don't kids with HIV suffer enough without this?

We may have a new government but, behind the scenes, the same unelected sinister forces are pushing their agendas at our children.

HYPNet - the HIV in Young People Network - describes itself as "a multidisciplinary group of health professionals and voluntary sector representatives" working for people between the ages of 14-24 who are unfortunate enough to be living with HIV.

They've just released draft guidelines on the management of sexual and reproductive health for adolescents living with HIV 2010.

The first thing that worried me on the guidance came as early as Section 3, Definitions. In this draft document, which dealt with "possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences" for adolescents, the term "adolescence" itself is defined worryingly:

The term adolescent will be used throughout these guidelines to denote young people aged 10-24 years old, which covers the age from the onset of menarche in the UK to the upper limit of the definition of young adult...

I had to read the lower limit of that definition again: 10. This is no faux alarm - the Telegraph's Aislinn Laing reported recently that "Between 2000 and 2007, a total of 15 ten year olds and 39 aged 11 fell pregnant in England and Wales". HYPnet's somewhat abusive take on sexual health care is outlined in bold letters at point 8.1:

PHCP [paediatric healthcare professionals] need to take responsibility for seeing that Sexual Health needs, if not brought up by the adolescent, are raised in consultations, starting well before sexual maturity is reached.

Yet, although the paper states twice that in England and Wales sexual activity involving under-13's is illegal and indeed rape (under common law consent is meaningless under this age), the waters are muddied by a statement in point 6.3, which concerns the Sexual Offences Act 2003, that "this document does not advocate mandatory reporting to police or social services of every sexually active under 18 if there is no cause for concern"; the cut-off point of 13 has been dropped.

A pattern starts to emerge at point 8.3, where we read under the heading of Sexual Health Education that "Psychosexual issues may arise from cultural and religious beliefs around...female circumcision". Again, there is no comment, even to the effect that "female circumcision", more properly known as female genital mutilation, is a vicious assault on a young girl which, even if it is carried out abroad, is still an offence as if it had been done in the UK under the terms of the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003. But the foul practice is listed as if it had no more significance than being one cultural phenomenon among many.

In 2006 Anthony Ozimic, Political Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) identified that the term "sexual and reproductive health" cannot be taken within any legal framework to include abortion.

The news has travelled slowly: point 9.2 in this document about sexual and reproductive health is a "checklist for sexual history discussion", and the ninth crib-note states: "Managing an unplanned pregnancy. Options of continuing with pregnancy, adoption or termination of pregnancy; methods of termination." The thought of an adolescent girl, already emotionally fragile through the stigma many people living with HIV are still exposed to, being put at risk of post-abortion trauma is as heartbreaking as is the omission of the risk of PAT from the crib-notes. Similarly, the advice under 16.4, emergency contraception, advises not only the morning-after pill Levonelle, which is basically a form of chemical abortion, but that double the dose (3000 micrograms instead of 1500) be given, and that the dose be documented because Levonelle is not licensed to be given in this quantity. There's no mention in the paper of the patient being informed of this in the event of the drug being given in a sexual health clinic as opposed to a pharmacy.

Ironically, the one area (16.5) where the paper hits the nail right on the head is the one that workers whose fields intersect that of sexual health are asked to keep quiet about:

Condoms are estimated to prevent HIV transmission in only 13% (4-40) of cases (Davis and Weller 1999) and should not therefore be relied on alone for contraception.

I recommend that you follow the link to the Davis and Weller article, which seems to contextualise a later study in the New England Journal of Medicine that found a higher rate of protection (22% - albeit against HPV transmission) - when condoms were used 100% of the time.

Draft Guidance on the Management of Sexual and Reproductive Health for Adolescents Living with HIV 2010 is a case-in-point of how wilfully incomplete advice drawn up along ideological lines can put real, vulnerable, people right in the firing line of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The nhsnetworks listing for HYPNet shows that membership is open to all, and current membership is 2 (one of whom is paediatric HIV expert Dr Simon Portsmouth, right) - who have managed to get this paper distributed throughout the world by the otherwise well-regarded aidsmap e-bulletin.

The trojan horse was an article called Numerous unplanned pregnancies in vertically-infected teenagers (the term indicating that the virus was transmitted during pregnancy or at birth), which did not appear to consider that there are numerous unplanned pregnancies in teenagers generally - Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe - precisely because of abusive sex education strategies of the sort championed by HYPNet.

