in such a polluted environment is actually more damaging to people than a pandemic. That doesn’t mean pandemics are good things, but it does mean we (or, more specifically, the global economic systems we have in place to prop up this weird obsession with capitalism) are the problem.

The advice we’re getting from officials is contradictory and changing every couple of days:

Day One: Carry on as normal, taking in on the chin, and because of some pseudoscientific thing I heard, everything will be fine, and only half a million people will die. And more importantly, the money my rich mates cream off the economy will be saved. Hooray! What’s that? The World Health Organisation thinks that’s bullshit? To hell with them. We’re British!

Day Four: So you know a few days ago we said disregard what the rest of the world is doing? Yeah, actually, do what they are doing. Don’t go out, don’t mingle. Schools? Staying open (economy first, lives second, remember?). Businesses? Staying open – just don’t go and use them. That way, my rich mates in the insurance industry don’t have to pay out.

Day Six: Um. Yeah, schools are closing. The science has changed. And by that we mean the science is the same as it always was, but we’ve just not listened until now, and it seems like we’d better start doing the same as everyone else.

Seems like nobody actually knows what to do. Or is putting the economy and the financial interests of the very wealthy above, literally, the lives of the vulnerable. Or simply doesn’t give a single shit about any of us. Or all of the above.

I hope that this thing will blow over with not much more damage than swine flu or bird flu, or even regular flu. But if it doesn’t, I really don’t think the mere fact that We Are Britain will do much to help us in the end. Seems unlikely this time, but eventually, our media-led, chest-beating hubris will be the ruin of us all on this fair isle.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, Frank Herbert's Dune.

Why is blue blue?

Emily, who is currently 6, is very inquisitive about the world. Like many kids her age, she asks many, many questions of her parents. Some of them are funny, some are cute, some are difficult to answer. She recently asked one that was particularly tricky – in her words: “Why does green have to be green and blue have to be blue?”

Well. How do you even start to answer that so a 6-year-old will understand it? How do you talk about the visible spectrum of light and wavelengths? How do you approach the idea that what you see as blue or green may not be what someone else sees – she’s too young to watch The Matrix, after all. I’m not even sure I know the answer. Needless to say, when we tried to answer her she looked at us, uncomprehending, and the longer we talked, the more her look became glazed.

When it had become inescapable that we were failing to answer her question, I asked her if we’d just confused her. She nodded. I then asked her what she thought the answer was. “God decided.” Of course. I might have known. Emily and her big sister Katie are still at that age where ‘god did it’ is an easy go-to answer for something they don’t yet understand.

They’re not alone – as a species we’ve been doing it for thousands of years. It’s a part of us I don’t think we’ll ever truly lose, no matter how much horseshit I consider it to be. I think that’s the case because we’ll never know everything – some things I think will always be a mystery to us. And as long as there’s something we don’t know, there will be something for folks to point at and say ‘god did it’ as if the very fact that we don’t yet know something is somehow proof of god’s existence. Even though, to quote the excellent Tim Minchin, “Every mystery ever solved has turned out to be not magic.” Every riddle we unravel reveals two more behind it.

This is the way religion has insinuated its way into the lives of men, women and children for generations; it seems like an easy answer for people who want to know how the world works. The way to overcome it is to learn more, to know more. This is why I always try to answer my kids’ questions, and never discourage them from asking them, even though sometimes you really want them to just shut the hell up and give you 5 minutes to think; even though I have the tiniest bit of sympathy for the parent referred to in Neko Case’s Nearly Midnight, Honolulu. Katie is already questioning the logistics of Father Christmas making it all the way around the world in one night, and I don’t think the stock answer of ‘it’s Christmas magic’ will work for much longer. This unquenchable curiosity will, I hope, one day dislodge from their mind this acceptance that ‘god decided’ everything they don’t understand and they start looking for a better answer.

New occasional feature: Ending with a song relating to the post:
Neko Case: Nearly Midnight, Honolulu: “You’ll hear yourself complain, but don’t you ever shut up please kid have your say.”

How does it feel to lose your mind?

My memory has never been particularly good. I am reasonably good at retaining things that are interesting to me, but the everyday stuff doesn’t usually stick. Thanks to a wife who is much better at it than me and the occasional making of lists, I manage to get by. Recently however, there was an incident that made me feel uneasy, and wonder if I might be slowly losing my grip on things.

