Please note The Green Man is usually accurate however he does tend to drift into the mischievous areas of satire and parody from time to time. Such is the nature of the Green Man. In fact he is not above complete fiction when the fancy takes him.
So Frodo says to me “Who are you master?”
I answer “"Don't you know my name yet? That is the only answer. ... But you are young and I am old. Eldest that's what I am. ... Tom was here before the river and trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. .... When the Elves passed westward Tom was already here, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the starts when it was fearless."
I was, of course, going by the name of Tom Bombadil at the time. Names, however, mean little to me, they are a human artifice and I have had many.
To the Morris Dancers of the English countryside I am “Jack In The Green”. My role in their dances typifies the ancient view of me. I was viewed as the Lord of Misrule, as wild as the ancient forest. My role is to disrupt the dancers, cavorting amongst them, upsetting the rhythm of the dance. I am also the subject of one of the most important alliterative poems of Medieval literature, Sir Gawain And The Green Knight. At one stage Sir Gawain lops off my head, I pick it up and laugh. I am symbolic of the seasonal nature of life in the forest, a representation of the conquest of spring and summer over the symbolic death of winter.
Many of you will know the story of Robin Hood and his wild existence in Sherwood forest. What you may not know is that I am the original Robin Hood. I existed in English mythology long before the Robin of Loxley character was grafted on and Maid Marion and the Merry Men existed. It was not until 1939 that Lady Raglan named me The Green Man but the name was embraced by the public. Since then this is primarily the name by which I am known.
Like the howl of the wolf at dusk in the wilderness I resonate in the dark recesses of your primitive mind. Suppress your knowledge of me if that makes you comfortable. I care not; I am not a spirit that particularly concerns itself with the comings and goings of men. My realm is the ancient forest, my friends are the giant oak and elm. The time of men is but a flicker of a shadow in the ancient forest.
Here is a photo of the main harbour in Hobart Tasmania with Mt Wellington in the background. It is one of the earliest settlements in Australia and a picturesque destination if you are in the general area.
The homesick British embraced life in Tasmania because its climate is somewhat similar to Britain and they were able to successfully plant and build a small replica of British life there. Of course it was not Britian it was a remote and foriegn land populated by natives who, quite understandably, were not entirely happy with having their land usurped and the way of life disrupted.
Naturally we have very little evidence of their life in Tasmania prior to and around the time of settlement. In 1831, however, John Glover, an artist of some reknown in England at the time, arrived in Australia to join his sons who had emigrated earlier. Independantly wealthy he devoted himself to the recording of early life in Australia.
He was quite prolific, producing many drawings and sketches. Although he had been a well respected painter at the time he left England, few of his Australian paintings made it back there. They simply were not interested in the reality of life in Tasmania. Here we can gain an image of what this area was like before it was destroyed to create Hobart, attractive as Hobart is.
Similarly we can gain a feeling for aboriginal life at the time through his documenting of their life style. Of the painting below he wrote
I wish to shew the Natives at a Corrobary, under the wild woods of the country – to give an idea of the manner they enjoyed themselves before being disturbed by the White People...
![Natives at a corroborry, under the wild woods of the Country [River Jordan below Brighton, Tasmania]](http://www.spin.net.au/~soren/corrob.jpg)
Read more about Glover, his art and his relationship with the aboriginals at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
This is not a cute little girl who has been taken along last month to be left by her tearful mother at the gates of the local primary school for her first day. Melissa has the dubious honor of being the first computer worm that infected the internet. She was launched onto the unsuspecting internet community on 26 March, 1999. A the time she infected 1 million computers, which we all thought was horrendous and it probably was, the internet was much smaller in those days.
So what have we learnt in 5 years? Not much really according to New York-based systems administrator Tom Finkle.
Back then, though, for most people a computer virus was new and interesting and a little scary. Now it's just annoying -- we're still saying the same thing each time a virus is released. I bet most of the people who clicked on Melissa five years ago also clicked on MyDoom, Netsky and Bagle virus attachments last week.
