blogosphere "thank-you's"

Risa from Isramom has been kind enough to tip me in an internet meme that was started on Adventures in Mamaland. I enjoy Risa's blog because she presents life in Israel as a series of everyday occurences in a religious Jewish family in the Holy Land, free from the accretions of gentiles like me who can write a blogpost then go to work in a Merry England wherein one can still perform the basic tasks of living without risk to life and limb. Thanks for the kind words, Risa; much appreciated.

These are the rules of the meme:

1. Thank the person who gave you this award.


2. Share one thing about yourself readers might not know otherwise.


3. List six (6) bloggers you think are fantastic, and say why.


4. Contact the bloggers you've picked, and let them know about the award.

One thing about me that regulars to the Draughty Old Fen might not know is that I'm addicted to cheese. So much so that last night, I NEEDED cheese so much that I stole some of Maxima's white stilton with bits of fruit in it, which she buys because nobody else in the house likes it. She confronted me and asked me why I took it. I replied that I took it because it was the only cheese in the house. I'm still on probation.

Here are six bloggers I think are fantastic:

Firstly, Naomi Litvin. The author of We Never Lost Hope: a Holocaust Memoir and Love Story, she critiques antisemitism and the contradictions of modern society in a manner that is no less forensic for being literary. I like her because, as the father of girls, I am grateful for the spotlight she shines - with David Appletree of the Jewish Internet Defence Force - upon Facebook.

My second choice is Linda, an American home-schooling Mom and photographer who writes passionately and frankly about the joys and miseries of life, love and standing her ground as a staunchly pro-life Roman Catholic. Her blog, Don't Poke the Baby, is as unmissable for her lyrical wisdom as it is for her photography.

Ellee Seymour is a Press Consultant and journalist who blogs about both national affairs and the minutiae of her beloved East of England. The reason she's my third choice is that I admire the inner security that allows her to praise people with whose views she disagrees when she feels praise is due. Another reason I admire her is that she's a supporter of Headway, a charity that helps people get over head injuries.

John Smeaton, SPUC Director is the blog of the head of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. He writes for people from all political and religious backgrounds and none who are concerned for members of groups vulnerable to Establishment anti-life prejudices - the unborn, pregnant women, people suffering from after-effects of abortion that aren't recognised as existing, the terminally ill, people with chronic physical/mental illnesses,older people - to name just a few. I chose him because I have uneding admiration for the tightrope he walks by praising members of the Establishment who are brave enough to defend members of these groups, while critiquing enemies of the vulnerable, who are often members of the same Establishment groups.

Lorena lives on a ranch in Texas, and on Lorena's Blog you can find photos of the most exquisite quality. Her blogs, centred on family and animals with the occasional review, are well worth the read.

Lastly, but by no means leastly, I first heard of Naomi Litvin's blog through David Appletree's world-famous blog, The Jewish Internet Defense Force, which provides a voice for Jews in the US and worldwide at a time when many vested interests would have this voice extinguished. More than this, though, if you're not Jewish and/or haven't heard of David, keep an ear open: as Facebook falls, I think you'll hear his name as one of the brave who spoke out against the exploitative network when it could do no wrong in the eyes of the Mainstream Media.

Again, a big thank-you to Risa. It's one thing to get a badge for political blogging, but to be tipped by somebody who likes to read what you have to say is on an entirely different level. And, as the time when I can only blog occasionally as other things demand my time fast approaches, it's something I'll never forget.

Eurovision awaits

UPDATE: click to read Eurovision 2010: great music, shadows fall

On Saturday we'll have the Eurovision Song Contest. My dearest wish is that it will produce some vintage cheese, but time goes on. But time goes on too quickly, sometimes: when I saw the Ukranian video (which does not by any means represent how the country will be represented on the night) I thought: I don't want my daughters to see this.

These are my two picks for Saturday night. First, the Netherlands entry: Sieneke with Ik Ben Verliefd (Sha-La-Lie):



And secondly, the Spanish entry - Daniel Diges, with Algo Pequeñito:



Don't get me wrong, I hope Britain wins; but I also hope rain will stop, Bank Holiday Mondays will be sunny, and Scotland will win the World Cup. Some things just aren't going to happen. But Britain will not win Eurovision again until, like other countries, we ask our best musical talent if they have the will to enter. Or else until our political masters put aside their mantras of being edgy and diverse, and listen to the wisdom of Beatles manager Brian Epstein: "the next big thing is a good tune".

