Catholic Herald, 23 June 2006
The dawn chorus began at 3.30 this morning when an insanely driven car with a faulty silencer drove over my duvet at 70mph. OK, the car didn’t actually enter the room, but on these balmy nights, a particular style of driving gives a person sleeping in the upper floor of a corner house on a normally peaceful street the powerful sensation of being in the middle of the M25.
A couple of seconds later a motorbike passed, equally furiously, in the same direction, probably ridden by a determined policeman. Two squad cars began calling from opposite sides of the borough. An aerial “chugga-chugga” noise heralded our friendly neighbourhood police helicopter, equipped with its familiar searchlight, which circled us for an hour like a guest who won’t quite go home: every now and again he raises your hopes, making a little sally as though looking round for his coat – then he thinks of another important point he wanted to make, and turns back.
I closed my eyes and imagined the person who had orchestrated this symphony: probably under 25, undoubtedly male, and driving a stolen car. Was this his first time? Probably not, if the daredevilry of his driving is anything to go by. Did he have passengers? Was someone’s daughter clinging to the passenger seat beside him, wondering where her night out went wrong?
We all need to feel that special frisson down our spines a few times in our lives – the sense that we have taken on a great task and might succeed, but also might fail. Life for children today is notoriously lacking in danger. So where does my dawn joyrider go for excitement? Where has he felt goose bumps on the back of his neck? Most likely, when defying the law: squaring up for a fight with a playground rival, running from a shop before being caught with his loot, seeing the bright flick of a knife in the hand of a boy from another gang – these are, I thought sadly, the only experiences which have made him feel alive.
A teenage boy nowadays stands between two impossibles: the bland world of school and authority, where every risk is assessed, every playground stripped of anything that a child could fall off; or the genuinely dangerous and thrilling world of the street.
With this thought in mind, I – and my family – have become somewhat hooked on a TV series about a choir. “The Singing Estate” (Five, 8pm, Sunday) began with conductor Ivor Setterfield holding open auditions in the Blackbird Leys Estate in Oxford – in order to train a choir of supposedly complete beginners to sing Orff’s Carmina Burana at the Royal Albert Hall.
The gimmick of the programme is that in episode 1, most of the auditionees started out with no idea how to sing at all. Many could not read music. Few knew anything of classical music. Most had no idea how to follow a conductor. Yet hidden beneath the strangled howls and would-be Kylie noises were real voices, even one really fine tenor.
In episode 2 Setterfield took his embryonic choir on an inspirational visit to Italy, where they experienced “goosebump moments” and excitement such as my poor joyrider could never imagine. On their first evening, a top Italian tenor walked into the restaurant where they were eating, and sang “Nessun Dorma” at full stretch; several choristers simply burst into tears.
There were more tears on a visit to La Scala in Milan: the splendour, the size and the cultural distance of it from the 1960s tower blocks that make up the Blackbird Leys estate was emotionally overwhelming. Crying when you walk into La Scala is a sure sign that a love affair with “difficult” music is in the air.
But then the choristers blew it, by going out on the town, and thus wrecking their voices for the next day’s scheduled al fresco performance…which was consequently a disaster.
All very contrived for TV, of course, and the programme rather exaggerates the non-musical backgrounds of the choristers: in truth, nearly all of them have sung before, notably with church choirs. But it is deeply moving to see young people who have never before met a seriously uncompromising teacher, and older people who had forgotten how to try hard at something, deal with such a challenge. And – more importantly – deal with failing, feeling humiliated, then rallying and coming back to the challenge again.
I wonder if my dawn joyrider can sing.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Exam Hell
Catholic Herald, 9 June 2006
We prayed for young people having exams last Sunday: I very much hope you did too. Unlike women in childbirth, who are woefully under-represented, students have a whole team of patron saints on their side – and now, more than ever, they need them and they need your prayers. Exams are not fun any more.
I used to enjoy exams. They were the nearest thing, I reasoned, to going into battle which I was ever likely to experience. In the old days, you spent the evening before the exam re-reading and re-reading the notes you’d written during lessons over the previous years. In the morning you got up early and dressed with care like a knight putting on his armour.
Breakfast was equally ritualistic, a French vocabulary book open by the plate and your stomach churning with adrenalin. Bright-eyed teenagers gathered at the school gate, chattering excitedly, our clear plastic pencil bags, the special insignia of the warrior, clutched in our hands. The sun always shone, the birds sang and there was a bright, fierce scent of battle in the air as we wished each other good luck, as though we would never set eyes on each other again.
It got even better at Oxford, where we really did have to put on a sort of medieval armour – dark suits and incongruous white ties for the lads, and for the girls black skirts and ties or bows adorning an amazing range of garments all loosely conforming to the rubric “a white blouse”.
Whatever the weather, the ensemble was topped off with an academic gown - for some of us (cough, cough), a calf-length scholar’s number billowing and fluttering through the Examination Schools corridors with glorious intellectual snobbishness; and of course everybody had to wear an absurd hat. Most difficult public occasions are made bearable by the wearing of an absurd hat, as High Court Judges, Fr Kit Cunningham and ladies at Royal Ascot can all agree.
From the moment you woke up, therefore, you were playing the part of the person sitting an exam, and best of all everybody in town knew what your role was just by looking at you. I liked to believe (probably erroneously) that kind motorists would note the wobbly girl cyclist in the black and white get-up and give her an extra wide berth. I hope they did.
But in those days exams came not more than every two or three years. Now they are with us constantly. They never go away. Even notwithstanding the plethora of lesser tests such as SATs, as soon as a teenager has done GCSEs they are plunged into AS levels, then A-levels. There is no longer a pleasant lower-sixth year when a young person can throw himself or herself into the school play, or the cricket team, without fear of losing marks in some trumped up subject that will be completely outdated in ten years’ time, like ICT or Travel and Tourism. The more exams we have, the less proper knowledge our children seem to be allowed to acquire.
In addition we are subjected to a year-round drip-drip of coursework deadlines which, as we move through the year, by turns threaten, then glower, then loom and finally pass (sometimes in deadly silence) in an almost weekly cycle. The tyranny of coursework is one of the worst aspects of the current system. From my very small sample of the teenage population, it seems that girls easily become obsessive about coursework, staying up late into the night perfecting their offering despite pleas from parents; while boys are constantly astonished to discover that deadlines which were written into the calendar over a year ago really do, eventually, arrive. I accept that my sample may not be reliable - but I resent the way that exams have crept, by means of coursework, from their traditional summer domain to squat toad-like on family life across the whole year.
All my exam-passing techniques of old seem to be useless: Examiners are paid a pittance for each script and have no time for cleverness, so any attempt by one’s child to be original or to discuss, say, the Second World War beyond “what Sir said we have to learn” is quashed. French vocab books have been replaced by brightly coloured revision guides with titles like “GCSE French In A Week”. “No good for us,” commented the mother of one of my son’s friends. “It’s ‘GCSE in Three Days’ we need now.”
So please pray for our young people; please call with me on Saints Benedict, Catherine of Alexandria, Gregory the Great, Jerome, John Bosco, Thomas Aquinas, Brigid of Ireland – and (in our case at least) not forgetting St Jude Thaddeus - to give them courage and a brave, cheerful heart as they go into battle on these cruelly sunny June mornings.
We prayed for young people having exams last Sunday: I very much hope you did too. Unlike women in childbirth, who are woefully under-represented, students have a whole team of patron saints on their side – and now, more than ever, they need them and they need your prayers. Exams are not fun any more.
I used to enjoy exams. They were the nearest thing, I reasoned, to going into battle which I was ever likely to experience. In the old days, you spent the evening before the exam re-reading and re-reading the notes you’d written during lessons over the previous years. In the morning you got up early and dressed with care like a knight putting on his armour.
Breakfast was equally ritualistic, a French vocabulary book open by the plate and your stomach churning with adrenalin. Bright-eyed teenagers gathered at the school gate, chattering excitedly, our clear plastic pencil bags, the special insignia of the warrior, clutched in our hands. The sun always shone, the birds sang and there was a bright, fierce scent of battle in the air as we wished each other good luck, as though we would never set eyes on each other again.
It got even better at Oxford, where we really did have to put on a sort of medieval armour – dark suits and incongruous white ties for the lads, and for the girls black skirts and ties or bows adorning an amazing range of garments all loosely conforming to the rubric “a white blouse”.
Whatever the weather, the ensemble was topped off with an academic gown - for some of us (cough, cough), a calf-length scholar’s number billowing and fluttering through the Examination Schools corridors with glorious intellectual snobbishness; and of course everybody had to wear an absurd hat. Most difficult public occasions are made bearable by the wearing of an absurd hat, as High Court Judges, Fr Kit Cunningham and ladies at Royal Ascot can all agree.
From the moment you woke up, therefore, you were playing the part of the person sitting an exam, and best of all everybody in town knew what your role was just by looking at you. I liked to believe (probably erroneously) that kind motorists would note the wobbly girl cyclist in the black and white get-up and give her an extra wide berth. I hope they did.
But in those days exams came not more than every two or three years. Now they are with us constantly. They never go away. Even notwithstanding the plethora of lesser tests such as SATs, as soon as a teenager has done GCSEs they are plunged into AS levels, then A-levels. There is no longer a pleasant lower-sixth year when a young person can throw himself or herself into the school play, or the cricket team, without fear of losing marks in some trumped up subject that will be completely outdated in ten years’ time, like ICT or Travel and Tourism. The more exams we have, the less proper knowledge our children seem to be allowed to acquire.
In addition we are subjected to a year-round drip-drip of coursework deadlines which, as we move through the year, by turns threaten, then glower, then loom and finally pass (sometimes in deadly silence) in an almost weekly cycle. The tyranny of coursework is one of the worst aspects of the current system. From my very small sample of the teenage population, it seems that girls easily become obsessive about coursework, staying up late into the night perfecting their offering despite pleas from parents; while boys are constantly astonished to discover that deadlines which were written into the calendar over a year ago really do, eventually, arrive. I accept that my sample may not be reliable - but I resent the way that exams have crept, by means of coursework, from their traditional summer domain to squat toad-like on family life across the whole year.
All my exam-passing techniques of old seem to be useless: Examiners are paid a pittance for each script and have no time for cleverness, so any attempt by one’s child to be original or to discuss, say, the Second World War beyond “what Sir said we have to learn” is quashed. French vocab books have been replaced by brightly coloured revision guides with titles like “GCSE French In A Week”. “No good for us,” commented the mother of one of my son’s friends. “It’s ‘GCSE in Three Days’ we need now.”
So please pray for our young people; please call with me on Saints Benedict, Catherine of Alexandria, Gregory the Great, Jerome, John Bosco, Thomas Aquinas, Brigid of Ireland – and (in our case at least) not forgetting St Jude Thaddeus - to give them courage and a brave, cheerful heart as they go into battle on these cruelly sunny June mornings.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Opus Domi
Catholic Herald, 12/5/06
Today I am waiting in for the dishwasher man. Six weeks of living without a functioning dishwasher have been salutary. Apart from the fact that our electricity usage took a nice little dive, it was interesting to discover that our children, despite annual no-frills holidays, still do not know how to wash up. Nor do they see any reason why they should wash up as long as their parents seem able and willing to do it for them.
“We teach our children almost nothing beyond cleaning their teeth,” fulminated the kitchen guru Prue Leith in the Financial Times at the weekend. “We cherish the freedom to live in a mannerless tip…yet schoolchildren are so overprotected out of the home that they many not go on a swing unless it has a cushioned floor beneath it.”
Ouch. It was with a chastened heart that I went along to the first Excellence in the Home conference at a grand Kensington hotel, where Mrs Leith was booked to expand the theme of her wonderful Financial Times article.
This is the kind of thing I normally dread. It should have made me feel inadequate and scruffy. A sea of well-groomed catering and education and corporate professionals in suits and pearls (though fewer pearls on the men) greeted the inspirational speakers: Ms Leith herself; a brilliant keynote speech on the balance between body and soul, from Tom Hibbs, a Texan professor of ethics; even a “chefs forum” on what professional chefs get up to at home.
And here’s the funny thing – I didn’t feel inadequate and scruffy at all. Well, I felt a little scruffy – maybe my favourite birdwatching anorak isn’t quite Royal Garden Hotel style. But otherwise I felt energised and inspired. On the bus home, I found myself devising a five-day crash course in self-maintenance and home skills with which to keep the sixteen-year-old busy when he’s finished his GCSEs. I now feel utterly determined to get my children learning to cook, to shop wisely, to keep their home and selves clean and comfortable because I’d been made to realise that home skills matter. Yes! The skills I’ve wasted so many years trying to cram into as little time as possible before doing “real” work really, really matter.
Excellence in the Home, which looks like becoming an ongoing series of events, is taking the Jamie Oliver phenomenon a step further; it is the sort of event which the Women’s Institute ought to be organising, but doesn’t. Also it has a genuine international dimension – there were delegates from all continents, even New Zealand.
So who organised it? None other than the Dawliffe Hall Educational Foundation, which has an excellent background in organising inspirational speaker meetings and conferences of a smaller scale, but has never done anything quite as big as this before. DHEF organises the kind of events which you drag yourself to thinking, “Why on earth do I want to spend a day listening to speakers talking about parenting?” and afterwards skip home crying “Hallelujah! There are other parents having the same problems as me – and we can solve them!” Which of course, you knew all along but didn’t quite believe.
Now, as some readers will know, the DHEF is – how do we express this? – inspired by Opus Dei. It would be inaccurate to say it is “run by” Opus Dei. But I do not think DHEF will quibble if I say that it is part of the Opus Dei family. Its energetic leading lights are all Opus Dei stalwarts.
This fact was not mentioned in any of the Excellence in the Home literature. Even the guest speakers, I discovered in conversation with one of them, had not been informed of it.
Meanwhile the film of the world’s worst-written and most obnoxious thriller, The Da Vinci Code, is opening all over the country. A whole generation of gullible people will believe from this month forwards that (a) Jesus married Mary Magdalene and (b) Opus Dei is staffed by murderous monks.
Well, I looked very hard round the Excellence in the Home conference and I swear I did not see one murderous monk, albino or no; yet at a time when their reputation needs all the help it can get, Opus Dei seem strangely, pointlessly even, reluctant to allow their connection with an entirely laudable initiative such as Excellence in the Home to be known.
Why?
Today I am waiting in for the dishwasher man. Six weeks of living without a functioning dishwasher have been salutary. Apart from the fact that our electricity usage took a nice little dive, it was interesting to discover that our children, despite annual no-frills holidays, still do not know how to wash up. Nor do they see any reason why they should wash up as long as their parents seem able and willing to do it for them.
“We teach our children almost nothing beyond cleaning their teeth,” fulminated the kitchen guru Prue Leith in the Financial Times at the weekend. “We cherish the freedom to live in a mannerless tip…yet schoolchildren are so overprotected out of the home that they many not go on a swing unless it has a cushioned floor beneath it.”
Ouch. It was with a chastened heart that I went along to the first Excellence in the Home conference at a grand Kensington hotel, where Mrs Leith was booked to expand the theme of her wonderful Financial Times article.
This is the kind of thing I normally dread. It should have made me feel inadequate and scruffy. A sea of well-groomed catering and education and corporate professionals in suits and pearls (though fewer pearls on the men) greeted the inspirational speakers: Ms Leith herself; a brilliant keynote speech on the balance between body and soul, from Tom Hibbs, a Texan professor of ethics; even a “chefs forum” on what professional chefs get up to at home.
