Old chestnuts

A news article today resurrects the age-old argument about tongue piercings being bad for your teath, citing "research" carried out at the University of Buffalo and reported in the Journal of Clinical Orthodontics. All sounds very authoritative, but whatever the research consisted of, it hasn't discovered anything new - the claims of tongue piercings damaging teeth have been doing the rounds for as long as the piercing itself has, certainly for as long as I can remember, anyway.

It's fairly self-evident that if you deliberately scrape a metal object against your teeth, then sooner or later it's going to wear the enamel away: that is, after all, the whole principle on which a dentist's drill works! More spurious is the claim that "constant pushing of the stud against the teeth - every day with no break - will move them or drive them apart" You don't do this naturally, not with a standard centre tongue barbell, any more than you suck your thumb or a dummy constantly. And with more of an eye on the sensationalism than the facts, the author of the article couldn't resist the temptation to mention the alleged link to brain abscesses - an extremely rare and unlikely complication, especially when compared to the many thousands of tongue piercings performed safely and successfully every year.

My tongue piercing is now nearly ten years old. Most of the time I'm not really aware of it: it doesn't cause me any trouble. I've had my fair share of teeth problems and expensive dentistry, but that's more or less entirely down to lapses in teeth brushing and deficiencies in general oral hygiene!

A brief trip back in time

I got hold yesterday of an old copy of "Warwickshire & Worcestershire Life" - which I vaguely remember as a very expensive glossy upmarket monthly magazine, long since defunct (or at least in that particular format). What made it interesting for me is that it had an illustrated 4-page article - from December 1970 - about my old school. There was a bit of a historical introduction, but mainly it took the form of an extended interview with 'Fred' Williamson, my old Headmaster.

It was written around the time that successive governments were alternately introducing and then abandoning plans to turn education comprehensive and the article concluded (rather optimistically in the light of subsequent events) that it seemed "unlikely that there will be any dramatic change in status during the next four of five years". In fact by 1974 plans to 'go comprehensive' had been approved and Leamington College for Boys ended life as a grammar school three years later.

The Headmaster is quoted as saying that he foresaw the end of the eleven-plus in its then-current format but that he couldn't see how you could "avoid streaming in a comprehensive school with a wide IQ range". The article adds that streaming had been abandoned at the Boys College - which must've only just happened: it was still in full swing when I was a pupil there. Prompted presumably by the interviewer to sum up the school in a catch-phrase, "A good all-rounder" is used as the title for the piece. I think I'd tend to agree with that. It was an interesting choice of phrase, too, in the context of the present tendency for schools to push for some sort of particular specialism status, though I suppose arguably a grammar school is (or was) a specialism in itself?

Burn, baby, burn

Today I finally got round to backing up some of my computer files onto CDs. It's one of those things I'd been meaning to do for a while, that I used to do more-or-less regularly and got out of the habit of. I've been doing automated back-ups on a weekly schedule for some time, but of course they're not really going to be of much use if the whole machine goes wrong or the hard drive crashes and I can't access anything at all. The PC I've got now has a pre-installed version of Nero 8, which I actually bought a copy of some time ago for the computer I had before: although it's not the latest version it does the job in a nice hassle-free way, so I'm not in any hurry to upgrade it. I'm a definite believer in the theory that the easier a routine chore is to do, the more likely you are to do it!

Work till you drop

I took Raggs for her customary walk in the woods this morning: being a bright little bean she's cottoned on fast to the significance of Sunday morning and starts to stamp her feet if she thinks I'm not getting ready quickly enough. It's an innovation which I introduced in fact after I gave up work altogether in October 2008 - almost two years ago now - and certainly it's been a change for the better.

I can't say I was sorry to give up work, and I'm more than a little mystified by some of the thinking behind the government's new idea of scrapping a "fixed retirement age". While in theory allowing workers who want to carry on working and who are capable of it is a 'good idea', it's inevitably I think going to produce a situation in which those who don't want to carry on are effectively forced to, simply because they can't afford not to - especially when the pension age starts to rise.

The other effect it's almost certainly going to produce is a worsening of the already high levels of youth unemployment as fewer jobs are 'freed up' through retirement. If you make the assumption that there aren't enough jobs to go round for everybody, then faced with a choice between bored pensioners with no job and nothing to do and bored youths in the same boat, it's a bit of a no-brainer to work out which is going to cause the most trouble!

Double standards?

