I once spent a weekend

with a family who were Dutch migrants. I was about thirteen at the time. My paternal grandparents, with whom I would normally have stayed, were away. My maternal grandparents were going to the same event as my parents. I suppose these people offered to have me. I did not know.
We did know these people quite well and they spoke excellent English. We knew they spoke Dutch of course but I had never heard them do this in public. I am sure they would have felt this was impolite. It was much less usual to hear people speaking another language in public when I was that age.
The weekend however was another story. They were at home. They spoke Dutch. They spoke Dutch to their children and they spoke Dutch to me.
I remember curling up in the bed on Friday night and crying myself to sleep because I did not understand what was being said to me. I told myself it was only for the weekend and that my father would be picking me up on Sunday evening. I could survive that long. I was terrified of being rude without meaning to be rude.
The mother was really very kind. She knew I was frightened and unhappy and trying not to show it. I think she would have spoken English for me but her husband was insistent that Dutch was spoken at home to their two children. Their children were about eight and six at the time. Naturally they understood what was being said to them.
The language was strange. The food was strange. They had family prayers at the breakfast table. Right through the weekend their were things that were different and that made me feel uncomfortable.
I managed to get through the weekend, indeed by Sunday afternoon I understood some things being said to me.English and Dutch do have words almost in common. Nevertheless I was very relieved to see my father. How, he wanted to know, had I got on?
I let him know, as teenagers will, what I thought about my parents sending me into a situation like that. To be fair to him he had no idea what would happen. I know that now but I did not know it then. The couple had offered to have me and my parents had felt it would be rude to refuse.
We saw the parents on and off for the rest of their lives. They always spoke English in public and Dutch at home. On many occasions, even as an adult, I had to visit them to deliver something or collect something. On those occasions they would always speak Dutch to me although a translation would be forthcoming if I looked really confused.
I wondered what would happen when the husband died. I went to visit. There were people coming and going all the time. She spoke English to all but their Dutch friends. She greeted me in Dutch and hugged me tightly, told me I was another daughter. I went to help her daughter clear away some fallen apricots so people could sit under the tree.
"Your mother still speaks Dutch to me," I told her.
She smiled.
"And just like me and John you answer her in English!"

Our census form

arrived last night. Census night is the ninth of this month.
My father says he is too old to be filling in forms. He gets an accountant to do the tax form and passes everything else to me.
I could have filled in the form on line. On reflection I decided against it. There were two reasons for this and the major one was to do with security. No computer system in the world is absolutely secure.
I am never happy filling in a form which asks for large amounts of personal information. I am even less happy about filling in a form which asks me for large amounts of personal information about someone else, in this case my father. This one must be filled in. The law demands it and there are penalties for failing to answer the questions.
Some of the questions however are rather curious. Where do I live now? Where did I live a year ago? Where did I live five years ago? These are no doubt designed to try and discover how mobile the population is but what of the people who have lived in more than one place in the past year? There are increasing numbers of such people.
Are you an Australian citizen? If not, where were you born? It sounds reasonable but which country did you come from? If you are a refugee you might have been born in one country and spent years waiting to come here. It would be useful to know that.
Do you speak a language other than English at home? My BIL speaks English in his own home but Greek to his parents. There is no sub-question for that - or any indication of how well he might speak Greek. There is a subjective question about how well someone speaks English.
On Tuesday I will help three people who cannot read or write English fill in their forms. They all speak English well enough to be understood but they cannot fill in a form. There is no means of indicating they had my assistance.
There is a question about assistance given to family members but no question about assistance given to immediate neighbours. It is a question which should be included to gain more information about urban isolation.
There is also a question about needing assistance with communication activities. I wish I could believe that question was designed to provide future assistance to people with special communication needs. It is not. It is designed to allow the government to find out what they need to do to inform people, not have people inform them.
There will be millions of census forms filled in. It will take a long time to analyse the data. It will be out of date by the time it becomes available so it will be, at best, only an indicator of what is going on in the country.
There is an optional question on the census. It asks about religion. I am going to leave it blank. What I believe is not something the government needs to know. I am not sure they can really use the other information they will get.

