"We are having visitors"

someone told me yesterday. 
Those four words suggested that "things are getting back to normal".  I considered this - and then decided things are still far from "normal". It is even more likely that the future "normal" will be different.
Yes, people are visiting one another now. We have someone coming for lunch on Wednesday. She is older than I am but younger than the Senior Cat.  The likelihood of her being a carrier of the virus is so remote that we all decided to take the risk. It  is a risk we think is worth taking because the Senior Cat is becoming depressed at seeing only me and Middle Cat. 
If the weather was good then he might have prowled, very cautiously,  out the front and sat there watering things. I might need to go backwards and forwards shifting the hose but I would happily do that if it meant he could watch people going past. There would be people who would stop to chat and their dogs would bound in to "talk" to him.  Pluto, the cat who thinks he owns our garden, would keep an eye on him.
The weather has been cold and damp. The Senior Cat has been outside once - to visit the podiatrist and the doctor last Thursday.  He is not, according to him, "bored" but I can see the frustration. At 97 he still has the intellectual capacity to want to do things - and he can't. Getting dressed tires him. He will shortly prowl out for breakfast. When he finishes I will have to make sure he doesn't fall asleep at the table - and end up with his head in the marmalade.
It is little wonder that he is looking forward to seeing a visitor on Wednesday.
We might have another one too. Our friend P..., a nun, was  due to visit but she had to spend a night in hospital instead of visiting us as planned. She will be as cautious as we are about visits.
There are little things that so many people seem no longer to be aware of. I  hope there are no new cases of the virus but it will not mean that it has gone away. 
We are going to have to go on taking precautions. If we do then perhaps the Senior Cat and so many others like him can have the pleasure of seeing family and friends again.  I am going to keep my distance from people and keep on washing my hands...and hoping.
 

I was accused of being "racist" yesterday.

I had supported a short piece written by a member of the police force asking for people to be more aware of what their job involves. I simply said that most police are ordinary people doing a difficult job. Apparently this is "racist". 
It is  apparently racist even though I have serious concerns about the way police here are trained. It is apparently racist even though I do not believe our police are perfect. 
Their training leaves something to be desired. There are people, perhaps too many people, in our police force who are there for the power it gives them over others.  
It does not mean that we should be protesting against the job they have to do. I will protest against excessive use of force or power or incidents of brutality and expressions of racism.  I will not protest against the entire policing system.
Why? Because we need it. We would be in a state of anarchy without it. 
Imagine a society without a police force. Imagine a shop keeper trying to prevent shoplifting without the support of the police. Imagine trying to use the roads if people simply chose to ignore road rules, speed limits and stop signs. Imagine the victims of domestic violence trying to protect themselves and their children without help. How would you protect the most vulnerable members of society, the wandering Alzheimer's patient or the frightened autistic child lost in the bush, and also give support to those involved in caring for them? 
Yesterday I went to buy something for the Senior Cat. I had to go to a more distant shopping centre and decided to pick up the milk for the weekend at a supermarket there. As I was about to be served there was a serious altercation at the back of the store, one which resulted in the police being called in. The assistant who had been going to serve me - and I had already unpacked the trolley - excused himself and went to help. He used a judo throw to take someone to the ground and prevent him from doing more harm. Other people then took over and he returned to help me. It was a very unsettling incident and people were relieved to see two members of the police force - who must have been buying their afternoon coffee at the cafe opposite - come quickly in. 
Yes, people were relieved. Here was "law and order", people who had the capacity and the legal right to handle the situation. The person serving me had no such right. He could be charged with assault if "unreasonable force" was used. He clearly knew what he was doing but it was still a risk. The situation needed the police.
But someone felt differently yesterday. She chose to challenge me and claimed that, by supporting the police request for understanding of their job, I was not supporting the demands of the protestors and the Black Lives Matter movement. She now considers me to be "racist". Nothing I could say or do would convince her otherwise. She even rejected my right to use a word from the language of the local community. It is not her first language by heritage either but she claims a right to use it. I don't speak the language but I know some words and have been encouraged by those who speak the language fluently to use them when communicating with them. A common language is a powerful bond and it has never before been suggested to me that the use of another language is anything other than a compliment to the native speakers of it.  Still, she saw my use of a single word as "racist".
It was at that point I realised that, no matter what I said, she would continue to believe that I am "racist". It won't matter to her that my friends and acquaintances are of a more than usually diverse background and culture. I have almost certainly experienced more discrimination than she ever will. It will make no difference.  She sees me as not supporting something she is clearly passionate about. 
Do I support different training and increased training for our police force? Yes, it is long overdue. Yes, but I am also realistic enough to know that changing attitudes is very very difficult. It is going to take a very long time. The protest movement might produce some changes but those protesting will lose support if their actions result in anarchy. Protesting will not be the catalyst but positive and workable suggestions for change arising from it might well work where protest fails.
It is for that sort of reason I will support the police in doing their job. If that makes me a "racist" then too bad.

