On blogging …

Damn! Never leave things too late.

I wrote a really intelligent response to a post on one of the WordPress blogs, which was incredibly complimentary, saying how I thought their ability to choose the most boring blogs possible to highlight, was seriously clever.

It hung in moderation for ever and a day, and now comments are closed, and it has disappeared. Sad Cloudyroughseas who wasn’t smart enough to copy her comment across before they deleted her.

Anyway, if you are having problems going to sleep – here you go:

http://wp.me/pf2B5-4dA

Recommended if you want to know how to write the most boring and long-winded blog ever.

WordPress is just as censorious as me.

And speaking of which, while I’m pretty flexible, I thought I would explain the recent deletion of comments on here.

Normally when someone writes something I disagree with I leave it up there. My golden PR rule is: Don’t reply to something that doesn’t merit a response.

But when it is rude and insulting, adds no value, then, on rare occasions, I will delete.

So this:

You probably don’t want my opinion but here it is – This is really nasty, intolerant and gender aggressive, in fact everything that I have come to expect of you by following your blog! Who cares? Life is for living not worrying about! Call me a gal – I wouldn’t mind!

got deleted. As did the subsequent comments. Nothing to do with the post and just a personal attack.

What about this one:

Call me what ever you like, I really don’t care that much.

I apologise that my comment was not what you like – a lot of people telling you how wonderful you are and how they agree with everything you say! That’s what you like isn’t it?

I am inclined to agree with the things you say but, crucially, not entirely, but that is irrelevant to you isn’t it – everything in your mind is black and white – you are grossly intolerant and interested only in your own perspective and narrow minded view of the World and quite frankly you are welcome to it!

Get a Life…

And let’s cut to the chase, when I deleted all our comments in that asinine exchange:

Ah, Censorship! Often used by those who cannot deal intelligently with a challenge.

Some time ago on blogger I got some pretty abusive comments on a couple of feminist posts. I deleted those too:

Here’s some real manly (also, scientific) wisdom for you: The majority of “radical feminists” who blame their problems on men simply suffer from an extreme victim complex (The majority of humans suffer this as well, however typically to a much lesser extent). The only problem in your life is that you aren’t happy about it. Of course, you automatically assume that if you don’t feel right, then something (other than yourself, obviously) must have wronged you. So, you blame men. And yet, you do nothing about it. Obviously, you are being oppressed! As well as victimized! Your entire life must be spend in recovery! It’s up to *someone else* to fix everything. Also, the fact that you blame an entire group of people (rather than a specific person or persons) implies that you have never experienced anything “oppressive”, “abusive”, or “hateful” by any man, or your instinctive thought patterns would instantly blame them. Since you have noone to blame, you blame people you have never even met.

I wrote about Telefonica (Spanish telephone network) and the same commenter came back and said my criticism about Telefonica was totally down to my feminist perspective. Um? I was writing about a poor and basically misleading public service.

OMG IM SO SORRY, THOSE PATRIARCHAL PHONE COMPANIES ARE PHYSICALLY AND SPIRITUALLY ABUSING YOU!!!!! WRITE MORE BLOGS ABOUT THEM, THAT’LL PUT AN END TO THEIR WOMAN-HATING POLICIES!

A discussion on a blog post is fine, but a personal attack is not. It adds no value to a serious post and leaves everyone waiting and watching on the sidelines to see how the spat develops.

I read on another blog (Gerry’s) a similar discussion about what to do with abusive comments. Most people said they deleted them. Only one said they would leave them up to show someone up for what they were. Censorship and editorial control have always been there and anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. You send a letter to your local newspaper and they reserve the right to edit, ignore and basically do what they want with your letter. Same rules apply on here. Actually I don’t edit comments, apart from spelling amendments by request. But it’s an interesting concept. Leave up irrelevant abuse or delete it?

And on different blogging policies, how about guest blogging?

I’ve offered/been asked to do a few. Being asked to guest on a blog with fewer comments than mine does raise a few questions. Basically why am I writing on someone else’s blog for no gain? What am I getting out of it? Cloudyroughseas is not that nice.

But still, if it’s a blog I like, then I’m interested. Some time back, Pippa (my dog) did an interview on a dogblog. And what did he get out of it? Jack shit absolutamente nada in terms of new visitors or comments. No engagement. No nothing.

My sticking points with guest blogging are people telling me how to write. Prescriptive rules. Word limit. Style. Spelling and grammar checks. Er, wait people, I’m a qualified journalist and YOU want to check MY writing? And that includes a guest blog post that I turned down for the Daily Post.

Recently I was asked to guest blog by someone who does get a lot of commenters and has a good blog. She helpfully pointed me towards her rules for guest blogging. I’d already read them. I’m not always entirely stupid.

I took the discussion to email. She would only check for grammar and spelling – aaaaagh! – and copyright was hers. For my work? For free? I don’t think so.

Apparently, if two people post the same crap on their blogs it sends both blogs down in the SEO rankings (Search Engine Optimisation, not Senior Executive Officer for those of us rooted in ancient British civil service days).