And here’s the funny thing – I didn’t feel inadequate and scruffy at all. Well, I felt a little scruffy – maybe my favourite birdwatching anorak isn’t quite Royal Garden Hotel style. But otherwise I felt energised and inspired. On the bus home, I found myself devising a five-day crash course in self-maintenance and home skills with which to keep the sixteen-year-old busy when he’s finished his GCSEs. I now feel utterly determined to get my children learning to cook, to shop wisely, to keep their home and selves clean and comfortable because I’d been made to realise that home skills matter. Yes! The skills I’ve wasted so many years trying to cram into as little time as possible before doing “real” work really, really matter.
Excellence in the Home, which looks like becoming an ongoing series of events, is taking the Jamie Oliver phenomenon a step further; it is the sort of event which the Women’s Institute ought to be organising, but doesn’t. Also it has a genuine international dimension – there were delegates from all continents, even New Zealand.
So who organised it? None other than the Dawliffe Hall Educational Foundation, which has an excellent background in organising inspirational speaker meetings and conferences of a smaller scale, but has never done anything quite as big as this before. DHEF organises the kind of events which you drag yourself to thinking, “Why on earth do I want to spend a day listening to speakers talking about parenting?” and afterwards skip home crying “Hallelujah! There are other parents having the same problems as me – and we can solve them!” Which of course, you knew all along but didn’t quite believe.
Now, as some readers will know, the DHEF is – how do we express this? – inspired by Opus Dei. It would be inaccurate to say it is “run by” Opus Dei. But I do not think DHEF will quibble if I say that it is part of the Opus Dei family. Its energetic leading lights are all Opus Dei stalwarts.
This fact was not mentioned in any of the Excellence in the Home literature. Even the guest speakers, I discovered in conversation with one of them, had not been informed of it.
Meanwhile the film of the world’s worst-written and most obnoxious thriller, The Da Vinci Code, is opening all over the country. A whole generation of gullible people will believe from this month forwards that (a) Jesus married Mary Magdalene and (b) Opus Dei is staffed by murderous monks.
Well, I looked very hard round the Excellence in the Home conference and I swear I did not see one murderous monk, albino or no; yet at a time when their reputation needs all the help it can get, Opus Dei seem strangely, pointlessly even, reluctant to allow their connection with an entirely laudable initiative such as Excellence in the Home to be known.
Why?
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Why get married?
When the Commission for Social Justice, the highly praiseworthy organisation set up by the Catholic MP Iain Duncan Smith as soon as he had been released from the shackles of being the leader of the Conservative Party, announced last week that according to its researches, “family breakdown” was a big problem, it was quite hard not to think, “Mmm, yes, we had noticed, actually.”
But to do the CSJ’s Family Breakdown Group justice, they made a much more forceful point than most politicians have been prepared to do for many years.
Thanks to the twin political monsters of fear of discrimination (on the Left) and a fervent belief in libertarianism (on the Right) politicians of all colours have had a habit of regarding the break-up of relationships as a personal matter in which the Government has no business making judgements.
The worst thing you can do is to “stigmatise” someone (interesting religious analogy, that) – especially a poor single mother. Following on from that it has been standard practice, in issues of public policy, to lump together all single parents as being equally vulnerable and deserving of special pity: from the vulnerable teenage mum whose baby gives her the total love she has never known from anyone else, all the way to the face-lifted trophy wife suing her husband for £5 million after kicking him out to make room for her personal trainer.
And following on from that, the problem of couples not sticking together tends to be regarded as just one of those things in society that we have to get used to.
No, says the CSJ. We do NOT have to get used to it. Even more, we have to stop it happening. “Public policy goals, such as the elimination of child poverty and improvement in educational standards, are being undermined by what has happened to the two-parent family.”
So instead of treating the fact of family breakdown as an unfortunate side-show and child poverty as the main event, a Government should regard family breakdown as the main problem to be tackled. This is a refreshing departure from the sticking-plaster attitude of most public policy on social issues; let’s hope that the Tories and other parties take notice of it.
The CSJ makes the important observation, that divorce is no longer what splits families – because there are fewer people getting married in the first place.
Couples who never marry are five times more likely to split up than married couples, and couples rarely stay unmarried and together for over ten years – they generally either split up, or decide that after ten years they finally know each other to take the great leap of marriage.
I have the impression that a great deal of Church energy has been directed over the years at the issue of divorce and remarriage as regards the gravity of the sacrament. But I wonder if this long debate has been at the expense of getting another, more urgent message across: the reasons why couples should get married in the first place.
Once upon a time it was too obvious to mention. But time has worn away the obvious reasons so that they are not immediately apparent to children, or even to people in their twenties and thirties.
There is an entire industry besieging young people with advice on marriage; books, magazines, websites, entire consultation services of every possible type. But nobody ever seems to bother to spell out to them why they should get married. Nearly all “relationships advice” has to tiptoe round the fact that marriage is better for everyone – men, women and – especially - children.
Much damage has been done by our accursed addiction to embarrassment: The term “partner” has more or less replaced “spouse” not for reasons of accuracy, but because we are afraid to assume a couple are married when they are not.
It is a mystery to me why we don’t work a little harder to explain to the wider public why marriage works. Standing up in public announcing an intention to stick together is still the best method ever devised of cementing a couple. The Church’s answer to the glib “why should we get married?” should always be – “But why not?”
But to do the CSJ’s Family Breakdown Group justice, they made a much more forceful point than most politicians have been prepared to do for many years.
Thanks to the twin political monsters of fear of discrimination (on the Left) and a fervent belief in libertarianism (on the Right) politicians of all colours have had a habit of regarding the break-up of relationships as a personal matter in which the Government has no business making judgements.
The worst thing you can do is to “stigmatise” someone (interesting religious analogy, that) – especially a poor single mother. Following on from that it has been standard practice, in issues of public policy, to lump together all single parents as being equally vulnerable and deserving of special pity: from the vulnerable teenage mum whose baby gives her the total love she has never known from anyone else, all the way to the face-lifted trophy wife suing her husband for £5 million after kicking him out to make room for her personal trainer.
And following on from that, the problem of couples not sticking together tends to be regarded as just one of those things in society that we have to get used to.
No, says the CSJ. We do NOT have to get used to it. Even more, we have to stop it happening. “Public policy goals, such as the elimination of child poverty and improvement in educational standards, are being undermined by what has happened to the two-parent family.”
So instead of treating the fact of family breakdown as an unfortunate side-show and child poverty as the main event, a Government should regard family breakdown as the main problem to be tackled. This is a refreshing departure from the sticking-plaster attitude of most public policy on social issues; let’s hope that the Tories and other parties take notice of it.
The CSJ makes the important observation, that divorce is no longer what splits families – because there are fewer people getting married in the first place.
Couples who never marry are five times more likely to split up than married couples, and couples rarely stay unmarried and together for over ten years – they generally either split up, or decide that after ten years they finally know each other to take the great leap of marriage.
I have the impression that a great deal of Church energy has been directed over the years at the issue of divorce and remarriage as regards the gravity of the sacrament. But I wonder if this long debate has been at the expense of getting another, more urgent message across: the reasons why couples should get married in the first place.
Once upon a time it was too obvious to mention. But time has worn away the obvious reasons so that they are not immediately apparent to children, or even to people in their twenties and thirties.
There is an entire industry besieging young people with advice on marriage; books, magazines, websites, entire consultation services of every possible type. But nobody ever seems to bother to spell out to them why they should get married. Nearly all “relationships advice” has to tiptoe round the fact that marriage is better for everyone – men, women and – especially - children.
Much damage has been done by our accursed addiction to embarrassment: The term “partner” has more or less replaced “spouse” not for reasons of accuracy, but because we are afraid to assume a couple are married when they are not.
It is a mystery to me why we don’t work a little harder to explain to the wider public why marriage works. Standing up in public announcing an intention to stick together is still the best method ever devised of cementing a couple. The Church’s answer to the glib “why should we get married?” should always be – “But why not?”
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
What is poverty?
What does a man need to live? Water, food, shelter, say some. Mobile phones, say others.
There is genuine disagreement about what poverty is. The official definition sets it at earning below 60% of median income after housing costs, which means that the poor are quite literally always with us, because the threshold rises as earnings rise.
The face of genuine poverty, however, is more subtly veiled by debt. However little you earn, it is always horribly easy to borrow, for there are always people unscrupulous enough to lend to you at the cost of your sanity. Some of the poorest people “own” mobile phones and satellite dishes whose value is dwarfed by the debt incurred to obtain them.
The Retail Price Index, based on a regularly updated shopping list of items, only shows what we like to buy, not what we need to buy. This month, children’s sandals and car seats dropped off the list while iPods and champagne were added. It only means that more people buy iPods than have babies; it does not mean that car seats are any less essential for saving children’s lives, or that children no longer need sandals. And if sandals suddenly become expensive, the RPI won’t notice.
There is an argument that poverty essentially consists of being unable to satisfy the pressures of your peer group. Thus, if a child is bullied and spat on for not wearing £85 trainers, and as a consequence his mum sells her happiness to a loan shark in order to buy the desired trainers, the family is clearly poor. It is pointed out that very poor single parents prefer to keep children at home, shoeless, until the cash for shoes can be scraped together.
What is wrong with this analysis is that second hand shoes are easily obtained, but the pride it takes to wear them with dignity harder to come by. What is also wrong with it is that the social stigma of debt, once reinforced by pride and piety, has gone for ever; what is also wrong with this analysis is that if the child’s school exercised its powers properly, the school bullies would have no idea whether the child even possessed anything other than the school’s “regulation” trainers.
On the other hand, a teenager without a PC and broadband is at a real disadvantage at school nowadays. So when an impoverished single mother gets into debt to buy a home computer, is she not as prudent as the middle class parents who take out a second mortgage to send a child to a prestigious school?
I am not saying that anybody defines poverty as finding it hard to pay for a computer…or for private education. I am saying, however, that it is misleading to define poverty by the lack of what you fancy you should be able to afford, rather than by what you actually need to help yourself towards independence and dignity.
Thus, the mobile phone is a luxury for me, as I have a home with a landline. But in the refugee camps of North Africa, where thousands languish in the hope of slipping into Spain one day, the mobile phone is a lifeline; it is more important than a pair of shoes or a loaf of bread, because it is the only channel by which a man may learn that he has a chance of being smuggled out that night.
Debt, susceptibility to peer pressure – these are different ways of defining poverty. One American bankruptcy expert claims that two-income families, despite being richer on paper than families with a stay-at-home mum, are among the most financially vulnerable of all because they have no “slack”. Asset-rich, time-poor, but stretched to the limit – there is nobody left in the family to send out to work.
“Man cannot live by bread alone”. It’s a two-edged dictum. It strikes most sharply at the rich who think the poor should be satisfied with bread and satellite dishes, and need not learn to aspire to dignity and spiritual enlightenment. But it also strikes at the nearly-rich who believe that happiness is just another credit card loan away.
There is genuine disagreement about what poverty is. The official definition sets it at earning below 60% of median income after housing costs, which means that the poor are quite literally always with us, because the threshold rises as earnings rise.
The face of genuine poverty, however, is more subtly veiled by debt. However little you earn, it is always horribly easy to borrow, for there are always people unscrupulous enough to lend to you at the cost of your sanity. Some of the poorest people “own” mobile phones and satellite dishes whose value is dwarfed by the debt incurred to obtain them.
The Retail Price Index, based on a regularly updated shopping list of items, only shows what we like to buy, not what we need to buy. This month, children’s sandals and car seats dropped off the list while iPods and champagne were added. It only means that more people buy iPods than have babies; it does not mean that car seats are any less essential for saving children’s lives, or that children no longer need sandals. And if sandals suddenly become expensive, the RPI won’t notice.
There is an argument that poverty essentially consists of being unable to satisfy the pressures of your peer group. Thus, if a child is bullied and spat on for not wearing £85 trainers, and as a consequence his mum sells her happiness to a loan shark in order to buy the desired trainers, the family is clearly poor. It is pointed out that very poor single parents prefer to keep children at home, shoeless, until the cash for shoes can be scraped together.
What is wrong with this analysis is that second hand shoes are easily obtained, but the pride it takes to wear them with dignity harder to come by. What is also wrong with it is that the social stigma of debt, once reinforced by pride and piety, has gone for ever; what is also wrong with this analysis is that if the child’s school exercised its powers properly, the school bullies would have no idea whether the child even possessed anything other than the school’s “regulation” trainers.
On the other hand, a teenager without a PC and broadband is at a real disadvantage at school nowadays. So when an impoverished single mother gets into debt to buy a home computer, is she not as prudent as the middle class parents who take out a second mortgage to send a child to a prestigious school?
I am not saying that anybody defines poverty as finding it hard to pay for a computer…or for private education. I am saying, however, that it is misleading to define poverty by the lack of what you fancy you should be able to afford, rather than by what you actually need to help yourself towards independence and dignity.
Thus, the mobile phone is a luxury for me, as I have a home with a landline. But in the refugee camps of North Africa, where thousands languish in the hope of slipping into Spain one day, the mobile phone is a lifeline; it is more important than a pair of shoes or a loaf of bread, because it is the only channel by which a man may learn that he has a chance of being smuggled out that night.
Debt, susceptibility to peer pressure – these are different ways of defining poverty. One American bankruptcy expert claims that two-income families, despite being richer on paper than families with a stay-at-home mum, are among the most financially vulnerable of all because they have no “slack”. Asset-rich, time-poor, but stretched to the limit – there is nobody left in the family to send out to work.
“Man cannot live by bread alone”. It’s a two-edged dictum. It strikes most sharply at the rich who think the poor should be satisfied with bread and satellite dishes, and need not learn to aspire to dignity and spiritual enlightenment. But it also strikes at the nearly-rich who believe that happiness is just another credit card loan away.
Friday, March 03, 2006
The Teens of Ave Maria
Catholic Herald 3 March 2006
What will life be like for families who move to Ave Maria, the proposed Catholic city which the pizza millionaire Tom Monaghan is building on Florida farmland? Centred round a new university, Ave Maria could potentially provide that blissful sense of freedom to express faith blended with intellectual curiosity which you get at a good family retreat. Heady but supportive, principled but not hidebound. That would be the ideal.
Predictably, Monaghan’s proposal to exclude contraceptives and abortion from his town has already been attacked by local busybodies as an assault on human rights. How dreadful, they say, for women who find themselves stuck in the middle of Ave Maria and suddenly requiring an abortion. They will have to suffer the profound human rights indignity of getting the car out and driving all the way to Miami, a town far more in tune with human rights, apparently, being plentifully stocked with lethal drugs, guns and abortions.
Yes, it seems the ability to obtain a lunchtime abortion and a snort of coke within a half-hour drive of one’s home is a human right. This will come as interesting news to inhabitants of rural English villages, who can no longer post a parcel or buy a bag of frozen peas, let alone obtain an abortion, without having either to wait for the once-a-day bus, or drive themselves into the nearest market town and negotiate the change-hungry pay-and-display parking ticket machines. It will also come as interesting news to the millions of Christians, Catholic and non-Catholic, who live an inconvenient distance from their nearest place of worship, since freedom to worship is surely still a basic human right.
