Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

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.

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.

Andrew, the second son of my granny, was born in Killinchy on September 18th 1920. and almost made it to 90, dying just a few days ago on January 16th.

Growing up in the depression obviously limited the options open at the time but even so after starting off in the day school of McQuiston Memorial Presbyterian church in Belfast, he went on to Euston Street school and then to Belfast tech (now the Belfast Metropolitan College). By the time he’d passed through those the war had started and Andy joined the merchant navy rising in due course to the rank of Chief Petty Officer. During his time in the navy he was stationed in Jamaica and New York from whence he sent various momentos back home and picked up a number of medals along the way.

With the end of the war he joined Mackies which was one of the big engineering works of that era in Belfast. He remained there the rest of his working life. Following the death of his father in 1963, Andy cared for his mother through to the end of her life in 1988.

Although born in Killinchy, for the majority of his life Andy lived in the family home at 16 Lecumpher Street. When that was earmarked for redevelopment at the end of the 1990s, he was forced to move on to the Clarawood Estate where he spent a few brief years before moving into the Tudordale Nursing Home where he spent most of his final decade.

Andy was quite keen on cars and motor transport generally. Over the years that I knew him he managed to get around in a variety of them including a “mods” type scooter in the early 1960s and an Austin A40 (one of the tiniest cars you ever did see!) and latterly a Mini Metro. A number of these would never have passed a modern MOT and at one stage he ended up driving the A40 minus the floor of the car! Added to this was a keen interest in photography with quite a steady build-up of photographs over the years although perhaps his best photos were taken the time when he’d managed to forget to put a film in the camera!

Whilst he’d travelled the world with the navy, afterwards Andy limited himself to Northern Ireland and specifically Killinchy where he spent the summer months in a cottage rented by the family for over 30 years. From that base he went on numerous day trips with his favourite destination being the reservoir at Silent Valley and the Mourne area generally. In his latter years though he found that the travelling became too much and gradually the trips became shorter and in his final decade he never travelled more than a few miles from the nursing home.

There’s no mention here of surviving children because Andy never did get around to having a family. That’s perhaps the saddest thing about his death because though he loved children he never had any of his own. It does seem particularly sad to go to the funeral of someone like that: though there are probably more tears from any children when a mother or father dies at least there is a continuation whereas here that’s not the case.

We’re all getting older and, thanks to the baby boom generation, there are more and more products to deal with that on the shelves these days and increasing number of medical treatments too.

But do you really want to stay young looking forever? I imagine that most peoples’ first reaction is a very definite “YES” and that would certainly be the answer were staying young an easy thing to do. The problem is that it isn’t easy and takes up increasing amounts of time as the years add up.

Those age spots that may be starting to appear will increase in number as your years add up thus it’s gonna take more time to cover them up as the years mount. Likewise for other treatments to cover up the cracks and wrinkles not to mention the hair to be dyed.

The alternative is to aim to gain a distinguished appearance gradually which is going to be much less time consuming I suspect.

Over the last week or so we’ve woken to a white landscape but, so far, the white is only frost with perhaps a very light dusting of snow.

That frosty covering makes for rather slippy pavements of course yet you don’t seem to really get the pleasure that proper snowfall can bring. No snowmen to built, no snowball fights. Just slipping and scraping the windows on the car.

And, yesterday, an unannounced closure of the school for the day. Instead of a final lie-in before school started we’d everyone up early to make sure we weren’t late with the slippery roads and found ourselves in front of a closed school. Oh, sure, if it had been way out in the country we’d have expected that but there wasn’t any big problem in getting to it so it was just closed for no apparent reason.

Still, with the weather forecasts continuing in winter mode for the remainder of the week perhaps we’ll get a proper snowfall one of these days.