I don’t blog to get high in SEO rankings. I really do not care two hoots where I am. I blog because I enjoy writing and because I enjoy the intelligent comments I receive from people in response to my posts. But what I write is mine. No-one else gets that copyright and certainly not for free. Stuff SEO.

I might add that we are still – as far as I know – on amicable terms. We just come from different sides of the blog.

The exchange did prompt me to write a guest blog policy on roughseas. Where I say that what you write is yours, and your views are not mine. Or something like that. If someone spends time writing for my blog, I’m not prepared to put restrictions on them. Not that anyone will offer to write my blog posts for me in a hurry I’m sure.

Political correctness

Here we go. Dons kick-arse boots and picks up 17mm Allen key (bought yesterday specifically for this post) to repel all attacks.

So, take care. The 17mm Allen key is one evil bit of kit. Even in my hands.

Now, if you want to read about the history of political correctness, you can find it on wiki. So I’m not repeating it.

Some time ago when I was looking up ‘political correctness’ because I was irritated about people using it as a generalisation for anything they neither agreed with nor understood, I found an interesting article about the historical use of the concept by right-wing parties. Sadly that article seems to have disappeared. Surprisingly.

This isn’t an academic post, I’m looking rather at popular usage of the term. And what is, or isn’t, ‘politically correct – or – incorrect’.

Let’s start with some easy linguistic examples.

My blog post here on Clouds that gets the most hits is what to call someone who chairs a meeting.

To summarise, the options are:

Chairman, Madam Chairman, Chairwoman, Chairperson, Chair.

I’ve done those basically in historical order of usage. Unless you were a member of the USSR where they had chairs a long time ago.

A chair is not just for sitting on (as I once thought). And as I am not a man, I do not wish to be called either of the first two titles when I chair a meeting. The third is gender specific, the fourth is contrived, and the fifth is simple. Easy.

Why is this important? Wait. Some more examples first.

Married names. Or not in my case.

When I got married I didn’t change my name. Elizabeth Taylor was my shining example, so if she didn’t have to do it, neither did I. Plus colleagues on the newspaper kept their maiden birth names too for professional use.

At one point, I thought I would have a change and use my partner’s name. I started with the building society and they managed to use my married name to send statements to me and my birth name for the account. I rapidly changed back.

So I am not Mrs Roughseas. Or Mrs Cloudyroughseas. I am either Miss or Ms. But as you don’t know my marital status, or you didn’t before I wrote this, why would you assume anything? Just call me Ms thank you. Men aren’t identified by their marital status so why should I be? I’m not a possession from the Middle Ages.

Change of subject. What about people with disabilities?

‘Wheelchair-bound’ is a classic. If you’ve worked with disabled people you may have come across their ire when this is used. I certainly have. The implication here is that their lives are restricted to a wheelchair, whereas the other way of reframing the situation is that they can get out and about and move around with a wheelchair. They are wheelchair-users, or people who use wheelchairs.

Disabled parking spaces. That is just inaccurate. The spaces are not disabled at all. When I was writing patient information leaflets for cancer services we had LONG discussions about how to describe the parking bays reserved for disabled people. These days it seems to be ‘Blue Badge Holders only’.

Then there are all the other health terms – elderly services, old peoples’ services or geriatric services?

There is, or was, a continual debate within the health service about the medical model and the social model.

So, the medical model refers to a diabetic, or an epileptic. The person is being described in terms of their disease.

The social model refers to a person with diabetes or a person with epilepsy. The person comes first here, they are not defined by their disease, rather, the disease is an adjunct. Sure they have diabetes or epilepsy, but it’s not the only thing in their life.

Another of my past lives. Health and safety, which seems to get blamed for everything under the sun these days. But even wiki supports me on this. Changes to health and safety legislation are not due to so-called political correctness. Even back 25 years ago when I was working for the Health and Safety Executive we were having to comply with EU regs. Bureaucratic and nanny state intervention would be valid criticisms but describing H&S regs as PC is ignorant.

What about unemployment?

Why on earth does someone think that it is because of ‘political correctness’ that women get work? A comment from a white British male years ago on a forum was on the lines of, he couldn’t get a job because of political correctness and the white working-class male was being victimised due to the other sex getting priority. Join the club sweetheart. I’ve been in it all my life.

What about wolf whistles from building sites? Banned. In the past I’ve had them (surprisingly). Quite right too. To ban them, I mean. No, it is not flattering before you all say it is. There is nothing remotely flattering in some arsehole who you have never met and would never wish to, sending you a verbal message that basically says ‘Oi, I’d fuck you.’ Because that’s what it is.

I’ll go back to gender-specific language, because much of the debate about ‘political correctness’ is relevant to feminism.

I have said this before, but I will say it again for those of you who have not yet got the message. Language influences our thoughts and behaviour. As do images. Por eso we have advertising to influence us to buy products through a judicious use of words and pictures.

If the slow ones at the back of the class have grasped that idea, let’s move on. (I won’t mention the use of the words women or ladies because I have learned the slow ones know better – they would do, they’re men).

Describing a woman who chairs a meeting as a man, perpetuates the idea that she is an anomaly, and that the norm (and the desired one at that) is a man.

Describing a woman in terms of her marital status (or lack of) does the same thing. She has no independence of her own and needs to be categorised.