Taxing shoppers for shopping online

is one of the latest ideas for trying to "save the retail industry". It may work but it may not too.
I am old enough to be able to remember shopping without the convenience of the internet. I am also old enough to be able to remember another sort of shopping as well. It was called "being served".
You went into the shop and someone asked you, usually very politely, what you wanted. Actually I think they asked the adult with me. I was very small at the time.
I wonder about this now. The person I would be shopping with was my paternal grandmother. She would do most of her household shopping in "Jetty Road" which was within walking distance of her home.
There was a butcher, a baker, a greengrocer, a bank and a dairy. There was also, at the far end, a fish and chip shop and the hotel on the sea front. At the other end there was a church and, across the way, the doctor's surgery. It was all very civilised.
Everyone knew my grandmother. The butcher would allow her to inspect the meat before she bought it. As a farm girl she knew what she was looking at and he knew that. I heard him advise her, "I would not recommend that today."
The greengrocer would take a list and "the boy" would deliver later. Peas came in their pods.
The bakery did not sell the huge variety they do now but they baked on the premises. Most of the bread was white and you could have "sandwich" which was square or "high top" which had risen to a more natural shape. My grandmother would buy "granary" and the baker would have a loaf set aside for her.
The general grocery store was next door to my grandparents' home. My grandmother would provide a list and "Hazel" the assistant or "the boy" would bring the order to the back door - never the front door.
Further down the road there was a drapery store which sold some clothing. You could still buy men's shirts with detachable collars there. It sold fabric, haberdashery, manchester and a small quantity of crockery. (It was the shop where my grandfather would buy new "cup, saucer and plate" sets when he broke the handle on the cup of my grandmother's "breakfast in bed" teacup.)
You had to go further afield for shoes or other clothing but everywhere you went you were "served" by someone. They would know the stock. My grandmother commanded great respect so she would often be served by the most senior person available. Nevertheless everyone was served.
Now you have to help yourself. It is often hard to find anyone to answer a question. The variety has grown in some ways but reduced in others. The "Jetty Road" shops are no longer there. You need to travel some distance to a supermarket where, while you can find most things, the greengroceries are not particularly fresh and often come from another country. You need not say anything to anyone except the check out person - and soon that will come to an end with the new self-service checkouts.
Is it any wonder people shop on line? It gets delivered to the door and you might be lucky enough to have a friendly delivery person who actually says "Hello".

There was a knock on our door

several days ago. When I went to answer it I found, for the first time in several years, two women from a certain religious group. I gave them short shrift. The claim that they are not "selling" anything is false. They are selling their brand of religion.
I find the notion of selling your religious faith to other people offensive. I find that particular group particularly offensive.
There are several reasons for this. Some years ago I was asked to give some assistance to an elderly woman. I did not know her but I was told she was "on her own". Having had very little schooling she needed help with the paperwork surrounding her move into an aged care complex. It was a thoroughly sensible move on her part because she had no relatives here and did not want to rely on friends.
She had been going to the meetings of this particular religous group for a long time.
When we sat down together to go through the paper work it proved necessary for her to let me know something of her financial affairs. I was aware she was not well off and the person who had asked me to help had said, "She does not seem to manage her affairs terribly well but I cannot work out what she spends the money on because she does not seem to indulge herself at all."
No, she did not indulge herself. She had been struggling to "double tithe". Twenty percent of her meagre income was being given to her church. She had been told she "must" do this. It was what "everyone" did.
This elderly woman had been denying herself all comfort in the belief that she must give up twenty percent of her income to her church - the place that had been her limited social life and support group and to which she had given hours or kitchen work and charity shop work. She was trying to work out how she was going to keep on doing this and pay her fees to the aged care complex. They would also take a fixed percentage of her limited income. It would leave her with almost nothing. Her distress was obvious.
It took a long time and a lot of help from a number of people before we had the situation sorted.
She stopped double tithing, indeed she stopped tithing. The church cut her off. She was no longer welcome there. The members of it would no longer speak to her. She no longer existed for them.
Fortunately, inside the aged care complex, she found there was a group of volunteers happy to take her to a church on Sundays. They did not ask her to tithe. They just said she was welcome. Would she like to join the women's group? There was no pressure to do so. It was just an offer of friendship. After a little hesitation she joined. She also, tentatively at first, joined in some of the activities the complex had to offer.
I saw her several times and she always told me how glad she was that she had moved there. She spoke of how kind and caring her new friends were. Just once she mentioned her distress when, in the chemist shop, she was completely ignored by someone she had once considered a very close friend. That went on hurting. She died without ever being visited by anyone from her former church.
I have heard similar stories from other people about similar groups. I have seen more than one teen or young adult leave such groups and have family cut them off. I have seen people cripple themselves financially and then still be forced from the group.
I am suspicious of "prosperity theology" and anything which demands a great financial contribution. I am angered by anything which cuts off contact because of a difference in beliefs.
If that is the sort of religion being sold by these people who trespass on the property then I do not want to buy.

