We Are Not Worthy

Our God and soldiers we alike adore

Ev'n at the brink of danger; not before:

After deliverance both alike requited,

Our God's forgotten and our soldiers slighted

Francis Quarles 1592-1644

Long ago when Red was just a tot and I was expecting Mr Charming I flew out to Florida to spend a few days with Big Man whose submarine was making a port visit there following a series of UK/US war games. It wasn't long after the first Gulf War and the Free World was still celebrating the liberation of Kuwait. It was Big Man's second port visit to Florida - the first had been several years earlier on a destroyer. At that time there had been an announcement about the visit on local radio and an 'Adopt A Sailor' scheme was instigated. Many Orlandians came forward and treated members of the crew to various fun activities. Big Man and his friend Scouse Easton were taken to a tequila bar by a businessman who proceeded to get them royally bladdered. Another guy was flown IN A PRIVATE JET to New York for the night! Yet others were treated to family-run hog roasts, barbeques and pool parties. The hospitality of the Americans and the way they accepted the visiting sailors, just because they were in the military (and Brits, I suppose), is something Big Man has never forgotten.

During the visit I made at the end of '91 we were amazed by the way service personnel and veterans were treated. There was a special 'Speed Queue' entrance for the military at Sea World and after Shamu had finished his (her?) performance the emcee asked all servicemen and women to stand up and get applauded by the rest of the audience. We were able to get access to any military base just on production of Big Man's ID card*, which was great because we were able to buy reduced 'Military Rates' price theme park entry tickets. Say what you like about the American people, they know how to treat the military and veterans. We were spoiled.

Even if I wasn't married to an ex-sailor and I didn't have many years as a Navy wife under my belt I still would have an awful lot of respect and affection for our Forces. All of my grandparents saw service in WWII - RAF, WRAF, Merchant Navy, Polish Free Air Force, ATS and a Military Nurse (that includes a step-grandad and a grandmother who first joined the ATS then went AWOL to join the WRAF because she 'liked the uniform better') - and I come from a port city that appreciates the Navy with a passion, thanks to their support in the Cod War. So I'm really outraged and disgusted when I read things like this article in the paper today. Six soldiers were turned away at the bar of a pub in Coventry when they tried to get a cup of coffee each. The six were in the city to act as pallbearers at the funeral of the brother of one of them, also a soldier, who was killed on active service in Afghanistan. A member of the bar staff had already taken their order before it was rescinded by the publican's daughter who told the men that it was the pub policy not to serve 'anyone in uniform' (including policemen, ambulancemen, nurses, bus drivers??? Doubt it).

The publican has, reluctantly, apologised after first refusing to do so and has given a £200 donation to the fund set up for the dead soldier's wife and child (they accepted it....I would've told him where to stuff it). He also explained that had he known the soldiers were in the city to act as pallbearers at a funeral they would of course have been served. Why does that make a difference? What sort of establishment refuses to serve military personnel in uniform at all? Coventry is hardly Aldershot or Portsmouth, full to the brim with testosterone-charged young fighting men....there can't be that many uniformed servicemen causing trouble in the Midlands - heck, even in Pompey you very rarely see a matelot in 8s.

Prince William wears 8s very handsomely

Years ago when the IRA were very active in the UK the MOD banned servicemen from wearing uniform outside of military establishments - their visibility could very seriously pose a threat to their safety - but nowadays it's encouraged. And so it should be. Protecting one's country is nothing to be ashamed of. A Facebook group set up to protest at the treatment received by the soldiers in Coventry has almost 100,000 members, which shows that many people are incredibly grateful to and proud of our Armed Forces. The outpouring of affection and admiration towards Lance Bombadier Ben Parkinson reinforces this feeling.

We lionise inarticulate footballers, vapid actors and autotuned singers whilst paying our frontline military crap wages; housing them in sub-standard homes; disrespecting their traditions and belittling their sacrifice. We give them no quarter, either during their careers when they could benefit from discounts and preferential access to services or after their period of engagement, when we send them to the bottom of the housing pile and refuse to acknowledge their service experience and achievements. What is wrong with this country? Every single serviceman is somebody's son, brother, husband. and we owe them so much. We don't deserve them.

I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play.

Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936

* this has never been a reciprocal arrangement to my knowledge and I doubt it happens in the US either now in these post-bin Laden days. I'm interested to hear about the military experience from any of my American readers.

What A Load Of Rubbish!

