There is a bike ride which

is a rite of passage for the young around here. It involves putting your bike on the train at the local station and then going to the end of the line. 

The line ends up in the hills behind me. You exit the station and then you do the hair raising ride down the hill. The road is steep and winds around. It is often busy. 

The ride is a thrill. It requires skills you cannot develop anywhere else. It is something which can occupy several hours of your time on any weekend - and right through the school holidays. If you are in your teens and your parents are not supervising your every activity during the day then you might even be able to do the ride twice in a day. 

I have never done the ride. I would not even consider it. I do not have the skills or the right sort of bike. It is not designed for tricycles at any point.

Middle Cat and the Black Cat did the ride once. Our parents did not want them to do it but agreed they could do it just the once. Once was enough. They found out what it was like. 

They also did the ride more than fifty years ago. They did it when the ride was not nearly as popular as it is now. It was not nearly so common to see dozens of young riders coming down the hill at terrifying speeds. Yes, you can break the speed limit coming down the hill - and they know it.

Now, if the weather is good, any weekend and daylight train into the hills is likely to be crowded with bikes. They are going "up to do the ride". It is almost exclusively the male of the species who participates in this activity. I have seen a female just once. 

I have also talked with them occasionally. We may not have said a lot but they will sometimes make a remark like "cool bike" of my tricycle. My response will be something like, "Thanks. Runs on banana power". That will usually produce a similar silly sort of response. I cannot say I feel comfortable crammed in with them and I avoid it if I can. The driver is usually happy to have me in the first carriage although the rear carriage is the "bike" one. They will tell me to come to the first carriage along with any wheelchair, gopher, pusher or pram.  Yes, I prefer that.

All that said I cannot help wondering about the woman who attempted to film the young who were "abusing" her in the rear carriage. I know any group of young can behave in ways they would not behave on their own or even in pairs. I know they can show off and even do harm. I have also discovered the best policy is to ignore that sort of behaviour, ignore it for my own safety. 

If I need to exit the train and they are trying to crowd on before I am off then the "hey guys more room for you if I can get out of the way" usually works wonders. They might even say "sorry".  

I know there will be renewed calls to try and stop them using the train to get to the start of the ride, perhaps to stop them doing the ride. I do not think that would be right. It would cause more trouble.  Let's face reality. Most of them will grow up to be law-abiding citizens if they can let off steam now.    

An address to the nation

or an encouragement to do the opposite? That is the question.

Our Prime Minister is not well liked. This is not simply because he is a politician and the "leader" of the party currently in power. He is not liked within the party itself. Their internal rules would make it very difficult to replace him so we are stuck with someone who is not liked and, from all accounts, not competent. 

I do not say that simply because I do not like or trust the man but because the evidence is there. He is not a leader. He dithers. He does not make bold decisions.

There he is with a huge majority in the House of Reps. He could do almost anything with it...and the threat of a double dissolution. He has done nothing of note. 

We seem to be stuck with "Net Zero". He is so captured by the increasingly unrepresentative trade union movement and their demands that we are not increasing manufacturing. We are increasing red tape and form filling. He seems terrified of investigating the unsustainable National Disability Insurance Scheme. Don't talk to him about anti-Semitism but do mention Islamophobia because of the votes not supporting concerns about that will lose. Allow a Human Rights Commission to deny rights to almost half the population. Encourage the leading medical body to deregister doctors who express concerns about potentially harmful practices after anonymous complaints are made by lay people.

Stand in front of three flags instead of one national flag for announcements of national importance while you tell us we do not have a fuel shortage - yet. Oh and don't forget to remind us that we won't have a fuel shortage because we are going to "net Zero" and show the world how it is done.

Yes, the Prime Minister may have meant well last night but he has just made the problem worse. Like it or not "oil" is not a dirty word. It is an essential part of human existence in the  21stC. We need it. Without it we are going nowhere. It is time to recognise that.    

Chocolate for Easter?

I am not sure when chocolate became a "thing" for Easter. It has to be a commercial thing of course. It is something which can be sold to us as "traditional"...and expensive.

The big bars of chocolate have more than doubled in price over the last two years. I bought the last bar of "the good stuff" for the Senior Cat around five years ago. It took us several months to eat it. Yes, we liked it but it was not something we wanted every day.  Prior to that my Easter chocolate consumption was limited to a chocolate "bilby" given to me by a very elderly woman I kept an eye on. I shared some of it with the Senior Cat but most of it was eaten by visiting children. 