Melissa was written by David L. Smith who was caught a matter of days after its release but, the court system being what it is, was not sentenced until May 2002 when he received a 20 month jail term. At his sentencing he said he thought the whole Melissa episode was "A big mistake". Well it may have entered us all into an era of inconvenience but it certainly provided a lot of employment in the virus checking companies.
Sky News has announced that they are releasing a new coverage of the Australian parliamentary sessions. Using the new digital technology it will allow the choice of 50 cameras recording the action in both chambers.
The next proposed step in this technology is for your average Australian citizen to hone in on their parliamentary representative to see what they are up to. Based on the television coverage of yesterdays sitting of parliament where only about 15 MPs could be observed in the chamber some of our parliamentarians will have a lot of explaining to do.
In a move that is guaranteed to upset those US citizens that have taken Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ" far too seriously, Monty Python's film The Life of Brian is to return to US cinemas next month.
Still the United States is a diverse nation and I am sure that there is a subset of its citizenry that have a good sense of humour and will find this movie extremely funny. The Life of Brian follows a Jewish character from Nazareth who is worshipped as the Messiah then crucified by Romans. It's original released was marked by claims that it was blasphemous however the producers have always maintained that it was satirising religious films not the Christian religion. Which, of course, is precisely why it is being rereleased now.
The president of the films distribution company Rainbow, Henry Jaglom said:
We decided this is an important time to re-release this film, to provide some counter-programming to The Passion.
Trailers for the comedy would start to appear in cinemas on Good Friday, hmmmm.
Via BBC
The Green Man is an accepting sort of person. He has been friends with all sorts of people even some vegetarians. At least one of the said vegetarians has indicated in conversation that they viewed vegetarians as being deeper thinkers than your average omnivore. It will come as a big disappointment to these individuals then to discover that their capacity for such deep thought is being linked to their ancestors meat eating ways.
New research by Nancy Minugh-Purvis of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia indicates that, lacking the constraints of a bulky chewing apparatus, the human skull may have been free to grow, enabling the massive development of the brain. The reduction in the need for a big jaw arose from a mutation 2.4 million years ago that left us unable to produce one of the main proteins in primate jaw muscles and marked a shift to a higher protein based diet.
Nancy summerises it nicely:
Humans may not have needed particularly strong jaws anyway. By then, our ancestors may have switched from eating chewy leaves all day long to snacking on smaller portions of meat.
Read more in Nature.
A lesser soul than The Green Man may have been tempted to question the relationship Robert Weinberg of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Boston had with his mother. The Green Man, on the other hand, is prepared to accept that there is an entirely legitimate reason for growing a female human breast on a mouse.
Of the technique Bob has to say
The key is to transplant two types of human breast cells into the mice, one of which has been blasted with radiation
Those interested in the said mice for research into breast cancer are quite pleased with the outcome. For those looking for some visual stimulation it is back to the drawing board. Unlike human breasts the mice's growths sit flush to the chest.
Read more in Nature.
Overstated has a transcript of a conversation he had with a nanniebot. Pretty uneventful really but interesting when you think it is a computer on the other end.
Read his discussion of it here and the actual transcript here.
See these little fellas. Cute aren't they? Well not to some. To some people they are dinner, they are known as "Bush meat".
Nature has a delightful habit of exacting its revenge however. Nathan Wolfe of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland has found that the practice of consuming "bush meat" is a great way of spreading simian diseases through the human population. What's more some of these diseases have a much greater impact on the human population that they do on chimps, HIV springs to mind.
HIV is thought to have crossed into humans from other primates many times over, eventually taking root some 50-100 years ago and spawning today's pandemic. Wild primates are also suspected of triggering Ebola outbreaks and an infection called HTLV that can cause leukaemia.
Sadly, we keep people in Africa in such poverty and ignorance that the bush meat trade is thriving, to the cost of us all.
