Not so here in the UK where ‘health and safety’ regulations have taken the school playground and turned it into a barren wasteland of bare concrete with nothing whatsoever thrown in for the kids to occupy themselves with. It’s BORING! and all so that little Dylan cannot get hit in the face with a ball, or little Alice does not trip over her jump rope and skin her knee…what a disaster that would be!

When I was in primary school we had these wonderful Moreton Bay Fig trees in our playground with wide spreading root bases that we climbed and used as spaceships or whatever else our imaginations could conjure up. We played with skipping ropes and ‘elastic jumps’, the boys played with marbles and the girls played with those ‘knuckles’ – you could kick a ball around, take a doll to play with…not my little charges though. All they have is a stark concrete square that they must run around in and they cannot have anything to play with in it – no ball, no jump ropes…nothing. As a result many of the kids get bored so they push others around, they swing round the lightpole for some fun and fall off it and fall against the large metal perimeter fence and hurt themselves. They chase each other for something to do and fall over and skin a knee, scrape a hand or a nose…obviously accidents still happen regardless.They are encouraged to tell you as soon as another child as much as looks at them the wrong way so that you are all the time fielding trivial complaints such as “she wont play with me…he poked my head…he pulled my hair…she bumped into me…” – when I was that age you were considered a time waster and tattle-tale for wasting the teacher’s time with such trivialities – the nuns taught us to sort minor things out among ourselves and if anything major happened one of the nuns would certainly see it in a split second – they had eyes like hawks so they saw and dealt with stuff that need dealing with.

I feel sorry for today’s kids, if they are allowed too much freedom and not have the security of strong boundaries they fall down form lack of judgement – and if they are wrapped up in cotton wool so they don’t hurt themselves they still end up in a scrapes of something or another. Either way they need to learn how to look after themselves to some degree, get a knock here and there and get up and get on with it. And have some good old fashioned fun along the way. A grazed knee is a far better option than a repressed spirit.

Okay, so let’s see this vile creature go to court under his new identity – and let us wait while the system of justice in this nation processes the latest crimes of this individual who was supposed to be ‘rehabilitated’. But one thing needs to be set straight; in the same way that authorities do not want his trial contaminated by his past as a child killer, it should also not be allowed that his messy childhood be used as an excuse for whatever he has done recently and be tried leniently for it. Maybe, hopefully, he will be tried as he was not allowed to be tried after he and Thompson slaughtered that beautiful little boy back in 1993. Now he can only be tried as an adult, a vile one at that, and we can hope that he will finally end up in an adult prison with other prisoners who have very long memories, and then his entitlement to all this anonymity must be withdrawn. He is no longer a ten year old, he is a grown man and must be treated as such. Possibly though, in a very round-about way, this could finally see true justice for little James Bulger after all these years.

They will be drawing straws to decide who defends him…

Jan Moir I doubt has had children let alone having breastfed anything, maybe she has a poodle she feels very close to and may feel the urge one day…

But the well-fed looking Ms Moir (the title of Ms suits her so well…) has felt it necessary to defend the actions of a vile little pervert called Steve Symonds who is the manager of a charity shop outlet of ‘Mind’ in East Dulwich via her extremely enlightening column in the Daily Mail.  Mr Symonds decided it was fine for him to peep through the closed curtains of a changing cubicle at a woman who had gone inside for privacy and needed to give her baby a quick breastfeed before trying on some items of clothing. This disgusting little man was actually spying on her; he threw a hissy fit when he saw her nipple make contact with the babys mouth and proceeded to scream, wet his pants, poo himself and spray air-freshener all around this mother and her child screaming that her ‘breast milk stank’…

And Ms Moir defends this man for being a Peeping Tom, she defends his right to be disgusted at the most natural function a mother can perform for her child. She is the spokesperson for all those immature, dirty-minded little simpletons who see  a baby breastfeeding as being a sexual act instead of merely a way of simply getting food into a baby’s body. One thing these people like her cannot seem to do is look the other way – they seem compelled to stare and then complain. Shame on them, and shame on you Jan Moir – and if I see you I shall run right over your big, awkward child-less feet with my huge, cumbersome pram.

Hows that for being ‘militant’ eh…? Grow up

Dhillon (below) by all intents and purposes, should not even be in the country – which just about sums up the pathetic immigration control that has existed since Kevin Rudd became PM. This is Dhillon’s way of staying in Australia – kill someone and you get to stay and have three meals a day and tax-payer funded accommodation in HM’s Prison. A ticket to comfort – it happens here in the United Kingdom. I say give him 2000 lashes and then deport the bastard and tell India to keep it’s murderers at home where they belong.

It was clear from the start that an Indian had committed this killing and I say the parents should be placed under a lamp and grilled for information until they can take no more. This is disgusting – that these people are filing into Australia in such huge numbers, assaulting and killing each other and each time it is Australians who cop the blame. Time to stop the Indian influx, time to tell them to go and study/work somewhere else. It is time for them to give up their places in OUR universities, time to vacate all those jobs they are taking from young Australians.

Australia does not need these people and their violent ways. We do not need the hypocritical Indian media accusing US of being racist when they behave like this towards each other both in their own country and in ours. We do not need them at all. Here is an article of sense and logic from The Australian. A wake call indeed – to a country that has enough violence of it’s own before it points it dirty finger at anyone else…

Then into the eighties, and then nineties…now there are no WWI vets left at all to march in April. The hands of time move on and now it is the WW2 vets who are dwindling in their ranks – in the Sydney parade in 2009 there were just 1000 WW2 veterans who paraded. I remember when their ranks stretched the full length of the streets of Sydney. I also recall when the first of the grandchildren started marching along with their grand-dads back in 1990’s as a special treat for them and how everyone thought it was so cute to see. It is not so cute now because it has gone too far;  last year those 1000 war vets were obscured by close to 7000 family members who all thought it their privilege to take part in the march. The trend to replace Dad, grand-dad or great-granddad in the march quickly caught on but now it has got to the stage where the descendants have taken over the march. Time for this to stop because it is wrong. I don’t want to see great-grandchildren marching along in jeans and t-shirts, waving at the crowds and the tv cameras as if they have earned the right to do so – because they have not.

This parade is for those who fought; it is for those who fought and survived to march and remember those who fought and died. It is not an opportunity for the descendants, however well meaning, to wander down the streets of Sydney waving at crowds who expect to see war veterans. Now it is hard to tell who are the war heroes and who are merely casual participants, this should never have been allowed to happen to the Anzac Day Parade. I lived in France where they revere their war vets more than any other nation, and now that no more WWI vets exist their Remembrance Days are celebrated with a service at a Cenotaph rather than a parade full of people who never wore a uniform but want to march anyway. That is the way to do it – we all must have known that one day the Anzac Day Parades in Sydney, and around Australia, would one day be very thin on the ground for ex-servicemen and we should accept that and deal with it.  Once these men are gone we cannot replace them, their grandchildren do not replace them, nobody who has not fought a war can ever replace them. The parade is for them, no-one else.

It will be hard to deal with the fact that one day no ex-servicemen from before the Vietnam War will march on April 25 but it is a fact of life – until then they, and only they, must be allowed the privilege of marching down the streets of Sydney. The applause, the respect, the crowds are there for them and them only. Their descendants can watch and wave and be proud…from the sidelines. As the line in Eric Bogle’s ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda‘ goes “Soon no-one will march there at all…”

And that’s how it should be – once they are gone that’s it, end of. It will be the end of an era for Australia but that’s what happens to great era’s – they all have to end sometime. And I want to see it be taken out by the men and women who lived through it…nobody else.