Happy Solstice to all

I am backing Paxman. We need to rescue the BBC from the cowards and incompetents.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/nov/11/newsnight-insiders-fear-survive-scandal

"It remains to be seen when – or even if – he will return to the programme after his statement, unprecedented for a serving BBC presenter, issued through his agent, Capel Land, late on Saturday night.

"George Entwistle's departure is a great shame. He has been brought low by cowards and incompetents," said Paxman.

"The real problem here is the BBC's decision, in the wake of the Hutton inquiry, to play safe by appointing biddable people.

"They then compounded the problem by enforcing a series of cuts on programme budgets, while bloating the management. That is how you arrive at the current mess on Newsnight. I very much doubt the problem is unique to that programme. I had hoped that George might stay to sort this out. It is a great pity that a talented man has been sacrificed while time-servers prosper. I shall not be issuing any further statements or doing any interviews.""

The old bully and coward has become a potential hero. Paxman spoke out to remind us that the real crisis for the BBC came with its demolition by Blair and Hutton.

Greg Dyke gave it independence from the Government status quo. Blair removed him and replaced him with cowards and incompetents.

They could not even make a stand against Jimmy Saville.

I am very much afraid that the enemies of freedom integrity and democracy have used poor Mr Meesham as a stick to make sure the BBC does not dare to dig out the abusers in high places.

They did not dare see where things were going with Saville.

Now they will dare even less to seek the rapists in high places. 

What we need is an unstoppable internet campaign to bring the focus back to the abusers of power and away from covering up for cowards and incompetents.

Who cares? Parents, the state and the abuse or neglect of children

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20226345 Just as more news comes out about the failure of the state to care for the children it "looks after," a report comes out suggesting the state should take over the lives of more children. Since the baby Peter case there has been a vast increase in care proceedings. There are monsters out there still in charge of children in the community. It was also monstrous that the state should have ignored and overlooked the needs and care of baby Peter. That case happened in spite of all the boxes that the Government set up as a way of taking care of the Nation's children. In that case the ticking of boxes should have helped. That it did not was down to the failure of the professionals involved. Ultimately, no tick box system will ever ensure the well being of children. It is a way of covering your back not covering your client's needs. We have a professional system that moves people away from direct and continuous contact with children as they become more qualified. The more qualified you become the less you are involved with care and the more "managing" you do. We recruit young inexperienced unqualified people to take care of children. They are poorly paid, which means the professionals with experience, knowledge and mortgages to pay do not take on the jobs. A child who comes out of the care system has much worse life chances than those outside care. This need not be so. The Scandinavian countries show that it can be done well. They spend the money and recruit quality staff. In a time of hardship this country is not going to spend the money on this most vulnerable of client groups. Children's homes are targets for politicians sexual proclivities. The latest news on past abuse in North Wales Children's Homes http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/news/?q=north%20wales%20children's%20homes shows that the rights of children are not being defended against the holders of power, even when there is an inquiry. Even now it is doubtful that the abused will dare to tell it like it is, or was. It is a while since I worked with children's home staff. I was consultant to four homes in London years ago, and worked with staff in a training role for many more. That was thirty years ago, though. Ten years ago I worked for a training company with staff from PLC's organized to make profits. I was appalled at the cost cutting measures they employed, so that staff remained on call during training. At one point half my course were called away to chase children who had run wild round the streets of Margate because the supervision was inadequate. It was a course on supervision, where many of the course members were supposed to learn to supervise before they had had any experience of being supervised themselves. They could not bare to explore any feelings. At the end of the course the staff had a box ticked which made them supervisors. When I protested about this they tried to withhold payment. Procedures ensure nothing. Ticking boxes ensure nothing. We should have learned that by now. It works at McDonalds. It doesn't work for taking care of vulnerable people. The whole system needs to be changed. I have much personal experience of how the state can fail in its attempts to take care of children. They are documented here; http://blairyengland.blogspot.co.uk/ When the people in charge are war criminals we should not be surprised when head teachers over step their marks. It was scant satisfaction to prove that the care we provided was much better than that provided by the school. Even forcing the resignation of the head was scant satisfaction. Nor was it any satisfaction at all when a potentially good social worked lost hos job for breaking procedures with us. All this new stuff emerging about child abuse reminds me of my own experience of school. We were so vulnerable sent away to boarding school at seven. Rumours have it my pre-pep school head was eventually sacked for abuse. There was one boy who was being very regularly beaten by the head. He used all manner of weapons, the cane, the belt, the salted gym shoe, being his favourites. A lifetime of therapy has helped me resolves much of my problems. But it has taken a very long time to recover from institutional attempts to control my way of being. There is something that is still compulsive about my non comformism.

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.