I find car alarms really irritating, at least the ones that make loud noises to alert everyone that someone wandered by the car a little too closely. Mind you I can live with those, but the ones that really get my goat are those that are so sensitive that they go off almost continuously.
There is one car with a particularly sensitive alarm near my flat that is always going off. One night it was going off every 10 minutes, all night!. The owner obviously needs a lesson in social responsibility.
Everyone hates paying taxes. To be honest nothing is going to change that at all, but there are a few things that could be done to improve the situation. At present people want to pay as little tax as possible, whilst having well funded public services. Which is kind of foolish and impossible to achieve; of course there are ways in which to make public services more efficient but that is a whole other rant.
I should point out at this point, that I’m somewhat partial here as my own salary comes indirectly from taxation (and pretty stingy the tax-payers are too), but that is also a whole other rant.
The funny thing is that when you start working, you get a nasty shock when you get your first payslip about how much disappears in the direction of the government and nobody is there to explain what you get for your money. Why not include classes in school about what taxation gets us ?
All that taxation does provide us with useful services which include :-
And I dare say I’ve left loads out … I nearly forgot education where I work! But we don’t get told about what we get for our money, we are expected to “just know”. Of course it some ways it is obvious, but why not make it clearer ?
In fact why not make the yearly pay slip (the P60) larger and include rough figures for how much we paid for each service ? If you get something that says you paid £10,000 in tax, of which £1,500 went to pay for Health, etc., we are more likely to be less critical of taxation.
Recently a government minister caused a fuss in the press (they’re very excitable) by taking her child out of a state school and putting the child into a public school (a fee paying school for any US readers) because the child was dyslexic. The fuss of course is all about whether the needs of dyslexic children are adequately met in the state sector.
This is not about that at all.
Of course we should try to meet the needs of “special needs children” in state schools, but don’t all children have ‘special needs’ ? I don’t know how things are today, but when I was at school teachers would often concentrate on the poorest students and ignore the brightest students. Probably the thinking was that the brightest students could pick up the education they needed on their own, which is true to an extent. However I know a number of bright children (myself included) who were not pushed to study as hard as they should have been.
What often happened is that bright children found some or many lessons boring when they were stuck in a lesson proceeding at the speed of the slowest child in the lesson. Boredom as is well known is the enemy of learning. You could frequently find bright children obtaining poorer results at exams than they should be capable of doing well at.
Obviously I’m prejudiced towards brighter children, but the same applies to all children … all children are ‘special needs children’ in that they all should have individual attention in their education.
The Uk government this morning laid into the airline industry for being environmentally irresponsible. I don’t know whether this is fair or not (although I lean towards it being fair given how airlines campaign against air fuel taxes and other such things that might affect their bottom line), but there is something daft about how we all travel on our holidays using airplanes.
Of course they are very convenient and for some distant destinations there is no real alternative. But certainly for short-haul flights, it does seem rather peculiar that we insist on travelling by shoving an immense amount of weight upwards using fossil fuels when it would seem that it should be possible to travel along the ground far more efficiently (and with the possibility of using less environmentally damaging fuels).
The obvious alternative for short-haul flights is the train, so why don’t we ? Well, it is quite possibly convenience. For my own travels in Europe (rather limited) I have looked at the possibility of going via train, but ended up in the air for convenience. Not that air travel is that convenient, but it does seem so compared with train travel.
For instance, travelling from my home town to Pamplona in Spain involves 4 trains including a trip on the Paris metro. Hardly convenient when carrying large amounts of luggage! Changing trains in the same station is bad enough, but changing stations is a nightmare! Especially if you are worried about missing your connection.
Ideally it wouldn’t be necessary to change at all, but I can’t see being able to catch a direct train from my home town to Pamplona even if there was just one a week! However I think that train companies could invest in making more direct trains possible, or even ensuring that someone making a difficult transfer is guided on their way (imagine carrying a sign saying “Here For Guide to Station X”).
The train companies could also try a little harder for online information. Finding information on European train journeys is not always easy, and when you do you can often find that you can’t book online, or you have to book different legs of the journey in different places. Make it easier please!
More generally we need to consider ways of making our transport needs more environmentally friendly. Not just by punishing bad choices (taxing air travel), but by using the carrot as well … making train travel cheaper and easier. For longer journeys, why not try re-introduce airships ? At the very least these would be a good option for replacing air-freight … not quite as fast, but a good deal quicker than by sea. And as someone who has experience of tracking packages shipped internationally, I can say that the actual time in the air is usually a small percentage of the total travel time.
You often find the far right making ridiculous claims about the virtues of the ‘anglo-saxon’ race and assuming that the modern English people share those virtues. They use this as a justification for being hostile to modern immigrants as though the English race is something special that needs protecting. It is curious that these people are so ignorant of the history of the English people given they are so proud of it.
Nothing wrong with being proud of being English and of being proud of English history … I’m both. But please lets put to rest this idea that we English have any kind of racial purity.
The name for these collected islands is “Britain” which originates from the original “Brython” being the Celtic name for these islands. For many centuries, the Celts had these misty isles to themselves, but then the Romans arrived and stayed for a while. Of course it was not only Romans who came but many people from all over Western Europe who had some reason or another to visit our islands. Then they left, except of course they did not really … at the very least they left many reminders of their visit, including not only Roman civilisation (which many of the Celts readily adopted and modified) but intermarriage is never as rare as people think.
We mistakenly believe that all the Celts up sticks and moved to Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany once the Angles and Saxons started arriving, however that is very unlikely. Sure many Celts moved to those places, but most probably stayed right where they were and stayed peasants under different landlords.
The concept that the ‘anglo-saxons’ were a single people is similarly mistaken … they were Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (at least … we do not know for sure that there were not others as the Romano-Celts had tried hiring mercenaries from wherever they could find them and many of those stayed). Although the three named tribes were probably pretty close, they were still distinct people.
Then of course we had the Vikings, raiding, raping, and eventually settling. And then the Normans (of course being Vikings who had settled in Normandy) turned up and threw the Anglo-Saxon royalty out on their ear.
Then far more recently we had a world empire (by far the largest the world has ever seen) where we had people from all over the world visiting, staying, and intermingling.
These are just the big waves of immigration. Many smaller waves of immigration have happened throughout our history. Almost everybody in England will probably have a mixture of Celtic, Anglo, Saxon, and Viking blood with a small pinch from almost anywhere.
Channel 4 recently had a TV programme about DNA testing of a random sample of English people to test what their ancestry was … and the results indicated that most had very mixed backgrounds. Not really much of a surprise given our history.
The idea that the English have any kind of racial purity is ridiculous and that is a good thing. We should celebrate that we are a mongrel race, because that is what we are and if we have any kind of greatness it is because it is what we are. It is our mixture of backgrounds, and influences from all over the world that has given us greatness.
So if anything modern immigration is a good thing because it gives the English people more of what made us great.