But, back to Ave Maria and its sun-kissed streets. Will it work? Americans make a lot of fuss about separation of church and state, but church and town planning have a long history of collaboration. Previous generations of immigrants regarded the continent as a vast blank sheet on which to design perfect communities. There are many examples in the USA of more or less thriving communities formed around a religious ideal: not all of them have ended up, like the Shakers, as a “reference” for fitted kitchen designers.
Perhaps the best known are the Amish, Mennonite and other communities known under the delightful umbrella title of “the plain people”. There are up to 18,000 of them living in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, alone. Everyone loves them because they drive horses and buggies, their menfolk have amazing beards and they are generally picturesque. Then there is Salt Lake City, of course, the Mormon settlement. Unless you are an Osmond fan, the Mormons are not picturesque, therefore less popular.
Hmm…maybe if Ave Maria can be made picturesque…. any chance of flying Tom Monaghan over to Wales, to have a look at Sir Clough Williams-Ellis’s ersatz Italian fishing village, Portmeirion? If Ave Maria were to resemble this delicious flight of old European Catholic cultural fancy, it would surely become beloved of its visitors – and, more importantly, an enchanting place to raise children.
However I fear Ave Maria will look like every other American town, with long boring avenues of suburban homes too far from the shops for walking. For the president of its new university, Nicholas J. Healy, in criticising the religious flabbiness of the West’s response to the angry new face of Islam, has particularly harsh words for us old decadents here in Europe, sitting stunned with disbelief at demands for Bradford to become a monoculture ruled by Sharia law.
But I wonder - how will Dr Healy avoid his town being simply another monoculture? With no secular yoke against which to chafe, will it not become an empty shell – a Little World of Don Camillo, but with no communist mayor? Is it not the very dissidence of the American Catholic Church which has drawn live wires such as Tom Monaghan into its fold?
And, raised in Ave Maria, what will the teenagers have to rebel against? Teenagers raised in a ramshackle European-style city, will, with guidance, develop a clear view of Christ’s truth, because they can see its opposite. Raised only among the godly, they will strain at the leash.
Will there be, ten years down the road, a furiously frowning adolescent stumping about Ave Maria’s sunny streets proclaiming crossly that he is “the only Protestant in the village”?
What will life be like for families who move to Ave Maria, the proposed Catholic city which the pizza millionaire Tom Monaghan is building on Florida farmland? Centred round a new university, Ave Maria could potentially provide that blissful sense of freedom to express faith blended with intellectual curiosity which you get at a good family retreat. Heady but supportive, principled but not hidebound. That would be the ideal.
Predictably, Monaghan’s proposal to exclude contraceptives and abortion from his town has already been attacked by local busybodies as an assault on human rights. How dreadful, they say, for women who find themselves stuck in the middle of Ave Maria and suddenly requiring an abortion. They will have to suffer the profound human rights indignity of getting the car out and driving all the way to Miami, a town far more in tune with human rights, apparently, being plentifully stocked with lethal drugs, guns and abortions.
Yes, it seems the ability to obtain a lunchtime abortion and a snort of coke within a half-hour drive of one’s home is a human right. This will come as interesting news to inhabitants of rural English villages, who can no longer post a parcel or buy a bag of frozen peas, let alone obtain an abortion, without having either to wait for the once-a-day bus, or drive themselves into the nearest market town and negotiate the change-hungry pay-and-display parking ticket machines. It will also come as interesting news to the millions of Christians, Catholic and non-Catholic, who live an inconvenient distance from their nearest place of worship, since freedom to worship is surely still a basic human right.
But, back to Ave Maria and its sun-kissed streets. Will it work? Americans make a lot of fuss about separation of church and state, but church and town planning have a long history of collaboration. Previous generations of immigrants regarded the continent as a vast blank sheet on which to design perfect communities. There are many examples in the USA of more or less thriving communities formed around a religious ideal: not all of them have ended up, like the Shakers, as a “reference” for fitted kitchen designers.
Perhaps the best known are the Amish, Mennonite and other communities known under the delightful umbrella title of “the plain people”. There are up to 18,000 of them living in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, alone. Everyone loves them because they drive horses and buggies, their menfolk have amazing beards and they are generally picturesque. Then there is Salt Lake City, of course, the Mormon settlement. Unless you are an Osmond fan, the Mormons are not picturesque, therefore less popular.
Hmm…maybe if Ave Maria can be made picturesque…. any chance of flying Tom Monaghan over to Wales, to have a look at Sir Clough Williams-Ellis’s ersatz Italian fishing village, Portmeirion? If Ave Maria were to resemble this delicious flight of old European Catholic cultural fancy, it would surely become beloved of its visitors – and, more importantly, an enchanting place to raise children.
However I fear Ave Maria will look like every other American town, with long boring avenues of suburban homes too far from the shops for walking. For the president of its new university, Nicholas J. Healy, in criticising the religious flabbiness of the West’s response to the angry new face of Islam, has particularly harsh words for us old decadents here in Europe, sitting stunned with disbelief at demands for Bradford to become a monoculture ruled by Sharia law.
But I wonder - how will Dr Healy avoid his town being simply another monoculture? With no secular yoke against which to chafe, will it not become an empty shell – a Little World of Don Camillo, but with no communist mayor? Is it not the very dissidence of the American Catholic Church which has drawn live wires such as Tom Monaghan into its fold?
And, raised in Ave Maria, what will the teenagers have to rebel against? Teenagers raised in a ramshackle European-style city, will, with guidance, develop a clear view of Christ’s truth, because they can see its opposite. Raised only among the godly, they will strain at the leash.
Will there be, ten years down the road, a furiously frowning adolescent stumping about Ave Maria’s sunny streets proclaiming crossly that he is “the only Protestant in the village”?
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Teens and the web
Catholic Herald 24 February 2006
Children are learning social skills via the internet? Teenagers whose days are spent bathed in a cold blue glow are learning to “make friends and form new relationships”? My scepticism programming went into action as soon as I read this in The Times.
And sure enough, the claim was made on behalf of a study of a teenagers’ chat room website which is owned by News International, the organisation which also owns…The Times.
On the other hand, according to a report by the London School of Economics, which as far as I know is not yet owned by News International, the explosion of internet use by teenagers is almost replacing face-to-face social contact. Youngsters prefer talking via mobile phone or MSN (instant messaging) to actually… talking.
And although most of them communicate largely with local friends, they all nearly all have “internet friends” they know nothing about – and over 40 percent admit to lying about themselves on the internet.
It was so different in my day. Social contact for me meant the ritual of the Home Counties teenagers’ party. Long before the internet, mothers had access to a virtual, unwritten list of all the “nice” young people in the area. “Nice” meant that you went to boarding school, your Daddy worked in the City and your home had a large lawn and probably an inglenook fireplace, maybe a Labrador or two. Or, at least it meant you could pass for such.
Thus nailed, you were herded into a barn full of flashing lights and 50 others gathered in tight, unyielding groups of strangers who all knew each other (they shared dorms) and, unlike you, were in jeans. (That floor length tartan taffeta dress looked so sweet in the mirror at home.)
Somehow, despite having a small lawn, no Labrador and being at day schools, my brother and I were sucked into this list and found ourselves being invited to parties in muddy barns on the far side of Hertfordshire, hosted by teenagers we’d never met, of whose parents our own parents knew nothing.
Not surprisingly, we found ourselves rubbing shoulders with some fairly odd people. Every party seemed to have, unbeknown to the hosts, its resident drug dealer and serial adulterer-in-training, slouched, glowering and unapproachable (at least to my unsophisticated grammar school girl’s eyes) beside the mobile disco. Essex not being far away, rumours would flutter around as to how so-and-so’s Daddy had made all his money.
The parents usually made sure there was a quieter room where we could have “conversation”. Conversation? As long as the lights were on, we were tongue-tied, reduced to asking each other what O-levels we were taking. The boys, accustomed to girls being glimpsed only through barbed-wire fences, regarded us as hostile aliens. A virulent mixture of fear and contempt set their hairless faces into a mask of indifference, punctuated by the occasional catty remark.
Our parents thought they were “shy”. We knew better, especially when the lights went off. The only worthwhile thing ever to come out of these horrible parties was the occasional exchanging of addresses with some less threatening youth, and the glorious anticipation of – oh joy! – an actual letter in the post.
And so I salute today’s teens for avoiding the cattle-market, and concentrating on the writing of letters. Endless letters. Often secret, often indiscreet, many-coloured and adorned with animated “smileys” and mottos. It’s an MSN world.
So they make up facts about themselves? How many kids at those parties I endured laid claim to social pretensions they did not have?
So today’s teens meet people their parents have not vetted? Who vetted the guest lists of the houses at whose doors my parents would trustingly deposit me at 8pm?
Many admirable new initiatives aimed at young people are entirely internet-based – the World Youth Alliance, which lobbies the UN in the name of “dignity of the human person, solidarity between the developed and developing worlds and the culture of life” would not have grown except by email. I would love to see an internet chat room for Catholic teens, though it would probably be impossible to police.
We have to be able to trust our teenagers, now as then. Catholics have the great advantage of a clear moral system – children brought up within that system should be easier to trust than others, though we rarely see it that way. Whether subjected to trial by disco or trial by chat room, they still need that system to fall back on to help them say “no” to the wrong things and “yes” to the right things. Wherever they are.
Children are learning social skills via the internet? Teenagers whose days are spent bathed in a cold blue glow are learning to “make friends and form new relationships”? My scepticism programming went into action as soon as I read this in The Times.
And sure enough, the claim was made on behalf of a study of a teenagers’ chat room website which is owned by News International, the organisation which also owns…The Times.
On the other hand, according to a report by the London School of Economics, which as far as I know is not yet owned by News International, the explosion of internet use by teenagers is almost replacing face-to-face social contact. Youngsters prefer talking via mobile phone or MSN (instant messaging) to actually… talking.
And although most of them communicate largely with local friends, they all nearly all have “internet friends” they know nothing about – and over 40 percent admit to lying about themselves on the internet.
It was so different in my day. Social contact for me meant the ritual of the Home Counties teenagers’ party. Long before the internet, mothers had access to a virtual, unwritten list of all the “nice” young people in the area. “Nice” meant that you went to boarding school, your Daddy worked in the City and your home had a large lawn and probably an inglenook fireplace, maybe a Labrador or two. Or, at least it meant you could pass for such.
Thus nailed, you were herded into a barn full of flashing lights and 50 others gathered in tight, unyielding groups of strangers who all knew each other (they shared dorms) and, unlike you, were in jeans. (That floor length tartan taffeta dress looked so sweet in the mirror at home.)
Somehow, despite having a small lawn, no Labrador and being at day schools, my brother and I were sucked into this list and found ourselves being invited to parties in muddy barns on the far side of Hertfordshire, hosted by teenagers we’d never met, of whose parents our own parents knew nothing.
Not surprisingly, we found ourselves rubbing shoulders with some fairly odd people. Every party seemed to have, unbeknown to the hosts, its resident drug dealer and serial adulterer-in-training, slouched, glowering and unapproachable (at least to my unsophisticated grammar school girl’s eyes) beside the mobile disco. Essex not being far away, rumours would flutter around as to how so-and-so’s Daddy had made all his money.
The parents usually made sure there was a quieter room where we could have “conversation”. Conversation? As long as the lights were on, we were tongue-tied, reduced to asking each other what O-levels we were taking. The boys, accustomed to girls being glimpsed only through barbed-wire fences, regarded us as hostile aliens. A virulent mixture of fear and contempt set their hairless faces into a mask of indifference, punctuated by the occasional catty remark.
Our parents thought they were “shy”. We knew better, especially when the lights went off. The only worthwhile thing ever to come out of these horrible parties was the occasional exchanging of addresses with some less threatening youth, and the glorious anticipation of – oh joy! – an actual letter in the post.
And so I salute today’s teens for avoiding the cattle-market, and concentrating on the writing of letters. Endless letters. Often secret, often indiscreet, many-coloured and adorned with animated “smileys” and mottos. It’s an MSN world.
So they make up facts about themselves? How many kids at those parties I endured laid claim to social pretensions they did not have?
So today’s teens meet people their parents have not vetted? Who vetted the guest lists of the houses at whose doors my parents would trustingly deposit me at 8pm?
Many admirable new initiatives aimed at young people are entirely internet-based – the World Youth Alliance, which lobbies the UN in the name of “dignity of the human person, solidarity between the developed and developing worlds and the culture of life” would not have grown except by email. I would love to see an internet chat room for Catholic teens, though it would probably be impossible to police.
We have to be able to trust our teenagers, now as then. Catholics have the great advantage of a clear moral system – children brought up within that system should be easier to trust than others, though we rarely see it that way. Whether subjected to trial by disco or trial by chat room, they still need that system to fall back on to help them say “no” to the wrong things and “yes” to the right things. Wherever they are.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Home Front 17 Feb 2006 Catholic Herald
“How would you feel,” a forceful secular friend said, “if your child was ill, and you took him to a hospital, and they turned you away saying the hospital was only for Muslims?”
The resentment of non-Christian parents towards church schools has to be felt to be believed. It is especially strong among London-dwelling, professional non-Christians – exactly the kind of people who make our laws, or are close to those who make our laws, or who meet up socially with the kind of people who make our laws, and nag them over dinner.
Dinner-party wisdom maintains that church schools select pupils from middle class backgrounds: this is believed in the face of the fact that any successful school, of any type, automatically attracts more affluent families.
Dinner-party wisdom responds to the conundrum of how requiring prospective pupils to prove that they go to church can make a school more middle class, when Christianity is so rare among the professional classes, with a vague, “Ah, but it’s the interviews, you see.”
There is no evidence, no academic study, existing to prove that interviews are responsible for any middle-class bias in church schools, if it exists. All the interviews I have ever been involved with seemed to me rather to prove the opposite. The church school interview must be the only educational practice to have been abolished without any proper examination of its purpose, efficacy or fairness.
Since we are now seeing the passing, almost unmarked, of a custom, let me tell you, as a parent who has been on both sides of the fence, what this allegedly abused practice actually amounted to.
You and your child sit down with a teacher who asks your child a series of questions which, if your child goes to church regularly, are a doddle. If your child does not go to church regularly, then he or she will flounder. That’s about it.
Yes, occasionally, other questions – hobbies, other schools applied to – float in. They should not have been allowed to. If the bishops had set down some firm guidelines for interviews instead of cravenly allowing the practice to be abolished, we would still be able to sort out the children who deserve places at faith schools from those who fib for England.
I have never seen interviews used to “catch children out”: on the contrary, I have seen one inspired headteacher use what I later realised was a hypnotherapy technique: she told the child to close her eyes and imagine she was in church, saying responses along with the rest of the congregation. If the responses are there in the child’s memory, they will spring to her lips like magic. If they are not in her memory, they won’t.
By contrast, this year, 11 year olds applying to popular Catholic schools had a written test: they had to complete a couple of Catholic prayers and name some holy days of obligation. Now, it is clear that children who are less confident on paper than in speech are at an instant disadvantage; and no child ever remembers about Corpus Christi. Worst of all, there is no opportunity for the school to check up on the claims parents made in their written forms.
