There were some books in

the local newsagent recently.
I should explain that our local newsagent is not like a branch of something like WH Smith in England. Ours sells newspapers, magazines, cards, wrapping paper, stationery and a range of "gifts". It is in fact more like a gift shop than a newsagency.  It occupies a prominent position in the shopping centre because the original owner knows the owner of the actual shopping centre and was given favourable treatment after a suspicious fire which destroyed half the shopping centre.
And, sometimes, the newsagency will have what are clearly remainder books.
They are often paperbacks by "popular" authors, cookery books, travel books or coffee table books. Last week there was even a knitting book there. It was not one I had and I did not succumb.
Sometimes there are also books for children. They are usually "activity" books or books for very small children. There are sometimes "colouring" books. These are usually printed on cheap newsprint. On one occasion there were some books that might be considered "adult" colouring books. I bought one and gave it to a cousin's wife when she was too ill to concentrate on reading. She was pleased to get it and whiled away some hours filling in the intricate drawings.
Sometimes there are other picture books. I will look at them if I happen to be passing the table at the front of the shop. More often than not they hold little or no attraction for me. I can understand why they have become "remainder" books.  Occasionally I have even wondered how they came to be published in the first place.
And then, just once in a while, there will be a real find. I will guiltily buy the book and often pass it on to a child I think might enjoy it. Yesterday I bought two. They were both far too cheap but they were two books about Maisie the mouse. Just right for a Cat to give to small humans!

You will know the sort of

blanket or lap rug I mean. You see them in nursing homes covering the frail, spindly legs of the "old dears" sitting in their wheelchairs or the armchairs in the "day room".
They are crocheted in little squares or knitted in little squares. They are usually made from scraps of yarn or garishly coloured acrylic. They are often inexpertly made.
As a knitter I understand why people make these things. Knitters tend to use every scrap of yarn - or pass it on to other knitters to use. Even while I inwardly shudder at the design and workmanship I know why these things are made. Of course some of them are lovely.
Some are interesting too. I spent over an hour one afternoon listening to a very old woman telling me about her blanket. She had made it herself. It was made from the left overs she had saved from the garments she had knitted her children, her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren. She had an album with pictures of the garments she had made. They were often intricate works of art.
Each year another elderly woman I know contacts me about half way through autumn and says, "I think it might be about that time again if you have any wool."
So far I have found wool for her. People have given it to me or I have found wool in the charity shop. I pass it over and she knits plain garter stitch squares. Her knitting is exquisitely even. Her squares are square. They are all the same size. There are no problems about sewing them together.
She knits enough squares to make a blanket that will cover a single size bed. The bookshop knitting group is supposed to sew them together and put a border around the edge. It then gets raffled off for the Fred Hollows Foundation, the eye surgery charity the group supports.
I loathe sewing. I am not good at it. My paws are  much too clumsy. I usually resort to pulling the yarn through with a crochet hook. It works.
Somehow I seem to have put most of the squares together this year but a friend is coming this afternoon. I am taking time out and we are, I hope, going to finish the sewing. She will add the border.
Most of the squares are tan this time and the design looks intentional. It's fine but I think of the really scrappy blankets and lap rugs. Somehow they seem to have a special beauty of their own.

"I know you,"