Describing a disabled person as wheelchair-bound is defining someone by the way they – don’t – get around. It doesn’t respect the person.

Similarly, describing someone by their chronic long-term condition is looking at them as an object. For scientific or medical study.

The whole issue about ‘political correctness’ is not just wanting to use different words for the sake of it, it’s about trying to change outmoded, prejudiced and disrespectful attitudes towards other people. To dismiss that as a derisory political agenda is to dismiss people who are discriminated against.

A few personal anecdotes.

Some years ago, I was parking my car in a city car park. A big black Rasta man approached me and I thought he was going to knife me.

‘Would you like my car parking ticket? It’s not used up,’ he said.

I figured it was time to stop being racist.

In the same city I met up with the woman with whom I’d travelled around the world.

‘Bloody disgrace,’ said her and her partner. ‘The council only wants to employ black lesbian disabled women.’

I’d moved on a little in my thinking by then. There aren’t that many black lesbian disabled women, and why shouldn’t they get a job? Given how prejudiced we all are. Innately or otherwise.

Guys ….

I said I would write this post about political correctness following a comment on roughseas that referred to a ‘guy’ writing a political speech. Given that there are some good women writers, politicians, political activists, and it wasn’t known who had written the speech, I took exception to this, and said commenter took his bat home.

Guy is NOT a gender neutral term, kid yourselves not. Just like saying, ‘when you read he, that also means she’ – but we are too lazy to write s/he for example. That is using the male default. Why not use she? And while ever the male default is used it reasserts patriarchal society. If you don’t understand the concept of a patriarchal society then I would respectfully suggest you don’t weigh in with your ill-considered opinion. I don’t add my lack of knowledge to discussions about LGBTQ or race, so unless you actually know something about feminism (which I doubt from previous comments on here), don’t waste your time.

You guys, may well be used to address a mixed group of company, and be accepted terminology. It doesn’t suit me however. How many times does a mixed group of people get addressed as you gals?

I’m seriously looking forward to the day that heterosexual men accept being called by a default female term.

IF you know what you are talking about, then please comment. If you don’t, then I would suggest you ask a question. If you are just going to come out with boring old simplistic trash about ‘it’s not my view and therefore it’s wrong’ don’t bother.

Also, I’ve heard the one about ‘you’ve got a chip on your shoulder before’ too. That’s why I’m living in Spain and Gibraltar with two houses.

Open for nice comments. Thank you.

Ghastly words

To avoid.

The English language is abundantly blessed with words, often many meaning the same but each one with a slightly different nuance.

Do you get the idea?

or

Do you understand my drift?

Both broadly mean the same, but the first is more specific, the second has a slightly vaguer feel to it.

Reading around the internet, blogs and poorly written articles on news sites, I felt like banging my head on poor Hal laptop.

It must be my age.

I wrote before about how awesome has me reaching for the sick bucket, closely followed by ‘stuff’.

It’s rather like when I was starting out in journalism, and I was instructed not to use the word facilities. It was too general. If someone was going to provide toilets, say so (can’t remember what else facilities referred to).

We couldn’t use erection either but that was for a different reason, eg erection of a garden shed. They always had to be constructed or built. But definitely not erected.

So which words have got up the Cloudy Roughseas nose this week?

Here we go:

You rock

It’s on a par with awesome. I think it is meant to mean, I agree with what you say, you are a considerate person, you write thoughtfully, blah blah, but it’s much easier to say you rock. And in point of fact, I don’t rock. Unless I have had far too much to drink.

• figurative (of a place) have an atmosphere of excitement or much social activity : the new town really rocks | [as adj. ] ( rocking) a rocking resort.

• informal: this game totally rocks; be impressive, informal kick butt, blow one away, blow one’s mind, rock one’s world, be cool, be on fire.

You guys

This is not a gripe at the gender-specific aspect of the phrase, but rather I find it irritating, sloppy, informal and slangy. [See, I told you my age was showing through]

In fact, You guys rock, you are awesome, is possibly the worst combination of all.

I’m down with

Down with who? Status Quo? (Down, down deeper and down) or where?

[Status Quo incidentally came to Gib a few years ago. Brilliant. Like all the other tight-arses we stood outside the concert venue and peeked through to vaguely see them but listened to the music for free. In fact looking at that 1975 vid I think I could get a retrospective crush on the one with the long straight hair playing guitar and singing ....]

Back to down with ..

Apparently this one means that you get on with people.

Or you agree with them, or you are homosexual. Well why not say any or all of those. I’m down (with) is just meaningless.

If I say something like that it would be on the lines of:

I’m down in the chicken shed

or

down at the bottom of the garden.

On my last grammar police post, J G Burdette mentioned ‘like’ and Perpetua ‘ mentioned ‘you know’.

Example of usage:

‘like, you know,’ to neatly combine the two.

Both valid ghastly words/phrases.

And one I learned a while ago, that left me scratching my head – the get-go. Get-go is actually in my computer’s dictionary much to my surprise, but there again, Hal is American. I managed to work out that get-go refers to beginning or start, eg ‘from the get-go’ means from the beginning. So why not say so?

What else have I noticed?

Well, a few grammatical errors.

