2016
March 2
Tackling the nanny way
It would appear that more than 70 doctors and academics are calling for a ban on tackling in rugby matches played in UK and Irish schools. They say that injuries from this “high-impact collision sport” can have lifelong consequences for children. They say that more than two thirds of injuries in youth rugby are down to tackles or during the scrum.
They name the injuries as including “fractures, ligamentous tears, dislocated shoulders, spinal injuries and head injuries” and state that they can have short-term, lifelong and life-ending consequences for children. There is, apparently, a link between “repeat concussions and cognitive impairment and an association with depression, memory loss and diminished verbal abilities.”
Right, that’s their view. Presumably if we remove these possibilities then people will last longer and be more intelligent and less likely to be depressed. But they will not have lived. If, as a parent, you don’t want your child to play rugby, send him, or indeed her, to a non-rugby playing school. I would agree that, maybe up to the age of 11, touch rugby is best but, after that age, with expert coaching and supervision, tackling must be allowed. It is all part of the game. By the way if you take this logically heading a football has been said, by doctors, to cause damage and if a football when kicked, goes straight in your face that too can cause damage. So school football must be played with a beach ball or else the ball must be unable to rise more than one foot above the ground.
Of course it is all useless, namby-pamby nanny-state nonsense. Children need to challenge themselves. They will get hurt but I can assure you, as ex-England hooker Brian Moore says, more children will die from obesity than on the rugby field and obesity in children will cause for more harm in later life, if such a life actually happens.
I played contact rugby for 8 of my 13 school years. I suffered concussion once (it was delayed and I walked home before it took effect); I tore all the ligaments in my ankle when producing a scintillating dummy on a wet field and my mind forgot to inform my legs which way we were going. I played on and then walked 3 miles home afterwards. True the doctor at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital at Stanmore did say I was a little silly when he viewed the mess the next day but he didn’t say give up rugby.
I then played another two years after leaving school and dislocated my shoulder twice and suffered a very brief temporary paralysis after a scrum collapsed when I was playing hooker because someone didn’t turn up. I was probably a bit lucky but, never would I have missed any minute of playing the games. I don’t think I have cognitive impairment nor have I ever been depressed, suffered memory loss nor had diminished verbal abilities. I actually had another delayed concussion when I was 4 years old and fell out of my father’s car, going round a roundabout at about 30 mph. Should we ban children from travelling in cars?
I do now get pain in my left ankle, especially in cold weather, and my shoulder doesn’t have full movement but, I repeat, I wanted to live as a child not be so wrapped in cotton wool that I had no experiences to take into later life, which I am enjoying by the way.
Please let our children have a life. Let them have minor scrapes and scratches. Yes, some may break bones, it’s part of living. If you make life so safe that you will never come to any harm, you will breed a mentality where you believe you can do anything because nothing has ever hurt you. Oh, and allowing 3, 4, 5 year olds to spend hours playing computer games on tablets, to let them watch films on mobile phones to keep them quiet, will, I promise, cause for more harm to their physical and mental health than a game of rugby.
March 9
Selfies should be heard and not seen
In the old days, we used to take pictures of people or places. We couldn’t see what we had taken until we got the pictures back from whoever had developed them and then we would know if they were good or under-exposed or over-exposed.
The BBC alerted me today to a story about some American woman, of whom I have never heard, who had taken a selfie in front of the bathroom mirror before she had put her clothes on. Obviously as this was on the BBC website, it must have been important so I decided to see why someone would want to do such a thing.
The first thing I would say is that if you are going to go round showing off naked pictures of yourself, please have a nice body. This woman, in my opinion, does not. Having then looked at her face I can see why she wanted to divert your attention to other parts of her body. She certainly lacks something when it comes to natural beauty; all pictures I could find made her look as though she had just come out of a plastic mould and that’s not the way beautiful women are created.
This woman also chose International Women’s Day to release, or possible allow to escape, this picture. On the basis that she didn’t tweet the photo to show how good she looked I am left assuming she was tweeting herself as some sort of object of desire, How very, very sad. Women are not objects of anything; they are people just like men are. Now in my humble opinion women are more beautiful than men but beauty is a personal view.
Is this, though, where we now are? Nobodys, who have achieved nothing except media exposure, have the need to broadcast themselves in order to ……………..what? And what a funny, witty caption, if you have an IQ in single figures. Maybe she did first think of writing “still, when you’re like I have no self-respect lol” or “when you’re like I’m desperate to be written about lol” or “when you’re like it’s International Women’s Day and I want to show you how bad women can look without clothes lol” Maybe not..
What a world. I preferred the excitement of seeing my good photos rather than some shoddy under exposed egg timer with oversize, malformed handles. But I’m old and have good taste. I just shudder to think of the example she is giving to young people.
March 16
Sweet
Imagine, if you will, that you need to explain to your mother that you have lost your blazer, torn your shirt, split your trousers and had the watch she bought you for a birthday present stolen. On the way home, you see a few daffodils growing in Mr Oliver’s garden. You nick them, walk through the door, head for the kitchen and hand her the flowers. She doesn’t even notice the lack of blazer, torn shirt, split trousers and empty wrist.
May I politely suggest you read the front pages of tomorrow’s papers. For daffodils substitute sugar tax and for everything else substitute broken promises, failed targets, fiddled figures and the stolen hopes and lives of the majority of hard working Britons.
I rest my case: in the same way as the one William Ewart had has been rested.
March 23
As was
After the horror of the terrorist attacks in Paris, I felt it inappropriate to make any comment in my blog that week. My view is unchanged this week and any other moan would be totally trivial.
March 30
Voting for the impossible
I like to think I’m an intelligent chap. I like to think I’m athletic too but on the intelligence matter age has not wearied me.
In just under three month’s time we are all being given the chance to decide to remain in Europe or leave Europe. Our lovely Prime Minister, while telling us we should stay, has nevertheless graciously said we can ignore his advice if we want. Or has he?
If the former Cabinet Secretary Lord O’Donnell is to be believed then little David is wasting all our time, a lot of government money and telling porkies.
Apparently, according to his Lordship EU rules are such that under the process set out in the Lisbon Treaty, a nation has two years to complete a deal once it formally declares that it will withdraw from the EU.
This, Lord O’Donnell says, is impossible. We can ask for extra time but this is only granted if everyone else agrees. There is, says his Lordship and he should know, a Cabinet Office paper which suggests it could take up to a decade, which, of course, it can’t because the rules say two years.
So, in my simple, though intelligent, mind we are being asked to choose between two possibilities, one of which is impossible. I think this is called democracy or maybe idiocracy.