Foreign Perspectives

We go to our local library twice a week for the kids Kumon class and it’s quite noticeable how different the mix of people in it are.

On Tuesday afternoons, the place is packed with school children. So packed, that it’s difficult to find a seat and indeed today we couldn’t find a seat at all. On Saturdays it’s more of a quiet library atmosphere. Fairly full alright, but there are always seats to be had.

The difference is down to it being used basically as a child minder service during the week. School age children use it basically as an after-school club and in a number of cases parents simply drop the children in and go off on errands or whatever. We’re talking down to fairly young primary school kids too.

Still, at least it hasn’t reached the extremes that Wendy experienced in one Australian library where the library had to bring in a rule that kids required an adult to accompany them. Somehow I can’t see it being long before that happens.

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There’s only one in fact and he’s the caretaker so to make a start on balancing things up they’re having a Dad’s reading week at the moment.

It turns out that it’s not quite so easy to get the Dad’s to do this. Besides the reluctance of people to volunteer for anything, there’s the matter of getting out of work to do it. There’s also the little problem that the Dad’s very rarely go on the school outings and therefore don’t have the necessary criminal records check. Net effect is that there’s only three of us doing it for the entire school so I’m taking three sessions of the kids this week.

Choosing the books for that isn’t quite so simple as I thought it would have been. After all, we’ve our own small mountain of Ladybird and Usborne books to pick through. The snag is that our library was chosen with our own little guys in mind and in practice it doesn’t seem to fit the bill terribly well in a “reading for a group” context. For one thing, the Ladybird books are basically all aimed at P1 and earlier or at least the collection that we have are. The Usborne books would be great for James’ class but the stories in them are just too long for the time slot we’ve been allocated. Great if it was an ongoing thing but not so good for just one 45 minute session.

In many ways it does seem a shame that it’s only a one-off opportunity to do the reading. OK, it would probably end up being something of a chore if it was every week but it also doesn’t seem so good that the kids are all seeing schooling as an entirely female affair. That affects us in the homework too as they often prefer Wendy to do it with them which I imagine is at least partly down to the exclusively female teaching staff that they encounter.

Anyway, by the time you read this I should be well into my first reading session.

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We’ve had a small run of deaths in the family lately which has set me thinking just how long you should consider prolonging a life.

In the past, prolonging a life generally meant a reasonably short lengthening so the issue of quality of life didn’t really enter into matters. Prolonging a life a few months or perhaps a few years seemed like a “good thing”. After all, there were painkillers to relieve any major pain so you weren’t torturing the person in any sense.

However, these days it’s quite a different matter. If you’ve a disease like malignant Mesothelioma you could potentially be living for years yet get to the point quite quickly where you were effectively a vegetable to those around you. That’s how my uncle spent his last decade of “life”. Was it worthwhile prolonging his “life” that extra decade? Well, consider the impact of having done just that….

For a start, he had a number of minor strokes over that decade so he was in to hospital just about every one of those years. Minor strokes don’t seem so bad but each one destroys part of your brain so as time went on there was less of him there. When we left for France some six years or so ago he could move his hand and in rare moments would stumble across the name of someone close to him that was visiting him in the nursing home. Last year, he could neither move nor speak.

Possibly more noticeable was that ten years back he was able to walk and see various friends and family now and again. Granted, his mind wasn’t all there at that time but aside from wandering out at all hours and thinking that every day was Sunday, he managed to get by quite well. In his final years he only saw his sisters briefly each week and never saw any other friends or family. In the eulogy at his funeral service the massive difference between his early life travelling the world and the final decade couldn’t have been more striking.

On the other hand, consider my cousin Harold. He’s been diabetic since he was 13 which sounds really awful and to some extent that’s certainly true. However, that didn’t stop him having quite a full life right up until a few weeks ago. Whilst he didn’t get to travel the world as Andy had, he certainly had a lot of good times with his family right throughout his life. Oh, sure, the diabetes was a major hassle causing him to lose his toe and his kidneys to close down but keeping him alive throughout that time did give him quite a good quality of life and indeed a good life (“quality of life” rarely means that, of course).

Prolonging a life that’s reasonably good does seem worthwhile. The snag is that there’s a tendency to prolong it way, way beyond that time these days, simply because we can.

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