Read more in Nature.
The Green Man has had it in his mind for some time to buy a fake PhD. It would be a huge lark, well except for the fact that money is a bit too hard to come by to waste it so frivilously.
The Government Affairs Committee of the US Senate is not so sure that it is as humerous as The Gren Man finds it. By way of investigation Sen. Susan Collins purchased herself a number of very prestigous degrees (see here) She says
No applicant for a job -- whether it's in the private sector or federal government -- should lose out to a candidate because that candidate holds a bogus degree. Moreover, our tax dollars should not be spent on helping federal workers obtain substandard degrees.
Of course not all polititians are quite so picky about the qualifications of their staff. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Jack Corrie to a high-level information technology position in the state's Department of Motor Vehicles. Corrie's credentials include a bachelor's and a master's from the University of Palmers Green, which is a fake university, according to John Bear, an expert on online learning and diploma mills. It is unclear whether Gov. Schwarzenegger was aware of this and, if so, whether he thought that it mattered.
The Green Man would like to assure his readers and potential suckers (err sorry students) that the PhD in Ancient Forest Technology offered by The Green Man University has nothing to do with this illicit trade in fake qualifications and that the "print your own" MS Publisher certificates are completely legit.
Read more in Wired.
Wired magazine reports on a group in the USA called Perverted Justice that have taken the law into their own hands vis-a-vis the internet paedophile problem.
Posing as teenagers the group attempts, often successfully, to entrap men who enter chat rooms looking for teenagers to exploit. Their method is to set up a meeting with the man. The meeting is attended by two or more substantial males from Perverted Justice and video taped. The tapes and chat room conversations are then posted on their site.
It is very easy to feel a sense of righteousness over this behaviour however it does interfere with the proper prosecution of these individuals. The purpose of criminal prosecution, as well as punishment, is to remove the threat to society that these men pose. The Perverted Justice approach does little to achieve this second objective. It also abandons the concept of "presumption of innocence" that is the corner stone of British derrived justice systems such as US, UK, NZ and Australia.
The Green Man is a big fan of the internet but, like every powerful tool, it can be misused and one of the most repulsive misuses of the net is the preying on children in chat rooms by paedophiles.
New Scientist reports that Jim Wightman, an IT consultant from Wolverhampton in the West Midlands in UK has developed a new weapon in the fight to detect and report this predatory behaviour. The software call ChatNannies generates applets called Nanniebots that engage in conversations in chatrooms listening for predatory convseration styles. Conversations that are identified by the software as being likely to be predatory are reported with the address of the suspect to the police for investigation.
The nanniebots are so good at imitating a childs chatroom behaviour that to date none have been sprung. Wightman currently has around 10,000 nanniebots chatting away in chatrooms ever vigilant to small inconsistencies in conversations that hint at an adult pretending to be a child. Based on a neural network the software is continually learning about the use of language and adapting its conversations to make them more realistic.
Follow the New Scientist link above and see if you can pick which is the child and which is the nanniebot.
Ever wondered what
"g(x,y) = cos(y*sin(y)), h(x,y) = cos(x*sin(x))"
looked like, I know I have. Well wonder no longer. Hyon Lee of MIT has provided the answer.
It is an entrant in a competition that exists at the intersection of art and science. Each year John Belcher at MIT holds the "Weird Fields" competition for his physics students. The competition involves using a Java applet that was written in 1993 to enable students to visualise energy fields to generate patterns that are both scientifically sound and of artistic merit.
Read more about the competition in Wired or check out some more of the entrants at the MIT site.
Forget the Blog, The Green Man wont be posting much for a little while, he will be off writing a childrens story that Disney can buy for $1 million (and I am presuming that is US$)
Clive Woodall 47-year-old supermarket manager in Hitchin, Hertfordshire is showing the way. Having signed just such a deal for a childrens story entitled One for Sorrow, after the first line of an ancient children's skipping rhyme. One for Sorrow is about a lone robin who is given the apparently impossible task of saving a world called Birddom from evil magpies.
