Transmission of the corona virus in schools

keeps coming up. 
A certain professor who seems to spend a lot of time on social media and in the press keeps posting news of outbreaks saying , "Schools are safe. I can't be any clearer than that."  The irony is probably lost on many people. 
I know too many people who believe that (1) children cannot catch Covid19 and (2) if they do then they only get a few mild symptoms and (3) that any child who does had to be sick before that.
I am not sure where all that "information" came from - probably from a source similar to the one that stated getting your childhood vaccinations  causes autism.
When I was teaching there was a folk-theory floating around that teachers developed a sort of "natural immunity" in relation to the worse of the colds, coughs and 'flu like illnesses. We taught children didn't we? The little darlings didn't cover their faces when they sneezed, blow their noses in a hygienic manner, came to school when they were not feeling well and much more.
Of course teachers, like everyone else, had days off because they were sick. They didn't want to infect everyone else. 
I actually left the teaching service with all but one of my "sick" days still intact.  It wasn't because I was a particularly healthy sort of person. I was simply fortunate. 
In one school I taught at we had a teacher who was, quite literally, dying. She had cancer. She came to school right up until the end of one term. A week into the school holidays she died. How she managed those last few weeks of school I will never know. I don't think the other staff had any idea how ill she was. It was purely by accident I found out. I needed a child's walker from her classroom and she was in there alone.  The pain and exhaustion was obvious although you would not have thought she was so ill when she arrived that morning.
    "Don't say anything please Cat. If I can see it out to the end of term that will make it so much easier for everyone, especially the children."
I said nothing. I don't know whether it was the right thing to do or not. The other staff were shocked by her death. Some of them had actually believed she was recovering. Others had no idea she was as ill as that.
Her group of physically disabled and intellectually retarded children would only have been, at best, vaguely aware of her not being there the following term. It was a kindness to them that I won't forget. 
I often wonder though what would have happened if she had, perhaps a few weeks before, caught some virus or other. Would she have continued to try and come to school or would the excuse that "Mrs L... is sick" have been enough?  Quite possibly it would have been.  
Now she would have been considered to be "highly vulnerable" and nobody would have expected her to be at work.  We might have been better informed about her cancer too. 
School was not a "safe" environment for her to be in. She was not going to make others ill but they might well have made her even sicker than she already was. 
Possibly it is that way for many other people too right now. We just don't know. Do we put life on hold because of the corona virus? Or do we take measures to minimise, as far as possible, the potential harm?  Do we simply make schools as safe as possible?

Playground safety and the playground police

are in the news again.
This time it is because a child apparently got stuck under a "train" in a playground in a country town.  The train has apparently been in the playground for the last thirty-three years. The playground is named for the train. 
Children have been climbing over, around and under the train all that time. There must have been more than one accident in that time. It is likely that a child has fallen off it and broken an arm or a collar bone, and more than a few knees have been scraped as well as heads banged. 
But now it has been declared "unsafe". Children can no longer play on it. They can no longer pretend to be the driver or the guard or order their passengers around. They cannot use it to go anywhere in their imagination.
For my third "birthday and Christmas" present I was given what I had been calling a "train toy" set. It was a Hornby clockwork train with two carriages and tracks that could be set out as an oval or in a figure of eight. It was a present from my paternal grandparents.
It is also my first memory of actually being able to read something. I read the instructions for putting the track together to my father. (We set it up under the big table in the dining room of my grandparents' home.) I still remember the thrill of doing that.
I loved that train. I turned the dolls' house my father had made me into the railway station and I went everywhere I could think of at the time. My brother came with me. We had to wait for the weather to be bad enough outside to play with it inside of course. Our mother sent us out of doors, unsupervised, when the weather was good - and even not so good.
Outside, across the road that led to a farm, there were some enormous (to us) concrete drainage pipes. They had been left there by the roads or water supply people while work was done. They seemed to stay there for months and months - and probably did. All the local children played in them. We raced our little tricycles (with the trays at the back) through them making train noises as we went. We called out to each other. The older children climbed on them and ran along the top. All sorts of games were organised around them.  Of course we should never have been anywhere near them, let alone played in them. Somehow though the workmen just left us to it, even asking occasionally where we were going that day if they heard the train noises. 
We caused no harm to those pipes. Nobody injured themselves very badly although I know there were a few scraped knees and elbows and some bruises.
Now of course if such things were left waiting to be in put in place there would be notices up on cyclone safety fencing saying, "Do not trespass." All the fun we had would not even be contemplated. I doubt children the age I was then would even know how to play in them.
The playground safety police have stopped all that. They are stunting imagination and physical activity and independence and so much more. I am waiting for them to say that the "whale" in the shopping centre, much loved as a piece of climbing equipment about one a half metres in height, is unsafe. It won't be long. 