There have been four universities

in Australia involved in some research called the "Aged Care in General Practice Project". The aim is to develop a test which will allow general practitioners to detect and manage memory problems among older people.
My father has, at the request of his old GP, been involved in this and so have a number of other people I know. There is nothing wrong with my father's memory. Like everyone else he forgets things occasionally but, for his age, he has a remarkably good memory. His mind is active. He can still seek a solution to a problem and learn something new. He gets up each morning wondering how he will manage to do all he wants to do not how he will fill in his day.
I know I am lucky, very lucky. It makes my father much easier to care for.
As part of the project I also talked with two people who were part of the research team. The first of these was the person who came to see my father in his home setting. As his "carer" I was also interviewed. I think this person was slightly startled by my father's inquiries about the research and how they hoped to develop the test! There are probably not too many people of my father's age who still read psychology.
The second person I spoke to rang because my father missed a question on the second test his GP had to give him twelve months later. As my father came home and told me he had done this and it relates to something he has done all his life nobody was concerned but the follow up questions had to be asked. The researcher and I then talked about other things - many of them to do with how the project might or might not relate to people whose first language is not English. It was not, at the time, something they had given a lot of thought to and I was surprised given the infinitely varied nature of our population.
Yesterday I came across an excellent reason to be concerned about this. A friend rang because she was worried about her neighbour. The neighbour is Greek. Her husband died a short while ago and this woman now lives alone. My friend went in to the neighbour because the power was not on.
My friend discovered that she had not paid the bill and that there was also another unpaid bill. She was afraid her neighbour was not coping and wondered what she should do about it.
So I asked the, to me, obvious question. Can her neighbour read English? There was a moment of silence at the other end of the 'phone and then, "I didn't think of that. I don't think she can."
Much later I had another telephone call. That was the problem. In the chaos surrounding her husband's death this elderly woman thought he had paid the electricity bill before he died. She thought the other notice was a receipt. She was acutely embarrassed.
In future my friend will give her some discreet help to read what needs to be read. And no, this elderly woman is not "losing it" at all. She expressed her gratitude for the help and understanding with a plate of freshly baked Greek shortbread biscuits.
I will be interested to see what the research study comes up with and what they have to say about this issue.

Reading the paper

is part of the breakfast ritual for my father. We get two newspapers. We get the state newspaper and the national newspaper. They are both from the Murdoch stable.
We get the state newspaper simply because my father likes to keep up with the local news. He refuses to watch the television news services any more, even the Australian Broadcasting Commission's Channel 2 or the SBS service. The ABC will put sports headlines before international affairs or even local affairs and the SBS now has advertising - although not as much as the truly commercial stations. All that irritates him. The bad news which makes headlines also bothers him. At 88 he has been through WWII, the Korean and Vietnam wars and now Afghanistan and other places. It is not that he does not care. He probably cares too much.
Reading the paper means that he can take his time over the news. He can avoid the parts he does not wish to read. He does not need to dwell on what distresses him. If he needs to know more he can ask me.
There is a good deal of any paper which remains unread by both of us. We do not read the sports section or the racing guide. We do not read the real estate or employment sections. We barely glance at the business section. It would save a great many trees if newspapers could be divided into sections and one could just have the part(s) one actually read. My father gets irritated with the extra pages and threatens to stop having the papers delivered. He never quite gets around to it. Breakfast time is newspaper time. It takes time too.
This morning however no newspaper reading is being read. The papers have not arrived for some reason. Breakfast will take even longer this morning. My father is reading a book.

There is political turmoil

in South Australia again. Late on Friday last week a move was made against the highly unpopular Premier of this state.
This is hardly surprising. There has been talk of it for some time. What might surprise many people however is who told the Premier he had to go. It was not, as might be expected, his parliamentary colleagues. It was not, as might also be expected, the people of South Australia through the ballot box.
No, it was the union movement accompanied by someone who does hold a seat in parliament. There is no doubt however that the person in charge was the union representative. He was there to tell the Premier what to do and he expected to be obeyed.
The Premier was about to fly out to India. He has now gone and he will be there for a week. He is not going as quietly as the union man must have hoped. The Premier claims he wants a transitional period - thus casting doubt on the ability of his anointed successor to do the job. It is a mess.
In a democracy the union movement, which represents around only 18-20% of workers in South Australia, would not have this sort of power. The numbers in the union movement would perhaps be even lower if it were not for the fact that there are still areas of employment where, although illegal to require it, the reality is that you do not get employed without a union ticket. Despite this the union movement still holds most of the power at ALP conferences. They have a great deal of say with respect to who gets pre-selected and what party policy is. Funds from union coffers are the life-blood of the ALP.
Two things need to happen. The first thing is we need to have an election in order to decide who is going to run the state. That is not going to happen because we have a "fixed" four year term and the government, elected by a minority of voters, is not going to recall parliament and revise the legislation in order to allow an election.
The second thing is the ALP needs to cut the union umbilical corn. That is not going to happen either.
In the meantime South Australia will be run by the union movement.