He drew his inspiration from the aggressive nature of the magpies that he observed each driving to work.
Good on ya Clive, it gives us all hope.
The fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square has been vacant for 150 years. During all this time the argument has been raging as to which General or notable figure image should occupy the spot. The matter has now been settled with the selection of a statue by Marc Quinn of Alison Lapper a thalidomide victim naked when she was eight months pregnant.
Whilst some may be confronted or uncomfortable with the 4.5 metre statue in white marble the subject certainly isn't. Whilst unable to attend the ceremony, because she was holidaying in South Africa with Parys, the product of the pregnancy, she sent the following message
"I regard it as a modern tribute to femininity, disability and motherhood. It is so rare to see disability in everyday life - let alone naked, pregnant and proud."
The Green Man can't help but feel that it makes a much more positive statement than yet another General, however she will only get to occupy the plinth for 18 months when she will be replaced with another art work. Where she goes from there who can tell but, being marble, she is built to last.
It's going to be a huge marble statue well capable of taking care of itself against the elements or the people. What it will gain from not being inside a gallery is incontrovertibly forcing people to deal with it directly. It's about the different kind of heroism.
Said Quinn, the artist.
Read a more detailed review and see the runners up in The Guardian
If you have come to this site looking for a big set of tits then look no further. This is one quality set and they are chock a block full of the spreadable butter potential.
You know about rape I presume. No not that sort of rape, I mean the seed crop. It is a valuable food source and it was suffering from some mighty bad negative vibes which is why, in our politically correct world, it was renamed canola. If you live in a developed country then you will have no doubt consumed it on bread from time to time.
In a "how come noone has thought of this before" moment Toni Steer from the UK Medical Research Council's Human Nutrition Laboratory in Cambridge decided to try feeding cows on an intensive rapeseed diet. The outcome was, you guessed it, healthy spreadable butter. Things can be just so simple sometimes can't they.
You can read all about his research in Nature.
Photo is courtesy of FightBac Teat disinfectant for the treatment of mastitis in cows. The Green Man does not necessarily recommend it for lactating mothers of the human kind.
Art comes in many forms and none more intriguing than the website that allows you to spell your name in naked people.
Via The Living Room who is taking the emerging church in an entirely fascinating direction. When the Adam and Eve night is on The Green Man will be there, as he was with the original Adam and Eve of course and a very nice couple they were too.
Freedom of the press is one of the sacred cows of modern democracies. We expect that the press will report on world events “without fear or favour”. Of late this has come into question with the demonstrated bias of certain media outlets over the war in Iraq, such as Fox News for example.
The press have always practiced self-censorship however. One of the criteria that editors use to make self-censorship decisions is the current state of public sensibilities. These change over time. Images and content that, 50 years ago, would have been completely unacceptable are now regularly printed with little or no complaint. There are still important news images that go beyond the limits of current acceptance and the media now have the ability via digital technology to modify these images to utilise them without causing widespread offence.
The recent bomb blast in Spain was an excellent example of consistent self-censorship across the mainstream British media. Reuters provided an image that was used by the major London daily news papers. The original contained, in the left foreground, what appears to be a bloodied severed limb, probably an arm.
All newspapers used this image but altered the image to remove or reduce the impact of the said limb. The Guardian recoloured it grey so that it blended into the background gravel.
The Times and Telegraph removed it entirely, replacing it with gravel.
This practice may be viewed as relatively harmless or it may be viewed with a degree of caution and suspicion. The removal of the limb has made the picture, at the same time, more acceptable and a false record. To try and maintain a balanced view of world events we need to be continually reminded that we are seeing them through the a lens that has been focused by a small number of people who have their own agendas and biases and decide what is fit for us to see.
Images courtesy of The Guardian (who are now making you register which is most annoying)
These goddamn foreign names. It is enough to drive you batty. How are you supposed to know who is a boy and who is a girl if they won't stick to nice gender specific names as Betty and John.
