Oh that’s cool

Such an easy way to publish to a blog. I like it.

An experiment using Windows live writer

I wonder what this will look like when I publish it.

It’s a dog’s life – and that’s just mine!

One of the benefits/downsides of having a dog foisted upon you is that you have to take it for a walk each day – preferably two walks. So, since Porgy, the slightly crazy Welsh sheepdog-Collie, cross came to live with us after his owner, my father-in-law, fell down in the February snow and broke his ankle in four places, I’ve been trailing the mutt through the beech wood and surrounding fields every evening.

Now spring is here, I’m finding the experience a delight rather than an ordeal. When Porgy isn’t barking at a hapless cyclist (he was knocked over as a puppy by a bloke on a bike), it’s quite blissful tramping through the balmy twilight, hearing the song thrush and green woodpecker doing their thing and seeing the bluebells carpeting the forest floor.

I’m not overly keen, though, on having to exchange pleasantries with fellow dog walkers, which seems to be par for the course. That said, if I was single, surely this would be a great way to meet “Mr Right”. Why, I wonder, don’t we hear more – well, anything really – about dog walkers meeting, chatting about their respective mutts and falling in love?

We read regularly about people drooling over re-found lost loves on Friends Reunited and Facebook, but we never hear about dog lovers hooking up and getting married (with their mongrels as bridesmaids or best men). But perhaps people are just too addicted to online living these days – I know I am. It’s only when you tear yourself away from Facebook and the like that you realise, anew, just how fabulous and soul soothing it is to commune with nature.

Anyway, back to Porgy: the opportunity to make new friends and lovers notwithstanding, I am baffled by the British obsession with keeping dogs as pets. Porgy isn’t too bad as a temporary resident; he’s compliant (apart from when he’s chasing cyclists) and seems happy enough, but I can’t abide the hairs all over the house, the crap on the lawn and the scorched turf where he’s piddled copiously and lethally in the same place. I’m also troubled by anxiety that he’s bored when not out walking: can a dog really be happy flopping around a house all day?

In short, what’s the point of Porgy? To my mind, he’s not having the best life (he was designed to herd sheep, after all) and, as a foster owner, I’m not getting much out of him either, apart from the lovely walks. He’s too big to snuggle on my knee and too old to play games with. He costs an arm and a leg in chews and dog food and I have a real problem buying tins of meat-related stuff that quite obviously don’t contain ethically-reared produce.

So, lots of downsides to having a dog, temporarily or otherwise, but I have to say that the major benefit – taking him for a walk – has not only helped increase my fitness but has also provided me with the opportunity to appreciate, more fully, the fantastic spring evenings. There may be a recession on, but walks through the beech wood are free.

I’ll be glad when it’s time for Porgy to go home – but sad that my twilight sorties are at an end. More time for Facebook, though!

Ros Dodd’s Life Oddities – a festive post

Well, here I am, two days from Christmas and many weeks from my last blog posting – the mind was willing but flesh wasn’t.
With Yuletide upon us, however, I thought I really ought to get my finger out – literally – and pen something halfway readable.
As I write, in between dallying on Facebook, Alexandra Burke’s rendition of Leonard Cohen’s magical song Hallelujah is playing on YouTube – and it strikes me what an extraordinary year it’s been for me in terms of engaging with popular culture. During 2008 I’ve become:
• A TV reality show stalwart (I used to hate the genre with a vengeance)
• An active (some might say too active) Facebook member. This time last year I hardly knew of its existence
• A confirmed and regular YouTube user – I can even find Barry Manilow songs!

On a more serious note, I have learned (through ways I won’t bore you with) that to live life as it’s meant to be lived, one needs to feel the pain – something I’ve not been very good at in the preceding years. So adept at this hitherto alien concept have I become that I found myself annoyed at the recent press coverage of the conclusion of the Rhys Jones trial, which reported that his parents had “fought back tears” when the killer was finally convicted. Why, I wondered, did they feel the need to fight back tears (assuming that was an accurate portrayal)? How could they do anything other than weep when the boy who took their own, beloved, boy’s life so randomly and so callously was finally nailed for his heinous crime?