The late Whirlwind tried to make me an egg one year. It was marshmallow and supposed to come out of the mould cleanly. It was a mess. I hugged her for the thought and we had hot chocolate without marshmallows. I still can't face marshmallows with hot chocolate. 

When I was a kitten Easter came with eggs...two eggs. There was the chocolate egg from my paternal grandparents and the sugar one from my maternal grandmother. (My maternal grandfather never played a role in these things.) We were not permitted to open them or eat them until Easter Sunday. They were rationed out on the Sunday and then in pieces until we had eaten them.  

One year we were also given hard boiled eggs which had been dyed red and beautifully decorated by the woman next door to the house we were living in at the time. She came from the old Yugoslavia and the eggs were traditional.  It was years later that I came across such eggs again. Middle Cat's mother-in-law did not decorate but she did dye eggs red. Other people gave Middle Cat's boys chocolate eggs. Unlike most children they were not interested. After they had gone to waste one year the older of her two told her to give the next lot away. I doubt we could have done that as children.

Now I look around the supermarket and wonder at the amount of chocolate on display. It has doubled and even tripled in price because of the cocoa shortage and other shortages. People still seem to buy it. At our library knitting group last Saturday the community officer appeared with those small gold covered chocolates and told us they were "Easter eggs". After he had gone they sat there until two small boys appeared with their grandmother. They ate some. The rest of them got taken home to others who would eat them. I have some sitting here which Middle Cat is supposed to collect today. They have a visitor coming for the weekend. He apparently likes chocolate. I wonder about that. He's a retired dentist.

Eggs. Maybe I could have a boiled egg for breakfast on Easter Sunday morning? 

  

The "gender" debate seems ro be

heading in even more directions.

I have always believed people who feel very strongly about the need to alter their gender should be given support. They need it. Making such a change is not easy. It can work well, very well. It can also work badly. It can cause people to lose the support of family, friends, colleagues and careers. We all need to step in and accept their decision. 

That said I also think there are lines which need to be drawn. If a five year old tries to cut off "her" penis then that is a matter for serious concern. It is not a result of a child being "denied" the right to attend a group which has hitherto been "girls only". Five year old children do not, whatever a gender advocate or a journalist might want to say, reason "I am a girl even though I have a penis. I am being told I cannot go to Guides because I have a penis. If I cut off my penis then I can go to Guides."  Yesterday I was told I did not support "gender diversity" because I did not believe a five year old could think this way. The person who told me this and showed me the article in question has extreme views about diversity, so extreme they are of concern to more than one person. Their views impact their job and that is one which involves young children.

I know I am in very dangerous territory here and that the most radical advocates will say that even a three year old can make an informed decision to change gender. All I can say is that many others will disagree with you. It is not so long ago that I came across the mother at the playground who, after I had thrown back the ball which had landed in the road, informed me of her child's "confusion". She had been told by the child's play group leader that children should be "asked" what gender they are. This child was a boy one day, a girl the next and then back to being a boy. He was either very confused or playing a game or perhaps just thought his parent was being silly. You will notice I have used the masculine. His mother said he was "all boy" and "into all the boy things". We may not like the idea that there are objects and ideas which many still relate to the old masculine ideal of sport, cars, engines and the like but the reality is that the idea is still there. "Anything with wheels" is still considered acceptable for boys. It doesn't mean girls cannot be interested but we do not consider it unusual if a boy is. It is simply considered "part of being a boy". 

I do not believe that the move to "ban" some from competing in events at the Olympics is surprising. Apart from anything else there is no "ban" at all. If the athlete is good enough then they can still compete but they may need to compete against a different set of athletes. They will simply not have a potential physical advantage. Whether this is "fair" or not is still being debated of course but I believe it goes further than a willingness to abide by the wishes of the President of the host country. It is a decision which has almost certainly been coming for some time.