It is no wonder that the illustrious leader of the free world once again found himself with his foot planted firmly in his mouth. Ananova reports the President of America as saying
"She's a local government official who was imprisoned in 2002 for advocating free speech and democracy."
He was referring to the Libyan Fathi Jahmi in an International Womens Day speech. Unfortunately Fathi Jahmi is a 62 is a male civil engineer. Never mind, under all that funny Arab clothing who could tell anyway.
The US House of Representatives has voted 276-139 for a bill that would prevent lawsuits against the food industry for making people fat which has become known as the "Cheeseburger Bill".
In the fine US tradition of suing someone else for your own stupidity or lack of self control over the last little while a number of US citizens had sued particular fast food organisations for making them fat.
Currently two-thirds of the US population is overwieght or obese and obesity is set to overtake smoking as the leading cause of death in the US. That being said, it seems that only in the US would someone seek to shift their personal responsibility for their actions to a third party in such a fundamental aspect of their behaviour. For 99% of the population the solution is exceedingly simple, exercise more and eat less.
Here is a simple start, don't eat any fast food at all. Make your own meals, that way you know what is going into them and at least you get the exercise of preparing them.
| Actual Causes | Actual Causes of Death* United States, 1990 | Actual Causes of Death† United States, 2000 |
|---|---|---|
| Tobacco | 19% | 18.1% |
| Poor Diet/Physical Inactivity | 14% | 16.6% |
| Alcohol consumption | 5% | 3.5% |
| Microbial agents (e.g., influenza, pneumonia) | 4% | 3.1% |
| Toxic Agents (e.g., pollutants, asbestos) | 3% | 2.3% |
| Motor-vehicles | 1% | 1.8% |
| Firearms | 2% | 1.2% |
| Sexual behavior | 1% | 0.8% |
| Illicit drug use | <1% | 0.7% |
The Museum of Bad Art is a web site dedicated to the less illustrious attempts at artistic endeavour.
A brief journey through the site will demonstrate that it does contain some works of questionable merit. I am sure however that the people who painted them thoroughly enjoyed the experience and many are probably still painting today. Good luck to them. Art is a journey and as long as they are still enjoying it then they should be encouraged to continue.
Who knows, Modigliani may have started this way.
Dr. Peter Bearman of Columbia University in New York is interested in teenage sex but only in the most scientific of ways of course.
There was a ripple of excitement amongst the conservative elements of the community a year or two back about the practice of teenagers pledging to not have sex until after marriage. Dr Bearman has been studying this concept. Interestingly the rate of sexually transmitted disease amongst these teenagers is exactly the same as for the general teenage community. This is because so few of them actually keep the pledge. He found that 88% of teenagers who pledged to remain virgins until they are married ended up having sex before marriage.
Not only did they have sex but it was also much more likely to be unsafe sex. He proposes that this is because they had not paid attention in sex education classes. You would also suspect that, if it was a spur of the moment decision, they would unprepared, ie would not have condoms.
So what happens when they catch a STD well it seems that they are much less likely to seek medical assistance for reasons I think we can probably guess.
The study also found that pledging reduced the number of sexual partners, lead to earlier marriages and delayed the age at which sexual activity commenced.
Hmmmm, so pledging teenagers are having less partners and the same rate of STD infection. One would have to speculate that there are some other teenagers who are very persuasive, very sexually active and also STD infected.
It will do this country no good if we spend the next decade hand-wringing and clinging to misplaced, but well-guided ideological purity; if we produce a generation of young men who are disengaged, who are disillusioned and who feel ill prepared for the future,
thus spake Brendon Nelson, the Minister for Education in the Australian federal parliament. He was referring to an initiative of the government to increase the number of male teachers in our schools, particularly at the primary level. Finally, it seems that the lack of decent role models for our young boys is being recognised.