A couple of interesting news stories have caught my eye this week.

Seventeen years ago, the horrific James Bulger killing sent waves of shock reverberating round, making people wonder how on earth two young boys could be capable of anything so wicked. They were both given new names and identities before being released on licence in 2001, but in a disturbing recent development, it's been revealed that one of them - Jon Venables - has just been sentenced after pleading guilty to having childporn on his computer. Describing it rather ineptly as "breaking the last taboo", he's made quite a few people wonder whether he didn't do that back in 1993 and appears to have learned nothing since? Either way, the trial judge is convinced that his new identity and whereabouts must continue to be kept secret for fear of retaliation.

And as if to reinforce the point that there are people ready and willing to retaliate with their own brand of rough justice, Ian Huntley, of Soham murders fame (or should one say infamy) is reported to be suing the prison authorities for negligence after having his throat slashed by a fellow-prisoner. Given his notoriety, it's something that could and should have been foreseen - the only question now being whether his claim for compensation is legitimate or not. Perhaps understandably the victims' organizations are appalled, but I was impressed by the comment made by the Prison Reform Trust: "If a court sentences someone to custody, they are not sentencing them to be attacked."

The pitfalls of vigiliante justice are all too obvious.

"It's Kool to go back to Skool"

I'm not too sure now how I originally came across this -but it's a school-finder website that goes by the name of My Home Town Schools, and at first sight seems to be a bit of a clone of Friends Reunited but on a much smaller scale: the vast majority of the schools listed don't (as yet) have any ex-pupils, and the database is for the most part limited to schools currently in existence. Which is odd, because they boast "we have 1000s of old long forgotten schools listed many with old photos going back to the Victorian / Edwardian era"? Nevertheless, I thought I'd submit the details and get my old school added, and was impressed when I got an email earlier this evening to say it was up.

It was quite easy to register and knock up a quick profile: submitting photos and messages requires them to be moderated, though (unlike Friends Reunited), so I'll be interested to see how long that takes: I can't imagine they're inundated with submissions to check out. I would suspect the whole site may be relatively new, in fact. I'm not expecting to get any long-lost friends turning up from it, but they were understandably keen to get a mention or a link in peoples' blogs or websites, so I'm happy enough to oblige here!

Three generations

I heard the sad news this week that my next-door neighbour has passed away. They've been living here about as long as we have - roughly thirty-five years - and we've got on well, often having a chat about this or that over the garden fence. She'd been losing the battle against cancer for over eighteen months, in and out of hospital a few times and having to give up first work and then her car, so I guess it wasn't totally unexpected. When her son, who still lives only just over the road, came over to tell me the news, he was putting a brave face on it: nevertheless the death of a wife or mother is always a painful loss however it occurs.

I was about his age - 40 - when my mother died. I went totally to pieces and I don't know to this day how I got through that week between her death on the Monday and her funeral on the Friday: nothing had prepared me for it. Perhaps I was lucky (or unlucky according to how you look at it) but I'd never experienced the death of anyone close to me.

My grandparents had both died while we were out in Hong Kong. We couldn't go to their funeral: I don't really remember how my mother coped with it, but knowing her I suspect she shielded me from much of her sorrow. In those days, air travel was an unaffordable luxury and the flights with stopovers would've taken a couple of days each way. Even international phone calls were prohibitively expensive, leaving airmail letters (or telegrams, if the message was both brief and urgent) as the only method of keeping in touch.

I wrote last month about the trip I took to Hornchurch after my mother died, and one of the places I visited was the graveyard at St Andrews Church: I was foolishly hoping to visit my grandparents' graves. But I didn't know where they'd been buried: although on our return from Hong Kong we'd visited the aunts and uncles from time to time whilever they were still living there, I was aware at the back of my mind that we'd never gone to my grandparents' graves, but it hadn't occurred to me that there must've been a reason for that. In fact it wasn't until my father died four years later and I inherited the box of family papers that I discovered two little poignant 'In memoriam' cards which had been sent out to us in Hong Kong and which showed that they'd been cremated - an option which I think was a lot less common in those days than it is now.


So, I was left with just the memories. Their flat was still there, with the iron fire escape leading from the back door in the kitchen, that I used to run up and down as a six-year old whenever we went to see them. I remember them as a kindly old couple: I liked going to visit, and I got the occasional treat - though I don't think I was ever spoiled rotten as some grandchildren appear to be!