Kate Middleton and Morning Sickness

I post here mostly about music, art and words but I digress here...

Kate Middleton's Morning Sickness. I've been through it. I found it best to throw up an hour before meals! That way there was some chance of keeping the meals down, oh dear. Also have regular small protein snacks every few hours to keep blood sugar levels as normal as possible - nuts, cheese, tuna, oatcakes, whatever you feel able to eat. Drink water in small amounts regularly too. I remember even smells in the food stores made me feel sick! Especially raw meat.

Also - DON'T TAKE ANY DRUGS for morning sickness. 

Sadly I was given an anti-sickness drug with my second pregnancy and had a very scary drug reaction several days later when my jaw started to freeze up and we had to drive to the emergency at the hospital. This drug allergic reaction caused me to loose the baby at 16 weeks a few weeks later. Drug allergies can be life threatening. My very strong advice is - DON'T take any medicine when you are pregnant.  
I went on a few years later to have my beautiful daughter (not without the heartache of the loss though).  I was sick again this time and sorry to say sickness can last most of the pregnancy, while it was better the last few months - and I took no drugs this time. Who says having a baby is easy! Maybe if men had to carry babies there would be less war and bloodshed I've wondered? I couldn't watch the news when I was pregnant. 

It may well be a girl for Kate - I had two boys and a daughter and was only sick with my daughter. I wish her well. : )  
Ps Also shouldn't be called morning sickness, more like all day sickness. : ( 

Is social mobility dead

'Is social mobility dead in the UK? We are now ruled by unexceptional people with exceptional education.'  British author Tony Parsons

 

There is now no social mobility in the UK says Parsons.

From 1960 to 1975 we had five Prime Ministers who were from ordinary beginnings and who were educated at state schools - from Harold Wilson to John Major. Parson argues that there is now no way for that to happen now and the gap between the rich and the poor has got wider. 

The argument against the Grammar schools is that they only lift up 20%  - well the Comprehensives lift up zero per cent!  Some argue that Grammar school selection is unfair - well life is tough and life is unfair.That selected group at least had a chance for university education - now it is zero %.

What happens now in schools is that mediocrity is encouraged in preference to excellence.

I know because my three children went through the present day school system recently. No matter how much work for excellence my daughter put in her efforts were consistently ignored while the less able were favoured. The attitude is that the bright children will do well no matter. What message does this send out to the children when high standards are ignored. My daughter is now training as a paediatrian, thanks to her own efforts - and yes my children all went to the local state school.  

One thing that does make a big difference is offering good nursery education, and a good grounding in pre-skills BEFORE schooling even starts. We lived in America for ten years where my older son was educated until he was six and he benefited greatly there from the training given in Kindergarten school.

It is wrong to say that the Grammar school system was inflexible. There was a young boy who lived near me - he was immature at 11 and never made the Grammar school cut off, but he started to perform well at secondary school and after two years he was moved to the Grammar school and he went on to study for a science degree at university.  In Scotland the Grammar schools were known as secondary moderns.

Parson states that the major parties are against social mobility and that we need to put family back at the centre. British author Tony Parsons on This Week BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/This_Week_06_12_2012/

Tony Parsons (born 6 November 1953) is a British journalist broadcaster and author.
He began his career as a music journalist on the NME, writing about punk music. Later, he wrote for The Daily Telegraph, before going on to write his current column for the Daily Mirror. Parsons was for a time a regular guest on the BBC Two arts review programme The Late Show, and still appears infrequently on the successor Newsnight Review; he also briefly hosted a series on Channel 4 called Big Mouth.
He is the author of the multi-million selling novel, Man and Boy (1999). Parsons had written a number of novels including The Kids (1976), Platinum Logic (1981) and Limelight Blues (1983), before he found mainstream success by focussing on the tribulations of thirty-something men. Parsons has since published a series of best-selling novels – One For My Baby (2001), Man and Wife (2003), The Family Way (2004), Stories We Could Tell (2006), My Favourite Wife (2007), Starting Over (2009) and Men From the Boys (2010). His novels typically deal with relationship problems, emotional dramas and the traumas of men and women in our time. He describes his writing as 'Men Lit', as opposed to the rising popularity of 'Chick Lit'.

Our Culture of Violence

I am writing about the tragic death of a young 20yr-old boy who lived behind us here in a northern suburb of Glasgow. He was a strong young rugby playing man who was violently and indiscriminately attacked in the centre of Glasgow by two youths on the night of an old firm game. He was beaten on his head with a baseball bat. A recent studio from California cited Scotland as having the highest rates of Youth violence in the world and when it reaches so close to home, it shocks and horrifies us all.

As I pick up the Evening Times I read of further attacks. Apparently the two youths involved in this random attack, injured several others that very same night. My son works as a junior doctor in Glasgow and those on call in the Infirmary talked of the numbers brought in injured that same night. It was a Friday night after an Old Firm clash, the Rangers vs Celtic football game. 

We live in a Culture of Violence that starts in the home and spread out into the community at large. Add to this a cocktail of alcohol over-indulgence and ease of access to drugs and you have a lethal combination and a powder keg waiting to explode. 

Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, recently suggested in the press that it was time for an Open Debate on this pressing subject. We need to look at other cosmopolitan areas such as New York which used to have a high level of violence and who adopted a ‘zero tolerance’ approach several years ago, which meant targeting young criminals and the smallest crimes before they resulted in more serious crimes. My daughter was in New York this past summer and found she found the city a safer place to walk around in than Glasgow. We also need to tackle alcohol and drug abuse problems through education and through stricter laws on selling alcohol to the very young.  

The introduction of new Laws banning physical violence in the home may help to raise awareness that violence towards others is not acceptable behaviour in our modern society. This also raises questions about our society’s attitude to violence generally, as a way of controlling others. There are other more successful ways of coping with problems and with young children. Another problem is the severe lack of male role models for many young boys growing up on the UK and the fact that Scotland has such a high rate of single parent families.

The second issue is attitudes to Binge drinking. We glorify ‘being drunk’ and ‘binge drinking’ in Scotland as if it is something to be proud of. A whole generation is being caught up in a cheap triple alcoholic haze. Do we care - well we should. We set the example by what we do and say.

My view is it is the entire Culture and attitudes here in Scotland that have to change and not about a few ‘experts’ telling the less fortunate to behave better.

It is time we looked seriously at these and other alternative ways of behaving before youth violence escalates even further on our streets.