So the Chinese authorities don't like

Downunder "spying" on them? 
It is of course perfectly acceptable for them to spy on Downunder. It is perfectly acceptable for them to spy on everyone,  indeed vital for them to do so. 
Anyone who is going to do business with the rest of the world, and do it to their own advantage, needs to spy on those to whom they are supplying goods and services. What they don't want is other people spying on them. They want to control the flow of information.
We all know that. Everyone accepts a certain amount of that. 
There is also "intelligence gathering" - the other sort of spying. It is almost nothing like the world shown in espionage movies. Most of it is very dull stuff. It is nevertheless vital to international business and international relations.
A man I know in the wool trade has interests in China. He put a lot of money into developing a business there. It employs a lot of Chinese people. About eight years ago he was warned not to return to China. He was told that, if he returned, he would be arrested. Why? Intelligence had picked up that he was not paying the necessary bribes to the local party officials. They had decided he needed to be apprehended in order to send the "correct" message to others. His mother, who was telling me this, was philosophical,
   "It's the way business is done in China but he wanted no part in it. It's still going to cost him in other ways."
I am sure it will. 
A family I know here were exporting other goods to China. The business seemed to be doing well, indeed very well. It was doing so well that the Chinese business offered them a "free" holiday in China - for both parents and their two adult sons. Intelligence gathering alerted them to the dangers of accepting the offer. They now find it impossible to do any business at all in China but, as the father put it to me, "We still have our business. We would not have kept it if we had accepted that so-called free holiday."
And there is the sort of intelligence gathering which China (and other countries) regard as "interference in our internal affairs". The Chinese are so sensitive about issues surrounding Tibet  and others around the Uighur community that they do not even want these things mentioned, let alone their handling of them questioned. 
   "It's about controlling that huge population Cat," I was told, "They fear dissent because it could cause the country to break apart."
It is why the "one country, two systems" policy for Hong Kong has never really worked - even when it appeared to do so on the surface. It was barely tolerated while there was no dissent but now it cannot be tolerated at all. It might break the country apart.
Yesterday I was asked whether I would take on a Chinese student for help with his English. I refused because I really do not have the time to give the sort of help he would need. He needs intensive English classes. I really want to stop doing that sort of work. He may have done me a favour.
 

I do not understand Facebook

or how it works when a perfectly harmless post by me can be seen by some  people but not by others. Why?
Yesterday, mostly for the benefit of a few people I knew might be interested I actually managed to put up two photographs. It seems some people cannot see them and others can. 
I thought they were harmless.

They are simply pictures of the front and back of something I have not quite finished. The skivvy hides the many ends I have not yet had time to deal with...and dealing with them is some way off as I have the other project to do. That one is rather more urgent than this one.
This was one of those, "Well now that I have all those little pieces I might as well do something with them" sort of projects. I never intended to make it - blame "social distancing".
There was no chance of having visitors - not that we have many anyway - so I pinned an i-cord (tomboy stitch or french knitting) outline on some polystyrene and filled it in over the weeks. 
It is not the sort of project that you can start and go through straight to the end without interruption. The dining room table is the wrong height for a start - back and neck suffer.  Although I had enough pieces to fill in about three  quarters of the outline I also had to make some more. 
Making more pieces meant designing shapes that would fit into the blank spaces. I had to cast on and off in unexpected places. 
I also had to find yarn in among the stash, yarn of the right colours, weight and type.  
The yarns are mostly linen or cotton. There is a little rayon and some metallic yarn with a patch or two of mohair. Some of the yarns have been combined with other yarns. There is no acrylic in it. I don't have acrylic in my stash.
There are some small pieces that have been knitted together but many of the pieces I made were single yarns I was trying out for other reasons. 
These are not my favourite colours. I prefer blues, green-blues and greens, greys and navy. They were colours I used for other people. But what is wrong with it?
I really don't understand why Facebook would decide some people cannot see it. It is not rude or racist.
Maybe it is because it really is rather ridiculous? 

Designing a knitting pattern

is fine. It is writing it up that I detest. I like writing in the general way.  Pattern writing however is something quite different. I think I have mentioned, probably more than once, the problem with writing instructions for anything.
Writing knitting patterns involves a certain amount of mathematics too. That's okay. I can cope with basic mathematics. I have a computer program that does the basic calculations. It is very basic but that is actually what makes it so useful. I was alarmed to see that the same program is no longer commercially available. I suppose it has been succeeded by "better" things.
I also have a very much more advanced program I am still learning to use. It is not intuitive but, up to a point it also writes some of the pattern - if that is what you instruct the program to do when you start.  I need to remember this - and have forgotten more than once.
The gap between the design and the writing of instructions however is immense. That is where the basic calculations have been so useful. That is where those tension (or gauge) squares have been so useful.  Combine those two things and you know what you have to work with - or so it would seem.
Right now all I am designing are squares.  This should be simple. It isn't. I need to fit things within the same measurement each time.  I thought I had the row count sorted for one square but it won't work for other reasons. Sigh. I also need to remember that some types of knitting are more stitches or more rows (or perhaps even both) in the making than others.  
I will get it done. I will. I will. But it is alarmingly slow and time consuming and there is so much more I want to do. 
And that is what so infuriated me about another knitter boasting of how she had managed to get a "free" copy of a complex pattern. She "borrowed" it from someone else. I know it happens all the time but I thought of all the work that had gone into the pattern. The writer of that pattern depends on sales to help pay the bills for essentials. The authors of books depend on sales to help pay their bills too. At very least they need the measly amount that comes in from the lending rights of books which are in libraries. 
I have committed to writing this pattern for a purpose. It is my contribution to trying to keep something important to our community alive. I will do it for that reason. 
I will be angry if someone else makes money out of it - but they might well do just that.  
 