There was someone in the chemist this morning. That person was wearing a pink frilly blouse and floral trousers. They had long hair tied back with a pink ribbon. There were sandals with sequins on their feet. The same person was also wearing a mask. I am still wondering whether it was for fear of catching something or infecting someone else - or was it to hide the very obvious facial hair?  The pharmacy assistant was indiscreet enough to inform me that this same person sometimes appears dressed as a male and without a mask. Perhaps they would be happier if we accepted that it is acceptable for men to like things which are often regarded as "feminine". We do not seem to worry too much about girls in masculine work outfits so why do we worry about the reverse?

We have five year old children starting school who are not toilet trained. How can we believe they know and understand so much about their bodies they can make an informed decision about their sexuality? These are ideas being imposed on them by adults.   

The "Kaurna" language

is dead. There are no speakers of the Kaurna language or, more accurately, the Kaurna group of languages as it was spoken in the 19thC.  The last known speaker of a Kaurna language died in 1929. Even by then the language had been lost because the old woman who spoke it had nobody else with whom to speak it and nobody recorded it. 

The present speakers of the Kaurna language are going to be furious with me for saying this. They will say they are "proud speakers" of it and that I know nothing about it or how much it means to them to have preserved. They will be upset and distressed but I believe something needs to be said when someone presumes to tell me that she speak "Kaurna" at home, that it is an ancient language which goes back thousands of years and that it is still relevant today. She tells me I know nothing about this and that it is people like me who make her feel unwelcome in her own country. I will ignore the fact that just one of her great-grandparents was here before white settlement and concentrate on her heritage from the one who was.

I do know something about this through the history of my mother's family. Her paternal grandparents, my great-grandparents on her father's side,  were the "missionaries" in charge of the "aboriginal mission" where the old woman who is said to have spoken it lived for the last part of her adult life. She was the cook there and she was mentioned in letters my mother found when she was clearing out her father's papers.  I might have kept those letters but my mother, who had good reason to loathe her father, destroyed everything. That is, to say the least, unfortunate but I did have a chance to read the letters before they were thrown on a bonfire and I am glad I did. Even as a teenager I wondered about the claim there was an aboriginal language still being spoken in and around the city. Other languages fascinated me even then but I had never heard that one spoken.

 Nobody seemed to know anything about it. Certainly my paternal grandfather knew nothing about it. He would surely have known something because my great-grandmother would have known something. She knew a great many of the local indigenous population when she ran the dairy farm on a river on the other side of the low mountain range. Some of them spoke what would have been an entirely different language but she would have been aware of it as she employed some of the men. (And did so on exactly the same basis and expectations as the "white" men she employed after her husband died.) It seems however the urban indigenous population used English or at least a form of it. This was in the late 19thC and around the docks of the main harbour at the time.

The language was dying then and dying rapidly. Thirty years later there would have been nobody speaking anything like that in the state's "capital". Yes, there would have been some of the intrepid Lutheran missionaries going to the farther reaches of the state to try and find out what they could about the languages spoken there but it is unlikely they recognised the importance of trying to save anything closer to hand. There was a sort of "pidgin" spoken sometimes between the older aboriginals and white settlers but the younger aboriginals spoke better English. Many of them were getting at least some education but it was of course an education in English.

The old woman who is said to have been the last speaker of Kaurna was literate in English and that alone would have meant that her knowledge and understanding of her language had been heavily influenced by her education. Even if someone had attempted to preserve the language it would not have been in any sense "pure". There would have been a need for words the original inhabitants simply did not need.

The same is true now. There were some words, or approximation of words, left. Landforms had sometimes been given names that might have been the names the native population had given them. The accuracy of even those names needs to be questioned though. We simply do not know and there is no way we can find out.

Even if it had been preserved in full any language called Kaurna now would have to have changed dramatically. It would have had to change from the very beginning because there was a massive culture clash. There were too many things that were strange and new and not needed by the original inhabitants. They simply did not have words for many things.

To now suggest that people still speak some sort of language called Kaurna which was spoken when the first settlers arrived is nonsense. There are perhaps some ghostly impressions of that language in what is a new language, a language which of necessity has many words and ideas imported from English and the German once spoken in the hills behind me. 

If people wish to use and develop that language they are welcome to do so. What they are not welcome to do is pretend that it is an old language which needs to be respected as "indigenous" or given that status.  Disagree if you wish but I believe we need to recognise this. 

   

Taking care of the elderly

is something I do know about. I have done it. It is hard work. It requires commitment, organisation, time, patience and any number of other things.