If you are concerned or disturbed about any of the issues in this post, please respectfully and with sensitivity towards the difficulties faced by young people with HIV email Dr Simon Portsmouth.

spring of hope: an update in pictures

I'm not doing too well this Lent. Last year, I gave up a couple of pints a week and gave the money to charity. This Lent I've had to learn editing from scratch to publish the village magazine - although I was priveleged to learn from somebody who'd done the job in professional and voluntary roles for decades.

So it was good to be sent a photo-update of a charity I was made aware of soon after moving to the Draughty Old Fen: the Spring of Hope foundation (part of the Youth with a Mission group) which helps disabled children in Uganda - much are in their clinic in Wabwoko, which is in the Kayunga District of Uganda, shaded orange in the map to the left. I'd like to share some of these photos with you, with the original comments.

Click here to go to the Spring of Hope blog

Emily (volunteer) and Victor (OT student ) on a home visit!! Feb 2010, we saw our first Uganda OT students come from Mulago training hospital!!

Our deaf children from both schools were able to visit the zoo in Entebbe thanks to Roxy fundraising!! 22nd Feb 2010

We bought our 2nd bike, after a previous volunteer Melanie fundraised. Moses is now out and about in the community. Children in Wabwoko are at last receiving weekly home visits!! Bought Feb. 11th!!

Carolyn(volunteer) and Moses counting medications at the end of a very busy clinic,. At this clinic in Wabwoko we received 96 epileptic patients!! Feb 12th!!

Children and parents at the clinic in Wabwoko. Feb 12th!!

The last pic really struck a chord with me because I remember the sense of wonder and getting bigger exuded by both my children when they started school, something I think one can see on the face of little Zachariah as he starts on his own incredible journey of education, thanks to Spring of Hope.

mothers' day: comfort and pain

The nomenclature of the feast of mothers leaves me confused. I'm not sure if the difference between Mothers' Day and Mothering Sunday is that one is American and the other British, or one secular and the other religious.

Anybody who has had the privilege of knowing members of the Filipino community in Cambridge (the city's St Philip Howard's church has been called Little Manila) will know that they celebrate Mother's Day as religiously as any Holiday of Obligation. It leaves you with a renewed appreciation of the feast; but it's a time of year that can bring as much upset as it can peace.

Mothers' Day at St Gallicus was a happy affair that saw the first reading subsequently dramatised preceded by the children, which ended up with the teenage daughter of a two-year-old Pharaoh rescuing a plastic Moses from a basket. At the close of ther service all the mothers in the congregation were presented with little potted primroses, with enough left over so that everybody was abe to leave with one.

At home, Minora had put a lamb joint in the oven, and Minima prepared the veg while I divested the table of a week's accretion of books, homework and other things we'd decided we needed to keep but couldn't quite remember why.

A sobering note came during dinner when we heard on the radio news of Children's Commissioner Dr Maggie Atkinson's cynically-timed announcement that murdered toddler Jamie Bulger's killers Jon Venables and Robert Thomson, both 10 at the time of the slaughter, would never have stood trial today under the change she wishes to implement to the minimum age of criminal responsibility, raising it from 10 to 12.

Calling Dr Atkinson's comments twisted and insensitive, Jamie's mother, Denise Fergus, called for an apology to be followed by her either jumping or being pushed from the post. Doubtlessly we'll hear more of the affair, as Mrs Fergus is due to meet Justice Secretary Jack Straw this week to discuss Venables' arrest, rumoured to be connected with child pornography.

Minima volunteered to wash up, while Maxima and I listened to Johnny Walker's Sounds of the 70s show on Radio 2, then we got the laptop out for something that, to be honest, I think we'd been avoiding.

Aled Jones came to fame as a choirboy singing most famously Walking in the Air from The Snowman, and now, as well as pursuing a singing career, presents Christian programmes on TV and radio. On this morning's Good Morning Sunday Mothers' Day special, he'd interviewed Kate McCann, whose daughter Madeleine was taken from the family's holiday apartment in Portugal.

At times her voice seemed on the verge of cracking - and we were close to tears - as Kate told how she thinks of Madeleine every day and prays for her captors: her Parish Priest has given her a key to the church. She said that "every day is the same without Madeleine", so Mothers' Day brings both comfort and pain. When Jones asked her if she could forgive the people who took her daughter, she paused then said "I don't know". It was, I think, the most searingly honest point in an excoriating interview.

