Upward Mobility
There is a lot of talk on the news today about how there is less social mobility. The first paragraph on a BBC report says.
Top professions such as medicine and law are increasingly being closed off to all but the most affluent families, a report into social mobility will say.
I came from what would be described as a strong middle-class family, with both Jewish and Huguenote roots. Both my parents were reasonably intelligent and they had a very strong work ethic. I certainly have the latter and wouldn’t have got where I have, without masses of long and hard work. Now, I did go to a very good grammar school and this helped, by giving me a strong believe in myself and also some very sound career advice in choosing engineering.
The latter choice I’ve never regretted and I would recommend it to anybody, who is that way inclined, as it is often a pathway into all sorts of related careers, if after training, you find you don’t like getting your hands dirty! I’ve also heard stories of how people with engineering degrees have got golden hellos to join various companies. Surely a bonus in times like these, where students leave university with large debts in addition to their qualifications.
My late wife actually had two first degrees; Politics from Liverpool University and Law from UCL. She then went on to be a successful barrister.
Her parents did own their own house, but could never be described as well-off. If she hadn’t been able to get into the local grammar school and then get a full grant to go to university, she would not have gone. She said so very often, as the government brought in loans so that they could spread higher education thinner and thinner.
I do find it strange that this government, many of whom got their start in life because of the system of grammar schools and university grants in the thirty years after the wars, have destroyed the system that gave them their start in life.
Apollo 11 Lands
Exactly forty years ago today, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
My wife was still in the Middlesex Hospital with our first son, who had been born on the 16th. There was no reason for them to stay that long, except that partly that was the way it was done in those days and also the hospital was rather short of clients. They were actually phoning round other hospitals and it appeared that everybody was holding back giving birth, as they were waiting for the landing.
My wife and everybody else in the maternity unit actually crowded round the television to watch the landing. I think that some of them actually watched the moonwalk later.
Immediately, the landing was over, the phones started ringing and all hell broke out in the unit and by the morning they had beds in corridors.
We’d also put his birth in The Times and I still have two copies of the paper for that day.
The Times - July 20th, 1969
He is still the only birth I have seen in The Times, out of alphabetical order.
The paper on the left is actually a 4 a.m. edition. Does The Times still have one now?
One little incident that a friend remembered was that they interviewed a mother, whose baby was born on the 21st and they asked her if she was calling her son, Apollo. She said she was going to call him Paul.
Thou Shalt Not Sail on the Sabbath
What poppycock!
There appears to be a bit of a row on the Hebrides, about a ferry to the mainland on a Sunday.
The Hebrides is very much a marginal area of the UK, that needs all of the help it can get. And that includes tourists, who often have jobs to do, to pay for their holidays. They just might want to sail home on a Sunday, to start work on a Monday.
But as Caledonian MacBrayne, the ferry operator, feel it might be a case of human rights, they have to provide the service.
As someone, who believes very much in the rights of people to do what they want within reason, I’m very much behind the ferry company. And what right does a whole load of people, who say they believe in god, have to tell me what to do, provided I don’t break the law? Especially when I don’t hold their views. Although, as I’ve said many times before I stick to the humanist principles of all the world’s major religions.
My late wife originally did believe in god and taught in Sunday School, but in her last twenty years or so, she lost all that belief. As she lay dying, she did not once mention god or religion. That further enforced my personal view, that god is just a figment of those minds that want to control us.
I hope that I’ll die happy, but without help from any supreme being.
Goat Finds God
Lord Myners is discussed in this article, titled “Lord Myners attacks bankers’ greed and finds God” in the Sunday Times. The opening paragraph says it all.
Lord Myners, the minister appointed to clean up the City, is so disenchanted by bankers’ greed and self-aggrandisement that he is planning to become a theology student.
He is one of Gordon Brown’s “Government of all the talents” and was Financial Services Secretary. It’s alright for this goat to find god, as he has already amassed a fortune of about £30 million.
I’m no fan of bankers, but by increasing the top rate of tax in the UK, Gordon Brown is actually playing into their and the smart lawyers’ hands. I sold two technology companies in the seventies and eighties, when top tax rates were at eighty percent and the lawyers had a field day and made large amounts of money, so that my hard earned money didn’t go to government schemes of which I do not approve. So we’ll see increased profits for lawyers and bankers again.
A few collective nouns sum up professionals.
- An anarchy of computer programmers
- A wunch of bankers
- A delay of solicitors
- A self-interest of politicians
Feel free to add some more.