Think about it. When a boy is working out how to "be a man" who can he model himself on. He may rarely see his father who is at work most of the time, and the other men he sees are sporting heros and television characters. Whilst our sporting heros are real people their presentation in the media is essentially two dimensional as of course are television characters.
The anti descrimination act is being modified to allow schools to selectively recruit male teachers. Sadly the opposition have indicated that they will not support the amendment. They say
The evidence shows the real barriers to men becoming teachers and staying in our primary schools are pay, career structure and status compared with other professions
they may be correct and more should probably be done but it is disappointing that they are choosing to block the small step forward that is being taken.
Completely missing the point, women's groups have criticised the move saying there is so much pro-male bias in society that more is not needed. This is not about benefiting men it is about raising our boys to be caring and well balanced men. If feminism does not see this as a noble objective then it has completely lost the plot.
Read more in The Age.
I think that it can safely be stated that an active volcano is generally regarded as one of your hotter environments. Even so the amount of heat that a volcano puts into the atmosphere is miniscule compared to the heat output of a developed nation such as America.
Robert Wright and Luke Flynn from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu are very interested in this topic and used a NASA satellite to measure the heat emitted by the world's 45 most active volcanoes, which are responsible for the majority of the Earth's volcanic heat. Over a 2 year period these volcanos put out enough energy to power New York for 2-3 months. Compared with the active volcanos it is estimated that America emits 1,000 times the energy into the atmosphere.
So here is the situation. My eldest son has rung and said he is at the bus stop at the other end of our township. Having had a couple of drinks I hop in my youngest sons car and head off to pick him up.
In that brief interval between driving over and driving back a booze bus has set itself up at the entrance to the township. I get pulled over. Have I had too much to drink? I'll soon find out.
I pull up. The window doesn't work in the car so I have to get out. I blow into the machine and the cop says "So you've had a few".
"A couple" I answer "and only five minutes ago so it is probably reading high"
I am thinking that I am off the hook, it is just under the legal limit and he says "So you are a P-plate driver" (this is the first 3 years of your licence and you can't drink at all).
"No" I say " it is my sons car. "
"Can I see your licence please, Sir"
It is about this time I realise that I have changed pants since I got home and I don't have my licence with me.
"Errrr I haven't got it but trust me I am not a P-plater. It's my sons car"
Guess what he did. Sometimes even the Police are human.
Susie Nanney is acting director of the Obesity Prevention Center at Saint Louis University and she is concerned that people are taking the message of "an apple a day" to literally. Susie recons
While people understand they should eat a variety of fruits and vegetables each day, they are not translating 'variety' in a way to capture health benefits, such as reducing their risk of developing chronic diseases. I'm just asking them to expand their interpretation of diets.
Of course this is a serious issue and The Green Man should take it seriously (there are some other serious posts on this if you look for them). Today, however, The Green Man is in a flippant mood and, as such, the first thought that sprung into The Green Man's mind was.
The last thing an obese person needs is more nutrients. Wouldn't the dietary equivalent of cardboard, bran, be more in line.
Anyway, to drift into the sensible for a moment she suggests that colour is the way to go with selecting your food.
White: Eat cauliflower more often than potatoes, onions and mushrooms.
Green: Add more dark lettuces, such as romaine and red leaf lettuce, spinach, broccoli and Brussels sprouts to replace iceberg lettuce and green beans.
Yellow/orange: Substitute more carrots, winter squashes, sweet potatoes, cantaloupe, oranges and grapefruit for corn or bananas.
Red: Select tomatoes, red peppers and strawberries in favor of apples.
How come I didn't get a job in a University? Well at the time it was a realistic option I thought that the big wide world of business seemed much more exciting. How wrong I was.
Charles E. Roselli is a professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, OHSU School of Medicine and he has been studying sexual orientation in male sheep. Now there is excitement for you.
The Green Man is more of a cow person than a sheep person so it came as a bit of a surprise to find out that approximately 8% of rams "bat for the other team".
