Oak and ash and thorn

There is a lovely old folk song I used to hear called "Oak and ash and thorn", a celebration of the English countryside. It is time for the leaves on the great big trees to come pushing through into the world once more.

The weather has become wintry, which is not what you would expect for late May. the trouble is there are no clear expectations of our weather any more. Even the butterflies are in trouble. Out early in the heat of March they probably wish they had not emerged now.

Oak before ash, there'll be no but a splash

Ash before oak and we're in for a soak

I think the oak is just a little ahead, in spite of the soaking we already had.





















Did I post these roots already? I like them so much. The rivulet was quite a stream still at this point.

This is a real art shot. I took it when the flood was very much at the height.

                                                      This was a very peculiar piece of debris. How did it get here ?                       

A day later the river had risen still higher and when I came back it was about 400 yards further down the river. No sign of the drowned calf though.

Eventually the waters went down enough to let us back into the meadow once more. This lovely pool was left behind.

The bluebells have grown really tall on all the water this year; almost too tall.

Little trajedies happen all the time in spring. WEas it the cuckoo we keep hearing who took this one?

    

foraging

waters slowly go down, but there is a long way to go before the flow is normal

The water was spread all across the valley; now it is a shrinking lake

 Sophie almost caught this one. Poor thing was lucky to escape.

Finally the May is out. It is so late this year. |Why?

Abused and exploited children: who is to blame?

http://www.itn.co.uk/home/44971/Asian+sex+gang+jailed+for+over+70+years

A gang of Asian men have been charged with grooming young white girls for sexual abuse in Rochdale.

Some time ago a group was jailed for something similar more locally in Oxford, though in the Oxford case the girls may have been trafficked.

Last night on Newsnight a poet, Lemn Sissay, and a children's Commissioner discussed the situation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01hhd8s/Newsnight_11_05_2012/

The poet said we were all, as a society, as a collective parent, responsible for failing to safeguard our children.

I think he was right.

But we have very little say in the matter as ordinary members of the public.

It isn't as if we could throw out the local government officials in charge of child care.

It isn't as if there was a political party offering to change the spending priorities of local or National Governments.

We have very few journalists willing to tell us the truth about these things.

In Denmark children in care are offered care homes with something akin to alternative parenting. It works. Children there grow up safely.

In this country we do not invest in that kind of care.

We ask that teachers get better pay. No one thinks we should pay care staff  a good wage.

What you end up with is young inexperienced adults being asked to be the main carers of vulnerable teenagers only a few years younger than themselves.

You have managers who build their careers out of keeping their budgets down.

The children want to be loved and cared for.

Maybe we should not be too surprised they turn to these Asian predators, in the absence of quality care in children's homes.

Care is low status and low waged in this country.

The higher you go in social work the less contact with children you have. You fill in the forms that are a substitute for real safeguarding. You tick the boxes.

The whole approach to managing abandoned vulnerable children is flawed.

How do I know this. I worked for many years in social work as a consultant and trainer.

I have been a consultant and training officer to  a large group of children's homes.

More recently, I have witnessed the privatization of child care, hiving off children to PLC's for shareholder profit.

We see a town like Margate over run with farmed out children from London boroughs.

The management cultures are a bit like Macdonalds.

It might work if children were hamburgers.

I asked Cruse, the bereavement charity if they would write a foreword for my book.

I received this in reply from the editor of their journal. You can see why I retired from being a therapist.

I’m sorry to disappoint you – we don’t provide forewords for books unless we are directly involved in their writing. It’s a decision we have had to take as we receive so many requests, which is gratifying but hard to meet within our scant resources. Perhaps more fundamentally, putting our name to a book implies endorsement, which necessitates having to agree standards of what we might, or might not, regard as an acceptable standard of description of personal grief. This we consider completely inappropriate.

Why On earth would it possibly mean that?

I don't suppose it is intended, which just shows insensitivity. What you have written is foolish and offensive. So much of the professional response to people's grief is belittling. My Cruse counsellor was very good, but the administration of my case in the first place was mediocre at best. I have not written about that. Perhaps I will. As retired director of a school of psychotherapy and also once an NHS Aids Co-ordinator, I don't need to let this kind of pomposity bother me. But I never saw anything so pompous, so self important.

What incredible arrogance to write that you might ever be able to decide an "acceptable standard of description of personal grief."

You are a charity offering volunteer amateur counselling not a Government Department.

The procrustean bed that has been made for counselling by modern bureaucracy seems to have infected even the volunteer level. A little humility might come in useful.

As if anyone could possibly have an acceptable standard of description of personal grief. Acceptable to whom? God. As my dead wife Gill would have said, this is "barking mad."

Grief, and how people choose to describe it, is indeed very personal, as is how individuals respond to accounts of bereavement and grief, and not something on which we want to pronounce judgement.