A system based solely on form-filling and reference-hunting plays to middle class strengths, and as a result, the powerful people who want to abolish state-funded faith schools completely will, very soon, be able to claim that “even after reform” the church schools are “still” showing bias to the middle classes, and therefore should have all admissions powers taken from them.
To return to the striking hospital analogy made by my eloquent secular friend. What in fact happens in state education now is more akin to taking your child to a hospital and being told, “We did have the world’s best expert on your child’s condition here last year. But he’s working in the private sector now.”
Unchecked and almost unregulated, private schools continue to drain state schools of their best staff, their language teachers and their more highly motivated families. If the dinner-party sages were to give half the energy they devote to destroying the ethos of faith schools (which actually work) to the task of forcing private schools to share their privileges, education in Britain would have a hope.
The resentment of non-Christian parents towards church schools has to be felt to be believed. It is especially strong among London-dwelling, professional non-Christians – exactly the kind of people who make our laws, or are close to those who make our laws, or who meet up socially with the kind of people who make our laws, and nag them over dinner.
Dinner-party wisdom maintains that church schools select pupils from middle class backgrounds: this is believed in the face of the fact that any successful school, of any type, automatically attracts more affluent families.
Dinner-party wisdom responds to the conundrum of how requiring prospective pupils to prove that they go to church can make a school more middle class, when Christianity is so rare among the professional classes, with a vague, “Ah, but it’s the interviews, you see.”
There is no evidence, no academic study, existing to prove that interviews are responsible for any middle-class bias in church schools, if it exists. All the interviews I have ever been involved with seemed to me rather to prove the opposite. The church school interview must be the only educational practice to have been abolished without any proper examination of its purpose, efficacy or fairness.
Since we are now seeing the passing, almost unmarked, of a custom, let me tell you, as a parent who has been on both sides of the fence, what this allegedly abused practice actually amounted to.
You and your child sit down with a teacher who asks your child a series of questions which, if your child goes to church regularly, are a doddle. If your child does not go to church regularly, then he or she will flounder. That’s about it.
Yes, occasionally, other questions – hobbies, other schools applied to – float in. They should not have been allowed to. If the bishops had set down some firm guidelines for interviews instead of cravenly allowing the practice to be abolished, we would still be able to sort out the children who deserve places at faith schools from those who fib for England.
I have never seen interviews used to “catch children out”: on the contrary, I have seen one inspired headteacher use what I later realised was a hypnotherapy technique: she told the child to close her eyes and imagine she was in church, saying responses along with the rest of the congregation. If the responses are there in the child’s memory, they will spring to her lips like magic. If they are not in her memory, they won’t.
By contrast, this year, 11 year olds applying to popular Catholic schools had a written test: they had to complete a couple of Catholic prayers and name some holy days of obligation. Now, it is clear that children who are less confident on paper than in speech are at an instant disadvantage; and no child ever remembers about Corpus Christi. Worst of all, there is no opportunity for the school to check up on the claims parents made in their written forms.
A system based solely on form-filling and reference-hunting plays to middle class strengths, and as a result, the powerful people who want to abolish state-funded faith schools completely will, very soon, be able to claim that “even after reform” the church schools are “still” showing bias to the middle classes, and therefore should have all admissions powers taken from them.
To return to the striking hospital analogy made by my eloquent secular friend. What in fact happens in state education now is more akin to taking your child to a hospital and being told, “We did have the world’s best expert on your child’s condition here last year. But he’s working in the private sector now.”
Unchecked and almost unregulated, private schools continue to drain state schools of their best staff, their language teachers and their more highly motivated families. If the dinner-party sages were to give half the energy they devote to destroying the ethos of faith schools (which actually work) to the task of forcing private schools to share their privileges, education in Britain would have a hope.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
National Marriage Week
Home Front: Catholic Herald 17/02/06
“There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, and children love hamsters,” observed Alice Thomas Ellis. There have been fewer funnier words written on the subject of love; even if you don’t particularly agree with the late Catholic novelist’s gloomy viewpoint, there have been fewer judgements on love that so well express how love, contrary to a million second rate poets, is inexorably enmeshed with the world outside.
And bearing that in mind, was it really such a great idea to have National Marriage Week coincide with St Valentine’s Day?
I know exactly how such a decision was reached. It seemed perfectly obvious and fitting, in the quiet decency of a committee room, to fix on 7-14 February. What a good idea, somebody said, to “peg” (as they say in newspapers) the idea of celebrating marriage to a nationally recognised calendar moment connected with love.
Unfortunately, St Valentine’s Day is not so much a saint’s day, more a nasty rash. It is not just that grocery shelves, sweetshops stationer’s and florist’s blister into lurid red and pink for the whole first half of February. Think, too, if you dare, of the millions of excruciating teenage parties and minor humiliations which it engenders celebrate very little: not so much love, as lerve. A manufactured saccharine substitute with little reference to the whole package of life for which love serves as the motor and energy – little reference, in other words, to the children of Alice Thomas Ellis’s maxim. Let alone the hamsters.
There could have been other, equally suitable choices for National Marriage Week: it could have been arranged to coincide with the feast days of St Joseph (mid March), St Barbara (early December – a good way of strengthening us against the marital tensions of Christmas) or St Thomas the Apostle (early July – a great time for a picnic). All of these saints have a special relationship with carpenters, and therefore could claim to be patron saints of DIY.
For is not DIY painfully important in marriage? Not only because it takes up a large amount of free time at the beginning of married life; also because it reveals every tension. One of the happiest half hours of my marriage in the past year was when we managed to dismantle a small settee and manoeuvre it through a narrow doorway, down the stairs and into another room before reassembling it, not only without damaging anything on the way but, more importantly, without bickering once. There are many couples for whom this seems hardly much of an achievement but we do not happen to be one of those couples: on the contrary, any practical activity seems to bring out the worst in both of us.
“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” says one self-help book. Actually, no. Do. Do sweat the small stuff. Never mind that some self-help guru has made himself a tidy packet from that single mantra. He is wrong, wrong, wrong. The small stuff matters. The small stuff matters with children – children care about daily routines and care desperately if you change things. (Let those who urge a return to more traditional forms of worship remember this: what seems a painful innovation to you is an age-old ritual to my child.) Children notice tiny shifts in your voice and posture, little changes betraying anger or pain which you thought nobody would notice, which would have escaped the eye of your boss at work. And the small stuff matters with marriage, too.
It is the little things – whether small achievements like getting a sofa down the stairs without raised voices, or small irritations such as persistent toothpaste-lid-duty-dereliction or chronic sock-strewing – which make the big picture.
At a very beautiful funeral last weekend, the poem “Adjustments” by R. S. Thomas was read, and it will reverberate in my head all through National Marriage Week:
“…Never known as anything
but an absence, I dare not name him
As God. Yet the adjustments
Are made…
To make a new coat
Of an old, you add to it gradually
Thread by thread, so such change
As occurs is more difficult to detect.”
If you imagine you are the same person you were when you were married umpteen years ago, you imagine wrongly. For if you have been happily married, you have changed, gradually, imperceptibly, weaving and grafting, thread by thread, the fabric of your two personas together to make one seamless piece of cloth, whose complexity cannot be expressed by a pink and red “Happy Valentine’s Day” card.
“There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, and children love hamsters,” observed Alice Thomas Ellis. There have been fewer funnier words written on the subject of love; even if you don’t particularly agree with the late Catholic novelist’s gloomy viewpoint, there have been fewer judgements on love that so well express how love, contrary to a million second rate poets, is inexorably enmeshed with the world outside.
And bearing that in mind, was it really such a great idea to have National Marriage Week coincide with St Valentine’s Day?
I know exactly how such a decision was reached. It seemed perfectly obvious and fitting, in the quiet decency of a committee room, to fix on 7-14 February. What a good idea, somebody said, to “peg” (as they say in newspapers) the idea of celebrating marriage to a nationally recognised calendar moment connected with love.
Unfortunately, St Valentine’s Day is not so much a saint’s day, more a nasty rash. It is not just that grocery shelves, sweetshops stationer’s and florist’s blister into lurid red and pink for the whole first half of February. Think, too, if you dare, of the millions of excruciating teenage parties and minor humiliations which it engenders celebrate very little: not so much love, as lerve. A manufactured saccharine substitute with little reference to the whole package of life for which love serves as the motor and energy – little reference, in other words, to the children of Alice Thomas Ellis’s maxim. Let alone the hamsters.
There could have been other, equally suitable choices for National Marriage Week: it could have been arranged to coincide with the feast days of St Joseph (mid March), St Barbara (early December – a good way of strengthening us against the marital tensions of Christmas) or St Thomas the Apostle (early July – a great time for a picnic). All of these saints have a special relationship with carpenters, and therefore could claim to be patron saints of DIY.
For is not DIY painfully important in marriage? Not only because it takes up a large amount of free time at the beginning of married life; also because it reveals every tension. One of the happiest half hours of my marriage in the past year was when we managed to dismantle a small settee and manoeuvre it through a narrow doorway, down the stairs and into another room before reassembling it, not only without damaging anything on the way but, more importantly, without bickering once. There are many couples for whom this seems hardly much of an achievement but we do not happen to be one of those couples: on the contrary, any practical activity seems to bring out the worst in both of us.
“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” says one self-help book. Actually, no. Do. Do sweat the small stuff. Never mind that some self-help guru has made himself a tidy packet from that single mantra. He is wrong, wrong, wrong. The small stuff matters. The small stuff matters with children – children care about daily routines and care desperately if you change things. (Let those who urge a return to more traditional forms of worship remember this: what seems a painful innovation to you is an age-old ritual to my child.) Children notice tiny shifts in your voice and posture, little changes betraying anger or pain which you thought nobody would notice, which would have escaped the eye of your boss at work. And the small stuff matters with marriage, too.
It is the little things – whether small achievements like getting a sofa down the stairs without raised voices, or small irritations such as persistent toothpaste-lid-duty-dereliction or chronic sock-strewing – which make the big picture.
At a very beautiful funeral last weekend, the poem “Adjustments” by R. S. Thomas was read, and it will reverberate in my head all through National Marriage Week:
“…Never known as anything
but an absence, I dare not name him
As God. Yet the adjustments
Are made…
To make a new coat
Of an old, you add to it gradually
Thread by thread, so such change
As occurs is more difficult to detect.”
If you imagine you are the same person you were when you were married umpteen years ago, you imagine wrongly. For if you have been happily married, you have changed, gradually, imperceptibly, weaving and grafting, thread by thread, the fabric of your two personas together to make one seamless piece of cloth, whose complexity cannot be expressed by a pink and red “Happy Valentine’s Day” card.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Home Front 16 December 2005
One of the most confusing aspects of the latest “Honey, I killed the kid” case in which a distressed ex-soldier suffocated his disabled son, is the judge’s chain of logic, in particular her definition of what makes a “mitigating circumstance”.
So-called mercy killing is illegal in this country. It always has been. So why did Mrs Justice Rafferty tell the court that Andrew Wragg’s act had not been a mercy killing, but in explaining her reasons for the accused’s suspended sentence add that “you did not do it for her [his wife] or for yourself, but for him”?
If Wragg, as the judge infers, had a “belief that what you did was an act of mercy”, how could this have been a mitigating factor unless mercy killing were in fact legal? Was the judge telling us that mercy killing is, in the minds of judges as well as of confused and stressed parents, really legal after all?
And what about the evidence that Wragg had been drinking heavily before the deed was done? If being drunk is a mitigating circumstance, why can drivers not use it if they knock a pedestrian over? “Sorry, your Honour, but I was drunk.” “Drunk! But my dear fellow that changes everything – you should have told us sooner!”
Lastly we come to the “mitigating circumstance” of the boy’s incurable illness, Hunter’s Syndrome, which kills most children by the time they are 14. I can only dimly guess at the grief the Wraggs must have experienced on learning that Jacob had this condition – and also the grief they must have felt on learning that a previous baby carried it too. That baby was aborted, very late, on medical advice.
If we are to look for mitigating circumstances in this case, surely this is the place to look: the moment when pressure from the medical establishment forced the couple to agree to the death of their unborn child. Was it at this point that Wragg’s personal Rubicon was crossed?
It is a mark of how muddled we all are about death, murder and killing that this unhappy family should have had to endure not one, but two trials. And the judge’s final words were particularly alarming when seen in conjunction with another case three months ago – that of a widow in her sixties who killed her adult Down’s Syndrome son, who was also autistic.
As soon as a judge sent Wendolyn Markcrow home on bail, there was an avalanche of kindly sympathy for her situation. Nothing wrong with sympathy - what worries me is the national confusion between understanding how someone can have committed a crime, and letting them off. Because so many people lack any religious framework for their ethical thinking, the difference between examining why a person committed an evil deed, and deciding that the deed was not evil after all, is becoming completely obscured.
Lynnette Burrows, the doughty Catholic campaigner for parents’ rights, is in trouble for voicing the opinion that to allow a gay male couple to adopt a boy would be to put the child at the same kind of risk as if pair of heterosexual men were allowed to adopt a young girl.
The very next day, a police officer called to inform Lynnette that a “homophobic incident” had been reported. Creepiest of all is the language the police officer used: “She told me it was not a crime, but she had to record these incidents,” said Lynnette later.
I do not agree with Lynnette on many issues, but it strikes me that on this occasion her comments were fair enough. In a home run by a married heterosexual couple, you have a balance of sexual identity. Psychiatrists tell us that as children grow up, cross-generational sexual signals start flying about.
Most of us are hardly aware of them, because in a normal family each parent’s presence acts as a check on the other, and those cross-generational signals just die on the wind. But in a home run by a same-sex couple, that balance does not exist.
Besides, if Lynnette’s comments were homophobic, they must have been heterophobic as well. So why weren’t the editors of Loaded and Nuts on the phone to the police, complaining that Lynnette had impugned the impeachable respectability of their readership?
ends
So-called mercy killing is illegal in this country. It always has been. So why did Mrs Justice Rafferty tell the court that Andrew Wragg’s act had not been a mercy killing, but in explaining her reasons for the accused’s suspended sentence add that “you did not do it for her [his wife] or for yourself, but for him”?
If Wragg, as the judge infers, had a “belief that what you did was an act of mercy”, how could this have been a mitigating factor unless mercy killing were in fact legal? Was the judge telling us that mercy killing is, in the minds of judges as well as of confused and stressed parents, really legal after all?
And what about the evidence that Wragg had been drinking heavily before the deed was done? If being drunk is a mitigating circumstance, why can drivers not use it if they knock a pedestrian over? “Sorry, your Honour, but I was drunk.” “Drunk! But my dear fellow that changes everything – you should have told us sooner!”
Lastly we come to the “mitigating circumstance” of the boy’s incurable illness, Hunter’s Syndrome, which kills most children by the time they are 14. I can only dimly guess at the grief the Wraggs must have experienced on learning that Jacob had this condition – and also the grief they must have felt on learning that a previous baby carried it too. That baby was aborted, very late, on medical advice.
If we are to look for mitigating circumstances in this case, surely this is the place to look: the moment when pressure from the medical establishment forced the couple to agree to the death of their unborn child. Was it at this point that Wragg’s personal Rubicon was crossed?
It is a mark of how muddled we all are about death, murder and killing that this unhappy family should have had to endure not one, but two trials. And the judge’s final words were particularly alarming when seen in conjunction with another case three months ago – that of a widow in her sixties who killed her adult Down’s Syndrome son, who was also autistic.
