At the Baftas last week, the women wore black - part of the #metoo brigade. How mindsets have changed. In the ‘70s I worked in the education sector, a time when sexual exploitation of women was not only rife but girls colluded with it, not wanting to appear square. Jimmy Savile was on TV in everything from pop shows, Jim’ll fix it to government clunk-click ads and dance group Pan’s People heralded the new, no holds barred, era of lude dancing. One lecturer thought it hilarious to walk from one typist to another, running his thumb down our backs to unhook bras within. Also he invited 2 naive secretaries (yes, I was one) to the film show he showed to 3rd year undergrads of explicit porn, pausing and even reversing the reel at the most salacious moment. One girl student ran out of the lecture theatre in shock to ribald applause from her fellow students. It was common for professors to have affairs with their PhD students, and I never understood why this didn’t affect the credibility of their theses. TG mobile phones hadn’t then been invented. In today’s totally different mindset, all would be sued.
Want to read more about life in 70s/80s UK universities? 3rd Degree Murder. authl.it/4ia. You’ve been warned!authl.it/4ia
18th february 2018
Strange week. A small earthquake here yesterday. Bruno went berserk. Elsewhere in the world, France and Germany are using Europe as their means for personal glory and grandification. Their ultimate dream? A United States of Europe, with them on the throne, lording it over ‘lesser’ nations. Self-appointed captains. And the US? Social media is at war over the Florida school shootings. It reveals what is so obvious to the rest of the world. Americans are so obsessed with their 2nd amendment they can’t see the wood from the trees. The world has changed since that was first introduced but they have refused to change it. Decades ago, after the school shooting in Dunblane, Scotland, the UK banned all guns. Result? Not one school shooting since. It’s not rocket science America. Modernise your outdated 2nd amendment and ban all guns and shops selling them. Probably need an earthquake to realise it though.
11th February 2018
Have just returned from visiting our son who’s moved to a beautiful English village. To help him we donated some household appliances but it was the goodie bag containing Marmite that really perked him up. As a vegetarian, its B12 components are essential to boost his health and well-being. Looking around the world I see that the North Korean leader’s sister has been used as a diplomatic tool to build relations with S. Korea but was this merely a subtle, cynical weapon against America? In Gaza children are indoctrinated from birth to hate the so-called ‘enemy’ Israel. It even uses toys and ‘educational’ books to teach innocent children to kill and maim others. This isn’t how to treat family members. In an increasingly uncertain world, family is often all we have and the ones we trust the most. Don’t use them as a weapon; give them love; give them Marmite to heal themselves. Only then will the next generation be fit to spread the love without inner hate.
4 February 2018
Social media is a wonderful thing. I joined a FB closed group re-living via photos and anecdotes scenes from my home town. At 16 I got a job with W & T Avery’s, a weighing machine foundry in Smethwick. I reminisced about my time there as a junior, where every morning I had to fetch from the works canteen everyone’s order of hot ‘breakfases’ as they called them. Horrible hot, greasy, brown paper bags and woe betide me if I got anyone’s order wrong. We all had to clock in at a punch machine and at 4.55 pm all would line up to clock out, then wait for the siren. Complete bedlam as hordes would then surge out homewards onto the cobbled inner foundry road, risking life and limb from all those men on bikes, khaki haversacks on their backs, wheels squeaking on the greasy cobbles. Who’d have thought that today, 50+ years later, someone would publish a photo of a colleague from those days? Yes, FB can dig out a past murky memory and remind you it all really happened. Great for people of a certain age, even aiding against rising dementia!
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