I was pleasantly surprised that the programme emphasized the religious aspect of Mothers' Day - Jones played Taverner's Hymn to the Mother of God, performed by the Choir of St George's Chapel, and an unexpected treat: Hymn to Mary by Beth Nielsen Chapman. It was interesting that Taverner composed his hymn in remembrance of his mother: this was the motivation for Paul McCartney's Let it Be, with the meditation on a line of the Prayer to Our Lady of Lourdes - priez pour ceux qui aiment et sont partis (pray for those who love and are parted) - in the middle two verses.

And the best prayer that I can send up to the mother of God on this day for Denise Fergus and Kate McCann and their families concerns the situation which many mothers have to face as regards their children, albeit hopefully in happier circumstances: pray for those who love and are parted.



Click the picture above to spend a "minute for Madeleine", or click here to listen to Good Morning Sunday featuring Kate McCann (until Saturday 20 March)

top tip for Tuesday

Only time for one tip this week, as I'm experimenting with the seat-of-the-pants style of editing the church mag: but what a tip it is.

Last Friday John Smeaton, director of SPUC (the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children) drews a line in the sand in response to the Government's abusive proposals for sex education in schools, which bode ill for the Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim voluntary grant-aided

Smeaton cites a Government media release praising St Thomas More's RC School in Bedford on the grounds that, among other things,

St Thomas More delivers SRE [sex and relationships education] through the pastoral programme in conjunction with the RE syllabus...the school explicitly recognises the reality that some young people may choose to be sexually active and, if that is the case, they need the knowledge and confidence to make an informed choice to protect themselves from pregnancy and STIs. The school nurse provides students with clear accurate information about the full range of contraception and STIs and details of local services...Pregnancy options, including abortion, are also discussed in a non-judgemental way with the RE syllabus requiring students to understand the spectrum of pro- and anti-choice views on abortion.

Smeaton provides a long list of tenets of the Roman Catholic faith that these grounds violate, after announcing that "I will be writing to St Thomas More school, asking them to confirm or deny the government's claims about what is happening in its school."

Later that day, the Telegraph's Blogs Editor, Damian Thomson forecast Bad Things for Oona Stannard, chief executive of the Catholic Education Service, which, as Smeaton identified, had helped the Government draw up its guidelines. Fr Tim Finnegan, a frequent flier on this feature, refers to both posts as he runs with the theme on his blog The Hermeneutic of Continuity. He asks how far the moral relativism will be taken:

I doubt whether you would get Healthy Schools Status if you taught that there was a range of views on the advantages of smoking tobacco; and I don't suppose there is meant to be a valid range of views on the pros and cons of nazism as a system of government. The relativism of Ed Balls and his friends who are setting the agenda for secular Britain is actually only applied to the "views" they disagree with, such as Catholic moral teaching on the sanctity of life, marriage, and the procreation of children.

The Government is mounting an attack both on one Faith and on faith. I remember minor Scottish politicians muttering about "Rome on the rates" and, as they have risen, they have dripped their poison slowly through the years in the hope that the erosion would create a cavity large enough to insert their specious moral outrage about "religion on the rates".

As John Smeaton notes, today - Tuesday 23 - is the day when Parliament is due to vote on what is effectively the nationalisation of the bodies, minds and spirits of our children.

Smeaton remarks that St Thomas More "preferred to sacrifice himself rather than put the state's demands above the church's teachings", as can be seen in the 1966 film
A man for All Seasons starring, among others, Paul Scofield and Susannah York. I wonder if the Government was careful to use a school bearing his name as a Trojan horse to try to use the state's demands to extinguish the church's teaching?

body image isn't all it looks like

Cavete: discusses and links to material some people may find disturbing

When I was in my mid-teens I developed acne. Never having been one to do things by halves, mine was in the form of angry boils flowering luxuriantly over my fizzog. I didn't have much of a problem with it, and didn't get more hassle than one might have expected in a working-class Glaswegian housing estate.

Then I went to university in Italy, and the head of my college decided he did have a problem with my acne, and at his insistence I set out on courses of antibiotics and various other pills and potions - one of which, as I remember, turned my first wee of the morning bright red, which was quite a thing if you weren't prepared for it.

During my first year at uni I fell into a deep depression, and I wonder if the head's effective declaration that my appearance was undesirable contributed to the mix of being away from home from the first time and studying like I'd never done before. But the past can be a dangerous place to form assumptions about, so who knows?