I also know that I was one of the lucky ones. I was incredibly fortunate in that my father, my beloved "Senior Cat", was so easy to care for even when he needed so much help. He was intellectually alert to the end of his life. He was good tempered, polite and forever saying "Thank you".  

I also know I was very fortunate in having my sister, Middle Cat, there to help. She was the one who took him to medical appointments when he could still get in and out of her car. She went with him in the access cab when he could no longer go in the car. On the rare occasions she could not go with him and I went she would always check to see we had arrived there and back safely.

Being at home for so long meant that I could see the Senior Cat had proper meals, meals he liked, meals he wanted to eat. I did the best I could to provide good nutrition and I did what I could to make sure they were presented to him at set times during the day. We both knew when to expect things to happen. 

These things matter for the very elderly...and the Senior Cat was almost ninety-eight before he made the decision it was all too much for both of us. He was the one who made the decision about "going into care" and I still feel I let him down by not arguing too hard. Yes, I was tired. I had spent too long sleeping "with one ear open" like a mother of very young children. I doubt I will ever catch up on the lost sleep.

Once in the nursing home Middle Cat and I alternated days so he always had a visitor. He had other visitors too, far more than most people. We just thought of it as the right thing to do - and it was the right thing.

I am saying all that now not to say "how good of us". No, that had nothing to do with it. It was the right thing to do. It was what should have been done. It is what should happen to all older people. It doesn't.

This morning's paper has the preliminary stories to a campaign the paper says it will be running. Their campaign is called "Care Repair" and is supposedly going to deal with the "reforms" in aged care that were supposed to lead to more care and have actually (and not surprisingly) led to less. They are talking about those who are getting one shower a week at triple the previous cost. They are talking about a pack of seven "fruit smoothies" which retail for less than $20 and cost $120 when part of the package. Is this how we keep the elderly clean and provide them with the fruit they can no longer prepare for themselves? 

There are people out there making an enormous profit. They must be. I know employing people is expensive. There are all sorts of additional superannuation, insurance, leave loadings and so on to consider. Even with those things there are people making a big profit. It is why they are in the business of "providing care". The problem is  they are not providing "care" at all. They do not care. It is simply a business for them.

I wonder if I will reach the point of needing such "care". Will anyone care? It just makes me so glad I was in the position to make sure that the elderly person I loved above all others was given some care. I was not perfect, far from it, but at least I tried and Middle Cat tried. No, he was not "lucky". We just tried to give the Senior Cat what all elderly people should be given - loving care.   

The ban is "not working"

according to the latest reports. Under 16s are still accessing social media.

Yes, of course they are. Did you really expect them to voluntarily give up such a large part of their lives? 

Last Saturday I was in the supermarket. Ahead of me there was a parent doing the weekly shop. In the child seat of the trolley there was a three year old. He was behaving very well indeed. He was quiet. He was not fidgeting. He was not pulling things from the shelves. He was not making any noise. He was apparently completely absorbed in playing a game. 

Not a problem? Yes, a big problem. It was a computer game. It was rewarding him each time he clicked on the "right" answer. It may have seemed like fun to him but it was teaching him to become addicted to such things. 

It was nice for his parent. They had a nice, quiet, well behaved child while they managed to get yet one more of the weekend chores out of the way. There was no attempt at all to communicate with the child or involve them in the food being bought or how it might be used.  It might be that the parent really did not have time to involve the child but it is much more likely that the parent simply did not see it as important. Their child was being "good" and that mattered more. 

Is it any wonder though that children grow up believing this is normal. that this is how you get entertained? Is it any wonder that they are addicted to the screen for entertainment? Should it surprise us that unless school based learning provides at least something approaching that level of entertainment then it is considered "boring"? 

Of course "Big Tech" will provide this sort of material. There is a lot of money to be made here but there is also a huge demand for it. It is not a demand driven solely by the companies providing it. It is also driven by parents who want their children to be entertained the easy way. The "oh, but that game is an educational one" is an excuse which is far too easy to use.  No, it is not "educational". It may teach something but at what cost? 

It is time to stop trying to make "Big Tech" entirely responsible for screen addiction. The addiction begins early and with the choices parents make for their children. They need to see it the way they would see alcohol and tobacco. Parents are making available something just as addictive and potentially dangerous. It is their responsibility first.