As soon as a judge sent Wendolyn Markcrow home on bail, there was an avalanche of kindly sympathy for her situation. Nothing wrong with sympathy - what worries me is the national confusion between understanding how someone can have committed a crime, and letting them off. Because so many people lack any religious framework for their ethical thinking, the difference between examining why a person committed an evil deed, and deciding that the deed was not evil after all, is becoming completely obscured.
Lynnette Burrows, the doughty Catholic campaigner for parents’ rights, is in trouble for voicing the opinion that to allow a gay male couple to adopt a boy would be to put the child at the same kind of risk as if pair of heterosexual men were allowed to adopt a young girl.
The very next day, a police officer called to inform Lynnette that a “homophobic incident” had been reported. Creepiest of all is the language the police officer used: “She told me it was not a crime, but she had to record these incidents,” said Lynnette later.
I do not agree with Lynnette on many issues, but it strikes me that on this occasion her comments were fair enough. In a home run by a married heterosexual couple, you have a balance of sexual identity. Psychiatrists tell us that as children grow up, cross-generational sexual signals start flying about.
Most of us are hardly aware of them, because in a normal family each parent’s presence acts as a check on the other, and those cross-generational signals just die on the wind. But in a home run by a same-sex couple, that balance does not exist.
Besides, if Lynnette’s comments were homophobic, they must have been heterophobic as well. So why weren’t the editors of Loaded and Nuts on the phone to the police, complaining that Lynnette had impugned the impeachable respectability of their readership?
ends
Saturday, December 03, 2005
amazing discovery by independent school teacher
A former independent school teacher writing under the pseudonym Timothy Hine has written in the Daily Telegraph of his disagreeable six months teaching in a comprehensive.
It came as something of a shock to him to discover that state schools are not at liberty to choose which pupils to teach: so they do get, amazingly, quite a few children who are - shock! horror! - quite tricky to teach! Who even require discipline! Who do not have ambitious parents hovering in the background!
For the first time in his life this man had to put some effort into his teaching. Naturally, he bombed and naturally he blamed the state system for his failure, and not his own teaching; naturally it did not occur to him how absurd is the national sychophancy towards schools that decide every year which pupils they feel like teaching...then smugly scoop the top rewards in the league tables.
It came as something of a shock to him to discover that state schools are not at liberty to choose which pupils to teach: so they do get, amazingly, quite a few children who are - shock! horror! - quite tricky to teach! Who even require discipline! Who do not have ambitious parents hovering in the background!
For the first time in his life this man had to put some effort into his teaching. Naturally, he bombed and naturally he blamed the state system for his failure, and not his own teaching; naturally it did not occur to him how absurd is the national sychophancy towards schools that decide every year which pupils they feel like teaching...then smugly scoop the top rewards in the league tables.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
The cost of not having babies
Home Front
Catholic Herald
2 December 2005
“Ten great things about having a baby” according to a current pregnancy magazine includes this one: “You can spend lots of money – without feeling guilty!”
This must be true, because last week the Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society, which has made the collecting of gloomy statistics into an art-form, informed us that “the cost of having a child” is now up to an average of £166,000, the value of a medium-sized family home, over a family’s life time.
The rate at which this total rises outstrips rises in prices and wages. Well, you hardly expected it to rise more slowly than prices and wages, did you? And does it mean that if I had not had children, I would now be the proud landlord of a row of medium-sized family homes? Would I get one every time I did not have a baby? Somehow, I think not.
But here’s the chirpy author of the “ten great things about having a baby” again: Reason Four – “Talking shop - it’s great fun planning what to buy for your new arrival”.
The remainder of the “ten great things” raise some doubt regarding exactly who is the baby in this relationship. Check out Thing Number One: “As soon as you announce you’re pregnant you are the centre of attention”.
It’s all “me, me, me”: “Pregnancy is a great excuse for putting your feet up and watching endless episodes of Friends” (Thing Three). “Just think how great it will be being able to act like a kid again” (Thing Seven)
Towards the end, it dawned on the compiler that a mum’s needs might not be entirely fulfilled by shopping so she added: “Having a baby can bring you closer to your own mum” and “You make new friends who will completely understand your hopes and fears”.
As far as I can see, a “Great Thing” is defined as anything which makes you, the pregnant mum, feel cheerful, skittish or adored. Does bringing a new human being into the world not rate as a bigger deal than a shopping opportunity?
The compiler ends, rather vaguely, with: “having your own family is a wonderful feeling” and “nothing can beat having a cuddle with your baby”. I feel she was aware that something in this set of “great things about having a baby” was terribly missing – she just couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
Having a baby is regarded as an indulgence like having a weakness for expensive shoes. Those parents who rush out and get themselves these luxury pets just because they want a cuddle have to be warned by the sober aldermen of Liverpool Victoria Friendly society: it’ll cost you! That money could be spent on a medium sized family home!
Demographic changes are spoken of in circuitous and hushed tones. So, in view of the fact that twenty years ago there were ten working people for every retired person and that this has slipped to four, soon to be down to two, I suggest that we rename the whole pensions debate: “Ten Awful Things about Not Having Enough Children.”
I think I have found the answer to juvenile crime. My father in law has just received an unusual gift from his Catholic boarding school – the same one where, he always claims, he suffered anti-redhead prejudice from his very first day when an older boy punched him for being a carrot-top, and a monk dragged them apart with the words, “Ah, Johnson! Fighting already!” – has presented him with a piece of his old desk. The tradition in his day was to allocate a boy with a desk with his name on it when he arrived. As the boy moved up through the school, so did the desk, a chunk of which is now sitting in my father-in-law’s study.
What a wonderful solution to school graffiti. Give the kids their own property and they will look after it.
In fact, by a simple act of loving generosity we could end mobile phone thefts overnight. Why don’t we extend the Stonyhurst Principle and give every 14-year-old in the land his or her very own 3 generation mobile phone?
Catholic Herald
2 December 2005
“Ten great things about having a baby” according to a current pregnancy magazine includes this one: “You can spend lots of money – without feeling guilty!”
This must be true, because last week the Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society, which has made the collecting of gloomy statistics into an art-form, informed us that “the cost of having a child” is now up to an average of £166,000, the value of a medium-sized family home, over a family’s life time.
The rate at which this total rises outstrips rises in prices and wages. Well, you hardly expected it to rise more slowly than prices and wages, did you? And does it mean that if I had not had children, I would now be the proud landlord of a row of medium-sized family homes? Would I get one every time I did not have a baby? Somehow, I think not.
But here’s the chirpy author of the “ten great things about having a baby” again: Reason Four – “Talking shop - it’s great fun planning what to buy for your new arrival”.
The remainder of the “ten great things” raise some doubt regarding exactly who is the baby in this relationship. Check out Thing Number One: “As soon as you announce you’re pregnant you are the centre of attention”.
It’s all “me, me, me”: “Pregnancy is a great excuse for putting your feet up and watching endless episodes of Friends” (Thing Three). “Just think how great it will be being able to act like a kid again” (Thing Seven)
Towards the end, it dawned on the compiler that a mum’s needs might not be entirely fulfilled by shopping so she added: “Having a baby can bring you closer to your own mum” and “You make new friends who will completely understand your hopes and fears”.
As far as I can see, a “Great Thing” is defined as anything which makes you, the pregnant mum, feel cheerful, skittish or adored. Does bringing a new human being into the world not rate as a bigger deal than a shopping opportunity?
The compiler ends, rather vaguely, with: “having your own family is a wonderful feeling” and “nothing can beat having a cuddle with your baby”. I feel she was aware that something in this set of “great things about having a baby” was terribly missing – she just couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
Having a baby is regarded as an indulgence like having a weakness for expensive shoes. Those parents who rush out and get themselves these luxury pets just because they want a cuddle have to be warned by the sober aldermen of Liverpool Victoria Friendly society: it’ll cost you! That money could be spent on a medium sized family home!
Demographic changes are spoken of in circuitous and hushed tones. So, in view of the fact that twenty years ago there were ten working people for every retired person and that this has slipped to four, soon to be down to two, I suggest that we rename the whole pensions debate: “Ten Awful Things about Not Having Enough Children.”
I think I have found the answer to juvenile crime. My father in law has just received an unusual gift from his Catholic boarding school – the same one where, he always claims, he suffered anti-redhead prejudice from his very first day when an older boy punched him for being a carrot-top, and a monk dragged them apart with the words, “Ah, Johnson! Fighting already!” – has presented him with a piece of his old desk. The tradition in his day was to allocate a boy with a desk with his name on it when he arrived. As the boy moved up through the school, so did the desk, a chunk of which is now sitting in my father-in-law’s study.
What a wonderful solution to school graffiti. Give the kids their own property and they will look after it.
In fact, by a simple act of loving generosity we could end mobile phone thefts overnight. Why don’t we extend the Stonyhurst Principle and give every 14-year-old in the land his or her very own 3 generation mobile phone?
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Your cheating parents
Home Front by Sarah Johnson
Catholic Herald 25 November 2005
I don’t do my children’s homework for them. It’s not for want of trying. The trouble is, most nights I can’t even find it. One of the benefits, if it can be called that, of having given birth to slightly more children than you are entirely competent to handle is that the poor things have to do things for themselves. I keep meaning to do their homework for them but dinner and other events intervene.
It is also quite hard to do one’s teenager’s GCSE coursework when he shouts “Go away, leave me alone” every time I come into the room. The 63% of parents who – says the Schools Qualifications and Curriculum Authority – are over-enthusiastically helping their children with their GCSE coursework make me feel terribly angry, but I am rather in awe of their resourcefulness.
How do these cheating parents find the work at all, among the mass of saved files with near-identical titles that clogs up the hard drive on most family computers? And when they have located it, how do they understand it (especially if it is maths)?
And how do they persuade adolescent boys to regard the words “write no less than 200 words” as anything other than a strict injunction to write absolutely no more than 200 words? How do they persuade adolescent girls that the same instruction does not mean “write a medium length history book”?
And why have the exam boards, not yet hit on the simple method of thwarting cheating parents by insisting that all coursework be hand-written by the student, instead of typed on a computer?
Coursework is the curse of modern youth. It was clearly invented by keen teachers, probably mostly female, who love reading round a subject, and fondly imagined that coursework would automatically transfer this enthusiasm. Coursework favours girls – who happily produce reams of elegant trivia – over boys, who rise more effectively to the adrenaline surge of traditional exams.
Coursework discourages actual learning: no teenager, especially if male, ever allows a fact to clutter up his precious brain space if it is not strictly essential for passing the exam. Any aspect of any curriculum where, to the question “do I have to learn this for the exam, Sir?” the answer is “No”, is literally worthless.
There is no doubt where the top cheaters are: in the private sector. The definition of a “good” school in this country is one which gets good exam results. If good exam results are all that matter, a school firstly will choose whom it teaches.
So an independent school such as St Paul’s Girls’ School, whose pupils are all female, brilliant and from highly ambitious families, is “top school” year after year. I have known many Paulinas in my time and believe me; you barely need to be a teacher to teach these girls. You just turn up and take their names, and they teach themselves. For politicians to attack faith schools for selecting children who go to church when such tremendous selection exists in private schools is ludicrous.
Secondly, to ensure good results, a school will offer all the coursework help it can get away with. Exactly how much is limited not by any scruple, or highfalutin’ belief in education for education’s sake, but only by the financial resources of the school and the parents – the posher the school, the more difficult will it be to detect the “extra” little nudges and pushes given to GCSE students.
Cheating parents never know they are cheating, at the time. Being a parent renders most people blind to their actions. Very sensible, very nice, otherwise totally trustworthy people suddenly become savages when it comes to furthering the interests of their children.
And in so doing they are merely following the most mendacious, hypocritical, divided school system in the West. When Labour back-benchers wail that the Government’s Education White Paper will create a “two tier system”, one has to ask – what country do they think they have been living in all these years?
ends
Catholic Herald 25 November 2005
I don’t do my children’s homework for them. It’s not for want of trying. The trouble is, most nights I can’t even find it. One of the benefits, if it can be called that, of having given birth to slightly more children than you are entirely competent to handle is that the poor things have to do things for themselves. I keep meaning to do their homework for them but dinner and other events intervene.
It is also quite hard to do one’s teenager’s GCSE coursework when he shouts “Go away, leave me alone” every time I come into the room. The 63% of parents who – says the Schools Qualifications and Curriculum Authority – are over-enthusiastically helping their children with their GCSE coursework make me feel terribly angry, but I am rather in awe of their resourcefulness.
How do these cheating parents find the work at all, among the mass of saved files with near-identical titles that clogs up the hard drive on most family computers? And when they have located it, how do they understand it (especially if it is maths)?
And how do they persuade adolescent boys to regard the words “write no less than 200 words” as anything other than a strict injunction to write absolutely no more than 200 words? How do they persuade adolescent girls that the same instruction does not mean “write a medium length history book”?
And why have the exam boards, not yet hit on the simple method of thwarting cheating parents by insisting that all coursework be hand-written by the student, instead of typed on a computer?
Coursework is the curse of modern youth. It was clearly invented by keen teachers, probably mostly female, who love reading round a subject, and fondly imagined that coursework would automatically transfer this enthusiasm. Coursework favours girls – who happily produce reams of elegant trivia – over boys, who rise more effectively to the adrenaline surge of traditional exams.
Coursework discourages actual learning: no teenager, especially if male, ever allows a fact to clutter up his precious brain space if it is not strictly essential for passing the exam. Any aspect of any curriculum where, to the question “do I have to learn this for the exam, Sir?” the answer is “No”, is literally worthless.
There is no doubt where the top cheaters are: in the private sector. The definition of a “good” school in this country is one which gets good exam results. If good exam results are all that matter, a school firstly will choose whom it teaches.
So an independent school such as St Paul’s Girls’ School, whose pupils are all female, brilliant and from highly ambitious families, is “top school” year after year. I have known many Paulinas in my time and believe me; you barely need to be a teacher to teach these girls. You just turn up and take their names, and they teach themselves. For politicians to attack faith schools for selecting children who go to church when such tremendous selection exists in private schools is ludicrous.
Secondly, to ensure good results, a school will offer all the coursework help it can get away with. Exactly how much is limited not by any scruple, or highfalutin’ belief in education for education’s sake, but only by the financial resources of the school and the parents – the posher the school, the more difficult will it be to detect the “extra” little nudges and pushes given to GCSE students.
Cheating parents never know they are cheating, at the time. Being a parent renders most people blind to their actions. Very sensible, very nice, otherwise totally trustworthy people suddenly become savages when it comes to furthering the interests of their children.
And in so doing they are merely following the most mendacious, hypocritical, divided school system in the West. When Labour back-benchers wail that the Government’s Education White Paper will create a “two tier system”, one has to ask – what country do they think they have been living in all these years?
ends
Friday, November 18, 2005
Abigail Witchalls
Homefront Catholic Herald
London 2005-11-15
The fortitude of Abigail Witchalls, the devout young Catholic mother paralysed by stabbing six months ago, has amazed the nation. The media, however, don’t quite know what to make of her.
First of all she let it be known that she forgave her attacker. This stymied the tabloids, who expect to be able to whip the victims of random violence into vengeful frenzies at the drop of a cheque.