he told me. I looked at the man sitting on the other side of the table. I was certain I had never seen him before.
I am not good at remembering people's faces on a casual basis. It is not that I do not care about people. I like people. I find them fascinating. My brain is just not wired to remember them when I have only met them briefly and perhaps once many years before. I assumed that, if he was correct, it was the case here.
He laughed at my startled look and said,
          "You might not remember."
I shook my head. He pulled out his wallet and took out a battered plastic coated card.
          "My father laminated this for me. I have kept it all this time. I often show it to people."
I recognise the card. It is the card I made for him and gave him on his second day at school in Australia.
We were both strangers at the school. I had arrived in the morning for my second lot of "practice" teaching. He had arrived in the afternoon. His family had arrived from Finland the previous day. We do not have very many Finnish migrants to Australia and I had no idea what they were doing here.
His English appeared to be limited to "good afternoon", "please" and "thankyou". He was about ten. He was bewildered. The teacher of the class he was placed in had little time for him and there were no external support services the way there are now.
         "You can help him," I was told but I was given no idea what to do.
I went home via the State Library. I knew there was a reference book there, a book of word lists in twenty different languages.  I copied out some potentially useful words. That night I typed them up with their English translations and pasted them onto a card. The following day I gave him the card. I gave similar cards to several other boys.
I was only there for three days so I had no idea if the cards really helped or not. I thought they would probably be lost in the rough and tumble of the playground or discarded in the waste paper but they were used that day and the next.
        "We are going to play jalkapallo - you come too?" one of the boys asked.
Football? He was bewildered by that too. Football is played with a round ball not an oval ball. Nevertheless he headed off to play with them at lunch time and they showed him where the "toaletti" was on the way.
        "I've kept it because it reminded me of how hard it was to learn English. I always wanted to tell you thankyou but you left again. I didn't understand at the time and I was terribly disappointed."
        "I'm sorry," I told him.
        "No - it is about forty years too late but thankyou. Bet you can't remember what I taught you?"
Oh yes I can, "Yksi, kaksi, kolme..." One, two, three....
We high five it over the table. I watched him carefully put the card back in his wallet. His family were Russian refugees in Finland. It was why he had arrived speaking so little English. Finnish was his second language. English would be the third.
Now I can remember a small, very blond boy. As we leave the meeting he asked me, "May I do something I wanted to do then?"
      "What?"
He hugged me.

There are two boys

who live just around the corner from us. Both of them are still in the primary school. They are having what we would once have considered to be a "normal" childhood. They spend most of their non-school daylight hours out of doors. They walk or ride to school on their own. They are not required to attend "after-school" activities each afternoon but entertain themselves instead.
They know how to climb a tree. They know how to make a swing by slinging ropes over a branch of a tree. They can ride their bikes with great skill up and down the gutters and in out of their driveway and those of all the neighbours. They go to the playground at the end of the street on their own and perform acrobatics on the climbing frame. They know at least a dozen ways to come sliding down.
Walking along the street they know how to scrunch the most leaves and avoid the cracks. They drag sticks along fences. They know where the dogs and cats live and have on occasion returned straying dogs to their owners. They have a cat of their own which, contrary to the expectations of one of the neighbours, they do not terrorise. When it went missing they were devastated. It was micro-chipped however and when it escaped from custody it was returned and they now watch over it anxiously and keep it firmly indoors at night.
Both these boys are doing very well at school. They have lively imaginations. They are physically fit and healthy. They watch very little television and rarely use the computer. They like to read.
We were discussing them at knitting group yesterday and someone remarked,
       "Their mother must have worked hard to get them to be like that and fancy trusting them so much."
Their mother would laugh at this. She once told me that she just expects them to be like this. She does not say they cannot watch television. If they wanted to go to some after school activity then she and her husband would be prepared to listen and support them.
Their mother also knows that she is criticised for allowing them so much freedom but it is her belief that you have to take risks. I remember telling her about the young Norwegian boy I mentioned a couple of posts back. She thought it was an entirely reasonable thing to do. Risks? Of course there were risks.
Pedalling home yesterday I saw the two of them on their way home from school. They were walking yesterday.
        When they saw me the older one called out,
         "Race you to the end Cat but you have to wait until we cross the road."
They are taking risks but they are learning. I was happy to let them have a head start on me because they are getting a head start on life.
    

Characters? Where do you get

the people you write about? I was asked that question yesterday by one of the Whirlwind's friends.
The Whirlwind and I looked at one another. We know precisely where one of the characters comes from. "Ruth" is "a little bit me, a little bit Cat and a little bit imaginary" in the Whirlwind's description. It was quite deliberate. It is what the Whirlwind wanted, what she asked me for. Nevertheless I had to wait for Ruth to appear. She took a while to come. When she finally did appear she was not quite the sort of person I thought she might be - and I had no choice.
The sources for the other characters are a great deal more complex than that - at least I think they are. The charscters seem to appear from nowhere. They tell me who they are. I have to listen. If I get it wrong then the writing does not work.
They name themselves too. Try to name them anything else and the character simply stops talking.
I do not normally write short stories. I have written very few of them. I have written three about "Tom" and "Lizzie" and "Mouse". Tom is a harp player with the Harpcottle Orchestra. Lizzie is his sister and Mouse is their cat. I have no idea at all where they came from. They just appeared. They have told me who they are and how they behave. I cannot change that.
I tried to explain this to the eleven year old asking the question. Next term they will do some writing exercises involving physical descriptions of people they know and that they create. It will tie in with biology, history, art and maths - and possibly other things. Their English teacher has already mentioned it to me.
But the question of where the characters come from is likely to remain a mystery. It irritates me but I am not sure I really want to know. It is better to be surprised.

