I was watching a programme called 9/11, about the Twin Towers in New York, and I was reminded of the holiday that my husband and I were going to have touring the East Coast of America that same year. We had booked our dream holiday thinking that we had deserved it after all the trauma we had suffered from losing my business due to a fire.

We booked to fly into Washington on September 10th 2001. We wanted to see The Pentagon and The White House. The following day we were going by train to New York and do all the things we had dreamed of doing, Empire State building, Central Park, go to the book shop featured in “Falling In Love”, and go to Broadway. Then we were going back on the train to Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, including whale watching, then on to Boston. I was so excited - it was to be the trip of a lifetime. Then one day, an ordinary day like any other, I heard this voice. It was very clear and it told me that something dreadful was going to happen on the East Coast of America in September and I was to cancel the holiday. I told Mike, and he knowing me so well didn’t question it and we cancelled it and lost our deposit.

Imagine our horror when 9/11 came onto our television screens. We had been booked to stay in the same hotel that the bombers were staying in, in Boston. We would have been in Washington on September 11th, probably looking at the Pentagon when the plane hit,  and we were then due to go on to New York the day after the planes hit the Twin Towers. I was so grateful to be so well looked after when I was told to cancel the holiday. I will go to America one day. It’s a country that I feel a very strong affinity with.
11 September 2009

 1)  Petty criminals should all do community work paying back to society. Non payment of a t.v. licence or council tax should never go to prison. Get them out cleaning up the streets etc. There are stacks of jobs they could do. Road signs need cleaning.

 2) Persistent non violent offenders need to be educated. Turn prisons into universities, educate them, get them fit for  proper jobs, give them self worth.

 3) Separate the mentally ill offenders who include drug  addicts, paedophiles and perhaps some murderers who are obviously mentally ill. They could all go to a secure hospital for the treatment they deserve and get well. They could also receive an education whilst they are there.

4) Only dangerous people, serial killers and terrorists should be locked up forever, thus reducing our prison population to a quarter of what it is now and save the tax payer at the same time. I don’t understand why we don’t all look after one another a lot better than we do. The divide between the have’s and the have not's is wider now than it was when I wrote Is It An Omen?

On a recent trip to see my Mother who lives in Worthing, I was horrified to see the amount of litter all along the dual carriageway from Lewes to Worthing. Why do people like to throw rubbish out of their cars instead of taking it home? I have got a real thing about rubbish and filth generally, and I will never understand the mentality of people who litter our beautiful countryside. It has always been bad along that stretch of road but this time it was gross. I couldn’t take my eyes off it (I wasn’t driving I must add!). Also when I go to see one of my sons who lives in Essex I am equally appalled at the litter on the duel carriageways  from the Dartford Tunnel to Basildon. What must foreign visitors think about us? It is just another case of lack of standards. I didn’t used to know what all the little white blobs were all over our pavements. I could hardly believe it when someone told me it was chewing gum. Isn’t it perfectly revolting that people spit chewing gum out of their mouths and that it sits on our pavements until the council cleans it off? In some areas the pavements are covered. I originally thought it was bird droppings.

Don’t be surprised that our hospitals are full of super bugs. Cleaning! Who likes cleaning today? Germs in hospitals come from filthy wards. Why don’t we clean everything  like we used to. Hospitals used to reek of disinfectant, and you were never allowed to sit on the beds if you were a visitor . Matron would have 'had your guts for garters'. Whilst visiting someone in hospital I was appalled at the filthy windows. They hadn’t been cleaned in ages. Not just the glass, I’m talking about the paintwork which should have been white but was black. And I was also horrified at the pots of pee all lined up alongside the patients bed. Outside the hospital front doors a lot of people were smoking and dropping their dog ends. Honestly what have we sunk to?

We are fast becoming a filthy country. How do you make people care who don’t care? The thing is you can’t. Standards  generally used to be set by those in positions of authority, but now all that has gone. Bring back the ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ hoardings that we used to have. If children were trained to put litter into their pockets to take home, and if no bins are available perhaps chewing gum could be put into the little piece of paper it came out of and then also put into the persons pocket until a bin could be found, that would be a good start. Hands should be washed after visiting the loo and before you eat. We wouldn’t have some of the horrible infections we have if these simple things were put into practice. Incidentally the governments initiative (to do with Swine Flu) that all sneezes should be caught in a tissue and then binned is a good idea but if people spit gum onto the pavements are they really going to sneeze into tissues. I don’t think so.