A little ways back we had a spot of sunny weather (hard to believe in our current state of grey skies and rain), during which I dusted off my sunglasses. One day I had taken them to work, and resolved to get a few minor jobs done over my lunch hour. My glasses were on the corner of my desk. At lunchtime I left work and headed to one of our local retail parks. As I arrived at the first shop I wandered inside, picked up a few things, browsed for a moment and went to pay. On the way out I went to put my sunglasses back on, only to realise I didn’t have them.

I checked back at the till, where the shop-worker had no interest in helping me at all. I retraced my way through the shop, checking all the places I had gone. I had a clear memory of wearing my glasses on the walk over, of taking them off as I walked in the shop and of holding them as I walked around. I could only assume that someone had picked them up and walked off with them. Red mist began to descend. While I calmly walked out of the shop and back to work, I was burning internally with a completely over the top fury. The shop, the person who must have taken them, anyone else I found to be slightly irritating; all were wished an untimely and violent death. (As a side note, I don’t genuinely wish for anyone’s death (apart from maybe Robbie Williams’) and wouldn’t attempt to engineer someone’s. I can wish an untimely death on a person internally when I’m annoyed because there’s no such thing as magic, and it wouldn’t actually have any effect. Anyway, due to the aforementioned red mist, this one would like to enter a plea of temporary insanity, guv’nor.)

Upon arriving back at work, it was quite distressing to note that my sunglasses were there on the corner of my desk where I had left them. I had never taken them with me. Those memories of removing them as I entered the shop and such were a garbled pile of steaming crap dreamt up by my failing brain as I struggled to recall the last thing I did with my glasses. So, I had got ridiculously angry over something that I was completely wrong about. Sometimes I can’t help feeling like I’m on the top of a long, gently-sloping decline into obliviousness and dementia. It is a cause for concern.

A declaration of undying love for the BBC.

I hate BBC’s Question Time. This is an odd way to begin a declaration of love for the BBC, but I do. I used to watch it and try to think of funny things to say regarding it to post on Twitter. This didn’t work for two reasons. Firstly, I can’t think of funny things to say about anything. Secondly, the programme would never fail to frustrate me and make me angry. It’s completely pointless and is a platform for bigots, politicians and ineffective lefties to spout their opinions, lies and misinformed bullshit masquerading as intelligent debate. So I stopped watching it. I watched one recently because someone I knew at college was in the audience. The show is as bad as it ever was, brought home particularly by Theresa May talking about how she thinks our economy works the same way as a credit card debt and the odious Peter Hitchens spouting the same kind of clueless hatred he fills his Daily Mail column with. In my incoherent rage I managed to make myself look like a dick on Twitter. I mean, more than usual. The lighter final question was about what people need to make them happier. Hitchens proclaimed loudly and proudly that faith in god was his particular remedy. Regular readers of this blog (and I have a few, believe it or not) will already know about my strong atheist opinions. I try my best to draw a line at insulting people who have faith – I try hard to only criticise religion itself. My tweet in response to Hitchens looked, frankly, like I thought he was an arsehole for the contentment he gets from his faith. I don’t, I think he’s an arsehole for his detestable and uninformed opinions on everything from immigrants, through those on benefits to scientists who found that second-hand smoke is harmful. That he clearly has so much contempt for those people he considers beneath him (like the poor or the foreign or, whisper it, the foreign poor) in one comment and then proudly declares his faith in god in the next. Now, is it me or is one of the few redeeming features of christianity the idea that everyone should be compassionate towards their fellow human and help those in need? That he failed to recognise the contradiction in what he was saying caused me to tweet without thinking. Hitchens went on to do what many like him love to do and give shit to the BBC. He criticised the corporation for not believing in god. First off, as Dimbledore rightly pointed out, the question related to a survey conducted by the Office of National Statistics and had nothing to do with the BBC. Also, being a corporation, and not a human, it has no beliefs of any kind. Thirdly, did Hitchens forget about Songs of Praise and Radio 4’s Thought for the Day? Of course he didn’t, he was just ignoring them to hammer home his nonsensical BBC-slagging point.