Then she astonished her doctors by the speed of her recovery. There is general agreement in the secular press that her positive attitude is helping her as much as the great skill of her carers; the idea that the constant prayers said for her by family and friends might have something to do with it does not, of course, get a mention.
Meanwhile Abigail, now able to speak and feed herself, continues to describe herself as “blessed” – again, language which the average tabloid journalist just can’t figure out at all.
Now she has really knocked them sideways. She has given birth to her second baby. One or two of the papers jumped the gun and reported this birth as being by caesarean section. Presumably the reporters simply could not imagine that Abigail, paralysed from the neck down, could give birth in any other way.
It later became confirmed that Abigail had given birth naturally, “with very little assistance”. He came a bit early, and he’s on the small side, but he’s working on that, because Abigail is breastfeeding as well.
“What a woman,” said a friend of mine in astonishment.
The surprise, however, is misplaced. The oddity is rather that anyone should think a caesarean section would be necessary. Nowadays, most women choose to put themselves into Abigail’s condition during childbirth, by having an epidural. Most of these births end normally (though honest midwives admit that the epidural does increase your chances of going under the knife). By birthing normally, Abigail was simply taking advantage of the only physical benefit her terrible paralysis has to offer her.
The question which is bothering me, though, is this - why do so many women choose this state of paralysis? And what, I can hear the Editor muttering, does this have to do with the rest of us?
OK, I am getting to it.
The doctrine concerning Our Lady’s perpetual virginity which, when I first read about it before I became a Catholic, enraged me beyond words, is the doctrine that she gave birth without pain.
As St Thomas Aquinas put it: “Painlessly, and without change in Mary's virgin body, her Son emerged from the tabernacle of her spotless womb.” This still seems to me to be an insult to the fortitude and patience of women who do suffer pain, and furthermore are willing to suffer it again and again.
However, recently I have been learning about hypnotherapy in childbirth. The main aim of the technique is to eliminate the one emotion which, its practitioners maintain, is the biggest cause of pain: fear. The theory goes like this: if women are taught not to fear, then they will have almost pain-free births. At first I thought this was sheer hokum.
But wait - what was the first thing the angel said to Mary? “Be not afraid.” Perfect freedom from sin means being able to obey God without second thoughts or hindrance. So, if an angel tells Mary not to be afraid, then she is not afraid, and that’s that.
Then I watched some films of women giving birth without so much as a squeak, and not an epidural in sight. These were not cranks, but ordinary women who, not having the grace of perfect freedom from sin, had used hypnosis to free themselves from fear.
With shock, I realised that what I had hitherto only been able to accept as a doctrine in a “symbolic”, Vatican 2 sort of way, rather than one of fact, was actually perfectly believable and obvious.
Now Abigail Witchalls adds a new layer to this mystery by showing that even when your life is riven by a horrible tragedy, there is no reason to be afraid. And what’s more, she, too, has a baby to show for it.
London 2005-11-15
The fortitude of Abigail Witchalls, the devout young Catholic mother paralysed by stabbing six months ago, has amazed the nation. The media, however, don’t quite know what to make of her.
First of all she let it be known that she forgave her attacker. This stymied the tabloids, who expect to be able to whip the victims of random violence into vengeful frenzies at the drop of a cheque.
Then she astonished her doctors by the speed of her recovery. There is general agreement in the secular press that her positive attitude is helping her as much as the great skill of her carers; the idea that the constant prayers said for her by family and friends might have something to do with it does not, of course, get a mention.
Meanwhile Abigail, now able to speak and feed herself, continues to describe herself as “blessed” – again, language which the average tabloid journalist just can’t figure out at all.
Now she has really knocked them sideways. She has given birth to her second baby. One or two of the papers jumped the gun and reported this birth as being by caesarean section. Presumably the reporters simply could not imagine that Abigail, paralysed from the neck down, could give birth in any other way.
It later became confirmed that Abigail had given birth naturally, “with very little assistance”. He came a bit early, and he’s on the small side, but he’s working on that, because Abigail is breastfeeding as well.
“What a woman,” said a friend of mine in astonishment.
The surprise, however, is misplaced. The oddity is rather that anyone should think a caesarean section would be necessary. Nowadays, most women choose to put themselves into Abigail’s condition during childbirth, by having an epidural. Most of these births end normally (though honest midwives admit that the epidural does increase your chances of going under the knife). By birthing normally, Abigail was simply taking advantage of the only physical benefit her terrible paralysis has to offer her.
The question which is bothering me, though, is this - why do so many women choose this state of paralysis? And what, I can hear the Editor muttering, does this have to do with the rest of us?
OK, I am getting to it.
The doctrine concerning Our Lady’s perpetual virginity which, when I first read about it before I became a Catholic, enraged me beyond words, is the doctrine that she gave birth without pain.
As St Thomas Aquinas put it: “Painlessly, and without change in Mary's virgin body, her Son emerged from the tabernacle of her spotless womb.” This still seems to me to be an insult to the fortitude and patience of women who do suffer pain, and furthermore are willing to suffer it again and again.
However, recently I have been learning about hypnotherapy in childbirth. The main aim of the technique is to eliminate the one emotion which, its practitioners maintain, is the biggest cause of pain: fear. The theory goes like this: if women are taught not to fear, then they will have almost pain-free births. At first I thought this was sheer hokum.
But wait - what was the first thing the angel said to Mary? “Be not afraid.” Perfect freedom from sin means being able to obey God without second thoughts or hindrance. So, if an angel tells Mary not to be afraid, then she is not afraid, and that’s that.
Then I watched some films of women giving birth without so much as a squeak, and not an epidural in sight. These were not cranks, but ordinary women who, not having the grace of perfect freedom from sin, had used hypnosis to free themselves from fear.
With shock, I realised that what I had hitherto only been able to accept as a doctrine in a “symbolic”, Vatican 2 sort of way, rather than one of fact, was actually perfectly believable and obvious.
Now Abigail Witchalls adds a new layer to this mystery by showing that even when your life is riven by a horrible tragedy, there is no reason to be afraid. And what’s more, she, too, has a baby to show for it.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Bad for children
Home Front
By Sarah Johnson
10 Nov 2005
Catholic Herald
“Why are you hunting behind the sofa cushions, darling?” I asked the eight year old.
“Blue Peter, of course,” she said in her most crushing you’re-so-stupid voice, emerging with a fistful of lost pennies.
Music to my ears. I am the world’s biggest fan of Blue Peter: this famous children’s magazine shines as a beacon of integrity in the sordid world of children’s programming. Or it would shine, if TV executives allowed it to, instead of merely using the words “Blue Peter” as a spell to ward off accusations of dumbing-down.
“And what are they collecting money for now?”
“Childline.” Immediately, I felt vaguely betrayed. Blue Peter? Raising money for Childline? Blue Peter appeals are usually about helping children in less developed countries (or LEDCs as we say now). It is depressing to find this powerful fund-raising force being mobilised to subsidise Esther Rantzen’s phone-in service, whose most obvious success has been to give children the belief that denouncing one’s parents to complete strangers is a perfectly normal thing to do.
I am being a little too harsh. Childline may have genuinely comforted, even saved some children. But underlying it is the belief that unless they can prove otherwise, parents are essentially bad for children, and must be kept out of the information loop.
On this hypothesis, Sue Axon must be very bad for her children. She is the single mum who is challenging the Department of Health in the High Court this week, by fighting for the right to be informed if her teenage daughter has an abortion.
As Sue says, “If she needs a plaster on her finger at her youth club, one of the youth workers has to phone me for permission – but a doctor can perform an abortion without my knowledge.”
The law is a muddle. You do not need to be a pro-life activist to see that. We have a right to be told if our children are at risk, and only the most fanatic pro-abortionists pretend that abortion is an entirely risk-free procedure: it is not the same as sticking a plaster on a cut finger.
In fact this is not even a particularly pro-life cause. The change in the law which Sue Axon is seeking won’t reduce abortions – at least not at first. For once the prospect of My Little Princess morphing into Someone’s Little Mummy looms, most parents instantly discard any scruples and are driving their daughters off to the abortion clinics with the horn blaring and lights flashing.
But at least we would see some of these parents issued with a much-needed wake-up call concerning their daughter’s sexual activity. I am constantly amazed by the insouciance of pro-abortionists such as Ann Furedi of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service at the facts of under-age sex: underage sex is medically risky, emotionally harmful and illegal, needing urgently to be discovered and stopped: yet according to Furedi and her ilk, it “just happens anyway”.
And, chorus the Furedis, what about girls who are being abused? What about Muslim girls who could even be murdered by jealous relatives if their misfortune were discovered?
Well, in the first case, a secret abortion won’t end the abuse. And in the second case, how easy do you think it is anyway, for a girl in a strict Muslim family to conceal the post-operative effects of abortion from her mother?
There should be no difficulty in reframing these mad guidelines so that in special cases doctors could seek permission from the family courts to keep the abortion secret, but would normally be required to inform parents.
But my fear is that the pro-abortion lobby will turn the fact that Sue Axton once had an abortion herself, and regretted it, against her - by accusing her of being a front for the pro-life movement.
Because the pro-life movement has been so successfully (and unscrupulously) discredited in the media (largely thanks to a few idiotic fanatics in the USA), this alone will be enough to influence the minds of the law courts against Sue.
Yet the truth is that this issue is not about abortion. It is about whether we believe parents are essentially good or essentially bad for their children – and in this we have to take a stand.
ends
By Sarah Johnson
10 Nov 2005
Catholic Herald
“Why are you hunting behind the sofa cushions, darling?” I asked the eight year old.
“Blue Peter, of course,” she said in her most crushing you’re-so-stupid voice, emerging with a fistful of lost pennies.
Music to my ears. I am the world’s biggest fan of Blue Peter: this famous children’s magazine shines as a beacon of integrity in the sordid world of children’s programming. Or it would shine, if TV executives allowed it to, instead of merely using the words “Blue Peter” as a spell to ward off accusations of dumbing-down.
“And what are they collecting money for now?”
“Childline.” Immediately, I felt vaguely betrayed. Blue Peter? Raising money for Childline? Blue Peter appeals are usually about helping children in less developed countries (or LEDCs as we say now). It is depressing to find this powerful fund-raising force being mobilised to subsidise Esther Rantzen’s phone-in service, whose most obvious success has been to give children the belief that denouncing one’s parents to complete strangers is a perfectly normal thing to do.
I am being a little too harsh. Childline may have genuinely comforted, even saved some children. But underlying it is the belief that unless they can prove otherwise, parents are essentially bad for children, and must be kept out of the information loop.
On this hypothesis, Sue Axon must be very bad for her children. She is the single mum who is challenging the Department of Health in the High Court this week, by fighting for the right to be informed if her teenage daughter has an abortion.
As Sue says, “If she needs a plaster on her finger at her youth club, one of the youth workers has to phone me for permission – but a doctor can perform an abortion without my knowledge.”
The law is a muddle. You do not need to be a pro-life activist to see that. We have a right to be told if our children are at risk, and only the most fanatic pro-abortionists pretend that abortion is an entirely risk-free procedure: it is not the same as sticking a plaster on a cut finger.
In fact this is not even a particularly pro-life cause. The change in the law which Sue Axon is seeking won’t reduce abortions – at least not at first. For once the prospect of My Little Princess morphing into Someone’s Little Mummy looms, most parents instantly discard any scruples and are driving their daughters off to the abortion clinics with the horn blaring and lights flashing.
But at least we would see some of these parents issued with a much-needed wake-up call concerning their daughter’s sexual activity. I am constantly amazed by the insouciance of pro-abortionists such as Ann Furedi of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service at the facts of under-age sex: underage sex is medically risky, emotionally harmful and illegal, needing urgently to be discovered and stopped: yet according to Furedi and her ilk, it “just happens anyway”.
And, chorus the Furedis, what about girls who are being abused? What about Muslim girls who could even be murdered by jealous relatives if their misfortune were discovered?
Well, in the first case, a secret abortion won’t end the abuse. And in the second case, how easy do you think it is anyway, for a girl in a strict Muslim family to conceal the post-operative effects of abortion from her mother?
There should be no difficulty in reframing these mad guidelines so that in special cases doctors could seek permission from the family courts to keep the abortion secret, but would normally be required to inform parents.
But my fear is that the pro-abortion lobby will turn the fact that Sue Axton once had an abortion herself, and regretted it, against her - by accusing her of being a front for the pro-life movement.
Because the pro-life movement has been so successfully (and unscrupulously) discredited in the media (largely thanks to a few idiotic fanatics in the USA), this alone will be enough to influence the minds of the law courts against Sue.
Yet the truth is that this issue is not about abortion. It is about whether we believe parents are essentially good or essentially bad for their children – and in this we have to take a stand.
ends
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Family Fun
Home Front
Catholic Herald 04/11/05
Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, we are told by lifestyle gurus. And we do try to! We try to keep a straight face, and think about the positive, but every now and then the negative breaks in, and before we know it we are rolling around on the floor hooting with laughter. For while the positive may be all very well, it’s the negative experiences which, so often, actually bring us closer together.
This was the problem the other day when I sat down round an episcopal conference table with a group of Catholic luminaries, and a vast pot of episcopal coffee, to hammer out ideas for “family friendliness” in churches.
Of course the question immediately reared – what is a family friendly church, anyway? Should not a church be welcoming to people of all shapes and sizes, whether they come in family packages or not?
It’s almost a false question, as there need be no principle of mutual exclusivity at work here. Of course we want to make separated and single parents, childless couples, and single folk welcome. But welcoming one lot of people should never mean ignoring another lot.
There is no other institution which takes the cornerstone of family life, namely the sacrament of marriage, more seriously than the Catholic Church. So if married couples do not feel valued here, they will feel valued almost nowhere.
There is no other institution which accepts the concept of having a large family as passionately as the Catholic Church. So if larger families do not feel welcome here, they feel welcome nowhere.
But back to practicalities. I and my fellow committee members have been asked by the Bishops Conference of England and Wales to look at good ideas for family-friendliness, and spread them about a bit. There are many churches whose priests and parishioners are brilliant at making families feel welcome, and it seems well worth doing a bit of information sharing.
Some ideas which flowed around faster than the episcopal coffee: “Lads and dads” weekends; golden wedding celebrations organised by the parish; welcome packs for new parishioners, pre-Mass meeter-and-greeter rotas – all manner of solid practical ideas which, when combined with warm smiles and a genuine interest in other people, go towards building a whole new universe of human contact and support.
You see, having a meeter-and-greeter rota pinned up in the back of the church won’t necessarily save the world on its own. But it does show parishioners how they can put their natural kindness to work. Kindness is a much under-rated energy source outside the Church. But within the Church, we have an abundance of it, and we have the means to channel it, too.
But as the episcopal coffee pot emptied, the conversation, as conversations do, veered off into the negative. Nearly all of us had funny stories to tell about spectacularly unfriendly churches, and the ghastly experiences we have had there.
There was the priest who barked at a red-faced young mum clutching her howling infant, “It’s either him or me!”
There was the church where a young family were greeted sadly with the doom-laden words, “Oh, you won’t want to come here. People with young children usually go to St Michael’s.”
We joyously toyed with the idea of a hunt for Britain’s Unruliest Catholic Family, Britain’s Most Surly Priest and Britain’s Most Miserable Church until Elizabeth Davies, who is the “marriage and family life project officer” at the bishops’ offices, had to rap the table sharply with her ruler and bring us into line.