Rubbish bins now adorn the front gardens of terraced houses of residents who cannot get the bins around to the back garden. On a recent trip to Oxford, a place I have wanted to visit for ages because of the television programme, Morse, I was very disappointed. On the way into the City lovely old terraced houses had wheely bins in the front gardens, and not just one bin, where it was multiple occupation, there were several bins, and some overflowing. Could you imagine the Victorians allowing that to happen, rubbish on display to all and sundry - it’s horrible. Rats are a real problem now. Rubbish lorries that have been to recycling centres to pick up their loads do not always secure them properly, and consequently some of the rubbish falls off them all along the road. Litter bins are hard to find now because of national security and if you find one it is usually overflowing. Pride has all but gone, ladies cleaning their front steps and sweeping the pavement has been consigned to history. Perhaps instead of the obsession with what we look like perhaps we could develop an obsession again in  cleanliness. I can but dream.
11th July 2009

Listening to the report about Scotland’s alcohol problem I was somewhat amazed that this was a surprise to anyone. Fifty million litres of alcohol were drunk last year in Scotland alone, which worked out at five hundred and seventy pints for each person. One thousand deaths resulted from this consumption and goodness knows how many more people seriously ill with liver and heart problems.
The figures for the U.K. for 2007 were 8724 alcohol related deaths. Again that doesn’t take into account all the people suffering with alcohol related diseases. We have become a drunken nation.
Increasingly we hear about binge drinking and the enormous amount of hospital beds taken up with alcohol related diseases.
 Many of our young people feel that it isn’t a good night out unless they get drunk. It’s a real drink culture that we have now, and cheap booze on sale in supermarkets doesn’t help at all.
 Programmes like Eastenders and Coronation Street make it seem commonplace to go to the pub every lunchtime and evening, and drinking too much is the norm for some of the characters in these programmes. In these soaps which are based around the Queen Victoria in Eastenders and the Rovers Return in Coronation Street, every celebration they have is always in the pub. What message does this send out to the millions of people watching those and every other programme where they portray excessive drinking as normal?  Of course not everyone who drinks has a problem - far from it, but it does seem that just as we have become used to overeating as normal, drinking large amounts seems to have become normal as well.
I have just read “The End of My Addiction” by Dr. Olivier Ameison, which is a very frank account of his own addiction to alcohol. In the book he describes first hand the destructive force it brings, when as an eminent cardiac doctor in New York he had to give up his practice for a while to get well. His prognosis was that alcoholism isn’t the disease - it’s the anxiety, that causes people to drink in the beginning, that is the illness that needs addressing.

And that made good sense to me when I read it. Why do people hit the bottle, or buy cigarettes with a warning on the packet saying that the contents could kill you? And why do people take prescription drugs and then move on to hardened drugs?  I think the majority of the people taking these substances are suffering from anxiety on a level that anti-depressants, beta blockers and tranquillisers do not address. As Dr Ameison says, the problem is that doctors do not know what to do with patients who are anxious, and they certainly don’t know what to do with patients who are addicts.
We live in a very tense world. Everything is getting faster, and humans are not always able to keep up with it. We’ve created an unnatural world. Gone are the days when you can park in the high street and shop in little shops that offer personal service. Now it’s huge supermarkets, huge shopping centres and multi storey car parks. This island is overcrowded, that’s for sure, and we are all cheek to jowl and jostling for our places. Our roads are nose to tail, our houses are all on top of one another, and this leads to more and more stress. Happiness today is thought to be in material things, but once objects are obtained people discover that actually things don’t make you happy. Debt is now the word on every newsreader’s lips - debt from huge loans that were thrust at us from every bank, building society, credit card and store card company. Now of course that has all gone wrong.  The bubble has burst and we have a serious recession, and with that comes house repossession and unemployment. More stress.
Happiness comes from structure and discipline, the very things that have been done away with in this country. We all know that children feel safer and more loved in a disciplined environment. Adults also feel safer and happier in a structured society. It has been proved that women’s health is better in a marriage than if she’s just living with a partner. Having done away with family life where kids feel very safe, having done away with boundaries generally, it’s no wonder that we are in a state of bewilderment. And kids know that if they commit a crime they won’t really be punished. We do not have a happy well balanced society at all, so maybe that’s why people take whatever substance they can get their hands on to just feel okay. Sad isn’t it?
28th March 2009

Kids Having Kids!