I will hold up my hand and say I always proof read, hit publish and then find something else that is wrong.

For some reason I have developed an irritating habit of writing now instead of know. They aren’t even pronounced the same, and yet the sneaky k disappears from the front.

On other blogs I’ve noticed where instead of were, and the classic confusion of affect and effect.

As in: to affect a change (um, don’t think so)

and

we were effected by this (really?)

I’m currently having to curb myself from using extremely, which I am currently over-using. Rather like currently. I like it because it seems more emphatic than very. However as soon as we start to overuse words, they lose their emphasis, and that’s the point of this piece.

Overusing lazy slang words because we can’t be bothered to think of more precise vocabulary, and overusing swearing, takes away from their meaning and results in sloppy and mediocre writing.

There is a place for informality, slang and swearing. But it should be the exception rather than the rule.

Nor is this a post directed at people with dyslexia or who have had a crap education and can not spell.

I was on a forum where someone was dyslexic and persevered to write posts, in spite of some inconsiderate toerags criticising his spelling.

I thought he was brave to continue with his posts, and admired him. It wasn’t even difficult to read what he wrote.

But there is a difference between a) sloppy use of language b) using text speak when writing and c) mis-spelling for whatever reason.

Most of us can do something about the first two. A lot of people can’t do anything about the third one.

If you have a good education, think about the words you use, choose them carefully and consider yourself extremely privileged. If you have problems spelling, for whatever reason, don’t feel intimidated, and write what you want.

So long as it isn’t ‘You guys are awesome, you rock.’

ETA: there are some good examples from readers below, so do read their views about words to avoid and pet peeves.

Sheer garbage

There is some utter tosh being written about the death of one woman. I can not believe it.

I have bored readers on roughseas enough, so I will make Thatcher, Part 3 a Clouds post.

And, what is interesting, is the way people can happily blur history to make their point.

This has always happened. But, people seem to be so thick these days, that they believe everything they read. Not that they read very much. I get more sense having a political discussion with my 80+-year-old Spanish neighbours than I read on half the internet.

Rather like the crazy music downloads. Either celebrating her death or commemorating her lifetime. What in the world will that achieve? Hardly going to bring back coal mines, British steel, shipbuilding, or restore public sector works and council housing.

I read one blog that said, Britons are split about Thatcher. Love her or hate her. Um. I’m ambivalent. Just like I am about the monarchy. So no. That is not true.

She lost power more than 20 years ago. Fin. The end. No more to say about her. And yet people are still carping on about what she did. Or rather, what the Conservative government at the time did.

Because despite the idea that she ran the country on her own, she did have a few MPs, and a cabinet, even if she was allegedly, a despot.

One blog said that she had slurred Nelson Mandela by calling him a terrorist. I could have missed something but he did lead a campaign against the government that involved bombing and was convicted of sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government.

That’s not to defend apartheid. Or racism. But rather to say, that technically, calling Mandela a terrorist is no worse than calling Yitzhak Shamir a terrorist.

Both became leaders of their country. Both were previously imprisoned by the state for planning to kill people, and leading campaigns of terror. A la Michael Collins. (Ireland) Unlike Collins, Mandela and Shamir have managed to live into their nineties. Recipe for old age? A little state rebellion.

I remember when Mandela was freed. I was on a bus in France going to our hotel in Vercors for a cross country skiing holiday and a couple opposite us burst into song ‘Free Nelson Mandela’.

But the point is, Thatcher wasn’t inaccurate to describe Mandela as a terrorist.

The other one, that is doing the rounds is the Belgrano issue.

Yawn.

For the benefit of the dull ones out there, and there are clearly millions, let’s do this easily.

1) The Belgrano was sailing away from the Falklands

2) The Belgrano was doing this as a ruse and planned to turn around and sail back to the Falklands

3) Britain was at war

Even the Argentinians admitted the Belgrano was going to sail back. What would you do if you were at war? Wait like sitting ducks for the ship to shoot you?

And that’s a war crime? I think the only war crime is Argentina invading the Falklands who want stuff all to do with Argentina and have put that on record this year with a 99 point whatever percent vote in favour of remaining British.

There are no fair play rules in war, either you want to win, or you sit around and wait for people to kill you.

But if we want to accuse former PMs of war crimes, where was Blair and Bush’s justification for a little invasive warfare under the guise of weapons of mass destruction? That to me, is a far more serious matter than defending territories of the sovereign realm.

I have read articles about Thatcher might have been involved in this, she might have been involved in that, dodgy finance deals. Well, prove it, instead of slagging her off when she is dead and can’t answer back. Because, as we all know (or you do now because I am telling you) you can’t libel the dead.

As far as I am concerned, she wanted to destroy the traditional working class socialist vote, and she succeeded in that. Although the union disputes/victories were part of her success, the right to buy council housing probably pipped it.

Thatcher’s government doesn’t need that much analysis. That is the essence of it. The rest of it is just bells and whistles.

But, while I didn’t agree with her policies, I just do not understand the crass and basically ill-informed vitriol that is being directed against a dead woman. Sexism I claim. Because after all, did any male prime ministers or presidents or leaders of state ever get anything wrong?