Unless you live on the stretch of the South Coast covered by 'South Today' you won't be aware that here in Southampton the dustmen have been on strike for weeks. Last Friday's local paper told us that the union covering dustmen has a 'war chest' of twenty million pounds, enabling the strike to carry on indefinitely. The strange thing is, the paper says that there will be another strike starting, as if they go back to work then stop again, but we haven't had our regular bins emptied for about six weeks now. The recycling bins were emptied maybe three weeks ago but who cares about that? We need the general, stinky rubbish clearing. The street cleaners are also on strike and it's beginning to get pretty ropey around here.

 Southampton city centre

We are finding it reasonably difficult even though we have four bins, two general and two recycling. We didn't buy extra bins but we live on a main road and years ago we came down one Sunday morning to find, first a wheelie bin in the front garden followed by a recycling bin on top of the car a few months later. We assumed drunks'd pushed them from outside houses further up the road and abandoned them at ours - what larks! Obviously we kept them and it's a jolly good job we did too! But if it's getting bad for us it must be worse for people who don't have a waste disposal system. When we had our new kitchen put in years ago we'd just come back from a villa in Florida and I insisted on having a 'garbage gobbler'. Thank goodness I did - all the food waste goes straight down the drain. Even so we have (or did have until this evening when Big Man, Mr Charming and Carb Addict burned them in the brazier) four black sacks full of rubbish too. It was warm today, they were getting smelly, there's MILLIONS of fat, lazy flies around.......what can I say, I live with pyromaniacs. And the smell from the fire was so foul that I'm surprised nobody called the police.

Student ghetto!!!

There's a student enclave near us and each year when they move out of their rented houses they tend to throw incredible amounts of 'stuff' out....kitchen utensils, clothing, bits of furniture, unopened packets of food...must be £000's of stuff. The universities set up a scheme a couple years back where the students could leave anything decent and reusuable outside their houses on a particular day at the end of term and it would get collected - it's still ongoing  - but it's always a mess at this time of year. Now it's just dreadful! Walking through there the other day I could see bags of unopened pasta, noodles, crackers; a pair of practically unused Ugg boots; a TV - I was so tempted to scrag some items but oh, the indignity of being seen and labelled as a middle-aged pikey deterred me. It's a throwaway society we live in and no mistake.

More student house trash round the corner from me :(

It really shows what dirty, lazy pigs people can be when you see the city centre littered with McDonalds' bags and wrappers, empty pop bottles and bits of paper - did their parents never tell them not to be a litterbug? I always made sure my kids used a rubbish bin and even Carb Addict, my special boy knows to put his rubbish in a bin, or failing that his pocket until he gets home. I think McDonalds should have staff out on the streets picking up their litter, if nobody else's. In fact I think all businesses should be responsible for sweeping and tidying outside their own establishment as a matter of course, not just when there's a strike on. Isn't that what they do in other countries?

Across the road from me...yuk

We have lost all civic pride in this country!!!!!

Here endeth the rant.

PS  I'm not sure how much blogging I'll be able to do from today because I'm having a visitor for a week, one who talks even more than I do AND expects me to answer. Yes, Babcia is coming to visit.

If she doesn't miss the coach, obviously.

AV Or Not AV? That Is The Question.....

...but I don't want your answers. Votes are secret, right?

Today I spent 15 hours at a local polling station. I was a Poll Clerk for the day and whilst it wasn't super-massive fun it wasn't too onerous. My colleagues, all but one of whom were city council employees, were complaining about how long the day was going to be from about 9 am (we started at 6.30 am); how it was going to drag; and how tedious it was going to be. They obviously have never spent 12 hours on a railway siding counting pedestrians....no moral fibre.

Like I said, all but one of the other five people knew each other from work and had done the job on several occasions. Poll clerks were paid about £150 after tax - not bad and mine will go straight into the bank tomorrow. However, one of the council employees told me that he had expected to have to book a day's leave to work in the polling station today and was pleasantly surprised to be told that not only didn't he have to book a day off, he also would get his regular day's pay PLUS the clerking pay. Is it just me or does anybody else find that totally outrageous?! I was really annoyed (but hid it very well, obviously) and just said 'no wonder you're all clamouring for the poll station work then' - when I had my training for the job almost all the others there were council employees.

I find it amazing that the council would happily pay its employees twice for the one job and am not at all surprised that public sector workers are clinging onto their jobs and perks with all their might. That's money from council tax paid by all the inhabitants of this city and I think it's just wrong, wrong, WRONG. I can understand that nobody's going to say 'actually, I won't take two lots of pay for this one day's work', after all they are just going along with a precedent that has been set, presumably for a long time. But at a time when councils are moaning that they have to cut back on frontline services perhaps they should look at the money that they've paid out to their employees for this one day. And I don't wanna hear the argument 'if the council workers weren't willing to do it there wouldn't be enough people to man the polling stations' - my local council found an extra 150 that they were told were needed with no trouble at all.  It just seems like 'jobs for the boys' to me.