That having been said, may the best act win - and if not the best, the cheesiest!

Click to go to the lyrics (original and in translation) for Ik Ben Verliefd and Algo Pequeñito

first TV abortion ad: new medium, old agendas

I've just seen Marie Stopes' advert on John Smeaton's site and, although I should be doing an application form right now, had to get blogging. First, have a look at the advert.



It starts pretty unremarkably with "Jenny Evans" standing at a bus-stop, and the graphics telling us that she is late, ie has not had her period when expected.

Then the interesting stuff starts. We go to "Katie Simmons", who is also late. She is propelling a baby in a pram with one hane and trying to control a toddler with the other. Marie Stopes' message, you might think is that two is enough; three would be too many. However, when you see the difficulty she's having with two children, the subliminal message becomes clear: one child is enough, two are too many. Fittingly, Father Tim Finnegan of The Hermeneutic of Continuity reports the visit last week of Ms Li Bin, called "Madame Sterilisation" (she heads China's forced sterilisation policy) to Marie Stopes' London headquarters. He links to Tibet-Truth, which says of Marie Stopes International that it is "an organization which by its silence, and open support of the Chinese population program, surely merits criticism and challenge".

The last lady we see is "Shareen Butler", a black lady who is in a pottery class. Here we come to the rotten core of the population control movement, as is witnessed to by Arnold Culbreath, Urban Outreach Director of US organisation Protecting Black Life. In asking why abortion providers are particularly interested in building sites in poor black areas of the US, we get a glimpse of their ugly agenda.

In today's Telegraph, trainee consultant Max Pemberton cries for less heat, more light on abortion, protesting that he sat in on a Marie Stopes counselling session with a patient who had been abandoned by the father of her unborn child. The session ended with the patient, contrary to what Pemberton would have wanted, deciding to keep the child. Personally, if I was a Marie Stopes counsellor and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph - known to be friendly to Judaeo-Christian traditions and the pro-life cause - was sitting in, I would have made sure that the pregnancy was continued as well. Tellingly, Pemberton reveals that the woman had a mental illness, in another confirmation of the pro-choice/anti-life eugenics agenda of the abortion industry.

If abortion services are going to advertise their wares on TV, why are pro-life organisations still barred from using this medium to raise awareness of the possible and proven side-effects of abortion? I can only hope that the Coalition Government will do what it can to level the playing-field which has been skewed in favour of the eugenics lobby for the best part of a century. All I can say to strengthen their resolve in this project is: your voters are watching you.

Cambridge's new mosque: planning still pending

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day was going through my mind today when I rang Cambridge City Council to ask how permission for the proposed mosque on the city's Mill Road was progressing. I must admit I expected to learn nothing, but a very polite and helpful chap informed me that, although the land, the former Robert Sayle's site, had been acquired, no planning proposal had been submitted and one was not expected in the immediate future.

The site was acquired in 2008 by the Cambridge Muslim Welfare Society and Mulsim Academic Trust; but a police investigation of an arson attack later in the year, which resulted in their demolition, is presumably hampering planning applications.

Freedom of worship is an essential human right, so if the Muslim community in Cambridge is poorly housed in the Abu Bakr Jamia Mosque off Mill Road, then I hope they get permission for their mosque.

I also hope that any planning process is not a set-up like the Mill Road Tesco process, which was hijacked by well-heeled sandalistas objecting on ideological grounds in the knowledge that they have the money to patronise the independent shops.

So, in the event of there being a planning process that is open to the public, I have one issue that I hope will be debated in the open:

Given that paragraph 49 of Government planning advice PPG13 discourages adequate provision of parking spaces in order to promote sustainable transport choices, how will Councillors and planning officers treat proposals for parking spaces in the plans? If they apply the proposals consistently by refusing an application with adequate parking, how will they respond to claims that not everybody without private transport will be able to make it to worship, depending on where in Cambridgeshire they're coming from? (The Cambridgeshire Roman Catholic community has experienced this, with changes in Sunday bus timetables leaving residents in some villages unable to attend Sunday Mass.)

I am glad that mosque leaders have said that the mosque will have no minaret or call to prayer loudspeaker; speaking of members of Cambridge's 4000-strong Muslim community trying to cram into a space meant for 500 then "spilling out into the street", trustee Mohammed Mahmood says "We don't want to be a nuisance to neighbours anymore".