I found myself thinking about this period of my life for the first time in a while after an advert directed me to BBC Radio 1's listen-again feature, where Aled Jones from the Chris Moyles show (me neither) had hosted a "surgery" about body-image, when a young man called in to speak about his desperation that nothing his doctor gave him was touching his acne. I felt for him.

An American psychotherapist called Aaron Haydn Jones explained the process of filtering, whereby we might ignore 100 positive comments and dwell on one negative one. I can't argue with that - Richard Carpenter attributed one journalist's comments about his sister's weight in the early 1970s to her tortured death in 1983.

The show, however, wasn't exclusively about anorexia and bulimia as such but about unhappinesses with one's body (which might admittedly feed the pathogenesis of one of these terrible illnesses). I started to wonder about the direction of the show when one chap rang in to complain about the shape of one of his eyebrows, but then a young woman said that she'd had problems with her mum after she (filia) had a breast reduction: Aaron was running with the ball immediately, and wondered if the girl had had cosmetic surgery for what was a relational problem, and spoke of feelings of jealousy - or at least displacement - that can sometimes occur between mother and daughter, father and son. Then, of course, another young woman rang in to complain that her breasts were too small.

Something that's been in the news recently is airbrushing - a case in point being a photo of model Phillipa Hamilton where her waist appears smaller than her head, an image that made fashion house advertisers Ralph Lauren regret their use of Photoshop and ultimately issue a reluctant apology. To indicate the power of the program, some Radio 1 figures allowed their images to be retouched and posted on the website.

Where things started to get interesting was when Emma Ledger, deputy editor of More clebrity magazine, came on the show briefly to say that the publication had no policy as to the sizes of models whose photos it published, and that it only airbrushed to get rid of zits or tidy up hair. "Who wants to see a zit on the cover of a magazine?" she moaned, and suddenly I realised that perhaps punk had a point after all.

The first thing I did was to reflect that if a mag is publishing pics of clothes that are supplied to it, its in-house policies on model sizes are meaningless if the sample garments supplied to it only fit "size-zero" models; something which caused (British) Vogue editor Alexandra Schulman to fire off an angry letter to designers.

The second thing I did was to buy a copy of More, and try not to look too embarrassed as I payed for it. This is something I did when suspicious about Now editor Abigail Blackburn's protestations of innocence to Louise Redknapp, who had accused her magazine of triggering "pregorexia; the issue of Now brought out to coincide with Redknapp's crusading documentary was a celebrity pregnancy special, but the devil was in the detail, and the detail turned out to be in the back issues.

I have no back issues of More, but on flicking through the magazine did find an advert for Tesco Clothing Online featuring a photo of a woman who looked as though she had other priorities than eating. Had the magazine been supplied with the pic, or with clothes that would only fit somebody of her dimensions?

What caught Maxima's eyes made a bee in her bonnet buzz furoiusly: she pointed to a photo of Sarah Harding of Girls Aloud with (I think) Tom Crane, and, pointing to Crane's form (which compared to mine looks skeletal), demanded to know why men could look any way they wanted while women had to look like Barbie. At least she let up quite soon - one Hogmanay she went on and on about male performers looking like they'd been dragged through a hedge while female ones were expected to exude glamour. At least she had a point. But I hope the bloke who phoned in to complain about his eyebrow never had a look at the "More man of the week" (Kellan Lutz from vampire flick Twilight); no wonder illicit steroid sales are booming, as vulnerable young men think they have to "get ripped". It's not for me to contradict Emma Ledger and say that the photo was digitally manipulated, but Radio 1 DJ Vis showed that it could be done (see pic below).

Ledger did stress that her magazine was for 18-26-year-olds ("of all shapes and sizes"), but the feature that gave me most cause for concern was nothing to do with body-image, rather "position of the week", demonstrated with Barbie and Ken dolls. I thought of the poor girl who texted Jones' show to say that she only felt good about herself if a boy told her she was pretty, and felt furthermore that the only way to bring this about was to sleep with said boy. I remembered sadly the travellers' tales of former colleagues in drugs work, who had given talks to schoolchildren and reported back that girls said that some boys threatened to spread the word that they were "frigid" if they refused to have sex. Sometimes we fellows are unconscionably nasty people, and moreover, while More is by no means the worst offender, I'm also not sure what Ms Ledger thinks happens to somebody on their 18th birthday to make them less vulnerable to masculine con-tricks than they were at 17 years and 364 days old.