You already did.

We are always delighted and grateful if someone wishes to include our contact details in their book, and we would be pleased if you wanted to do so.

I’m afraid the journal also took an editorial decision not to publish personal accounts of bereavement. So many are published and we just don’t have room in the journal, as we publish only 3 times a year. Again, it doesn’t feel right to be pronouncing critical judgement from an academic viewpoint on personal accounts.

I wonder what kind of critical judgement from an academic viewpoint you would have made on some of Kubler Ross's work.

A journey through grief: the book

A journey through grief: the book
Originally uploaded by NickOwenPhotography.co.uk

When light is fading from the day
Before night comes
I will remember you
Your light burned brightly
As the shadows grew

When the sun sinks slowly downwards
Turning the western sky to gold
I will remember you
And the riches you brought me
That suffusing warmth I knew

When the sun becomes a ball of fire
And the sky a vivid glorious red
I will remember you
The passion in our loving
Never stale and always new

When the sun is gone and the sky turns black
When the moon and stars emerge once more
I will remember you
Reflecting inwards on the life we shared

I know the world will be restored
And that our love was true

Nick Owen copyright 2007


Grief has come back to me in heavy waves this week. i had thought I was recovering and in so many ways I am. But I shall maybe never fully recover from losing my love. I wrote this poem while going round a theme park with Gill, or maybe just the boys. So sad I don't remember! I was not thinking at all about Gill dying. I thought this would make a good card poem for my new series "Poetry and Picture cards" I guess when I make the card the words will go better on the back. You tell me.

Hack Hack Hack Hack

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/15644038

The Murdochs may find it harder and harder to wriggle out of responsibility for their minions' intrusion into the private lives of British citizens both great and small.

I am not sure if it is more surprising that it has taken so long for even a part of the truth to be told, or the vast extent of the spy tentacles of the Murdoch empire into the life of our nation.

I have been concerned for a long time that we are living in a Police State. I was relieved when the Cameron Government started to take steps to reverse that development.

I had no idea that this pivate enterprise was able to recruit ex-policemen, and MI5 trained ones at that, to do work which makes the state's surveillance systems seem quite restricted.

It always amazed me that even the John Prescott's of this world were unable to get the ball rolling on exposing Murdoch and Co.

I begin to understand the terrible power and control that our politicians had given away to them now.

Can we take it back?

Who knows?

I have noticed how privatised military outfits took over policing powers in Iraq from the US army. Blackwater was well named.

Maybe it should have occurred to me that the multi-national company is often bigger and more powerful than the state, and that their activities would not be limited to law abiding behaviour.

Still naive after all these years, eh?

Oxford; Burning Man

The rise and possible fall of the wicker man

Far away from the encampments in London and Wall Street, where very peaceful protesters sit patiently for social justice to appear from some celestial plain, Oxford erected its Wicker Man. Designed by children to support a cancer charity, it makes me think of a more terrible cancer at the heart of our body politic. It has been touring the towns all round the county. I saw it at the Wychwood Fair in Cameron's own back yard, near Witney.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.143560239070619.32029.103566629736647&type=1

It seems that we have forgotten poor old Guy Fawkes and his barrels of gun powder under the houses of parliament. We are not bothered about the bickering Christians and their luke-warm support for poor people sleeping at the feet of the bankers’ gleaming spires. We have even changed our minds about King's marrying catholics.

We might just be returning to Paganism. I heard no screams from any bankers, buried in the fiery heart of the vast wicker sculpture that was set aflame in South Park on November the fifth. But I can record that there was a particularly demonic figure revealed, when the wood had all burned away. It seems that there is something hideous at the heart of our business world that cannot be destroyed by the fire of our every day anger.

It also seems that the purgatory fires of the financial melt down in 2008 left the ugly inner realities, almost the same as their outer forms, still standing.

The Prime Minister of Greece now falls at the feet of the money brokers who do not care for a democratic response to their country’s and Europe’s financial crisis. How infuriating of him to seek some kind of popular endorsement for the austerity foisted on ordinary people, while the power elites continue with no adjustments to their own wealth and status.

When London burned, back in the summer, there were few voices raised to stand up against the torrent of invective which was turned on the under class by the men in power. There were no bankers strung up on the capitals splendid riverside lamp posts. People who felt they had too little of the wealth of the bankers merely wanted to steal some for themselves.

Jesus Christ threw the money me out of the temple. They run his show today.

After the politicians’ expenses scandal and the more extreme scandals of corruption of Government by Murdoch media, and the elite’s massive payouts to each other for the failure and duplicity of their executives, the poor might have expected to be forgiven for dipping their own hands in the till of Mammon.