We are all  familiar with a recent story about the young teenagers becoming parents, and whether you’re horrified or not, this highlights  a serious problem in Britain today.

Let’s not discuss this from a moral point of view. After all, kids were having sex in the Middle Ages from a younger age than that, but as the average life expectancy was only thirty five it is hard to tell who died from sexually transmitted diseases, and who from all other diseases. Girls from rich families were often married at twelve.

We hopefully should have moved on from that scenario, which is why the age of consent was brought in to protect children.
Britain and the welfare state has created this society - it didn’t just arrive. Some girls who don’t have much opportunity to get good jobs and get on the housing market are making a conscious decision to get pregnant and get housed with all the benefits on offer as well. The number of teenage pregnancies just published for last year is 42,000. 8,200 of those are under 16.

As Churchill said “ …The era of procrastination … is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences”. We now live in a very sexual society. Nearly everything you buy is termed “sexy”. Sex is rammed down our throats like never before. To be female is very difficult in this society. I wonder how many men would tolerate male nudity splashed everywhere, and would they like to wear the same provocative clothing that girls are encouraged to wear. Yes girls are actively encouraged to, because magazines and the media dictate that they have to, and in some shops it’s all that’s on offer. A lot of young girls look like they’re prostitutes. We need pop stars and actresses to start setting standards for these girls who idolise them, there are some who have set very bad examples.

When I was young it was easy. There were rules. You didn’t have sex until you were married. You went as far as you could, heavy petting it was called, but sexual intercourse was left for marriage. It was much better for the girls then, we felt protected by the rules. There wasn’t all the pressure that girls have today. I feel that girls nowadays have a really tough time because there is a lot of peer pressure to have sex by the age of twelve. They also are encouraged to wear provocative clothing,  thongs, crop tops, mini skirts, heeled shoes and jewellery from a very early age. And I’m surprised it isn’t illegal to have your baby’s ears pierced. That is a decision surely that the girl should make when she’s maybe at least eleven. And men no longer know how old girls are, its very confusing for them.

Children should ideally not have children for two very good reasons. 1) They are not mature enough to be parents and 2) They haven’t got any money to pay for it. Why should the tax payer have to pick up the bill? Girls should be made aware of the risks of not only STD’s but also the HPV Virus, the major cause of cervical cancers, and as screening starts at twenty five in England (twenty in the rest of the U.K.) a lot of them are risking their lives. The walls of the vagina are very thin in a young girl, another reason to wait.

Education seems to fail so many kids, and I suppose if education isn’t actively encouraged in a home it’s much more difficult for kids to get excited about learning. When I went to school in the fifties after the war and then the sixties,  there were a lot of poor families, but education we were told was the way out of poverty. Many parents who may not have been well educated themselves actively encouraged their kids to do well. It was as it should be. We all knew we had to get a job (it wasn’t optional) so naturally we wanted to get as good a job as we could. And where some parents in my day used to fail their kids, teachers took over and inspired their pupils, they were a kind of surrogate parent. But teachers wouldn’t be allowed to do that today. They have to be very careful and watch their backs, getting overly involved with  a child could be very difficult, it’s all changed so much.

 Charles Murray wrote about the underclass whom he refers to as Neets which stands for ‘Not in education, employment or training schemes’. Some families are third generation not working, but they don’t stop breeding! They don’t contribute to society but they still want to take from it. They all know their rights. What effect does that have on their kids? Well, they grow up thinking that it’s normal to live off the state, so why bother with education and getting a job. Work? Don’t be silly!

Kids should be allowed to be kids. They have so many more opportunities than we ever had. Sex education should arm them with all the information they need. It should also alert them to all the dangers of sex too early. And to be honest, what kid really wants to saddle itself with the responsibility of another human being at such a young age? These kids do lose most of their choices, and I’m sure that when they get older they will be filled with regret.
 Is this the sort of society we want in Britain?
3rd March 2009