Month: June 2019

Smash Hits

See also: Found.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised these last few days, for two reasons.

Firstly, I see who “referrers” to the site are. Over time, I’ve seen the referrers start to include some of the main search engines. A couple of months ago it was google.co.uk, a few weeks ago it was google.com, their main site. So, ever so slowly, I guess the profile of the blog is going up.

Secondly, a couple of times over the last few weeks, I’ve seen an abnormal number of hits, probably 10x normal. Once, probably 100x. I see the demographics of these hits, though, and whilst most of the hits are from the UK, there are a noticeable minority from other jurisdictions like the USA, Russia and Israel.

I don’t mind this one bit – as long as my audience realises that I’m only really going to write in English, then if I can help anybody else get through their experience, that’s brilliant. However, it’s also raised my caution levels as well. In the past, people have left spam comments, “buy viagra here”-type comments. I really don’t like to censor things, but I do if I feel they run against the spirit of the blog. So I try to look at the comments regularly just to make sure…

Blogger helps me a little with this, it automatically rates comments and might put them in a kind-of “Junk Email” folder (where presumably they remain until I approve them for publication), but it does kind-of surprise me that anybody would feel this blog is an appropriate place to write such comments in the first place. But I guess the point is that they just don’t care.

Maturity

Part of me chuckles whenever some kind of sexuality-based issue comes up. LGBT, Pride etc. I mean, other than a broad notion that a couple should be able to behave as they wish, as long as it is consensual, I am surprised that it is such a big deal for people. But then I’m probably surprised because with any non-hetero situation, there has been an associated fight for equal rights. I’ve always seen this in other scenarios and appreciate that, yes, a fight for equality is a big deal.

There’s an issue currently with some schools in Birmingham. As you can imagine it’s not a topic I follow closely, so I might have this wrong. A group of schools up there are teaching kids about relationships. The teaching includes gay and bi relationships, and I’m not sure if all the schools involved are primary schools (4-11 years), but certainly some of them are. These lessons have sparked protests from parents, and I think the dispute is framed as the establishment (including local council and national government versus the parents.

I think the interesting question here is the broader one of “at what age is it appropriate for someone to do x. X might be many things, from something like learning about non-hetero relationships to the criminal age of responsibility. We’ve had politicians over the last few years for expressing views when they were young-grown-ups which are different to the views they hold now. I’d include this as well – basically anything along the road from immaturity to maturity.

Just taking a yardstick, I think that the current age of legal responsibility in the UK is twelve. So, presumably, somebody could be convicted of a hate crime aged twelve. Theoretically. So if you’re teaching somebody about non-hetero relationships, it is probably good that people know about them before the age of twelve.

I don’t say here that twelve is the correct age, merely that one event should precede the other. In fact, I think that twelve is a pretty arbitrary number and would be happy to be swayed by science. Just as I would with things like the minimum age for smoking and drinking etc. In particular, that other example I gave – people changing their views on something – I have heard that there is evidence that our brains don’t finish growing until our mid-twenties, so maybe rather than talking about lowering the age to do something, we should be talking about raising it?

Incidentally, the reason I’m mildly amused is because, to me, somebody’s sexuality is totally unimportant. I’ve thought this since maybe the stroke, so possibly something like stroke re-defines the things we consider to be important in life? Having said that, equality is still important to me. So I can understand their struggle, even though I don’t share it. It can’t just be an “age” thing, because some of the people getting so worked up on this issue are older than me!

Water Into Wine

I’m very good these days at turning a negative into a positive. Let’s face it there aew so many negatives!

I’ve run out of Pyrex bowls in which to cook my porridge. I’m just trying to wait for the dishwasher to be full before I put it on, so a couple of empty bowls are in there waiting to be washed.

Havever, I need breakfast, I NEED breakfast, and remembered some Pains au chocolat in the freezer, ready to bake. I mean, porridge may be good for my carbs but….fuck it!

I just need to train myself not to burn my tongue, and let them cool a while as I get them out of the oven!