“We want people to think of the positive, not the negative,” she said. “Can we appeal for POSITIVE stories about churches where people felt welcomed?”
So here I am, appealing for positive stories about churches, parishes and occasions where you felt genuinely welcome. Now, now, I said positive stories. You are NOT to send your favourite horror stories about hair-raisingly unfriendly churches to Elizabeth (c/o Department for Christian Responsibility & Citizenship, Catholic Bishops' Conference of England & Wales, 39 Eccleston Square, London SW1V 1BX). Positive examples only, please!
But if you slip the odd funny story in, it will at least give us another good laugh at the next meeting.
Catholic Herald 04/11/05
Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, we are told by lifestyle gurus. And we do try to! We try to keep a straight face, and think about the positive, but every now and then the negative breaks in, and before we know it we are rolling around on the floor hooting with laughter. For while the positive may be all very well, it’s the negative experiences which, so often, actually bring us closer together.
This was the problem the other day when I sat down round an episcopal conference table with a group of Catholic luminaries, and a vast pot of episcopal coffee, to hammer out ideas for “family friendliness” in churches.
Of course the question immediately reared – what is a family friendly church, anyway? Should not a church be welcoming to people of all shapes and sizes, whether they come in family packages or not?
It’s almost a false question, as there need be no principle of mutual exclusivity at work here. Of course we want to make separated and single parents, childless couples, and single folk welcome. But welcoming one lot of people should never mean ignoring another lot.
There is no other institution which takes the cornerstone of family life, namely the sacrament of marriage, more seriously than the Catholic Church. So if married couples do not feel valued here, they will feel valued almost nowhere.
There is no other institution which accepts the concept of having a large family as passionately as the Catholic Church. So if larger families do not feel welcome here, they feel welcome nowhere.
But back to practicalities. I and my fellow committee members have been asked by the Bishops Conference of England and Wales to look at good ideas for family-friendliness, and spread them about a bit. There are many churches whose priests and parishioners are brilliant at making families feel welcome, and it seems well worth doing a bit of information sharing.
Some ideas which flowed around faster than the episcopal coffee: “Lads and dads” weekends; golden wedding celebrations organised by the parish; welcome packs for new parishioners, pre-Mass meeter-and-greeter rotas – all manner of solid practical ideas which, when combined with warm smiles and a genuine interest in other people, go towards building a whole new universe of human contact and support.
You see, having a meeter-and-greeter rota pinned up in the back of the church won’t necessarily save the world on its own. But it does show parishioners how they can put their natural kindness to work. Kindness is a much under-rated energy source outside the Church. But within the Church, we have an abundance of it, and we have the means to channel it, too.
But as the episcopal coffee pot emptied, the conversation, as conversations do, veered off into the negative. Nearly all of us had funny stories to tell about spectacularly unfriendly churches, and the ghastly experiences we have had there.
There was the priest who barked at a red-faced young mum clutching her howling infant, “It’s either him or me!”
There was the church where a young family were greeted sadly with the doom-laden words, “Oh, you won’t want to come here. People with young children usually go to St Michael’s.”
We joyously toyed with the idea of a hunt for Britain’s Unruliest Catholic Family, Britain’s Most Surly Priest and Britain’s Most Miserable Church until Elizabeth Davies, who is the “marriage and family life project officer” at the bishops’ offices, had to rap the table sharply with her ruler and bring us into line.
“We want people to think of the positive, not the negative,” she said. “Can we appeal for POSITIVE stories about churches where people felt welcomed?”
So here I am, appealing for positive stories about churches, parishes and occasions where you felt genuinely welcome. Now, now, I said positive stories. You are NOT to send your favourite horror stories about hair-raisingly unfriendly churches to Elizabeth (c/o Department for Christian Responsibility & Citizenship, Catholic Bishops' Conference of England & Wales, 39 Eccleston Square, London SW1V 1BX). Positive examples only, please!
But if you slip the odd funny story in, it will at least give us another good laugh at the next meeting.
Monday, October 17, 2005
No vaccine for lost souls
Home Front by Sarah Johnson
Catholic Herald 14 October 2005
I suppose the researchers who have devised a vaccine for cervical cancer deserve a pat on the back for all their hard work; but I expect you, like me, find it hard to work up massive enthusiasm for the prospect of all our daughters being offered the new jab, to be called Gardasil, before they have even left primary school.
In fact, I felt so underwhelmed at the news that I felt it was time for an examination of conscience. What could be wrong with a vaccine for a lethal illness?
Let’s think back to the 1980s, when the link between cervical cancer (among other diseases) and sexual activity became known. Family-values pressure groups such as the doughty Family and Youth Concern made much of this link. There you are, they said: told you so! We always said sleeping around was bad for you.
The Government took no notice and, instead of telling kids to stop sleeping around, talked about "safe sex" and dished out condoms. No British government, I hardly need remind you, has made the slightest effort to tackle the effects of promiscuity by restoring the old taboo against it.
Well, it looks like cervical cancer rates have fallen. But according to the NHS's own information this is not because of condoms, which only give "some protection", but because of its cancer screening programmes.
Of course, there's no point trying to discern any kind of governmental logic here. Have we not been waging a successful war on cigarettes, all the way from the earliest 1960s advertising restrictions to the proposed ban on public smoking? So why not try to cut back teenage pregnancy and STDs by the same methods - attacking the root causes, rather than trying to cure the effects?
Well, why not? The abstinence teachers in the recent - and remarkable - BBC2 series Romance Academy succeeded in radically changing the lifestyles of a dozen teenagers not by lecturing them about health risks.
Instead, they homed in on the emotional effects of casual sex: “In the end,” explained one, “nobody is getting loved.” The faces of the youngsters, as it dawned on them how this fitted with their private experiences, were a picture.
The truth is, a lot of us parents have been lazy. We have been using the health risks of free-and-easy sex to frighten our teenagers. This is a short-sighted and cowardly tactic; firstly because the pharmaceutical industry keeps on finding what purport to be solutions to the diseases, and secondly because it avoids being frank about the less easily discussed moral objections.
If a real campaign against casual sex were ever (dream on) to take place, it would have to be centred on the moral, not the health objections. (Banning that ad for beer that reads “Virgin Wool must come from very ugly sheep” would be a good start.)
We have to come clean about why sexual promiscuity offends us. We hate it because we hate seeing people treated as commodities; we hate to see love and sexuality, which God has bound up together, torn apart. Sex without trust, without love is always going to be rotten sex.
A young man who never allows himself to deepen his knowledge of another person, or to walk tall in the knowledge that someone depends on him for his love, will ultimately find only loneliness.
A young woman who gives away her intimacy cheaply in one whoops-what-was-I-thinking one-night-stand after another, is teaching herself to think that she is loveable for nothing else. The next step will be to feel she is not worth loving at all.
And the saddest thing of all is that the effects are slow. When a young person's sense of worth is handed out one little piece at a time, it takes a while before its owner is aware of how bruised, how shy and distrustful her heart has become - by which time it may be too late to love freely, without fear of rejection.
So thanks, you clever cancer researchers. You have forced us to start being frank with our children. For if we fail in this, then the boffins had better start work on a vaccine for lost souls. It could take a very, very long time.
Catholic Herald 14 October 2005
I suppose the researchers who have devised a vaccine for cervical cancer deserve a pat on the back for all their hard work; but I expect you, like me, find it hard to work up massive enthusiasm for the prospect of all our daughters being offered the new jab, to be called Gardasil, before they have even left primary school.
In fact, I felt so underwhelmed at the news that I felt it was time for an examination of conscience. What could be wrong with a vaccine for a lethal illness?
Let’s think back to the 1980s, when the link between cervical cancer (among other diseases) and sexual activity became known. Family-values pressure groups such as the doughty Family and Youth Concern made much of this link. There you are, they said: told you so! We always said sleeping around was bad for you.
The Government took no notice and, instead of telling kids to stop sleeping around, talked about "safe sex" and dished out condoms. No British government, I hardly need remind you, has made the slightest effort to tackle the effects of promiscuity by restoring the old taboo against it.
Well, it looks like cervical cancer rates have fallen. But according to the NHS's own information this is not because of condoms, which only give "some protection", but because of its cancer screening programmes.
Of course, there's no point trying to discern any kind of governmental logic here. Have we not been waging a successful war on cigarettes, all the way from the earliest 1960s advertising restrictions to the proposed ban on public smoking? So why not try to cut back teenage pregnancy and STDs by the same methods - attacking the root causes, rather than trying to cure the effects?
Well, why not? The abstinence teachers in the recent - and remarkable - BBC2 series Romance Academy succeeded in radically changing the lifestyles of a dozen teenagers not by lecturing them about health risks.
Instead, they homed in on the emotional effects of casual sex: “In the end,” explained one, “nobody is getting loved.” The faces of the youngsters, as it dawned on them how this fitted with their private experiences, were a picture.
The truth is, a lot of us parents have been lazy. We have been using the health risks of free-and-easy sex to frighten our teenagers. This is a short-sighted and cowardly tactic; firstly because the pharmaceutical industry keeps on finding what purport to be solutions to the diseases, and secondly because it avoids being frank about the less easily discussed moral objections.
If a real campaign against casual sex were ever (dream on) to take place, it would have to be centred on the moral, not the health objections. (Banning that ad for beer that reads “Virgin Wool must come from very ugly sheep” would be a good start.)
We have to come clean about why sexual promiscuity offends us. We hate it because we hate seeing people treated as commodities; we hate to see love and sexuality, which God has bound up together, torn apart. Sex without trust, without love is always going to be rotten sex.
A young man who never allows himself to deepen his knowledge of another person, or to walk tall in the knowledge that someone depends on him for his love, will ultimately find only loneliness.
A young woman who gives away her intimacy cheaply in one whoops-what-was-I-thinking one-night-stand after another, is teaching herself to think that she is loveable for nothing else. The next step will be to feel she is not worth loving at all.
And the saddest thing of all is that the effects are slow. When a young person's sense of worth is handed out one little piece at a time, it takes a while before its owner is aware of how bruised, how shy and distrustful her heart has become - by which time it may be too late to love freely, without fear of rejection.
So thanks, you clever cancer researchers. You have forced us to start being frank with our children. For if we fail in this, then the boffins had better start work on a vaccine for lost souls. It could take a very, very long time.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Student blues
Home Front
Catholic Herald 30 Sept 2005
Home Front by Sarah Johnson
Are you currently empty-nested? Have you a bedroom in the house that seems unnaturally still and tidy because its normal occupant has packed her iPod, phone and laptop and tripped off to university for the first time?
If so, be warned; at this time of year the freshers’ honeymoon fortnight ends with an abrupt crash to earth. It’s about now that the tearful phone calls home begin - or, even worse, the tight-lipped, wobbly-voiced phone calls in which nothing is said, but everything may be guessed at.
For an awful lot of students, university life means a continual sense of social inadequacy. One half of the student population is cooler, taller, thinner and cleverer than you are…and therefore out of your league; while the other half is duller, podgier and spottier than you, therefore not to be touched with a bargepole.
The trouble with going away from home for the first time is that there is no return. While at college, you long for the comforts of home, but just try going home for a weekend: you find yourself longing for the freedom of having your own space, feeling like an adult. So you schlep back to college, and the loneliness of your institutional little room hits you like a wet fish.
At university you are metaphorically issued with a blank piece of paper headed “what I am“ and given the frightening task of filling it in. You have the freedom to reinvent yourself from scratch.
At the same time, it is deeply tempting to try to live without all the little personal disciplines which parents have been trying to instil for 18 years. Fresh vegetables, alarm clocks, clean clothes, religious observance.
The happiest students are those who most quickly pass through the blank paper stage, and are confidently defining themselves, while also entering the adult world of self-discipline: getting up early to work, visiting the laundrette weekly, even eating the odd carrot.
Many young people, however, stare hopelessly at the blank sheet for months, while subsisting on Pot Noodles and being frankly terrified of the prospect of creating a new identity. If they happen to be Catholic, however, they can trot along to the Catholic chaplaincy and tell themselves they are only there because Mum or Granny asked them to check it out, “just out of curiosity“.
Among the many things I wish I had known before I went to university was this: the university’s Catholic chaplaincy is not necessarily a totally uncool place. At least it does not organise what appear to be impromptu social events which turn out to be carefully planned religious recruiting exercises, leaving freshers feeling distinctly cheated and distrustful of anyone with a religious agenda.
All universities are crawling with religious groups who try to pull in converts under the guise of making friends with freshers. These groups may do good, but they have given university Christians a bad name.
Catholic chaplaincies, by contrast, seem more to exist for the already converted, so do not have quite the scary aspect of proselytising groups. Many young people are terrified of being involved in anything that might turn out to be uncool or simply not to their taste.
Catholic chaplaincies, of course, vary a lot in nature, depending on where you are: at Bradford University, everything centres round something called the Melting Pot Bar, which involves a lot of Guinness, I gather. Exeter University’s catholic chaplaincy lays great stress on Devonshire cream teas and in Sheffield, brisk walks to the Peak District are planned regularly. Bath University’s chaplaincy is proud of its Shrove Tuesday “pancake night”. And of course, many university “CathSocs” organise ceilidhs.
University life is largely a process of putting out feelers, looking for like-minded souls at a time when you aren’t entirely sure what your own mind is like. So now is a good time to suggest to the student in your life that he or she looks in on the Catholic chaplaincy - just out of curiosity , of course.
At the least, your student will have a chance to commiserate with others about the privations of a Catholic upbringing…in between feeling strangely consoled by the familiar rhythm of Mass.
Catholic Herald 30 Sept 2005
Home Front by Sarah Johnson
Are you currently empty-nested? Have you a bedroom in the house that seems unnaturally still and tidy because its normal occupant has packed her iPod, phone and laptop and tripped off to university for the first time?
If so, be warned; at this time of year the freshers’ honeymoon fortnight ends with an abrupt crash to earth. It’s about now that the tearful phone calls home begin - or, even worse, the tight-lipped, wobbly-voiced phone calls in which nothing is said, but everything may be guessed at.
For an awful lot of students, university life means a continual sense of social inadequacy. One half of the student population is cooler, taller, thinner and cleverer than you are…and therefore out of your league; while the other half is duller, podgier and spottier than you, therefore not to be touched with a bargepole.
The trouble with going away from home for the first time is that there is no return. While at college, you long for the comforts of home, but just try going home for a weekend: you find yourself longing for the freedom of having your own space, feeling like an adult. So you schlep back to college, and the loneliness of your institutional little room hits you like a wet fish.
At university you are metaphorically issued with a blank piece of paper headed “what I am“ and given the frightening task of filling it in. You have the freedom to reinvent yourself from scratch.
At the same time, it is deeply tempting to try to live without all the little personal disciplines which parents have been trying to instil for 18 years. Fresh vegetables, alarm clocks, clean clothes, religious observance.
The happiest students are those who most quickly pass through the blank paper stage, and are confidently defining themselves, while also entering the adult world of self-discipline: getting up early to work, visiting the laundrette weekly, even eating the odd carrot.
Many young people, however, stare hopelessly at the blank sheet for months, while subsisting on Pot Noodles and being frankly terrified of the prospect of creating a new identity. If they happen to be Catholic, however, they can trot along to the Catholic chaplaincy and tell themselves they are only there because Mum or Granny asked them to check it out, “just out of curiosity“.