Crying doesn’t solve the problem – but it helps. Trying to mask the trauma with a “stiff upper lip” approach is counter-productive: you can push it into a box and file it away, but one day it will leap out and bite you. And the bite will be worse for not having dealt with it at the time it happened. I’ve been crying about things that happened 15 years ago – I should have grieved then, but I didn’t, and now I’ve had to re-live all that pain. Silly me; I thought distraction was the name of the game.

Going back to the Rhys case; this cemented in my mind what I’ve thought for ages – why weren’t his parents in the dock? To describe as “feral” kids who get involved “gangs” and think taking pot shots at rivals is a great way to spend a Saturday night is just darn lazy – these are children who didn’t stand a bloody chance: they were raised in a hideously dysfunctional family and allowed to roam the streets without anyone knowing, or caring, where they were or what they were doing.

Rhys’s murderer, Sean Mercer, will languish in jail for many years to come, but the ignominy of his crime will do little to change the warped mindset of the thousands of households who have lost the plot in terms of right and wrong.

It upsets me too much to get into a Baby P discussion – I only have to think about my daughter in similar circumstances and my blood runs more than cold – but I wonder why more isn’t being done to protect vulnerable kids

So “light up”, as Leona says, and have a 2009 that is true to you.

Your friend, Ros

Refuse isn’t rubbish – it can purge the soul

Here’s a strange subject to be writing about – rubbish collection day! Stranger still to confess that it’s something I consciously look forward to. Yes, really. A feeling of quiet exhilaration steals over me when Tuesday night rolls around, because this is the evening each week when I can stuff the detritus of the past seven days into a couple of black sacks and deposit them firmly outside the house for the refuse collectors to cart away the next morning.

Out go the smelly tuna fish tins and milk cartons, empty wine bottles and chocolate bar wrappers.

For a few hours, my house is devoid of rubbish: the bins are empty and the whole place feels unencumbered and refreshed.

Putting the rubbish out each week is not just a physical thing; it’s an emotional one. I can discard the incriminating evidence of a life not led entirely healthily and believe, however momentarily, that I have also discarded all my bad habits. In short, the house is purged – and so am I.

On Wednesday mornings, when the refuse people have done their stuff (well, not quite…they always leave a trail of packaging, nub ends and grubby tissues in their wake for yours truly to remove and, ironically, begin to infest the kitchen bin with the first of another week’s rubbish), I have a spring in my step and a new resolve in my heart that this week will be different. This week I won’t consume a whole packet of Jaffa Cakes in one sitting; nor will I sink quite so much wine. I won’t leave vegetables mouldering in the fridge so that I end up having to chuck them and I’ll resist the urge to buy a newspaper unless I know I have the time to read the damn thing.

Actually, a lot of the rubbish I accumulate in the course of a week isn’t entirely down to my bad habits – much of it is down to the mounds of unnecessary packaging that comes with almost everything we buy these days. Why, for instance, do supermarkets have to wrap cucumbers in a plastic sheath? (although I notice Co-op has stopped doing this – and well done them). Why hasn’t someone devised a way for shoppers to simply weigh fruit and vegetables on the shop floor and tip them straight into their trolley or basket, instead of having to put each item into a separate plastic bag? I could go on, but you get the drift – and lots of other people have been saying the same thing for a while now.

But back to the original thrust of the blog – the psychological effect of binning the weekly rubbish. I wonder if anyone other than me feels as if they’ve started writing on a new sheet of paper when the bin persons roar off with the incriminating evidence of the previous week’s over-indulgences.

As I write this (on a Thursday evening), I’m heading off on holiday tomorrow and I go with a heavy heart – for I know that the rubbish of the past two days will languish in the bin until we return. I will come home knowing that my house is not a temple.

Ironing out a new career

My husband has started behaving strangely. So strangely, in fact, that I’m wondering if he’s having a mid-life crisis a decade after one might have expected it to occur. In short, he’s been ironing.