Frankly, Hitchens and those like him can go eat a shit sandwich, for the BBC is no less than the finest broadcaster in the world and is worth the licence fee a hundred times over. Want some examples as to why? Blackadder, Red Dwarf, The Brittas Empire, Not the Nine O’clock News, The Day Today, The Young Ones, Bottom, Alan Partridge, Alas Smith & Jones, Comic Strip Presents, The Office, Extras, Faulty Towers, Gavin & Stacey, Hancock’s Half Hour, Monty Python, Not Only...But Also, Steptoe and Son, The Thick of It, Have I Got News For You, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, QI ,Shooting Stars. That’s just some of the comedy.

BBC 3 recently had The Fades, an outstanding horror thriller in which the dead came back to take over the world and cannibalise the living – not a terribly original idea, but highly original in its execution (although I was slightly disappointed by the last episode it doesn’t change the fact that it was great). In Fry’s Planet Word national treasure Stephen Fry explored the history and possible future of language, and was wonderful, Fry’s obvious enthusiasm for his subject pleasantly engrossing. As a science-nut, Horizon is like catnip to me, as well as recent documentaries on the history of humankind’s discovery of the elements or the current series exploring our origins (I love the fact that the BBC has no problem with shows that present evolution as fact (because it is) and don’t have to compromise by acknowledging the nutty alternative theories of creationism and intelligent design (which are not fact)). Wonders of the Solar System and follow up Wonders of the Universe were each worth the licence fee by themselves, as was the little-seen three part series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, which explored the idea that our economic, environmental and political systems are inspired by the way in which machines work and the disastrous results that have come from it. It illustrated quite neatly how Ayn Rand, that hero of misunderstanding leftists and Silicon Valley moguls everywhere and her flawed ideology (that she couldn’t even live by herself, so frick knows how she expected others to do so) contributed to the recent global economic collapse. It showed clearly how we completely misunderstood natural environmental systems for years but based much of our own social and political systems on our misunderstanding of them and then couldn’t understand how things went so badly wrong. It showed the horrifying human cost that is paid when people who don’t know anything act like they’re experts and meddle. It should be seen. And of course there is Planet Earth, The Blue Planet, Frozen Planet, Life in Cold Blood and all those other Attenborough documentaries that are perfect, wonderful, glorious television.

So, the hateful Question Time notwithstanding, I am proud to love the BBC, and will continue to do so, and will never understand why other people don’t.

Wading in to another pointless debate.

So, I overheard a conversation while out in the world. That conversation was regarding circumcision. A woman was talking about her little boy who she is taking to get circumcised for medical reasons – didn’t hear it all, plus I was trying to enjoy a cup of tea at the time, so I didn’t really want to hear the details – there are apparently problems with the foreskin being too tight and rubbing the little fella’s little fella painfully.

There were two or three other women around this table who then chimed in to the conversation. One of them declared that her husband’s looked so much better so she had her boys subjected to it. Another, whose husband was circumcised for religious reasons, admitted that it was better, and easier to clean (can he not clean his own?), although she couldn’t bring herself to do it to her son.

I sat there, drinking my tea, saying nothing. I was rather proud of my self-restraint. Wouldn’t want to make a scene. I did feel like asking the woman who thinks it looks better whether she was circumcised. Did she think lopping her clitoris off would result in a minor subjective cosmetic improvement? Or her daughter’s, were she to have any? No, that would be barbaric, wouldn’t it? Go ahead; mutilate your boys, no problem. I also felt like turning to the other woman and pointing out that my own uncircumcised knob is very easy to clean – it simply requires washing regularly, just like the cocks without hats. And that having it done for religious reasons is staggeringly bizarre, and further comfort for me in my wholly atheist standpoint. How is it possible that an omnipotent, supernatural creator of everything would give a gnat’s fart whether it’s creations went round with a bit of skin over their bellend or not? Why create it that way if it needed to be cut? If it was decided god didn’t like fingernails, would they have to go as well? If you thought people looked better with only four toes, would it be alright to snip the little one off without waiting for the child to be old enough to be able to make their own decision?

Of course not, so why is this OK? I don’t know, but it's none of my business, so I stayed quiet, finished my tea and decided to moan about it here while subjecting you to altogether too much information.

An early sign of middle age.

"I used to be 'with it'. Then they changed what 'it' was. Now 'it' seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you too." - Abe Simpson.

I'm 32 next month. This feels old. I know to a 50 year old it's nothing - still a shining beacon of youth. I also know to a 20 year old it sounds like the best years of my life are behind me. Being or feeling young or old is relative - there is some truth to that 'only as old as you feel' spiel. Maybe 32 feels old to me because I can remember how it felt to be 17, when the thirties seemed another life away.