Now I only look in the mirror on those occasions when I have no choice but to shave and comb my hair; but I remember a strange young man who would examine his image, although I'm no longer sure what he was looking for or even at. Young people today are not the means to enrichment of the staff of celebrity magazines and/or the shareholders of companies that own them. It's no cliché that children are the future: young people will father and bear our grandchildren, will work in supermarkets and universities and, among a milion other things, will hopefully enjoy life enough to convince the grumpier among us that there's a point to it all.

And, on a personal note, I'd like to send a message to the young man with acne. Nothing worked for me either - but it faded in every way as I got older.

Related posts:

Abigail Blackburn and the truth about pregorexia

Claire Sweeney's big fat...

top ten songs for St Valentine's Day

Click here to view this post for 56k modems, or slow broadband connections

Once again we're approaching St Valentine's day, in the runup to which postal workers are kept working overtime taking cards ranging from the sublime to the cheesy - and often unsigned - from A to B.

Valentine is reckoned to have been a bishop of the early church in Rome at a time when legionaries had been forbidden to marry, as senior members of the Senate reckoned the marital to detract from the martial. Managers of football teams used to have equivalent ideas and ban WAGS from travelling with players for big fixtures; o tempora, o mores...

10 - The Carpenters voice what it feels like to want to be in love, but for love to escape one...a feeling not unknown to adolescents nor, unfortunately, to Karen Carpenter for most of her life.





9 Deep Purple, in something of a symphonic rarity from their 1969 Book of Taliesyn LP, describe from an adolescent male's point of view the emptiness referred to in the above song, and the epic heights to which boys (and men) can elevate an attraction that's not always much more than hormonal.




8 Sometimes young people find themselves thrown together then torn apart - especially in times of war. Here's Dame Vera Lynn singing about precious time together in a song that elements in the Government of the time tried unsuccessfully to ban: That Lovely Weekend.




7 Symphonie Fantastique, 1st movement: Hector Berlioz composed this section of his emotional record of artistic life recalling himself at a dance when his beloved - Harriet Smithson - suddenly appears: a sweet moment when it happens, and sometimes this sort of thing does. One might see it as a classical version of Lennon and McCartney's I saw her standing there. Here it is performed by Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School's Senior Orchestra.





6 Janine - David Bowie, written by the songsmith about the girlfriend of a Polish acquaintance. I'm reminded of a trip to Ireland in the 1970s a my Mum sought out somebody she'd met at a party, presumably to ease the loneliness in the wake of my Dad's death. (Coming back there were no hotel places, but a Dublin Gardaí division let us sleep in their interrogation room.) Also of an ill-advised engagement to a Swiss girl after a holiday romance; thankfully, in both cases, good sense intervened before too much damage could be done.




5 There's an ongoing debate over the degree to which Shakespeare understood women. I don't know if that will ever be resolved, but Abba's songwriting team of Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson put words into the mouths of their spouses, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog, that evinced an understanding of the female mind that sold millions of records, not least to women. One record in particular, The Day before you Came, reminds me of a poem by rennaissance woman Joyce Grenfell called Ordinary Morning:

It felt like an ordinary morning
It began in an ordinary way
And then, without warning
Ordinary morning
Became extraordinary day.

Hadn't the slightest sort of inkling -
No-one said love was on its way -
And then, within a twinkling
Without the smallest inkling
It became an extraordinary day.

For there you were
And the whole world stood still.
There you were,
I lved you then, and I always will.

At first, an ordinary morning.
Began on an ordinary way,
And then my heart was beating
At this ordinary meeting
And we both knew
This was not an ordinary day.

The song is all the more poignant as it was released as the band was disintegrating:





4 Sometimes we form pairings that, for better or worse, fall apart. Sometimes couples reunite, other times they don't; the pain of parting is universal - but not all separations are forever...





3 ...as Emmy-Lou Harris sings: Together Again.





2 And when he and she are reunited, one hopes that romance still lives:





1 This song reminds me of my wedding to Maxima, my love. We had no money, but when we arrived at Church there were so many beautiful flowers; to this dayI don't know who provided them, but every night I thank God for them.




Have a happy Valentine's Day.

If you enjoyed this, click here for more Top ten songs about...

top ten songs for St Valentine's Day for 56k modems

To view the YouTube videos embedded for broadband modems, click here.


Once again we're approaching St Valentine's day, in the runup to which postal workers are kept working overtime taking cards ranging from the sublime to the cheesy - and often unsigned - from A to B.