Now, you might not think this type of domestic activity particularly noteworthy, let alone a precursor to some kind of mental breakdown, but let me put it into context. My husband doesn’t care about clothes or what he looks like, to the extent that he throws on whatever comes to hand when he rummages in the wardrobe in a morning, thinks nothing of teaming a worn flak jacket with a pair of chinos and grubby trainers and is (or, rather, was) of the opinion that ironing is one of the most time-wasting exercises ever devised by the modern world.  Quite simply, he is quite comfortable with looking like he slept under a hedge last night and was dragged through it several times after he awoke. The more crumpled his attire, the happier he is. Or so it seemed.

Now, suddenly, he’s ironing like a maniac. It started with his observation – startling in itself – that my ironing basket was chock-a-bloc with blouses, skirts and dresses, some of which had been there so long I’d forgotten they existed. He questioned the reason behind the mountain of saggy cloth. I told him that I had quite enough to do, thank you very much, without ironing anything other than was urgently needed.

I’ve no idea what tipped him over the edge, but one day, a couple of weeks ago, I became aware of a thumping noise emanating from the spare room. Intrigued, I ventured in and found him pressing one of my long-forgotten shirts. I was incredulous. What was he doing? I asked (though it was entirely obvious) Almost sheepishly, he replied that he was fed up with seeing an Alpine pile of material sitting, dejectedly, in a corner of the spare room.

I thought it was a moment of madness/extreme boredom and humoured him. I didn’t for a minute imagine he would plough his way through the entire ironing basket – despite him being bolstered by high-volume Neil Young surging from the office stereo – but that is what he did. I celebrated his unlikely achievement by immediately donning a smock top I’d worn only once before putting it in the wash and consigning it to the burial ground of the ironing basket.

Yet it seems it wasn’t a moment of madness/extreme boredom. Since that first, Herculean effort, my husband gives every indication of having become addicted to ironing. Even before things are dry, he can be found removing them from the clothes horse and ironing them, with a loving, even reverent sweep.

What’s most bizarre is that his newly-found obsession doesn’t settle for ironing skirts and tops; he’s pressing his hankies, tea towels and even – get this – my undies! I’m getting a bit worried that he’ll try to iron our young daughter’s machine-washable soft toys next.

So what’s he on? Search me. But, interestingly, my husband is looking for a new career. Assuming he’s not suffering an emotional breakdown, I think he may have found it – an ironing service. I’ll be his first customer.

And oh, before you ask, he no longer looks like he’s slept under a hedge. He looks, well, rather beautifully ironed.

Singing more fun than stabbing people to death

Our esteemed Prime Minister is pledging "action" to combat
knife crime in the wake of the death-by-stabbing of seven
people this week. What action would this be, then, because
unless it amounts to confiscating every single knife in
every kitchen drawer and teenage closet in the country, it
will fail.

What needs to be done, and it's not something even the best
government - let alone Brown's bunch - could achieve, is to
revive the dying heart of traditional family life and
old-style community. The stabbing epidemic is not the
problem - it is the terrible, brutal consequence of the
problem. And the problem is that too many kids are being
brought up in broken and dysfunctional families where
traditional values have been ground into the dust. There is
no discipline and no love and attention. So no wonder, as a
top police chief recently acknowledged, that children look
to gangs rather than their parents for a feeling of
belonging.

I've just watched the second episode of the BBC1 reality
show Last Choir Standing and it was delightful to see an
outfit called Dreemz, made up of black teenagers from an
obviously "rough" area of Birmingham, sing their way through
to the next round (with the help of a musical director who'd
been in place for precisely a week). The passion for music
that some members elucidated on camera made your heart,
well, sing. These are kids who, without their songs, might
be running with gangs, but the choir has given them a focus
and a discipline. Above all, I suspect, it's shown them that
however difficult their personal circumstances, the power
and beauty of music can raise both their spirits and their
aspirations.

I doubt they'll win the contest, but their gutsiness and
determination have made them winners already. Gordon Brown
can't mend the problem that has spawned knife epidemic, but
he would do well to tune into the next episode and resolve
that any "action" he takes focuses on pumping money away
from the credit crunch and into enabling alienated young
people to find a positive outlet for their angst.

The inspirational Dreemz have shown that you can have much
more fun singing your heart out than stabbing rival gang
members to death.