Someone has gone missing

and his mother is, as always, worried.
I saw her yesterday. She had gone out into the front garden to look down their street, phone in hand, hoping he would appear.
Her son is a grown man but he has serious mental health issues. Every so often he simply disappears. Sometimes it is for just a few  days. More than once it has been for several months.
He knows how to disappear. He takes cash from his bank account. He takes his "pup" tent and his sleeping bag and he goes - on his pushbike. Nobody has ever been able to find out where he goes.
I suspect he doesn't go that far but the police, alert to his disappearances, have never found him. He can blend in with the environment in ways that nobody else I know can do it. 
I travelled on a local train with him once. We were going up into the hills behind us. I know better than to ask him any questions. He sometimes talks to me because I  do not ask questions. Questions make him suspicious - and angry. He volunteered he was going into one of our national parks that day. 
The park begins one side of the railway line and I was going to the other side. We both got off at the same stop. He is sufficiently socially aware that he actually helped me take my tricycle off the train. By the time I was outside the station he had disappeared  completely. There was no sign of him at all. I remember another passenger looking puzzled and saying to me, "Where did he go?"
He might be in the park now. 
It is what passes for winter here and it will be cold but it doesn't seem to worry him. A couple of weeks back, at a really low point, he was outside in nothing more than a singlet and shorts - nothing on his feet. He was talking to a light pole. I pedalled past without saying anything to him. You don't interrupt such "conversations" because he could turn violent.
His mother was worried then. She is more worried now. She is in her eighties. He is fifty something. He has been a problem since early childhood. Back then the other families in the street asked his parents to keep him apart from the other children because he would lash out for no discernible reason. The other children were frightened of him.
When he reappears he will be taken "into care" for a few weeks. His medication will be adjusted. He will be sent "home". The cycle will begin all over again. 
While he is in care his mother will have some respite. She can visit her other son and he will visit her. These things are not possible while this man is with her or missing. He will have nothing to do with his brother. The very sight of his brother sends him into a violent rage. He has injured his mother more than once because he believes she has had some contact with his sibling. His mental condition is such that he has never been convicted of assault. His brother is doing his best but the "mental health team" insist that this man is "better off at home".  His brother told me once that he did not believe this and that he was putting aside savings for when his mother could move "to somewhere safe and comfortable".
It is becoming too much for his mother to handle. 
   "I've tried Cat. I am getting too old for this. He frightens me more than ever. They keep telling me this is the best place for him to be but I want to sell up and go somewhere safe."
She is too old for this. She has the right to somewhere safe. This has to be about more than the "best place" for him. I doubt it is the best place for him anyway. It is simply the cheapest option, the option that allows others to wash their hands of the responsibility. For them it isn't about "safe" - and it should be.

Some football event or other

is apparently going to be held in Downunder. It is being shared with our friends across  "the Ditch"  I am told.
I was told all this by a clearly excited dog walker of my acquaintance just after I had waved off a visit from our friend P.... 
I do not share his enthusiasm. The dog looked bored too.
When we lived in a tiny rural community with a two teacher school (at which my parents were the teachers) Brother Cat was expected to play football simply because they needed him to have enough to get a team together. He loathed it. He was better than the local bank manager's son. B... would be described as a "nerd" now. He was so intelligent the Senior Cat did the only thing he could do B went from year 4 to year 6 in one leap and still came top of the group of about six or seven children. Brother Cat was not good at football but B... was hopeless. 
B... was so bad that Middle Cat, a GIRL!!!!, took his place. She was smaller but "about ten times more useful" I can remember one of the boys saying. She was out there in about the smallest size boots available and a guernsey that our mother had made for her. Her ball skills far exceeded those of Brother Cat. 
Middle Cat would come home battered, bruised and covered in dirt (or mud on the rare occasions it rained). Our mother would listen to the long winded description of the match and the tactics used. The Senior Cat would read something. My brother and I would sit in stony silence. We were NOT  interested. 
We still aren't  interested. I have never watched a football match in my life. My brother has only been to those he was forced to play in.  Middle Cat and the Black Cat have both played. They have both played netball and five-aside basketball. Middle Cat has played softball and hockey for the state and apparently had a "whizz-bang" tennis serve as well. 
I haven't seen her since the announcement that Downunder won "the bid" but I will be interested in her reaction. She would not let her two boys play more contact sport than was required of them at school. Now she is much too conscious of the dangers. Her knee replacements, wrist and ankle problems have arisen partly through her many sports injuries.
We see what happens to the men who play football. They are not fit old men at all. Some of them have serious problems, not the least brain injuries from head contact with each other as well as the ball.
The praises of "the game" were being sung on the television news later last night. The reporter sounded even more excited than the dog walker. 
I prowled off wondering whether, somewhere down the track, people will regret playing because of the long term injuries they do themselves.