It seems from Chuck's research that a male sheep's preference for same-sex partners has a biological basis. Apparently brain anatomy and hormone production may determine whether adult rams decide to adopt a happy and gay lifestyle. They have discovered a densely packed cluster of nerve cells in the hypothalamus of the sheep brain, which they named the ovine sexually dimorphic nucleus or oSDN. This area of the brain was significantly smaller in those rams that preferred other rams to ewes.
Well I am back after a loooong weekend at the Port Fairy Folk Festival. A venue where a significant percentage of the audience actually know of The Green Man myth.
Happily this year it shedded some of the rigid authoritarianism that had crept in over the last few years. The security guards were a lot less obnoxious this year and generally the festival was better for it.
It was a big weekend with the consumption of The Green Man's annual quota of Guiness and very loud music of the Celtic variety in the Guiness tent. It is good to get back to work for a bit of a rest.
The BBC reports that Arab Big Brother has been cancelled. A mere 1,000 people that gathered protesting in Bahrain have caused Arabic satellite TV channel MBC to suspend it.
Surely we could have found 1,000 Australians who could have made it to Dreamworld on the Gold Coast to protest and we would have been rid of the Australian version. Perhaps not, they were probably off fishing or something.
The Green Man has important blog news for those of you that feel that you do not have enough excitement in your day. He is proud to annouce the existence of Downing Street Says. This exciting new blog gives you access to the press briefings from No 10. (That's the home of the British Prime Minister for the republican readership).
If you are not satisfied with government representatives speaking on radio and television at length and never actually saying anything then here is a chance for you to read the latest politispeak and spin doctoring in its boring original form. Marvel at how much the Prime Ministers press secretary can write on such hot topics as Local Government Finance Reform, renaming of Crown Prosecution Service as well, of course, on Iraq and Northern Ireland and never actually says anything.
I notice that it is powered by Moveable Type, the same blog software that The Green Man uses. ooooo, somehow I feel sort of sullied. I think I go wash my hands.
Structured play, in the form of playgroups, is all the rage these days. Young mothers can be observed with their designer prams, taking their offspring to have their lives enriched by engaging in constructive activities that have made numerous child psychologists wealthy from the proceeds of books about the subject. Whilst the children engage in activities that allegedly teach social skills, improved cognitive ability and creativity the mothers can drink coffee and socialise amongst one another.
Isn’t it great to have your obligations to the creative development of your child so conveniently catered for? No need for any nasty unstructured mess around your model house. Cute finger paintings and crayon drawings can be restricted to the ten square feet of whiteness that is the fridge door.
These women are achieving exactly what society expects of them. They are raising sons who will have to fit into the rigid world of industry and daughters whose time will be taken up taking the children to structured playgroups, socialising with other mothers whilst maintaining the house in a tidy and germ free state. These future adults will have their time for their minor creative endeavours carefully regulated by society and they wont care.
Heaven forbid that you inadvertently raise an artist! Imagine arriving at the home of your adult child to find it in chaos, children on the rampage, exploring, learning what they want to instead of what they are told to, creating, and having fun. All this whilst their parents are engaged in having fun themselves. Not only are they poor but they don’t care.
Obviously they are being irresponsible. How will they afford the world cruise when they age? Think of what they are missing out on, the opportunity of seeing the world in a luxury version of a troop ship. Herded from one carefully sanitised parody of some local culture to another. If they travel at all they will be forced to actually associate with the locals and take the trouble to conform to the social mores of the community in which they find themselves.
I hear you thinking “Society would collapse if everyone behaved like that” but, of course, they wont. There are too many young mothers training the future fodder for the factory and the home as we speak. You however can give you child the most rare and precious gift that you have to offer. The ability, when they approach a fork in the road, to choose to take the path less travelled. You give them this gift by showing them the way. Be brave. Stop pretending that you are happy. Stop trying to be what society expects you to be. Follow your dream and to hell with the consequences.