English notes and a wedding...

First the wedding of my step-daughter, Sinead Graham, to Edward Titheridge, near Brighton on 22 March. See proud mother and happy and beautiful bride. Bride and groom off to Africa, done deal. God Bless! Bravi Sinead, Ed, and Laurie. ...The wedding required our 6 day stay in cold Brighton which afforded us time for pre-wedding and post wedding parties, plus visits to the Pavillion and to Jane Austen's house in Chawton. Sadly, the numerous second-hand bookshops in Brighton which we frequented 11 years ago are all gone. But numerous curries, unavailable in Venice, and properly made fish and chips restored us to mental health.

Notes on the continued decline of the United Kingdom, or... there will not always be an England, that is certain.

Idiocy 1:

There was a report in The Daily Telegraph (22 March), that a public school fired its senior nurse, Susan Pope, because she smacked her 10 year old son, on his bottom (he wearing trousers) at home after he was abusive and refused to stop swearing at her. This smacking  was witnessed by her 15 year old son who promptly phoned the police to rat on his mother. The police duly arrived and arrested the mother and the father who both spent 32 hours in the slammer. Her employer, the public (private to American readers) school then fired her.  Mrs Pope said,"Smacking is not against the law in this country and I am a firm believer of physical chastisement within reason". "My son was behaving badly and I warned him if he swore at me again I would smack him." The police put the two children's names on the Child Protection Register which is an indictment of the parents.The school felt it had to protect its reputation and fired the nurse. Would you send your son to that school now?  I hope Mrs Pope gets lots of job offers. Sic transit gloria...

Idiocy 2:

The Sunday Telegraph's education correspondent reports this: Pupils as young as 10 are sitting on interview panels and rating teachers as part of the government's plan to give them a "voice" in schools. Children in thousands of primary schools have been drafted to interview new teaching staff. Also, one in ten schools allow pupils to formally rate teachers' lessons. These ratings are used in evaluating the teachers' performances. The government says that giving pupils a "say" in how the schools are run is part of the (socialist-labour) government's "Every Child Matters" agenda. As one of the teachers put it, "The lunatics have taken over the asylum."

Idiocy 3:

In Brighton we walked by a hair stylist salon which advertised in its window: extensions, weaves, straightening, etc.  Also, it advertised hair services for "Euro, Afro, and those of mixed parentage" (italics mine). So I guess one cannot use the word race in England. "Mixed racial parentage" is what they meant to say. But race as an adjective is equally abhorrent, apparently.To say "mixed parentage" is to state the obvious, man and a woman, tall and short, blond and brunette, stupid and smart, blue eyes and brown...but apparently the race word is verboten in England's green but unpleasant land.

Coda: A US acquaintance visited Venice a month or so back and saw numerous Nigerian bag sellers hawking their counterfeit Pradas on the street. He said, "Hey, look at all those African-Americans selling bags".

Basta.