Treading carefully- some thoughts on immigration

One of my friends has some really odd thoughts about immigration. He gets very angry and has an incredibly intolerant view about it. You see, if you so much as mention the "i" word, he goes off on one, branding you a "stupid...hate-filled...biogted...Daily Mail reading...BNP voting...fascist." There are no such things as "genuine concerns over immigration" like those Mrs Duffy apparently had about Eastern Europeans.

But this did make me think about the state of immigration. I'll save you worrying, I'm not about to start any sentence "I'm not racist but..." likewise I'm not going to go on about "I spoke to a black man and I agreed with what he said." like Big Dave Cameron did recently.


I do however live in a small city with a  Bengali, Pakistani, Indian, Italian and Polish minority. Some might think the Poles are the most recent but there has been a strong Polish population in the south of England since the early 30's as people fled the beginning of the 3rd Reich. Likewise the Italians POW's that were employed in agriculture that didn't stay after WWII was over, were joined by over 100,000 more as Attlee actively recruited immigrants to help rebuild the country in the late 1940's. And of course the establishment of the Commonwealth meant near enough completely unchecked immigration from India up until the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was passed in 1962- this was welcomed as Indians often did menial jobs for little pay.

So against the background of recent immigration due to asylum seeking and our freedom of movement in the EU, it's important to remember there has been a steady recent history of immigration.

There are some interesting stats my wifes old university found when it comes to EU immigrants too:


EU migrants made a "substantial net contribution to the UK fiscal system", paying 37 per cent more in taxes than they received in welfare payments. Researchers found that, on average, migrants were younger and better educated than the native population, as well as being 60 per cent less likely to claim benefits and 58 per cent less likely to live in social housing.


And it's when you start seeing stats like this that it becomes apparent that some of the comments on immigration are based in ignorance but that's always going to be the case. You see, to my mind its more complicated than that. We have many different sorts of immigrants, economic migrants, asylum seekers, and so on. It's harder to find figures to support the contribution, for example of asylum seekers, who in theory should be observing the "safe third country rule" - the convention that asylum seekers must apply in the first free nation they reach, not go "asylum shopping" for the nation they prefer. This of course makes a mockery of the Sangat camp the French had, not least in as much as the asylum seekers shouldn't have even made it to France in many cases.


It's also difficult to find the hidden costs some inner city councils and police forces have to pay for in house translators and multi lingual publications, which raises the question should there be a scheme in place for immigrants to learn the language of the country they live in?


Finally there is even the discussion of whether we truly live in a multi cultural society and not simply a society with many cultures that occasionally interact but mostly keep themselves to themselves.


You see, it's all about debate and asking questions, and asking them or thinking about them can surely only lead to a better understanding can't it?

Discussing things of import

I had a half day holiday yesterday. To cover my mum's brief trip to Wales on one of the days she spends the afternoon looking after M'laddo after pre school. He wasn't too fussed, the idea of hanging out with me seemed a good substitute to too many sweeties and other such contraband that his Nana gives him.

We started the afternoon well, with some lunch at a fab local restaurant, Kashu. They do great pizza and pasta at lunchtime for bargain prices. I think the thing that M'laddo liked best, aside from being taken seriously by the owner who has a Ben 10 mad 5 year old, was the seating, which was sort of booth based. When we left he was grinning from ear to ear and so evidently pleased, I even managed to remove his sweater from him, something the 20 degree heat had failed to do.

I'd plotted a leisurely walk home that I reckon is about 3 miles to walk off the pizza, with the promise of an ice lolly (aka lollopop  in 3 year old speak). It was progressing well and the conversation naturally turned to an in depth discussion of lollipops. I freely admit I had never felt the subject merited a detailed 25 minute discussion that encompassed both different types of lollipops and the ideal way to eat them but rest assured, by the time we reached the Inn on the Park, I was an expert.

Wordless Wednesday- Little bit of politics

Wordless Wednesday- Its Not Your Bike

We received a balance bike for review/feedback recently and I haven't yet managed to finish my write up as M'laddo isn't quite big enough (nor is his 3 and a half year old friend). Her dad on the other hand just about fits...

Patio doors + little fingers

We've been trying to no avail to get either a generic or specific to the makers patio door lock to enable us to shut the door part open for ages now. M'laddo likes to slam it shut you see, and whilst he is now savvy enough to ensure that his fingers aren't trapped, we felt it was only a matter of time before he caught the wee lass's fingers (or more of her) in it. Ouch!

Well we finally gave up and I popped down to Homebase to have a look at their clamps. I ended up with these little babies:

Two ratchet clamps for £8.49. I was worried the sprung loaded ones would be; i) too heavily sprung for wifey to open and ii) might actually damage the door frame. But these are ideal. Now we can have the door open and wont run the risk of accidental sibling manslaughter. Which is nice.

The only down side so far? M'laddo was devastated when I took his "poo poo gun" off of him. Apparently when we play space battles and I make a "pew-pew" laser noise, he interprets that as me firing poo poo at his space ship. Interesting extra dimension to the stickle brick space ship wars I suppose!