How about those bastards who have changed my pension age? And endlessly fuck about with private pensions?

The banking crisis? The so-called austerity measures?

And that’s all Thatcher’s fault?

As for the funeral. Should have been a private one. Rather like Alan Clark’s. Over and done with before anyone knew about it.

Sink or swim

My mother never learned to swim. When she visited us in Spain, we took her for a walk around the beach, she was in her late 70s, a leisurely walk of around an hour, but she was quite capable of it.

We got to one of the local streams, and she refused to cross it. It was slightly more full than on the pic I have linked to, but still, it was doable and we would both have taken her across. It wasn’t exactly waist high. So we had to turn around and go back the same way. She was too frightened.

But 30 or 40 years before, she had made sure I could swim. Because she couldn’t.

I’d gone to one of the local swimming baths. They were baths in those days rather than pools. They also had turkish baths, invariably for men, in the days before saunas became popular.

My cousin was an extremely good swimmer and had trained with Eileen Fenton. Who, you ask?

22 August 1950
• Hassan Abdel Rehim (Egypt) won the first Daily Mail cross channel race(men) – France to England August 22, 1950. The women’s race was won by Eileen Fenton (Dewsbury, England).

WELCOME HOME EILEEN FENTON

[Click on the image for the link, it is worth it for the incredible crowds, the very old-fashioned British voice, and the rather nice image of Dewsbury Town Hall]

Meanwhile, my rather sporty cousin took me to the baths and told me to make friends with the water. I was confused by that. I thought I was going to learn to swim. Not throw water in each other’s faces. Might have been a good tactic for some. Didn’t work for me.

Next up. Mr Grimes. He looked exceedingly old to me when I was seven or eight, but even back then I’m sure he had retired from his official teaching position and was just doing private coaching. I had one to one lessons. Five shillings an hour or something like that on a Tuesday afternoon. Maybe it was 2/6 but my mother paid extra. My mother would pick me up from school at 3.30pm and drive to the baths about eight miles away (I went to a school in a different town).

Mr Grimes had a very large stomach and waddled down the side of the baths. He looked like a beached whale. He dived into the water and was the epitomy of elegance.

The swimming baths were those olde worlde ones with cubicles on the side with swingy doors. I went in, took off my clothes and left them on the bench (no-one stole anything back then), put on my swimsuit and entered the shallow end. These were of course the First Class swimming baths. The Second Class ones (where I later went with some local pals) had communal changing rooms! The horror.

Mr Grimes used the life-saving technique of teaching me to swim by holding me under the chin. I didn’t like to take my foot off the bottom of the pool but gradually we entered deeper waters. I didn’t have any choice. I don’t know when I was swimming on my own because he always left his hand under my chin. It just wasn’t touching. My first length was a moment of glory.

So I could swim. Or so I thought.

At senior school (ie 11+), Mondays were swimming days, or maybe it was a different day, but anyway, swimming was part of the curriculum.

We were divided neatly into those who could swim, those who couldn’t, and those who were shit hot.

I put my hand up for the could swim group.

This was the girl who had swum a length, thinking Mr Grimes had supported her all the way and was now asked to swim six breadths/widths with a load of noisy splashy overconfident girls all in two seconds flat, or so it felt.

I was consigned to the non-swimmers group.

I spent the whole term/year/whatever it was holding the wall and learning how to move my legs to swim breast stroke, or standing against the wall doing arm stroke, or going across the pool with a float. I am still griped about it.

Meanwhile the real swimmers raced up and down the pool or jumped/dived off the springboard and top board. I gazed at them enviously and slunk into the depths of zilch confidence. Oh to have been able to say, ‘I CAN swim, but I need more practice in the swimming group, not to be dumped with the non-swimmers and waste my time.’ Perhaps I was a good statistic. Maybe I was recorded as a new swimmer? A success for the sports teachers? Most of the non-swimmers didn’t learn to swim.

A few years later I went on holiday with a schoolfriend and her family to somewhere near Nice, the name of which escapes me these days. It was two weeks in a rented caravan. Me, Nicky, Nicky’s younger sister Susie and Susie’s friend Claire. Claire swam like a fish. I liked Claire. I spent more time with Claire than sulky Nicky. Nicky was interested in boys. Claire and I were interested in swimming or going out and walking or something. The boys were OK, but a minor interest.

One day, we were in the pool with a group of young people we had met and I realised my swimming was crap as I flustered around out of my depth panicking. I decided to do something about it.

When I returned home I started visiting the local swimming pool. No longer the same two tier baths from my olden days but a brand shiny new thing. Missed the chance to be included in competitions apparently because they measured it in yards not meters. So it was 33 yards. Not 33 metres. Older pools were 25 yards and a mile was 72 lengths.

I started swimming the distance. I was often first in the water when the pool opened. The staff knew me. I got the ASA badges (Amateur Swimming Association). Technically you were meant to say, ‘I’m going to go for this many lengths today’, and the attendant would count your lengths.

‘How many lengths did you do today?’

‘Fifty, 70, a hundred, not sure,’ I’d reply.

‘Don’t forget to apply for your badge then,’ they said.

A bit like Freshly Pressed, I never did wear them though. But I was hellish pleased when I completed my one mile.