Attitudes to certain things change as age increases - I mentioned that already here, but I noticed something this week that is beginning to happen with increasing frequency and is an indication that I'm getting older: I am getting annoyed at the NME.

I've read the NME for years. Loved it for years. For years, it's told me where to find some of the best music on the planet. I always loved the writing; how the writers would describe the music. It's becoming increasingly undeniable to me that the writing is a little youth oriented, and is starting to sound stupid to me. I don't think it's anything to do with the magazine changing, I think it's me. I think I'm getting older, and 'it' is making less and less sense to me, just as Abe Simpson predicted. Take this week's issue. Here are three examples of what I think are supposed to be descriptions of music. "For a man who sings like a dismal hippo, he makes rather a lovely racket." How, pray, is a dismal hippo supposed to sound when he sings? "Like trying to beat out loneliness with a dustbin lid." Um, pardon? Is that anything like The Beatles? "Akin to someone dripping poison in your ear." This is actually supposed to be a recommendation. It is nonsense, and it annoys me because it doesn't tell me how those three songs are supposed to sound. Were I barely five years younger, I don't doubt I'd have loved reading such descriptions of music.

It's not the NME's fault. It just doesn't make sense to me anymore. Guess I'll have to start reading Mojo instead.

How do I know I’m not going to ruin my kid’s life?

As mentioned here, we decided on the Priorslee Primary School, recently upgraded to academy status, to be Katie's primary school, with a number of misgivings. When it came down to it, there was little difference between the two local schools we were considering, and the one we chose simply had a slightly better Ofsted rating. We weren't sure if we had made the right decision. Well. Katie got her first choice, and we're still not sure if it's the right one.

Of course, this doesn't mean all that much compared to Katie having to start only a couple of months after her fourth birthday. And yes, I know she doesn't 'have to' - we could keep her out until year 1, when she'll be five, or we can hold on until either January or April. The thing is, keeping her out for a full year means she'll miss her reception year and go straight into formal lessons, and as there is only one intake this year in September if we hold her back until a later term, the other kids would have already made friends and be used to the routine, meaning there is a risk of her being a friendless outsider.

It could be argued that it makes little difference in the end, the 'I didn't have a great childhood and I turned out alright' view. But there is someone close to me who went to the wrong school, was bullied by a teacher and developed a phobia of school, making a large chunk of their childhood unpleasant. Yes, eventually they turned out fine, and couldn't be lovelier, but I don't want Katie to go through that experience. I want her to love learning for the wonder it brings in its own right, not to feel pressure to perform tricks and jump through hoops for grades, which misses the whole point of education. Starting this early at the wrong school could deny her the positive experience she has a right to. Starting her at any school this early could be a mistake, but we feel we've been forced into putting her in too early to give her a chance to bond with other kids in the same situation. Does she really need to be put into this pattern of a five day week of work to prepare her for an adult life that turns her into a worker bee, a capitalist automaton who exists only to create wealth while she's still so young? It's a frightening thought that a decision such as this could easily wreck a large proportion of Katie's early life, and have repercussions throughout her adult life.

All we can do is make what we think is the best decision at the time and hope it was the right one. But we won't stop worrying it's the wrong one.

An automotive conspiracy.

A certain nameless car fixing place (can you tell from the jargon that I know less than nothing about fixing or maintaining cars?) has me doubting the honesty of their employees. A few months back, our car developed an annoying squeak which seemed to be coming from the front on the driver's side. We took the car to the fixing place, where after a little while, they admitted they didn't know what was wrong. They put some grease on a few bits to try to help, but didn't charge for it. We go on with the annoying squeak.

Not long after, the exhaust gets noisy and the acceleration has lost a little of its 'oomph'. Back we go to the car fixers. It turns out that two big chunks of the exhaust need replacing. It'll cost over £250. Now, a mind more cynical than mine might think that a little dodgy, to have a previously working car go kaput shortly following the first visit that happened to not cost anything. It's not outside the realms of possibility that the problem might have been set up during that first visit. Still, it was paid, it was fixed, and on we went.