When things go quiet here...

...it's usually because I'm busy somewhere else. You see, I bet you thought it was because I'm an idle so and so ;)

When I started writing this blog almost a year ago, part of the impetus to do it was my previous blogs/websites had usually ground to a halt. They lacked a theme or motif for keeping them going. I'm good at having ideas but poor at maintaining the momentum to keep things going. So a parent blog seemed a good idea, as it meant I could blog about something that is close to my heart and at the same time hopefully save all those poor bastards at work who are too polite to tell me to shut up when I go on and on about my family.

I'm happy that this is still the case, and with the odd short term hiatus, this blog has probably had more input from me than half a dozen other sites I've administered since I got my first hosting package in 1997. But there are other things I want to talk about that don't necessarily fit in here. One of which is my love of reading. I'm a bit of a sci fi/fantasy/horror bore at heart, arguably that part of me hasn't grown up, but last Autumn I joined a book group to try and broaden my horizons a little.

As a result of this I decided to set up a secondary blog (it's in my blogroll but I'm sure you never check that), called I am currently reading. It contains my musings on the books I've always loved, the one I'm ploughing through at the minute and the one I've just finished. It's probably not your cup of tea but that's what I've been up to recently, in case you were wondering :)

Calls for a Facebook panic button- why its misguided

Considering when so many of the population are internet literate now days, it always makes me cross when newspapers and TV stations employ people who haven't the slightest clue what they're reporting on.

I'm picking on the BBC here but the quotes could have as easily come from any newspaper of TV Station:

Calls for Facebook to place a "panic button" on its pages have received the support of 44 police chiefs in England, Wales and Scotland, it has emerged.


Facebook said an existing link allowing users to report abuse will in future enable a report to be made to Ceop.


The dispute comes after Peter Chapman, 33, was last month jailed for killing Ashleigh Hall, 17. He made contact with her while using a false identity on the social networking site.


Can someone explain how a nice shiny red button on a website would protect a teenager from a stranger she has met in public? Or is this just another moral panic fuelled by the technically illiterate press? This is simply the case of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) centre pushing its own agenda and the press have picked it up and are doing their work for them.


A sad fact is that research into web habits of 14 to 19-year-olds across Europe found that 51% enjoy unfettered access to any and every website. No parental supervision whatsoever.


There are ways to look after kids on line, I wrote about it on wifey's blog last year when I had a go with Cyberpatrol. Just expecting everyone else to police your kids isn't responsible.


And it's not responsible for 44 Chief Constables to suggest a big red panic button is the panacea to online grooming either.

(Not quite) Wordless Wednesday- Stumps and shoots

I walk past this tree stump every day on the way to work. Recently it's started sprouting some shoots which are beginning to bud. A fitting metaphor really, the young shoots are M'laddo and the Wee Lass, the knackered old stump is me. 

Yes, I'm probably feeling a bit sorry for myself; my knees are clicking more I sprained my wrist the other week and its still not better and I have a bad cold.

A Blokes Diet

Following on from Karin's sterling work on getting rid of mummy tummys, I thought it was high time to address the paunch that most 30 something men seem to develop. The gov guidelines say that a chaps recommended calorific intake should be around 2,500 calories a day because they reckon that's what blokes tend to expend.

In simplistic terms the way to lose weight is to intake less calories than you expend. It does get more complicated than that but lets face it, there's a lot of things more interesting than reading about weight loss.

The simplest way to do it is through changing your drinking habits. I'm personally not a heavy drinker any more but even if you only have 4 or 5 pints of Stella on a Friday night, that will be half your recommended calories in one go (before the chips/kebab/burger beckon after the pub). Rather astonishingly, I worked out you could have an additional two and a half pints of Guinness or two pints of Carling to reach the same calorie intake as 5 pints of Stella. If you switch to drinking shorts, you can, if you wish, drink yourself unconscious with a clear conscience (if that's possible).

Here are the calories of a few beers (in pints) and shorts, to give you an idea of how much they can vary.

Stella Artois 256
Guinness 170
Double Gin 112
Double Vodka 110
Becks 204
Carling 187
Fosters 193
Carlsberg 182
Guinness 210
Boddingtons 170
Vodka 55
Vodka Redbull 112

Obviously the general common sense stuff like getting more exercise and eating less crap (especially pizzas) will also help but if you want to do sustainable gradual weight loss (which is the best way to do it), then the booze is probably the best way to start.

A packet of spicy tomato wheat crunchies has 123 calories, which means I could theoretically eat 20 packets a day if I had nothing else. The salt would probably kill me if the smell when I went to the loo didn't but I tend to work out everything in multiples of wheat crunchies now days. It helps me suss what's too bad for me.

Finally, don't forget that getting a six pack is entirely different from losing a beer belly, buy a copy of Men's Health if you want to get muscled.

Good luck :)

Wordless Wednesday II-Strapped

Wordless Wednesday- Makka Pakka, Suggestive?