Valentine is reckoned to have been a bishop of the early church in Rome at a time when legionaries had been forbidden to marry, as senior members of the Senate reckoned the marital to detract from the martial. Managers of football teams used to have equivalent ideas and ban WAGS from travelling with players for big fixtures; o tempora, o mores...

10 - The Carpenters voice what it feels like to want to be in love, but for love to escape one...a feeling not unknown to adolescents nor, unfortunately, to Karen Carpenter for most of her life.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1tjFIuyCAU

9 Deep Purple, in something of a symphonic rarity from their 1969 Book of Taliesyn LP, describe from an adolescent male's point of view the emptiness referred to in the above song, and the epic heights to which boys (and men) can elevate an attraction that's not always much more than hormonal.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAsGTkksHB4

8 Sometimes young people find themselves thrown together then torn apart - especially in times of war. Here's Dame Vera Lynn singing about precious time together in a song that elements in the Government of the time tried unsuccessfully to ban: That Lovely Weekend.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUeBMKN0mGM

7 Symphonie Fantastique, 1st movement: Hector Berlioz composed this section of his emotional record of artistic life recalling himself at a dance when his beloved - Harriet Smithson - suddenly appears: a sweet moment when it happens, and sometimes this sort of thing does. One might see it as a classical version of Lennon and McCartney's I saw her standing there. Here it is performed by Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School's Senior Orchestra.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2yLUxvrCvc

6 Janine - David Bowie, written by the songsmith about the girlfriend of a Polish acquaintance. I'm reminded of a trip to Ireland in the 1970s a my Mum sought out somebody she'd met at a party, presumably to ease the loneliness in the wake of my Dad's death. (Coming back there were no hotel places, but a Dublin Gardaí division let us sleep in their interrogation room.) Also of an ill-advised engagement to a Swiss girl after a holiday romance; thankfully, in both cases, good sense intervened before too much damage could be done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSt9PJV5CAo

5 There's an ongoing debate over the degree to which Shakespeare understood women. I don't know if that will ever be resolved, but Abba's songwriting team of Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson put words into the mouths of their spouses, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog, that evinced an understanding of the female mind that sold millions of records, not least to women. One record in particular, The Day before you Came, reminds me of a poem by rennaissance woman Joyce Grenfell called Ordinary Morning:

It felt like an ordinary morning
It began in an ordinary way
And then, without warning
Ordinary morning
Became extraordinary day.

Hadn't the slightest sort of inkling -
No-one said love was on its way -
And then, within a twinkling
Without the smallest inkling
It became an extraordinary day.

For there you were
And the whole world stood still.
There you were,
I lved you then, and I always will.

At first, an ordinary morning.
Began on an ordinary way,
And then my heart was beating
At this ordinary meeting
And we both knew
This was not an ordinary day.

The song is all the more poignant as it was released as the band was disintegrating:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIV2ZE-cf6A

4 Sometimes we form pairings that, for better or worse, fall apart. Sometimes couples reunite, other times they don't; the pain of parting is universal - but not all separations are forever...



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1O_0ibqzUg


3 ...as Emmy-Lou Harris sings: Together Again.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG1qTFZSiAM

2 And when he and she are reunited, one hopes that romance still lives:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyrqgTsjNGg

1 This song reminds me of my wedding to Maxima, my love. We had no money, but when we arrived at Church there were so many beautiful flowers; to this dayI don't know who provided them, but every night I thank God for them.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnbqwWm17Sc


Have a happy Valentine's Day.

beauty pageants and the scorpion's sting in Songs

Geneviève de Fontenay, septuagenarian grande-dame of Miss France, is living proof that there can be honour in the much-maligned art of appreciating the beauty of the human form.

Beauty pageants have been with us since pre-Christian Europe, when Roman and Germanic traditions independently decided that an attractive young woman be chosen to represent in comprehensible form the burgeoning spring - what became known as the May Queen, part of many a town and village ceremony, even as socialists coveted May-Day and then, as the contestants in Miss London School of Economics found, proclaimed the ceremonies like those of the day's original tenants an "objectification of women".

While the pagan overseers of May-Day may have had a better grasp of the procreative aspect of sex than the unitive one, the author of Song of Songs displays no such impediment as we see carnal and romantic combine to turn the marriage-bed into a gateway to the numinous:

While the king was at his table,
my perfume spread its fragrance.