Among the many things I wish I had known before I went to university was this: the university’s Catholic chaplaincy is not necessarily a totally uncool place. At least it does not organise what appear to be impromptu social events which turn out to be carefully planned religious recruiting exercises, leaving freshers feeling distinctly cheated and distrustful of anyone with a religious agenda.
All universities are crawling with religious groups who try to pull in converts under the guise of making friends with freshers. These groups may do good, but they have given university Christians a bad name.
Catholic chaplaincies, by contrast, seem more to exist for the already converted, so do not have quite the scary aspect of proselytising groups. Many young people are terrified of being involved in anything that might turn out to be uncool or simply not to their taste.
Catholic chaplaincies, of course, vary a lot in nature, depending on where you are: at Bradford University, everything centres round something called the Melting Pot Bar, which involves a lot of Guinness, I gather. Exeter University’s catholic chaplaincy lays great stress on Devonshire cream teas and in Sheffield, brisk walks to the Peak District are planned regularly. Bath University’s chaplaincy is proud of its Shrove Tuesday “pancake night”. And of course, many university “CathSocs” organise ceilidhs.
University life is largely a process of putting out feelers, looking for like-minded souls at a time when you aren’t entirely sure what your own mind is like. So now is a good time to suggest to the student in your life that he or she looks in on the Catholic chaplaincy - just out of curiosity , of course.
At the least, your student will have a chance to commiserate with others about the privations of a Catholic upbringing…in between feeling strangely consoled by the familiar rhythm of Mass.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
I've got something to tell you
Home Front
Catholic Herald
23 September 2005
Catholic Herald
23 September 2005
“Mum, Dad, I’ve got something to tell you.” Words that strike dread in the heart of parents. What comes next? “I’m gay”? “I’m pregnant”? “I’m appearing on the X-Factor”?
Whatever it is, we can handle it. Today’s liberal, tolerant parents pride themselves on being able to be understanding about any shocking revelations from their offspring. Today’s parents are trained to be open-minded, to keep loving their children, to respect their decisions to choose a different life-style from that of their family. Aren’t they?
Not quite. There is one revelation which your bog-standard liberal parent simply cannot swallow: “I believe in God”.
A young person who reveals to his atheist parents that he or she has become a believer in deity and, worse still, has signed up to a mainstream religion, may be shouted at, argued with, eventually sent to Coventry. Pleasant, charming, educated parents and siblings suddenly turn into the dad in Billy Elliot.
A new play by Mike Leigh at the National Theatre centres on the same situation, within a secular Jewish family. Several years ago, the novelist Hanif Kureishi foretold similar divisions soon to explode in Muslim families, in a story called “My Son the Fanatic”. In general, the religious child of non-religious parents is treated with a lack of sympathy which would be considered completely unacceptable, and psychologically damaging, for anyone else whose path diverged from the family norm.
So it must have been for a Benedictine monk called Tom, whose sister Lucy insouciantly revealed to Guardian readers what he had gone through to become a monk. I’m not quite sure if Lucy intended to come across as an inverted bigot: her thoughts are so focussed on the trauma suffered by her parents and herself in facing up to Tom’s bizarre insistence on religion, that the little matter of how this felt for Tom does not rate her attention.
The discovery that, aged16, he attended a church youth group “threw” the parents; Lucy, three years older, instantly “challenged Tom to justify his belief”, a rather pointless attack, since she admits she “didn’t understand it, didn’t want to, and felt it was all, well, incredibly disloyal”. Tom’s eventual decision to be a monk “shocked”, “embarrassed” and “bewildered” the parents, who actually “wept” while his sister “all but cut him off”.
Had some mischievous computer virus surreptitiously spell-checked Lucy’s article and replaced the word “monk” with “gay prostitute” or “drug addict“, I doubt the Guardian would have printed it. The language would have been intolerable in its intolerance. To stop talking to a sibling because he’s become a bit different? Bigoted! But to stop talking because he’s become a Catholic monk? Dear me (they said at the Guardian), how perfectly dreadful. We can quite understand how the family felt…
Reading between the lines of Ms Ward’s account, the unwillingness of his family even to try to understand him must have been immensely painful for Tom, though this does not seem to occur to his sister. At the age of 16, to have your convictions dismissed by your family; to have your life choice pitied by your sister; to be regarded as an “embarrassment”; hardly the road to self-esteem, is it?
*****
Last Tuesday saw the final episode of an extraordinary TV series that deserved more attention than it got: BBC 2’s “No Sex Please, We’re Teenagers”. What we had thought might be a new low for reality TV turned out to be the uplifting story of twelve teenagers who really did discover self-esteem, by giving up casual sex and embracing abstinence.
“You are doing something that could change the whole of Britain,” said their inspirational and reassuringly good-looking teachers, Dan and Rachel. And indeed they were. I suspect the reason why the series has not attracted more interest is that Dan and Rachel’s “Romance Academy” actually worked: rather than becoming luridly sexually frustrated for the benefit of cameras, the kids learned to become calm, happy, self-believing young people. Very disappointing for the tabloids.
But how to spread the word? Firstly, the BBC should put the series on DVD instantly for showing in secondary schools. Secondly we need more Romance Academies, and Catholic schools are the place to start.
Whatever it is, we can handle it. Today’s liberal, tolerant parents pride themselves on being able to be understanding about any shocking revelations from their offspring. Today’s parents are trained to be open-minded, to keep loving their children, to respect their decisions to choose a different life-style from that of their family. Aren’t they?
Not quite. There is one revelation which your bog-standard liberal parent simply cannot swallow: “I believe in God”.
A young person who reveals to his atheist parents that he or she has become a believer in deity and, worse still, has signed up to a mainstream religion, may be shouted at, argued with, eventually sent to Coventry. Pleasant, charming, educated parents and siblings suddenly turn into the dad in Billy Elliot.
A new play by Mike Leigh at the National Theatre centres on the same situation, within a secular Jewish family. Several years ago, the novelist Hanif Kureishi foretold similar divisions soon to explode in Muslim families, in a story called “My Son the Fanatic”. In general, the religious child of non-religious parents is treated with a lack of sympathy which would be considered completely unacceptable, and psychologically damaging, for anyone else whose path diverged from the family norm.
So it must have been for a Benedictine monk called Tom, whose sister Lucy insouciantly revealed to Guardian readers what he had gone through to become a monk. I’m not quite sure if Lucy intended to come across as an inverted bigot: her thoughts are so focussed on the trauma suffered by her parents and herself in facing up to Tom’s bizarre insistence on religion, that the little matter of how this felt for Tom does not rate her attention.
The discovery that, aged16, he attended a church youth group “threw” the parents; Lucy, three years older, instantly “challenged Tom to justify his belief”, a rather pointless attack, since she admits she “didn’t understand it, didn’t want to, and felt it was all, well, incredibly disloyal”. Tom’s eventual decision to be a monk “shocked”, “embarrassed” and “bewildered” the parents, who actually “wept” while his sister “all but cut him off”.
Had some mischievous computer virus surreptitiously spell-checked Lucy’s article and replaced the word “monk” with “gay prostitute” or “drug addict“, I doubt the Guardian would have printed it. The language would have been intolerable in its intolerance. To stop talking to a sibling because he’s become a bit different? Bigoted! But to stop talking because he’s become a Catholic monk? Dear me (they said at the Guardian), how perfectly dreadful. We can quite understand how the family felt…
Reading between the lines of Ms Ward’s account, the unwillingness of his family even to try to understand him must have been immensely painful for Tom, though this does not seem to occur to his sister. At the age of 16, to have your convictions dismissed by your family; to have your life choice pitied by your sister; to be regarded as an “embarrassment”; hardly the road to self-esteem, is it?
*****
Last Tuesday saw the final episode of an extraordinary TV series that deserved more attention than it got: BBC 2’s “No Sex Please, We’re Teenagers”. What we had thought might be a new low for reality TV turned out to be the uplifting story of twelve teenagers who really did discover self-esteem, by giving up casual sex and embracing abstinence.
“You are doing something that could change the whole of Britain,” said their inspirational and reassuringly good-looking teachers, Dan and Rachel. And indeed they were. I suspect the reason why the series has not attracted more interest is that Dan and Rachel’s “Romance Academy” actually worked: rather than becoming luridly sexually frustrated for the benefit of cameras, the kids learned to become calm, happy, self-believing young people. Very disappointing for the tabloids.
But how to spread the word? Firstly, the BBC should put the series on DVD instantly for showing in secondary schools. Secondly we need more Romance Academies, and Catholic schools are the place to start.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
The trendy vice
Home Front 16 September 2005
Passions were running high during the Ashes series, naturally, and no cries of anguish were louder than those which I heard whenever Channel 4, shamefacedly and with many blushing apologies, had to stop broadcasting the cricket and “go over to Doncaster”.
“Racing!” spluttered the 10-year-old, waving his bat menacingly. (It is necessary, I am told, to carry a cricket bat while watching the sport on TV. This must be where I‘ve gone wrong all these years - I‘m not using the right equipment.) “Who on EARTH,” he went on, like an enraged colonel, “cares about blinking, blasted racing?”
We all know the answer. Nobody follows racing because they enjoy watching horses running. If you like horses, you follow eventing. The only thrill in watching one horse get round a track faster than another horse rests in the winning or losing of money on the result. Without gambling, racing is not much of a sport.
Governments have always tried to control the vices of smoking, drinking and gambling. The first, for centuries regarded as an annoying but harmless indulgence, has of course fallen completely from grace, and with smoking’s meteoric tumble we have seen a increased acceptance of the two vices which were once most successfully and thoroughly condemned by religious authorities.
Thus, public drunkenness has reached the point where young people simply have no other idea of what might make an evening enjoyable, and public gambling is now becoming a messianic Government cause.
Of course everyone agrees that the government’s theory of drinking - namely, that if bars are open all day in the “continental” pattern, then Saturday night’s lager louts will suddenly turn into Parisian existential poets - is not going to work. The plan is firmly opposed by around 70% of the whole population.
Incidentally I worry that our debate on binge drinking has not fully recognised the dread and awe - not affection - in which old-fashioned drunks regarded old-fashioned bobbies.
A fellow who got sozzled in Victorian London would most likely end up in a cell, minus his watch. To avoid causing an embarrassing scene, which would alert his employer - and his missus - as to where he’d spent the night, the gentleman would usually discreetly decide against reporting the watch as missing: hence the music-hall hit, “If you want to know the time, ask a p’liceman”.
By contrast, very few of the young men and women who roar and stagger half-naked through our towns actually wake up in a cell next morning. The law exists to put them there. It simply isn’t being used.
And as for the Parisian gendarme - the first thing I was warned of by my parents when travelling to France alone was “remember French policemen are not like ours! They are surly and have absolutely no sense of humour.” Well, after decades of dealing with “continental style” drinkers, is it surprising?
So having turned drunkenness from a vice to a pleasure and then belatedly realising our mistake (and having not a clue what to do about it), we now are rapidly following precisely the same path with gambling, the fastest way to wreck a home and family yet devised.
First step: social acceptability. Poker is a fashionable game, with its sad, solitary online version making millions. Second step: the profiteers push the limits, with internet gambling sites advertised on the Tube, giving children the impression it is a normal, harmless activity like shopping.
Third step: relax the laws in response to “public demand” - the plans for super casinos are still pressing ahead, despite (or because of?) the opposition of every church and religious group.
At least some of these are still holding out.
Birmingham councillors are currently trying to soften up local Muslims with promises of “inner city regeneration” if they will only give up opposing a super-casino in the inner city (instead of out of town in the sprawling NEC complex).
One Conservative councillor, a veritable Mephistopheles of the Midlands, purred warningly: “The communities have to weigh up the benefit of major capital investment against faith issues”.
When Western civilisation utters language like this, so utterly uncomprehending of any concepts of morality, eternity or obedience to one’s God, one begins to see why idealistic young Muslims turn radical.
ends
Passions were running high during the Ashes series, naturally, and no cries of anguish were louder than those which I heard whenever Channel 4, shamefacedly and with many blushing apologies, had to stop broadcasting the cricket and “go over to Doncaster”.
“Racing!” spluttered the 10-year-old, waving his bat menacingly. (It is necessary, I am told, to carry a cricket bat while watching the sport on TV. This must be where I‘ve gone wrong all these years - I‘m not using the right equipment.) “Who on EARTH,” he went on, like an enraged colonel, “cares about blinking, blasted racing?”
We all know the answer. Nobody follows racing because they enjoy watching horses running. If you like horses, you follow eventing. The only thrill in watching one horse get round a track faster than another horse rests in the winning or losing of money on the result. Without gambling, racing is not much of a sport.
Governments have always tried to control the vices of smoking, drinking and gambling. The first, for centuries regarded as an annoying but harmless indulgence, has of course fallen completely from grace, and with smoking’s meteoric tumble we have seen a increased acceptance of the two vices which were once most successfully and thoroughly condemned by religious authorities.
Thus, public drunkenness has reached the point where young people simply have no other idea of what might make an evening enjoyable, and public gambling is now becoming a messianic Government cause.
Of course everyone agrees that the government’s theory of drinking - namely, that if bars are open all day in the “continental” pattern, then Saturday night’s lager louts will suddenly turn into Parisian existential poets - is not going to work. The plan is firmly opposed by around 70% of the whole population.
Incidentally I worry that our debate on binge drinking has not fully recognised the dread and awe - not affection - in which old-fashioned drunks regarded old-fashioned bobbies.
A fellow who got sozzled in Victorian London would most likely end up in a cell, minus his watch. To avoid causing an embarrassing scene, which would alert his employer - and his missus - as to where he’d spent the night, the gentleman would usually discreetly decide against reporting the watch as missing: hence the music-hall hit, “If you want to know the time, ask a p’liceman”.
By contrast, very few of the young men and women who roar and stagger half-naked through our towns actually wake up in a cell next morning. The law exists to put them there. It simply isn’t being used.
And as for the Parisian gendarme - the first thing I was warned of by my parents when travelling to France alone was “remember French policemen are not like ours! They are surly and have absolutely no sense of humour.” Well, after decades of dealing with “continental style” drinkers, is it surprising?
So having turned drunkenness from a vice to a pleasure and then belatedly realising our mistake (and having not a clue what to do about it), we now are rapidly following precisely the same path with gambling, the fastest way to wreck a home and family yet devised.
First step: social acceptability. Poker is a fashionable game, with its sad, solitary online version making millions. Second step: the profiteers push the limits, with internet gambling sites advertised on the Tube, giving children the impression it is a normal, harmless activity like shopping.
Third step: relax the laws in response to “public demand” - the plans for super casinos are still pressing ahead, despite (or because of?) the opposition of every church and religious group.
At least some of these are still holding out.
Birmingham councillors are currently trying to soften up local Muslims with promises of “inner city regeneration” if they will only give up opposing a super-casino in the inner city (instead of out of town in the sprawling NEC complex).
One Conservative councillor, a veritable Mephistopheles of the Midlands, purred warningly: “The communities have to weigh up the benefit of major capital investment against faith issues”.
When Western civilisation utters language like this, so utterly uncomprehending of any concepts of morality, eternity or obedience to one’s God, one begins to see why idealistic young Muslims turn radical.
ends
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