There was an owl in the avocado tree

late yesterday afternoon. 
Middle Cat saw it fly in and settle high up just as dusk was settling. It is very rare to see an owl here, especially in the city so I went out to have a look. Yes, definitely an owl. It was probably a "Boobook". They are not very big. This one was not much more than my hand span - about 20cms high. 
It gave us a sleepy look and settled down, eyes closed, for another nap. I heard it again in the night and that confirmed that I had heard it the previous night too. 
I wonder how long it will stay? Is it taking a holiday from delivering letters to Harry Potter at Hogwarts?
Quite apart from the delight of seeing it was the sheer pleasure of thinking about something other than the endless protests that seem to be dominating the media right now.
Yes, some of those protests are about something important, very important. Others are not.
This morning the front page of our state newspaper is about the demands of the hotel industry to open up to more people. They want to be allowed to have a hundred rather than twenty at a venue. This is apparently so people can drink while watching a football match.  Some of those people would normally be at the football match but "social distancing" has meant that there will be just a fraction able to attend.
Apparently all this is more important than actually getting our economy back to something approaching "normal". We are in the middle of a nasty spat with China -  because we dared to demand an investigation into the origins and handling of Covid19. The Chinese are saying that there has been a massive increase in serious racial attacks on their citizens and that it is no longer safe for  university students from China to  study here. That is nonsense and the Chinese authorities know it but it suits their purposes to say it.
I noted this yesterday because I had to go to a bank. Their ATM in our shopping centre, the only ATM available outside shopping hours,  has been out of action for over a week. I suspect they are intending to remove it. It will leave many elderly people with no available ATM unless they are able to drive - and increasing numbers of them do not.  
The bank branch in question knew nothing about it of course. I did not think they would but they noted my reasons for keeping it open and actually sent an email while I was there. It is unlikely to do any good but at least I have done as I was asked to do. 
Coming out of the other shopping centre however I passed a clothing shop having a "sale" - actually getting rid of summer stock at very, very low prices. There was a neatly dressed indigenous woman standing outside the shop. She was looking at a rack of clothes but not touching any as someone else was pulling things out and roughly putting them back in.  Some of them had fallen to the ground.
I won't describe what happened next. It still makes me too angry to even think about it.  Suffice to say it was a very nasty piece of racial abuse aimed at the indigenous woman who had started to pick up the items which had fallen to the ground. The shop assistant heard it too and came to look just as I was going in to get some help. The indigenous woman was standing there with an armful of clothing being accused of theft. 
    "No, you were letting things fall to the ground. She has already put things back on their hangers," I said. The other woman glared at me and said, "It's all rubbish anyway!" She stalked off.
The indigenous woman looked terrified, as well she might. It would be all too easy to believe that she was planning on shoplifting.  The shop assistant looked at me and then, with a smile at the indigenous woman, said, "Thank you for doing that. They do keep sliding off. Were you looking for a particular size?"
A shake of the head and then a whispered, "Skirt?"
    "We have some on sale inside. Come and have a look," the assistant told her. 
I could see her reluctance but also her longing so I said, 
    "Why not? You might get just what you want."
I spent the next few minutes looking at clothes I did not want while she looked at skirts. She eventually found one and, I was delighted, she looked at me as if to say, "Do you like this one?"
    "It's lovely,"  I told her, "It will go with a lot of other colours."
It was a lovely skirt too. She paid $5 for a skirt marked down from over $100 and went off. The shop assistant asked me if I wanted any help and I told her why I had stayed. 
    "I hope she doesn't remember every time she wears it," the assistant told me.
I hope what she remembers is the shop assistant thanking her. 