The reason I thought about Everybody Draw Mohammed Day when I was making my phone call was that I was reflecting how censorship on ideological grounds nurtures but disfigures that which it would suppress: it would have caused much less of a splash had Facebook not pulled the page that founded it. I was going to do a post for the day, but found myself unable to because any blog I would have linked to contained pictures I will not reproduce on a blog accessed by a lot of schools. But anyway, being given the information I wanted straight away was an unexpected and very pleasant surprise.

We see the worst of Islam all too often on the media. I hope the coming negotiations will show us its best out in the open.

And in a spirit of conciliation here, unlinked, is a cartoon by California's Earl Jones that I hope will speak to Muslims, Christians and beyond.

search: "trumpington bible"

UPDATE: If you are looking for "Trumpington Bible", please look at the three comments to this post by ernest green, patrick of bath and anonymous, and all will be revealed!

UPDATE 2: for an erudite discussion of the Trumpington Bible, click here to go to Bishop's Blog, the blog of Dr David Thomson, Bishop of Huntingdon.

This blog has had a lot of hits recently, which is never something to complain about, but I regret that many readers find themselves unsatisfied. Since yesterday, I've had a huge amount of people being led to my blog after googling the terms "Trumpington Bible". I've spoken about a General Election campaign in Trumpington, a village to the south-east of Cambridge, and list the Bible on the sidebar as one of my favourite books. But I've never mentioned the two words together and - strangely, given the number of hits googling the terms - Google can't find any document mentioning the two words side by side.

I wonder what's going on, what news is breaking? Can anybody enlighten us?

"Mental: a History of the Madhouse"

As a part of a series of documentaries detailing changes in views about mental illness in the last 60 years, BBC4 screened Mental: A History of the Madhouse last night, and it did an admirable job of exploring the spectrum of shades of grey involved in the issue without black-and-white judgement.

For example, there was Maggie, who volunteered for "experimental" brain surgery in the 1960s and who feels that, after 5 years of debilitation that followed the surgery - in which a section of her brain was burned out to stop the fits of violence that would require increasing lengths of hospitalisation - she recovered in spite of and not because of the operation. She has been given awards for campaigning for community causes...but one is left wondering if this would have been possible without the operation.

I thought of this towards the end of the documentary, when we saw the dark side of the opposite of the asylum model of care. Following a series of murders by people who had been released into the community as beds were closed (so the chance of their being readmitted stadily diminished), the most famous of which was the 1992 murder of Jonathan Zito by Christopher Clunis at Finsbury Park, a psychiatrist briefs a police shift that one of his patients is having increasingly violent urges, and then a dozen riot officers break into his house because both psychiatrist and police have decided that "overwhelming force" is required.

There have, of course, been huge leaps since the days of the asylums, when staff violence towards patients was recalled by a former psychiatric nurse as having been justified, when he was a student, by his charge nurse on the grounds that "if you live among shit you become shit". Although thankfully I missed this period, I felt ashamed to have been a psychiatric nurse.

In 1959, Patricia Hornsby-Smith (in Harold MacMillan's Conservative government) reported on the crippling price of keeping more people in psychiatric institutions than there had ever been, reporting on the "appalling legacy" of the buildings and how maintaining them would take up an increasing portion of the NHS budget; but she also spoke on how an appreciation of mental illness being like "any other disability" was a prerequisite on action that would need to be taken on both pragmatic and humanitarian grounds.

Hornsby-Smith's speech was the prologue that Enoch Powell's 1961 Water-Tower Speech was written to follow:

it is the duty of a Minister of Health and the duty of the National Association for Mental Health, to...choose and to favour wherever they have the choice, the course of more drastic and fundamental change: for we may be pretty sure that even so the progress of medical thought and method will still be well on ahead of our practice.

Powell was, of course right (and it was good to see the BBC admit that the man was more than a controversial 15-minute speech): as the documentary showed, "hope came from the laboratories [in the form of] a new generation of psychiatric drugs". However, Largactil (chlorpromazine) created new problems to replace the ones it solved in the form of simultaneous agitation and sedation, and Parkinson's Disease-like symptoms. Had the resarchers looked further into its genesis, they might have found that it was derived from a dye produced in Victorian England, but wasn't much use. So it was fed to cows to see the effect, which was that the cows calmed down. And died shortly afterwards.