I must say, I've worked in the NHS and it was nothing like the rest of the public sector seems to be. Cushy with a capital C.......

Staples, You Stink

Far be it from me to criticise the staff of any store - it's a crummy job, customers are generally rude and obnoxious (Red and Mr Charming both worked for Tesco whilst at college and had some hair-raising stories), the pay sucks and the hours are long. So this isn't me having a go at the Staples staff but more a go at the whole Staples experience. Can there ever have been, in the history of stationery retailers, a situation where there are so many employees around but nobody actually doing any serving?

I paid a visit to my local Staples yesterday lunchtime and ending up storming out empty-handed. I should say here that storming out of shops and restaurants is something I do fairly often. Big Man wasn't a 'storm-outer' when we first met but as the years have passed he too has mastered the art of the strop whilst Red has become quite the princess of the flounce. Mr Charming is obviously too, well...charming for that kind of carry-on. But I digress. I needed some packing tape for my eBay parcels so found a multi pack for a very good price and also found a very handy ruler kind of thing that measures whether your parcel can be a large letter. I was excited because I had been after something like that and it was very reasonably priced too. There seemed to be a strange kind of queue near the checkouts...it ran parallel with the Print Station (ha ha) which had several people and employees at it but nobody actually seemed to be doing anything other than - well, it's hard to know what they were all doing to be honest. Staring into space (staff). Looking resigned (customers). None of the checkouts were open. After a while of hanging around a checkout was opened and the first person in the queue went to it and got served. Then a guy appeared out of nowhere and went to the checkout (everyone else was still in the queue parallel to the Print Station in the hope that a checkout there would become free). I said to the woman in front of me, who should have been served next, 'are you going to say something?'. She told me that it was too much confrontation on a Monday. I thought that this was a bit wussy but let it go. The guy on the checkout was well aware that there was a queue and that this...interloper...had pushed in, but said nothing. Then, whaddya know, another bloke came along and was about to go to the checkout at which point both I and the other woman objected. I think he was a chancer because it was pretty obvious we (and the six people behind us) were lining up for something. Retired kind of guy, glasses, looking for a good pasting, you know the kind. By this time I was getting pretty hacked off and all it needed was for somebody to say 'Is anybody paying with cash, the card machines have all gone down'. When somebody came along and said that I had had enough and stormed off, leaving my tape and ruler on top of a computer. I really wanted that ruler too.

So Staples, sort your checkouts out. Sort your card machines out. Sort your queuing system out. Life is too short to spend it pointlessly waiting in line.

Here endeth the rant.

Schadenfreude

Do you know what Schadenfreude is?

It's defined as 'a malicious satisfaction obtained from the misfortunes of others'. Did you even know there's a word for that? Would you think badly of me if I told you I had that very feeling yesterday?!

If there's one thing that's guaranteed to get me rolling my eyes and tutting it's people riding bikes on the pavement. And by people I really mean teenage boys and men up to about 35. Because it's never middle-aged women or mothers with a tagalong on the back of their bike. Oh no, it's males who are quite capable of riding on the road but they won't because they want to persecute pedestrians by weaving in and out then speeding up madly. Why do they do it? I suppose these people are just cocking a snook at society - they want to do whatever they like and balls to everyone else. I didn't bring my kids up like that but obviously a lot of parents did. Years ago, when policemen walked the streets, they always pulled people up for riding on the pavement but now, well it's just another thing, like talking on your mobile whilst driving, that's against the law but isn't enforced. Where I live the pavements are pretty wide and there are always big boys riding on them, despite notices up that say it's a pedestrian area and that there is a spot fine of £30 if you are caught. Well, many's the time I've seen PCSOs walking along and they don't stop these idiots which makes the signs, and the fines, a complete waste of time. However, malefactors are not always punished by law..........

Whilst standing at bus stop yesterday a studenty type of chap, about Mr Charming's age came flying along on his bike. The wide pavement was greasy and wet with rain....he lost concentration for a minute....the front wheel skidded...he went crashing to the ground and slid along on his face...you can picture the rest. I had a split second of Schadenfreude...and then Mum-mode took over and I went over to help him up, check he was okay, pick his belongings up and help with his bike.

Not such a mean Keshling after all.

PS. He then got back on his bike and rode off..on the pavement.