"Those who cannot remember the past

are condemned to repeat it" wrote George Santayana.
To that I will add a Gaelic proverb,
       "Cuimhnichibh air na daoine bho'n d'thainig  sibh" - remember the people whom you come from.
If we don't do these things then what will the future hold?  
It is tempting to cheer when a statue of a tyrant, thief and murderer gets knocked down. Why did anyone put it up there in the first place? We might well ask but, at the time, at least some people must have believed it to be the right thing to do.
I personally think statues are rather silly things. I don't think they serve much of a purpose.
I have several pewter mugs with inscriptions for various prizes won over the years - and a "silver" plate which is probably tarnished too dark to read the inscription. I suppose I could use the mugs but it seems more than a bit pretentious.  If I used the plate I'd put a paper doily on it to hide the inscription although it would still seem pretentious.
But statues are different. They are out there in the world and everyone is intended to see them.  They are, I suppose, intended to acknowledge the great and the good - like those along our "North Terrace". The tourists are more likely to notice those than the locals. There are also brass plates along the inner edge of the footpath. I doubt many people notice them.
All that said though I don't think there is any point in removing them simply because the achievements of those people are no longer considered cause for celebration. Did they do no good at all? Were their actions acceptable at the time?
The Romans had a slave trade. They bought and sold people in the market place. It was am absolutely vile thing to do - and they would not have been the first but they are among the best documented. Through the centuries though nothing much has changed. We still have a slave trade. People are still bought and sold. Much of it was hidden then and it is hidden now. We conveniently forget that many African Americans are descended from people who were actually sold to white slave traders - sold by other Africans. That in no way makes what happened to them right but is it part of a past that needs to be acknowledged? Why don't we do that?
Much of the history in this country has also been taught in ways that have conveniently ignored the actual circumstances. We have abandoned the concept of "terra nullius" (land unoccupied) in favour of acknowledging that this country was inhabited. The Mabo case is in fact a major and very important turning point in our history.  We could put up a statue to Eddie Mabo in every capital and town in the country - but what would it do? It is not what he would have wanted. He has a place in the constitutional law of this country instead. That is a good thing. 
Where we have problems it is because we still persist in teaching myths about such things as deliberately infecting blankets with measles to wipe out the original inhabitants. Measles did cause the death of many of the original inhabitants. It is highly contagious and there was no immunity as the disease was unknown to them. The same might be said for small pox and chicken pox. There are still those who argue that infection was deliberate but it did not need to be to inflict the damage that it did. Saying it was deliberate suits some versions of history. It is as if we have to flay ourselves for the actions of the past.
I am not responsible for what others did. My ancestors also came far too late to be involved but, even if they had come on the First Fleet, I cannot be held responsible for what they did or did not do. What I have to live with instead is my conscience and the way I treat others.  I can learn from the past but it needs to be the actual past and not a convenient version of it. History is not there to make me feel guilty or ashamed but to try and understand so that I do not repeat what has become unacceptable. If we simply pull down the statues I won't have those essential reference points which will help me to understand the present anger and work towards a better future. Let's put more plaques on statues instead - so they can explain the past and the present and work for the future.

Computer programs are a mystery

to me. I do not understand how they work at all.
I tried once. It was a required component of my statistics course at  university. I somehow scraped through. After that I managed to use SPSS - the "Statistical Package for the Social Sciences". 
I used that program because, like the statistics course itself,  it was a required part of my studies. Statistics themselves however are something I have little time for when they are applied to the learning abilities of actual people.
Once in a while since then I have had to do a simple statistical calculation and put it into something I have been writing.  For the most part I have avoided such things. I understand there are now computer programs which will do all these things in an instant. My students have used these - and probably do not understand the maths behind the figures.
But there are computer programs which will do other things. I have several in the machine I am currently using. They do the mathematical calculations for a knitting pattern of one sort or another.  There is also a  cross stitch pattern maker - not that I cross stitch but it made useful knitting charts. I need to remove that as it no longer works. 
And there is the new knitting program. Well not quite "new" I bought this over twelve months ago. I researched the available programs first, found out what the publishers of knitting patterns preferred,  read the reviews and went ahead. It was not particularly cheap but it was not the most expensive program either.
The computer technician had problems loading it and sent frantic messages off to the maker. No, they could not work out why it would not load. There was nothing unusual on my computer apart from the Blissymbol program - and  that was not causing the issue.
Eventually we managed to load it.
Other things happened. Last year was not a good knitting year for me. The Senior Cat needed more help, other people needed more help. I had some extra work to do. I completed my second doctorate. The garden needed more watering. Children needed minding and adults needed a listening ear.
I now have to come to grips with this program. I have a major project to design and hand over as quickly as possible. It isn't "urgent" in the sense that I need to sit day and night at the screen until it is done but it needs to be completed more quickly than I otherwise might do it.
This program will produce a chart and knitted instructions. It is actually very good. I am sure it is very good. I am the problem. It requires the ability to manipulate the mouse to land the pencil or the paintbrush (for colours) precisely on the little squares. My paws do not like this. Then there are things I still have to work out how to do - a repeat for instance. I would like to repeat an entire block not just a tiny part of it. Do I really have to click in eleven ships for the First Fleet? Couldn't I just do one  and then repeat it eleven times? How do I add columns of stitches - and take columns of stitches away?
I thought I had worked it out - and lost the entire afternoon's work.
I am a frustrated cat!
I will not be beaten by this thing. I will go back to it. I will work on it.  
If I don't you might find me curled up in a corner with one paw over my ears and another paw over my eyes...and I will be a quivering mess.