Meanwhile, if I went in the evening, yes, the speed swimmers came back to haunt me. The Eileen Fenton class no less. (She took a local class of serious swimmers). Some of my school friends were in it. I said hello and quickly scarpered leaving them to thrash up and down the pool in a way I’ve never been able to achieve.

But armed with a bit more confidence after my distance badges, I took some different water classes at university. Diving – where – sadly, we had someone who appeared to be the French champion, I soon lost interest in that one. But life-saving was good. Except the tutor seemed more interested in my body than teaching so that one went by the board too.

I did pick it up later and got my bronze medallion. I did personal survival too. A bit like the length swimming, the class was meant to be going for bronze but we all passed for silver anyway. Never went for gold.

What happened after all that though?

When I travelled to Sydney I met a county swimmer and we regularly went to Bondi Junction RSL club where they had a brill pool and we could get in free with our Brit passport. Nice. There was no competition. Gillian just swam a shit load faster than me, but hey, we both liked swimming.

Back in the UK, I seemed to find work with pools nearby. Good one. And there was always a colleague to go with me at lunchtime. Some were slower or poorer than me, others were better. At my last job I used to swim with a woman who was brought up in Australia and seriously left me behind. Our pool was just over the road at a local school where I negotiated a deal for us to use it at lunch breaks. An hour’s lunch break? You can crack off a fair amount of lengths in that time. Forget the stress of the office and just count the lengths. Seriously good.

I’ve never done swimming for speed. I do the distance. A bit like walking. You just keep going. And although I learned to swim breast stroke and back stroke, I later taught myself back crawl and front crawl.

I liked back crawl. I liked to consider myself elegant as I arched my arms through the water and powered away with my legs. And being vain, I liked to stand at the side of the pool for a while before I dived in. Pretty much like most men do. Difficult now with crappier eyesight than ever. Can’t even see where the water starts.

Front crawl was something else though. Do you keep your head underwater for six or eight strokes and quickly come up for air, or do you splash from side to side? I went for the underwater number as I thought it was more aerodynamic. Butterfly? I’ve done that too, but you really need to be Arnie.

I’ve never swum in Gib although roughseas has dabbled in the Med. It didn’t happen last year. Maybe this year? At least the sea is free.

But thanks Mum, you did well taking me to Tuesday afternoon swimming lessons.

Do journalists have morals?

Apparently not.

A blogging friend recently compared plumbers with politicians, journalists, sex-offenders and bankers in the scheme of detritus of life.

Given that my partner does plumbing work as part of his multi-skilled toolbox and I’m a trained and qualified journalist, that’s something of a double whammy.

Personally I would add lawyers, medics and dentists to the list, although naturally I would remove journalists.

Whatever happened to used-car salespeople? They used to be the absolute measure of shady and unethical dealing. Still are in Gib but that’s another story.

It is fair to say that some journalists are bad. Unethical. After the glory. What drives journalists is not so much the money but the fame. It is an incredibly competitive industry. It is unbelievably difficult to get into, and for the majority of journos, involves working long hours for low wages.

Some of us are qualified. In law, public administration, shorthand and practical journalism in my case. Others take degrees in multi-media journalism. At the end of the day you need to know how to ask questions, put a story together, and not fuck it up with a load of errors or bring a libel suit down on your company.

Example 1

In Sydney, my partner met the editor of the local Reader’s Digest and mentioned I was a journalist. I dutifully went off to meet him and discussed writing a story.

Except it wasn’t writing a story at all. It was visiting an area to basically fill in the gaps of a pre-written story and write Sydney where the original post said Los Angeles. All Reader’s Digest stories had to be the same. You write about tiger on the rampage in India, you have to write about tiger on the rampage in California, or in my case Sydney.

Tiger on the rampage wasn’t the actual story I was commissioned to ‘write’ but it might as well have been.

I went out, did some interviews, wrote up the story. Not good enough. I’d rebelliously changed the text to reflect the actual story and hadn’t managed to find enough tigers on the rampage. Well tough shit, because that wasn’t true. There were no tigers on the rampage. I chucked the job.

I’m not willing to make up stories to fit with a pre-set mould.

Example 2

I was ordered to go and do a story about violence on a council estate in the UK. I knocked on loads of doors and no-one would confirm there was any violence.

What do you write? Residents are so terrified of repercussions that they won’t speak to a reporter about alleged violence?

Or just go back to the news editor and say, no-one would confirm this story so I’m not writing it?

I didn’t write the story.

Example 3

I was sent to a council meeting about poll tax (local taxation for non-Brit readers which is based on properties, except the poll tax was based on people, hence the name). I sat in the press gallery. Someone came up to me who I didn’t know and confided that she wasn’t actually a reporter. She was a political activist and wanted to disrupt the meeting at a later point.

I wasn’t the local council police, so I let it go. Plus there would be more of a story if she did disrupt the meeting, which she did with a couple of colleagues. They were obviously escorted out at that point.

Back in the newsroom one of my colleagues argued with me because I hadn’t informed on them as not being genuine journalists. That is just not my job. I was there to report not to breach someone’s confidence. One of the old-fashioned ethics about being a journalist is that you don’t disclose your sources if they have told you something in confidence. One crime reporter I used to know went to prison because she refused to reveal information to the police.