Just before Christmas the car starts to make a noise more like a motorcycle. A little pissed off, we head back to the car fixers, thinking they might have messed up the job last time. Apparently, it's the other bit of the exhaust they didn't replace last time. That they in fact gave a green light to last time. That'll be another £200 plus, cheers. This seems decidedly off. But what do I know about fixing cars or what might go wrong with them? Cock all, that's what. They fix it, again. As a parting gift, they let us know that they haven't fixed the noise, but it can be sorted easily with a bit of duct tape. If we bring some in they'll do it, no charge. Considering what happened the last time they had a look at a noise for no charge (a noise which was never fixed), I don't think I'll bother.

So it may be my lack of knowledge here, but there seems to be a distinct possibility they're swindling cunts. Guess I'll never know.

An attempt to understand why people like shite.

I've been trying to understand why the whole Twilight thing exploded. I don't know why I've been trying to understand this, I suppose it's because I have too much time on my hands and not enough interesting thoughts in my head to fill it with. The whole thing was passing me by, but recently my wife got caught up in it. Now, that's not to say she's a 'Twi-hard' - she doesn't scream at the mere mention of Rob Pattison, she's not planning on any tattoos or T-shirts to proudly advertise her obsession. Truth be told, she's a bit embarassed by it. However, like it and enjoy it she does.

I get most youth culture crazes, even if I don't share them. Take Harry Potter as an example. I can understand why so many fans got swept up in the books and the movies. I certainly didn't become a fan, per se, but I can acknolwedge that the books are very well written. The first few are most definitely written for kids - they've got that simplistic way about them, like a less sophisticated Roald Dahl. The idea is that the reader should be a similar age to the title character, allowing the books to increase in depth as the reader matures. As such, the writing style and the story increase in complexity with each book. The stories caught the attention of so many older readers because of the subtleness of Rowling's writing - simplistic enough for kids but with just enough underlying darkness and complexity to attract adults. As the books go on, the darkness is much less underlying and the 'for kids' moniker is left behind. In addition, the attraction of reading something that evokes how it felt to be a child is very strong for many readers.

The same is true of The Hobbit. It was also written for children, but with enough potential for expansion into more complex themes to attract adults. A potential that was realised with the writing of The Lord of the Rings, which has such a multitude of underlying themes and levels of depth that most who read it cannot ever leave it behind.

Another example is Star Wars, but this is more about remembering and attempting to relive childhood memories than hidden depth, because the last thing Star Wars is, is deep. Personally, I think it's completely over-rated and is nothing compared to the likes of Indiana Jones and Back to the Future. That's because I was late to the party - Star Wars was released two years before I was born. People love it because they love how they felt watching it as a kid. Those same people hate the prequels. The prequels are, granted, poor films, but so, I would contend, are the original ones. Those that hate them hate them because they were not children when they watched them, and were, therefore, not the target audience. They were not young enough, not simple enought to be taken in by that world. There is a whole generation out there that will tell you that their favourite Star Wars movie is Episode 1. That's entirely down to the age they were when they watched it.

When I attempt to apply that logic to Twilight, it falls apart. Yes, it's aimed at teenagers, and not women in their 30s, but the same is true for Harry Potter. The fact is, they are very badly written - Stephenie Meyer couldn't write her way out of a wet paper bag. You can see it in the writing - while Rowling writes in a way that children can relate to she creates a very vivid picture of a hidden alternative world in our heads. On the other hand, Meyer's style is simply dull, like a teenager with no imagination and an over-riding obession with a boy would write. I can tell Harry Potter is written for children by a talented adult. I can't tell if Twilight is written for teenagers, in the style of a teenager or by an actual teenager. When Rachel tried to explain to me why she liked it, she gave me a hint as to the actual reason why I couldn't understand. She said it made her feel like a teenager herself, reading Point Horror and Point Romance novels, and that while she knows the writing is unsophisticated, the feeling of nostalgia it evokes is more effective. So, the truth is, it's probably because I'm male and simply can't understand. Fair enough. But, to be honest, I think girls deserve better than this depthless, vacuous shite.

What baffles me further is that like many other Twilight fans, Rachel's now got into True Blood. True Blood is much better - smart, well-written novels and a surprisingly good TV series. It's almost like the reader grows up and moves from one to the other - kind of like when you first discover holding hands and then move on to sex. I can't understand how it's possible to be a fan of both (Twilight and True Blood, not holding hands and sex) - it's akin to liking both Mozart and The Wiggles.

Of course, there's no reason why I should care at all. People are obviously free to like whatever they like regardless of what I or anyone else thinks. It's frankly none of my business. Maybe I can't help thinking I'm missing out on something. I doubt it, though.