Moderation of news websites

needs to be moderated.
I had something "rejected" by a "moderator" yesterday. It was a completely harmless comment, nothing more than a clarification. I wrote it simply because it was clear the some people were unaware of a verifiable fact and that was causing them to be confused.
The rejection puzzled me until I realised that a moderator had almost certainly failed to actually read it. Yes, they looked at it - hence the rejection. They did not read it.
The site was busy with other stories as well so perhaps the moderators were working overtime. I don't know. 
What I do know is that, by rejecting the comment, the moderators have allowed people to go on believing something which is not true. My comment did not even have the dubious merit of being a political opinion. 
I wonder how long it will take the misinformation being debated to spread out into the community and become a "fact"? It is likely to do so very rapidly in this day of "social media".
"Social media" is really not very "social" at all.  All too often it is the vehicle for bad behaviour, vile comments, racist remarks, and much more. At a distance people will do and say things they would never dare to say face-to-face. Yes, we all know that.
Moderators are supposedly there to prevent the worst of all this. I assume they do or we would have anarchy on their hands. But - a big "but" - moderators also have opinions and beliefs. They also have power. They can direct a debate simply by rejecting comments which do not support their opinions and beliefs. They can "white out" verifiable facts that do not suit their agenda.
They are supposed the guards and, as the saying goes,
   "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"  

Childhood sweets or lollies

were not quite the same here as they were in England. We did not have those glorious, magical shops filled with glass jars of mysterious sweets that our mother tried to prevent us from eating.
There were no pear drops or lemon sherbets in my childhood. Other children may have had them from somewhere but I doubt it. 
We did have "Conversation Sweets" - small round discs printed with things like "love me" on them. They were pink, lavender, pale yellow and paler green. There were "licorice all sorts" and "bananas", "ripe raspberries" and "spearmint leaves". There were long thin "jelly snakes" and small sticky peppermints  with red and white stripes. We also had plain chocolate frogs, aniseed balls, gum balls which changed colour as you sucked them and sherbet  in "Wizz Fizz"  packets with a tiny spoon to dig it out. Oh, the glory of that sweet fizziness against our eager tongues! Best of all were the hard pink squares of musk flavoured "pastel" that could be sucked slowly and made to last  or the similarly hard "sticks" of musk, lime or  orange which could be carefully sucked into a point on the end - and then used to jab an annoying sibling or friend.
When permitted we would spend our very  limited pocket money on these things as well as packets of "Life Savers".  The proper way to eat one of  those was to suck it until it was almost not there and then give the resulting paper thin ring a final satisfying "crunch" before continuing to suck the last of it. 
Mum completely banned "Fags" - sweets made to look like cigarettes . They were very popular but if Mum had caught us buying them we would have been beaten with the hair brush and lost all chances of having any sweets. What is more we knew they didn't last like other sweets. 
What we liked most of all was probably the hard home made toffee poured into "patty pans" - small paper cake containers - and sprinkled with "hundreds and thousands" or the same toffee, coloured with cochineal coating an apple on a stick. Those things lasted. We could suck them.
We were patient about sweets. It made them last.
Of course there were more expensive sweets but we rarely saw those. I was in my teens before I found out what a "Polly Waffle" was - a tube of waffle like biscuit filled with marshmallow and covered with chocolate. I was similarly in my teens before I tasted a "Violet Crumble" - essentially a bar of honeycomb covered in  chocolate -  and an adult before I tasted a "Crunchie" and decided they were superior.
We would sometimes be given single squares from a "grown up" block of chocolate or Crown Mints or humbugs - "black and white" peppermints.
My paternal grandfather understood our need for something sweet occasionally. He would buy our grandmother "Scotch mints" - small balls of peppermint that were relatively soft and slip us a packet of peppermint flavoured Life Savers  or some Conversation Sweets as well. I doubt she ever bought herself anything like that. 
My maternal grandmother liked "jubes". They were soft and probably suited her false teeth. We children did not think much of them. They did not last and could not be pulled apart in layers like licorice all sorts. We preferred her to buy cashew nuts - a rare luxury back then -  the only nut she could manage. She bought them from a shop run buy people my grandfather knew. It was probably the closest thing to a sweet shop we children knew.
So, where did we get our sweets? 
For the most part we went with our paternal grandfather on a "Short walk". The "Short" in this case was the surname of the people who had first owned the delicatessan on Jetty Road. By the time we children were old enough to go there it was run by a Mrs Clements and members of her family. It sold just about everything you needed in the way of groceries and newsagent items. 
There, behind the glass,  on a tray were the sweets - four for a penny or the block of pastel for a penny. Mrs Clements knew full well what we would choose if we could. One glorious afternoon she even told us, "Now just be patient. The box only came in this morning. If it is pastel you want you will have to wait a moment."
We waited without moving while she went "out back". Would she find the box? We held our breath and then let it out with an anticipatory sigh of pleasure. She opened the box and my brother and I spent our pennies on those squares which seemed to last, if not quite forever, such a long time.