Every trade, craft or profession has their own code of ethics.

Back to the press gallery, or rather the newsroom. The same colleague wanted me to refer to the protesters as a mob or ragamuffins. I thought that was a judgemental and political comment and refused to write that. The news editor, who happened to be sleeping with him, finally came down on my side.

So three examples of ethical journalism on my part, or so I like to think.

I have been screwed by a crap lawyer, treated by bad dentists, and worked with poor medics and lying politicians and civil servants.

As for construction, my overall view is that the worst are joiners who generally move onto general building. Followed by painters, half of whom don’t know one end of a paintbrush from another.

I do however, take exception to being likened to a sex offender. And bankers, and politicians come to that. Like every trade, there are some good people in there and some bad. Some break the law.

Some Saturday thoughts on blogging

Another gem from WordPress.

If you write a long post, you need to tag it as a long post. Not with the obvious word ‘long’ of course.

You now have to tag your post using WPLongform. What is a long post, you might ask?

http://wp.me/pf2B5-447

Ah, therein lies the catch. The author of the post didn’t want to be prescriptive so wouldn’t give a word count for ‘longform’ I had to look up longform of course. It just means long as far as I can see. Stupid word. On a par with awesome. Perhaps it is American.

What was really funny was, that in the actual post, the author told us to tag the articles #WPLongform. In some of the comments a different WP supremo told us to tag them WPLongform, and possibly longform too.

I helpfully (always helpful me as everyone knows) suggested someone edit the original post to reflect the information in the comments because, not everyone reads the comments before they add their two centimos. Last I looked they hadn’t altered it. So half the world will be tagging their posts #WPLongform and half will be tagging them WPLongform.

Yet another one answered my query about word count. Given that most of my posts are between 1000 and 2000 words, what is long to me, ie more than 2000 words isn’t the same as someone who writes Tweet-style blog posts, where more than 150 characters is going to be longform. I saw a Tweet-style blog recently and gazed at it in amazement. What is the point of having a blog and only writing one sentence? or two at most eg ‘I don’t like what Obama said. He is wrong.’

Anyway, I was told that 1000 words was the rough guideline.

I am all for individuality, but for someone to write a post and her colleagues to come back in the comments and contradict her just makes the whole team look like they don’t know their arse from their elbow.

And people will be adding an extra word to reach that magical figure of 1000 I wonder if I should tag every post under 1000 words WPShortform?

I have threatened to give you the worst of the ‘best’ of Freshly Pressed and highlight a few seriously bad blogs. The trouble is there are just too many of them! My original draft post wasn’t just longform, it was totally War and Peace form.

But, here are a few, chosen for no particular reason except they are crap.

Fem and veggie too! (never let it be said I am biased)

I should like this one as it is sort of feminist. I don’t. I struggled to read it. Left hand sidebars are terrible for left to right readers. Which most of us reading English or European languages are.

The intro was crap. The sentiments were great but very badly expressed. Blog theme was Chateau which does not suit that sort of post. I want to like this blog, feminism, vegetarianism is a great start, but it just doesn’t do it for me.

http://wp.me/prg3m-mR

Oh no! I thought the recipe blogs had died the death. As if.

Bloody hell, there is always a recipe blog on there, and I thought they had faded out or gone off, or somewhere.

How to spend three years making lasagna.

Boil lasagna in pan, make sauce/s, er what more?

Why the hell does this long drawn-out boring shite get freshly pressed?

http://wp.me/pjMTi-3es

And a totally non-post.

Meat with a side of …

What was the point of this post?

Boring as hell. Seriously. Something about we need to balance veg and meat. Really? How amazingly clever and unoriginal. Dire. Shit theme. Crap text layout too. I mean just, totally poor. Definitely gets five stars for appallingness from me.

Just at least personalise your header photo. And shorten your paragraphs (yes I know I always say that).

http://wp.me/2Rw5m

Whisky galore

http://wp.me/p2P2Dw-1sX

Oh, no. A drinks post too about whisky. I know something about single malt whisky, mainly on the grounds that whenever we visited somewhere in Scotland, I drank the local single malt to decide whether or not I liked it.

Verdict on this one: pretentious in the extreme, uses someone else’s views of single malts (why not ask me for mine, at least I have tasted the fucking things), too long paragraphs (again!) and spelling errors. Original photos? No. Links to other sites.

My fave five are, for your information (as if you are interested in mine or the other blogger’s choice),

• Bruichladdich
• Bowmore
• Bunnahabain
• Jura
• Ardmore

Yes I know they are all island ones. OK I’ll add a couple of mainland ones:

• Oban (still on the west coast though)
• Dalwhinney (there, that’s a bit more off the beaten track)

Iraq War

Here is an odd one about Iraq. I’m not sure what the point was to be honest, but it was mildly interesting, which is more than can be said for most.

http://wp.me/p2evT9-tt

And over at another FP blog, which I actually found because it was FP’ed, the author produces a weekly round-up of vegan news whch lazy roughseas enjoys reading as it saves her work. I learned that Bill Gates has discovered something I have been saying for years. But it must be meaningful and true if Bill Gates says it. It’s not what you know, it’s who you are that counts.