My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh
resting between my breasts.

My lover is to me a cluster of henna blossoms
from the vineyards of En Gedi.

How beautiful you are, my darling!
Oh, how beautiful!
Your eyes are doves.

How handsome you are, my lover!
Oh, how charming!
And our bed is verdant.

The beams of our house are cedars;
our rafters are firs.

What's notable about Songs is that the Beloved is no beauty-queen; taking the work as an erotic poem (one of several interpretations), she initially tries to turn the Lover's eyes away from her because she has been put to work in the fields - "Do not stare at me because I am...darkened by the sun."

Andrew Jones, leader of Grace Church in London's Hackney, teases out in polemic form the tocsin rung by Songs identifying the difficult path Geneviève de Fontenay must tread if she is to keep Miss France (or any beauty pageant) above the level of a flesh-feast: "We are to read it as a celebration of and a warning about the power of sexual love."

Mme de Fontenay enforces strict rules regarding the conduct of Miss France contestants before, during and after the contest: entrants must be single, nulliparous, not have posed for nude or scantily-clad pictures; and a successful Miss France must not pose for such pictures for five years after gaining the title.

In an article about the crisis surrounding the present incumbent, First News' Gavin Mortimer revisits a controversy 2008 incumbent Valérie Bègue of Réunion, he says, "was ordered to stand down by de Fontenay on account of a series of titillating photos, one of which involved licking yogurt off a ledge. Bègue refused, saying that she was fully clothed in the photos and hadn't authorised their publication. De Fontenay was forced to back off when she was accused in some quarters of racism."

Mortimer, a class-war conspiracy theorist, is showing an aversion to traditional values in his selectivity with the facts: despite its cherished laïcité, there is a strong core of Judaeo-Christian values in France. The photo that endangered Bègue's crown did so not because she was in a swimming-pool wearing a skimpy bikini: the clinching factor was that she was in a "crucified" position, floating on a wooden cross. I refrain from posting the pic due to its blasphemy rather than any salaciousness.

The present unhappiness to dog Miss France by association is the publication of nude photos of Miss Paris 2010, Kelly Bochenko, in scandal-sheet Entrevue. The 23-year-old stated that they had been taken either by or for a former boyfriend four years ago and she'd forgotten about them.

Actually, I don't have too much of a problem swallowing the last statement. In a toxic practice called sexting, young people - predominantly females - send lewd and sometimes downright pornographic photographs of themselves to males or even to their peers by mobile phone, something that is planting a harvest of tears for the future as these photos find their way onto the internet where they await the subjects' parents or even children should the models be hubristic enough to achieve anything. Yet explicit "lads' mags" whose publishers resist every effort to relegate them to the top shelf continue to brainwash young men into moulding young women into sex-objects, as all the while feminists fix their fury on beauty contests which, while staunch guardians like Geneviève de Fontenay stand watch, are much more about a celebration of grace and elegance than that much-used misnomer into which all the varied subtleties of sexuality are crushed, "just sex".

While in Songs Lover and Beloved embrace and encircle in a double-helix dance, sex without commitment splinters us into so many shards we end up out of control and easy meat for predators who feed on the vulnerable.

Perhaps Bochenko's boyfriend was jealous of her incipient success? The wonderful passage of Songs about love being as strong as death has a scorpions' sting in the tail that Andrew Jones indicates with his point "sexual love is so powerful that it needs to be sealed": "its jealousy [is] unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame." I just wonder whether her forgetting about the skin-pix represents a genuine lapse of memory or a need for a psychological fig-leaf.

The First Post's Gavin Mortimer has a depressing prediction for Bochenko and too many women who have been softened up by the abusive phenomena of sexting and lads' mags, with an insight into their raison d'être: "the photos will do her no harm should she wish to go into the porn business". That's nothing to sing about. I hope Kelly Bochenko can put this behind her, whatever the gutter press's ambitions for her, and reaches for the heights she is capable of.

Akmal Shaikh - one among many victims of heroin

It's started already. Have a read:

Where is the medical research that says that being bi-polar impairs your judgement as to what is right and what is wrong? Do you think that if I decided to go out now on the streets and start dealing drugs when I end up in court I could say to the judge; "Oh please your honour, I didn't know what I was doing- as I have bi-polar!" It is a pathetic excuse and can never be used in a court of law to excuse a crime.