However, the growing voice possessed by mentally ill people and their advocates - who included many mental health workers - drove the phamaceutical search for medications that had maximum effect on symptoms with minimum unwanted effects. The quest still continues.

But how did we get from this sense of optomism to a mentally ill man's flat being raided by a dozen riot police? As beds decrease, I worry that the stigma that infested the ageing Victorian structures hasn't disappeared but has rather been absorbed into society, which has become itself an über-asylum wherein, asserts London Mayor Boris Johnson in an exegesis of Eleanor Rigby, too many people "pretty much stay at home and watch TV" with their loneliness acting as a straitjacket - a garment never used once in the history of the crumbling Victorian asylum where I trained.

As politicians struggle to describe how they are going to deal with the deficit, it's obvious that there are going to have to be cuts. But this should not blind us to the fact that cuts started some time ago. Fulbourn hospital, the psychiatric hospital serving Cambridge and surrounding areas, lost two rehabilitation units and two acute psychiatric wards in 2007. This could have been ameliorated by better services in the community, but Vocational Services, providing occupational therapy, and Cambridge Clubhouse a range of less structured opportunities of rehabilitation after psychiatric treatment, are long gone. The Clubhouse was replaced by a mental health resource centre that aimed to make ex-patients in the community into trainers, but access is now only by telephone.

I'm not setting out my stall for my territory, having switched from a psychiatric nurse to a psychiatric patient some years ago. I'm merely arguing for common sense: in the absence of dedicated resources people requiring mental health treatment are, at the more severe end, going to keep ricocheting between inpatient wards, police cells and prison and, at the less severe, take up more of the general resources that are available, eg GP appointments, A&E beds, etc.

And the human cost is intertwined with the financial one, something that Patricia Hornsby-Smith and Enoch Powell would have recognised. I met a fellow Clubhouse veteran recently; unable to maintain employment without input but "not ill enough" to warrant a community psychiatric nurse, she spends her time subsisting on benefits - mostly, as Boris Johnson says, at home watching TV. Investing in resources that would help people like my friend both to work and to pay more taxes would, in my opinion, be a win/win situation.

Related posts:

Good taste back on the Horizon: How Mad are You?

Blurred Boundaries, Fine Lines - How Mad are You?

Ronnie James Dio RIP

Being something of a heavy metal connoisseur, I was saddened to hear the news of Ronnie James Dio's death on the radio last night.

Dio started playing in bands in 1957 and releasing records the year after. What a time his first full decade as a recording artist must have been, as rhythm'n'blues morphed into psychedelia which, in its 1970s incarnation as progressive rock, laid the foundations for the golden era of heavy metal in the 1980s. This, incidentally, was kicked off by Black Sabbath's release of Heaven and Hell, with Dio on vocals replacing Ozzy Osbourne, whose demons had nearly destroyed the band.

What marked Dio (born Padavona in Portsmouth, New Hampshire) out as a giant was his eschewal of the rock'n'roll lifestyle, which he put down not to studying pharmacology for a year at degree level but because, he told an interviewer for dmme.net, "I saw how destructive it was, and how it dulled your sensibilities and ate up your talent and your life". On records his first instrument was the bass guitar, but before that he learned trumpet, which built up his diaphragm to the point where it would sustain his most powerful and nuanced instrument: his voice, which would come to international prominence with Rainbow and, after recording arguably the definitive Black Sabbath album, with his eponymous band as well as numerous collaborations.

Dio succumbed to stomach cancer yesterday after battling with it since late last year. This may be of little comfort to his widow at the moment, but his avoidance of the rock'n'roll lifestyle put him beyond the rock'n'roll death that follows on all too often. Not for him choking on vomitus after downing a handful of sleeping-pills like Jimi Hendrix; or alcohol poisoning due to mistaking Heminevrin for recreational tablets, which prevented Keith Moon's stomach ejecting the bucketful he'd had during a relapse; or, most cruelly, Phil Lynott sliding into the last goodnight due to liver failure while his mother wept.

All of these people have left us wonderful music, but Dio left something else alongside - a template for living well in an industry that has been known to eat its children. Thanks for the music, Ronnie.

Here's RJD as I like to remember him, singing about his beloved pop medeivalism with Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow in 1975.