There are three reasons for being vegetarian, four probably.
1. Health
2. Ethics ie aversion to animal cruelty or eating them
3. Environmentalism
They are the idealistic reasons, the fourth would be you don’t like the taste of meat, fish, fowl.
Bill Gates has hit on the third one, as he clearly has no understanding of the other two issues because he carps on about the wonderful meat/egg/whatever substitutes. Now, while I might have been vegetarian for more than 20 years, I have never met anything that was remotely like a plate of smoked salmon or roast beef – to use two random examples.

And I would be extremely racked off if I did eat meat to read such drivel from Gates. He’s totally right with his statement about how much food it takes to raise animals for slaughter to end up on someone’s plate, but he has no concept of a vegetarian diet if he thinks everyone will just switch merrily to meat substitutes.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and a vegetarian, penned an article for Mashable on the future of food. In “Food is Ripe for Innovation” Gates writes: “The global population is on track to reach 9 billion by 2050. What are all those people going to eat? . . . Meat consumption is expected to double by 2050 — it seems clear that arable land for raising livestock won’t be able to keep up.”
The answer is plant protein, says Gates.
There’s plenty of protein and necessary amino acids in plants, including the world’s four major commodity crops — rice, maize, wheat and soy.
The problem is that instead of feeding these crops to people, we’re feeding most of them to livestock. And so we’re caught in an inefficient protein-delivery system. For every 10 kilograms of grain we feed cattle, we get 1 kilogram of beef in return. The calorie kick-back is just too low to feed a growing world population.

http://wp.me/p2USvw-ys

I have to end with these.

http://wp.me/p31CP0-j8

I assume it is meant to be witty.To be pedantic I also studied calculus. It didn’t look a bit like that.

It seems the goalposts have changed drastically for becoming Freshly Pressed. It is no longer glossy photos that would grace a food magazine with an accompanying simplistic recipe, or bungee jumping in New Zealand.

Now you apparently need to be as boring and long-winded as possible, or just write the most inane rubbish you can think of.

Don’t know where I got this one from. [ETA, yes I do, it's a later post from the boring lasagna blog with even more unoriginal recipes that I knew everyone would so wish to read]

Lamb with rosemary and garlic. Yes. Been there done that. Yet despite this unoriginal contribution to the world this post doesn’t appear to have been FP’ed. Why ever not? Hits all the buttons. Unoriginal and not glossy piccis plus boring text. Pretentious too.

http://wp.me/jMTi

And on lambs, I read a blog recently bemoaning the bad winter in the UK and how difficult it is for the farmers and the poor starving little lambs and calves. There were a lot of comments about how cereal farmers get subsidies and animal farmers don’t. They even have to buy in expensive food. They would, wouldn’t they, now that they can’t feed vegetarian animals on sheep’s brains?

Those subsidies may possibly be because cereal farming is more sustainable than animal farming, qv Bill Gates above.

I didn’t comment on said blog in the end. I would only have written some self-opinionated comment so I might as well do it on my own blog.

There are two sides of the coin. Or even more. Most people haven’t been on my side (of the coin), I’ve been on both. If you want to eat dead animals that is your choice. I’ve done it, and enjoyed it at the time. I did struggle when I realised that one of my favourites – ox tongue – was actually the tongue of an animal. I thought it was just a name! I liked sweetbreads too. What a quaint term. Why not call them bollocks? Because you are basically eating lambs’ testicles.

I don’t like the hypocrisy that surrounds eating meat, a rabbit is ok if it is bought, but you don’t kill a pet rabbit? Huh? Or we eat cows and lambs and pigs, but not horses or donkeys, dogs or cats? Or it’s cool to eat rattlesnake and shark? Maybe elephant and tiger for all I know.

So I find the ‘oh it’s a hard winter and the baby animals are struggling to survive,’ concept totally surreal. Let’s be honest, these animals are going to be killed at some point, normally sooner than later. Why waste compassion on them? They are bred to be killed. To end up on a plate. With mint sauce. Simple.

Meat-rearing farmers are no different to anyone else who is struggling in the current climate, whether economically or weather-wise. We all have competition of whatever sort, and fail to make the money we want.

The idyllic pastoral scene is just garbage. Many farmers have fed their animals on the cheapest shit available, eg sheeps brains resulting in BSE and CJD. That’s before they’ve even fed them with steroids. Or packed them in tight crates. Great animal welfare there.

Try this link about cows (it has a happy ending so the squeamish amongst you don’t need to worry – well if you consider a 60% survival rate ok).

http://violets-vegan-comics.com/2013/03/23/help-the-cows/

How about sheep?

http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-clothing/hidden-lives-of-sheep.aspx

and this

http://www.veganpeace.com/animal_cruelty/wool.htm

Shearing
Sheep are sheared in the spring, just before they would naturally shed their winter coats. Because shearing too late would mean a loss of wool, most sheep are sheared while it is still too cold. An estimated one million sheep die every year of exposure after premature shearing.

I’m sure none of that goes on in the UK though. Just Texas and Australia. Y’all enjoy your cruelty-free lamb chops.