Excitement in the Fitzwilliam Museum

During a break from some rather epic gardening/decking/raised bed building, we popped up to Cambridge for the day on Saturday. Being a loving hubby, I offered to take (wrangle) the kids round the Fitzwilliam Museum after lunch so wifey could do a bit of shopping in peace. I'm good like that.

It's been a while since I've taken both of them out on my own, the last time was a trip to the rather fab Imperial War Museum Duxford but this was the first time since the wee lass was adamant about walking rather than going in the buggy.

Not that I had to worry as the two of them are now the best of friends. M'laddo wanted to hold the wee lasses hand as she strolled along and she was happy for the security of it. It was indeed one of the cutest things I have seen in a long time. There were two problems that kept me from fully enjoying the situation: i) the speed of the two of them as the dodged in and out of the human traffic and ii) the gallery doors were individually slightly narrower than the buggy, necessitating me opening both more often than not.

On the second point, I must say I have never come across staff so universally lovely and helpful as the staff at the Fitzwilliam. They usually shout at me for owning a mobile phone, which should be switched off apparently as they have the worlds shonkiest alarm system which is ruined utterly by mobile phones, but on this instance every single member of staff that saw me heading towards a door offered to help.

If you're my wife, you can stop reading here and naturally assume that everything went okay and so on.

They even helped when disaster struck! We'd reached the exit and I was re-garmenting us all, coat on Fifi, coat on me, jumper on M'laddo, coat on M'laddo. Hang on a tick, where's his coat???

Front of house walkie talkied around to see if it had been handed in but it hadn't. Unfortunately we'd been in every single gallery at least once, including the fan room, which had steps in and out of it and was only marginally larger than our kitchen. The panic began to set in, I knew wifey would be unreasonable and blame me rather than M'laddo (should he have been keeping a better eye on his coat? He is almost 3) so I knew we had to find it or I'd be in trouble.

We did two laps of the entire museum at speed, asking all the concerned staff whether they'd been handed a coat whilst they held the doors open. No one had seen it. And it wasn't there. I was fairly sure I'd covered every square inch of the museum, so unless they'd accessioned it into a collection someone must have picked it up.

We returned to reception with M'laddo of the verbal opinion he wanted his coat and of the silent opinion that Mummy wouldn't have lost it when an American gent walked past it and handed it in. I bounded up and gave him a rather too vigorous handshake because I was fairly sure he must have been walking round with it for at least an hour but at the end of the day everything worked out all right. Which was a relief.

Extract- film review

It's nice to watch a film that doesn't feature:

• dinosaurs;
• talking dogs;
• animated fish.

This film doesn't have any of those in, so it's a bit different from my recent child inspired viewing. The eponymous Extract is some sort of beverage malt thing thats made in a factory that Jason Bateman runs.

It's really a story of a chap having his mid life crisis, spurred on by his wife changing into her sweat pants at 7pm on the dot and denying him any conjugal rights, juxtaposed against the buxom and flirtatious Cindy. Who is also a con artist. It's also a story about really really stupid people, the people who surround Bateman's character.

I think they've got the mentality of factory floor workers down to a tee. I spent a summer factory working once and whilst the majority of people were nice blokes, none of them were going to have a conversation about what they read in the FT that morning. This is awesomely exampled by the slightly mad heavy metal fan. He's handing out flyers for his bands gig and says, "It's pronounced God's Cock." The flyers have the words "God's Cock" plainly written on them.

I find that utterly hilarious and I think it's a good example of the humour in the film. Ben Affleck is awesome as the bearded bartender who introduces Brad the gigolo to Bateman. This leads to Bateman hiring Brad to test whether his wife would have an affair (have I mentioned he's accidentally high on horse tranquillisers at the time? No? it's that sort of film, trust me). When Brad falls for his wife and begins an affair, Bateman is determined to keep on paying him. Its a wonderful twisted sort of logical that nicely permeates the film.

If you do get the chance to watch this, jump at the chance, its something really different and really enjoyable.

An Inability to Buy Cress

The title says it all really. I've experienced the highs and lows of competency this week. I've built an area of decking large enough to park my car on. It's level, sturdy and looks good. I felt very good about myself, all was well in the world.

Then, when I went to get the final deckboard that I needed to complete the thing, wifey asked me to get some cress seeds so M'laddo could do some planting before I get the raised beds sorted. Sure thing! Only I bought the wrong ones. I opted for water cress as the mustard cress didn't look right. Silly me.

Not to worry though, for the very next day I popped into Wilkinsons (celebrating its 80th anniversary this year) to remedy the situation. And I was thwarted once more. My eyes fell upon two distinct separate products: little packets of mustard seeds and little packets of cress. I was paralysed, I didn't know which one to buy! My hand went to my pocket for my phone to call wifey and ask advice but then I thought she might think me the worlds most incompetent man (she'd be fairly accurate in that thinking to be fair to her). So I solved the problem by buying neither and now feel like a right wally.