There have been calls for a

"bi-partisan" approach on the issue of those attempting to enter Australia by boat. They come of course from the government and the media. They do not come from the opposition. There is no need for them to come from the opposition.
There is also an excellent article in our state newspaper today by Alexander Downer, our former Foreign Minister.  It makes interesting reading. I also have no doubt that what he has to say will be criticised in tomorrow's letters pages.

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/downer-political-poison-costing-lives/story-e6freacl-1226406992596

I am not sure whether I am right or not but I have always believed that it is the role of the government of the day to run the country. If the present government and the media are to be believed however everything which currently goes wrong is not the fault of the government. It is the fault of the opposition for failing to support the government.

I do not believe it is the role of an opposition to support the government in everything. Any reasonable opposition is going to support a government in some things but not others.

In this case I believe that the government has got the border protection and asylum seeker policies catastrophically wrong. As Downer has said, nobody wants anyone to drown. It must be a most appalling and terrifying way to die.

What is perhaps even worse is that those who drowned were safe. They were safe but they wanted to be somewhere different. They are no longer fleeing persecution - if indeed some were fleeing persecution in the first place - they are attempting to travel to a chosen destination. That is a very different thing.

The rescue operation which was mounted has been incredibly expensive. Australia has had to assist and accept survivors. Aircraft are being used. Hospital beds are being taken up. Later there will be the expense of resettlement in Australia because, without a doubt, all the survivors will be granted refugee status.  It bothers me even more that there are "unaccompanied minors" among the survivors. Their needs for care and protection are going to be even greater.

The money all this has cost could have been put towards education, housing, hospitals, roads and other essentials in places which desperately need them. It could have benefitted many. Instead it is directed towards saving a few, some would say a selfish few.

All this tells me that it is not a "bi-partisan" approach we need. We need a government which will acknowledge that the current policy is not working, that the "solutions" they have offered are not going to work.  They need to acknowledge that anything else is going to be very hard work and that they have made it much more difficult through intransigence and ineptness.

It is not the role of an opposition to support policies which do not work, nor is it their role to compromise in the hope that something "might" work. The government is there to govern. It claims to have the numbers in both houses. If it cannot get their policies to work then it is up to them, not the opposition, to do something about it.

If they can get something to work then they might even get bi-partisan support.

I once had a conversation on

a train with a Norwegian boy. He was ten years old and his English, while careful, was excellent.
The conversation began because he asked me a question. He was travelling alone.
He and his parents were travelling the world for a year. He was keeping up his school work with help from his mother. The train journey he was taking was part of his schoolwork. He was equipped with money, map, a mobile phone, his lunch and his school work. He was facing the world with a degree of confidence rarely seen in ten year olds. Yes his parents were at a business meeting in a seaside suburb and he could phone them for help if he really needed.  He was permitted, indeed encouraged, to talk to female strangers he assessed as likely to be safe. Male strangers, unless railway personnel or someone like a policeman were not to be spoken to.
He told me all of this while we waited for the train to leave. He investigated my tricycle and asked questions about it. He showed me the work he had to do as part of the journey. It was demanding. It involved reading, maths, following a map, observations to be taken in the National Park which was his destination and other activities.
Had he done this sort of thing before? Oh yes. He showed me a smaller map of a larger area in his work folder. He was a well travelled child. I have no doubt that the work he had been set would have been done. There was evidence of previous solo expeditions in the folder.
I was telling two people I know about this child yesterday. They were horrified at what he had been allowed to do. Travel alone? Even worse, travel alone in a strange city? He did not speak the language! He could not possibly look after himself all day! He would not have done the work he had been set. It was ridiculous. It was irresponsible. Why had I not reported the incident to someone?
Why should I?
I know children who have never been anywhere alone. They reach the first year of secondary school and they still have not been anywhere alone. They travel in cars and do not know how to use our public transport system. Part of the problem is time when both parents work. A far greater part of the problem however is fear of what might happen if you let your child out alone.
I hope I would be an irresponsible parent. I hope I would want my child to show a degree of independence. I would like to have the trust in my children that the parents of the Norwegian child had in him. It would be taking a risk but it would be a risk you would have to take if you really wanted your child to grow up. Wouldn't it?