No chance. It was exemplary prison sentences for this rabble. On the other hand, just four members of parliament went to prison, when even the home secretary was cheating on the nation. The worst bankers slipped away with their pension pots intact, under legal agreements that could not be questioned by courts or politicians.

Bonuses are as high today as they were before. RBS declares another bean-feast today on the back of falling profits.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2058354/RBS--500m-bonuses-casino-bankers-despite-collapse-profits.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

In spite of the fact that we all now know that phone hacking was endemic in the Murdoch press for years, no one new has yet been sent to prison, or even sent to trial.

Since the prince of darkness, Peter Mandelson, declared his state of extreme relaxation around increasing wealth for the wealthy, it appears the whole country has begun to worship Money. Everything today is given a cash value. There is very little chance of a Big Society emerging that can live by any other value. Cameron is Thatcher's heir. He cannot escape her legacy of, "There is no such thing as society."

I don’t suppose many people think mythologically today. The Gods are supposed to be dead. A mere three million ever visit a Christian church. But the Old Gods are returning. Pluto was the Roman God of the underworld. He was the God of wealth. The Greeks called him Hades. Once you cross into his territory there is very little hope of return. Hades is the Lord of Death. He is the Lord of all today.

It is not Jesus Christ who has conquered death in this brave new world, however. The bankers’ towers dwarf the little edifice of St Paul's. These are the cathedrals to Pluto.

As floods swept into the Thai capital last week only the big banks had vast sand bag walls to keep the wet away.

There needs to be no death and/or resurrection for our moneyed men. They do not throw themselves from penthouse windows as the stock brokers did, when the slump was as bad back in the thirties. No-one drags their bodies out into the streets. They just sit tight and carry on as if nothing had changed. It is all a matter of confidence. Magicians are also sons of Pluto and his minister, Mercury.

A little juggling of perceptions, a little spinning, a little sitting tight, and then everything is fine again, at least for them.

The news papers and TV media have been incredibly slow to acknowledge the message of the “Occupy” protesters. They have all preferred to constrain the issue within parochial church affairs.

Not till the Archbishop of Canterbury expressed sympathy did they start to write about there being a case to answer by the plutocrats. That is why they are called plutocrats, by the way. They come from the underworld.

Peter McKay picks up the problem today in the Daily Mail. “Why terrorise inept clerics when they could camp on the doorsteps of Bob Diamond and his pals?” he says. But they aren’t terrorising anyone. My question is, can anything but terrorist tactics, fire and brimstone, do anything to dent the firewall of the arrogant rich.

Bob Diamond, and every other top banker who comes on air, seems to speak about appropriate remuneration for the scale of responsibility of these top people. But they did not take responsibility for the crash. Many did not even comprehend how it had happened. On this line of argument the dictators that are falling about us in the middle east should have been allowed to keep their vast fortunes, since they took responsibility for everything in their countries. In the past, Idi Amin and other tyrants slipped quietly into exile with their ill gotten gains. Gadaffi was not so lucky.

Cameron and Clegg mouth protests about income inequalities and unfairness. But they will never do anything serious to change things. Nor will Milliband, whatever he says now. He was part of the Blair project, which only made Thatcher’s changes worse for poor people.

The Christians made a fundamental change to western culture. They made one person a sacrifice for the failures of all time. Maybe it is time to revert to older ways. The pagans knew it was important to sacrifice the King in a ritual process that would ensure prosperity. This often meant ritual murder.

Leaders were heroes who suffered and died for us. Now only the poor squaddies die in Afghanistan for us.

If we are to start rebuilding the wicker man for a ritual regeneration of our Kingdoms, then our plutocrats may have something real to fear, when they steal from us, aggrandize themselves at our expense, and expect the rest of us to pay the price for their failures.

We await the fate of the new Greek Government and the old lecher, Berlusconi, with interest.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15617132

shadows

shadows
Originally uploaded by NickOwenPhotography.co.uk

A Lecture upon the Shadow
BY JOHN DONNE
Stand still, and I will read to thee
A lecture, love, in love's philosophy.
These three hours that we have spent,
Walking here, two shadows went
Along with us, which we ourselves produc'd.
But, now the sun is just above our head,
We do those shadows tread,
And to brave clearness all things are reduc'd.
So whilst our infant loves did grow,
Disguises did, and shadows, flow
From us, and our cares; but now 'tis not so.
That love has not attain'd the high'st degree,
Which is still diligent lest others see.

Except our loves at this noon stay,
We shall new shadows make the other way.
As the first were made to blind
Others, these which come behind
Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.
If our loves faint, and westwardly decline,
To me thou, falsely, thine,
And I to thee mine actions shall disguise.
The morning shadows wear away,
But these grow longer all the day;
But oh, love's day is short, if love decay.
Love is a growing, or full constant light,
And his first minute, after noon, is night.