This was, curiously, posted on a football website, about the execution on 29 December of Akmal Shaikh in China for bringing 4kg of heroin into the country, having been allegedly "duped" by a chap in Poland. I don't personally have a problem with believing that: a friend's son was offered a wad of money to take a package from A to B and, having been stopped by the police, found that the "easy money" had been payment for his being stupid enough to transport a class-A drug. So he served his time in prison: paid the price, you might say, according to the law of the land he was arrested in.

What the fellow says in the quote at the top of the page isn't all that far off-target, but where I take issue is with the phrase "pathetic excuse" as part of a description of a serious mental illness, one that I have myself. I prefer the more measured reasoning of the Telegraph's Richard Edwards:

The episodes [of extreme mood swings] can last several weeks or months and at worst can include psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions that one has special powers or abilities...There is debate in legal circles as to whether those affected can claim it as a defence to their actions because bipolar [disorder] affects mood rather than cognition, and therefore does not necessarily affect a person’s ability to know right from wrong.

Shaikh's supporters pointed to the lyrics of a song for world peace inviting a rabbit to pray with him as proof of his mental illness, and even Reprieve, the prisoners' human rights charity, called the song "bizarre" and "terrible". But if insipid songs voiced by grandiose personalities indicated serious mental illness, there'd be still more pop stars on medication than there presently are - even among the hubris-scarred Live Aid veterans, whose pomposity was outdone only by the scale of the hair and shoulderpads. (Actually, Syd Barrett produced some rather brilliant stuff in the florid phase of his illness.)

While I was in hospital and in the grip of a delusion that was urging me to break the law, a psychiatrist advised me that should I do so then my treatment would continue in prison, and that was enough to keep me on the right side of the law. The same principle has applied here in reverse: Shaikh broke the law not just in China but in its Xinjian Uyghur Autonomous Region, where the treatment of Christians such as Alimujiang Yimiti, bravely exposed by ChinaAid, show that compassion there is especially a stranger in a strange land.

But there we may be hitting the nub of the problem - the Establishment's pavlovian response to selected shibboleths of diversity. Had he been called, say, Joe Bloggs and not Akmal Shaikh, and been born in Penzance instead of Pakistan, would Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Foreign Secretary David Milliband and Foreign Office Minister Ivan Lewis (who professed himself "sick to the stomach") have joined the howls of protest from Amnesty and Reprieve?

Another villain in this tragedy is British drugs policy, especially as relates to celebrities who use drugs. We've seen supermodel Kate Moss cut lines of cocaine and not be arrested; Amy Winehouse hospitalised after a multi-substance overdose and Billy Joel describe the routine nature of rehab for substance abuse disorders as "mental floss". (And sacked chair of the Advisory Board on the Misuse of Drugs, David Nutt - who seems to be trying to break into the celebrity circuit in his own right - admits to experimenting with highly-addictive benzodiazepines before giving lectures.)

All of this is no comfort to the Shaikh family who, presumably through no fault of their own, have lost their loved one. It might be worth noting, though, that in the UK, the 4kg of heroin he was carrying would be worth £40,000 ($63,700) at current prices before it was cut with potentially lethal contaminants to make it go further and earn up to ten times as much.

So should China have executed Akmal Shaikh? You could say that what he was carrying in his suitcase, knowingly or not, was as life-destroying as a bus ploughing through a crowd; like a suicide-bomb in slow motion. I cannot find myself condemning China for the move, but that doesn't mean we can become less suspicious towards the murderous tiger, whose colonial claws are already gripping swathes of Africa, nor can we pretend not to see the abuses towards its own citizens who may be members of house-churches that don't officially exist, or perhaps aren't even born yet. SPUC director John Smeaton highlights our own complicity in this:

The UNFPA's participation in China's forced abortion one-child policy is well-documented. Furthermore, when Colin Powell (a supporter of abortion) was US Secretary of State, the State Department verified the pro-life Population Research Institute’s allegations that the UNFPA was cooperating with China's coercive abortion programme...The UK government gave over 40 million US dollars to the "regular funds contributions" of UNFPA in 2007 (the latest report available), about 10% of the total income China received in regular donations from over 180 countries worldwide.

Presumably the diplomatic and political row over the execution of Akmal Shaikh will lumber on as China saves face while Gordon Brown searches for a figleaf to cover the intellectual, moral and political paucity of his position; and meanwhile, the products of the Afghan opium fields alone kill 100,000 people a year - the equivalent of over 1900 executions daily. Where are the wailing politicians?