It’s All in the Article
The Sunday Times always tries to make the business pages more interesting by putting a lady on the front page, who is showing herself off. Last Sunday’s article about how Lord St. John of Bletso hosted a party in 2004 and 2005 for Ross Mandell, who is now charged with fraud in New York, was accompanied by one with Lady Bletso in a dress that to say it was low-cut would be an understatement. She was described in the article as a former Miss England.
Now, I have no knowledge of the couple except what I read in the media, but I don’t think I would be very happy with the article if I was them. After all they would appear to have been married since 1994, have four children and that Lady Helen is a doctor of medicine according to Wikipedia. She is also in her early forties and if nothing else, she certainly doesn’t show her age.
Luckily, I’ve never been described in the Press in anything but a complete and proper way, but I can understand how clipping out a few words and missing a few facts, can give a totally different view.
Waiting for Apollo 11 – Part 3
The Tuesday was a day of waiting. They broke the waters in mid-morning and nothing happened. And then in mid-afternoon, contractions started.
Now my late wife wasn’t a lady with a large frame. Although she was nearly 5ft 5in, she was really only a size 8, so getting the baby out, when he finally arrived after midnight, was a bit of a messy business. Our first son was also about 8lb 5oz, so he was not small and she had quite a few stitches. Luckily, the student doctor , who was nicknamed Smooth Hugh, was very very good.
So that night I got back to Barnet about three in the morning, with mother and son doing well.
In other words exactly forty years ago.
But the time in the hospital was not without tragedy. The lady in the next bed with the unusual ring, lost her baby. Her son was born with a hole in the diaphragm, which meant he was unable to breathe.
But in those days of no ultrasound, it was impossible to diagnose the condition. Six years ago, my granddaughter had the same condition. It was diagnosed before birth and she was operated on at two days old. She is now a bouncing ad very normal girl, with no after effects from her ordeal.
So medical science can solve our problems.
But just as my wife was helped through a difficult birth by Smooth Hugh, good surgery helped in a much worse case to enable my granddaughter to survive.
We must train our surgeons to be the best.
Later that day, Apollo 11 blasted off to the moon. My wife told me later that evening, that everyone was gripped as they watched the huge Saturn rocket take off from Florida.
And there was still a shortage of babies in the hospital. They’d even resorted to ringing round hospitals and the message was the same. Everybody must be waiting for the moon landing.
Dangers in Mexico
One would have thought, that with swine flu, that this was the main reason not to go to Mexico. But they do seem to have their fair share of drug-related killings too.
Perhaps it is best to stay home or get attacked in Naples.
I think it probably illustrates though, that drugs and not global-warming, terrorism, Afghanistan, Iraq or swine-flu is the most pressing difficulty facing everybody.
An Expensive Smoke
If there’s anything that might make someone give up smoking, then it is a mistake like this.
I bet his heart fluttered a bit.
Waiting for Apollo 11 – Part 2
To return to the story of my late wife’s first pregnancy. This tale was started under Waiting for Apollo 11.
I stayed all night at the Middlesex Hospital and about midnight, the contractions stopped and I think I fell asleep with my head on her bed.
She was sharing the room with another lady, who was perhaps a ten years older than my wife’s then 21 years. I can’t remember much about her except that she was dark-haired and she had a wedding ring with a buckle in it. But at least my wife had some pleasant company whilst I was not there.
In fact, I remember going to work on that Monday in Welwyn Garden City. You had to do that in those days, as there was no such thing as paternity leave. But at least my bosses were fairly sympathetic.
I returned to the hospital on that Monday evening and nothing had happened.
I seem to think that the hospital had decided that if nothing happened on the Monday, they were going to induce the baby on the Tuesday morning. I probably got a good night’s sleep at my mother-in-law’s in Barnet.
There are other things that I can’t remember. Did I drive up to the hospital in our elderly Morris Minor? Did my mother-in-law visit before the birth? Oh! How you wished you had wrote it all down.
Dignitas and the Care Tax
Two stories from yesterday, should be linked together.
We had the tragic tale of Sir Edward and Joan Downes going to Dignitas to commit suicide together, because of her terminal cancer.
We also had the government outlining proposals that when you retire, you’d have to pay £20,000 for compulsory insurance for your long term care.
I should say that I’ve helped care for someone in the last few weeks of their life and when the pain gets too bad to endure, all sorts of thoughts arise. But for me, as there is nothing afterwards, I would never countenance any premature end for myself. But others should be free to choose.
So if Aunt Sally or Uncle Fred have to retire early because of some long term illness, would the family push them off to Switzerland because they don’t want to pay the £20,000?
The Care Tax is insane!
Something needs to be done and people need to be encouraged to provide for their long term care, but anything compulsory needs to be consigned to the bin.
The Anonymous Widower 