"Should you be going to a meeting?"

someone asked me yesterday. 
    "Why not?" I asked
    "Well this coronavirus thing and you looking after your father..."
As we were standing in the post office at the time and someone further along in the queue was sniffling and snuffling I wondered just what the person in question was thinking.
     "Do you think I should just stop going out altogether?" I asked
     "No but you don't need to take unnecessary risks."
     "So going to a meeting is an unnecessary risk?"
     "Well you don't need to go do you?"
Actually I don't need to go and I do need to go. I am not even sure I want to go but that has nothing to do with the coronavirus. Indeed if I told people I wasn't going for that reason some of them would just accept it.
I know the Senior Cat is at risk if he goes anywhere. It isn't just the coronavirus. He's 97. He has a range of health issues, some more serious than others. 
Middle Cat has been staying away from him this week because she has a mild cold and didn't want to risk giving it to him. I've had one too and have been very, very careful about hand washing. I am careful about that anyway.
My first teaching appointment was in a school for profoundly intellectually disabled children. We washed our hands constantly there. It didn't stop the bugs entirely but it did keep them to a manageable level. 
I have to think about the coronavirus in the same way. I need to take the sensible precautions like being even fussier than usual about hand washing.
But should it stop me from doing other things? The meeting isn't essential but someone there is doing something for me and she will be, at very least, disappointed if I don't go. She is a good friend who has not had it easy of late and I want to support her. I have some DVDs she can borrow. One of her pleasures in life now is to sit and knit and watch a DVD. Perhaps it is selfish of me but I like the idea of being able to give her some pleasure.
We could all stop doing things because of the coronavirus. We should stop if we even suspect we might have it. That does not mean we should cease to do things. 
I am not one to prowl off to crowded places. I don't like crowds. I have never liked crowds. If you are short you can't see things...and I am at risk of being knocked over as well.  Avoiding crowds at things like football matches is not a problem. I don't go to those things.
But I still need to go to the post office, the supermarket, the library, and more. I don't need to go to the meeting but the risk there is very low.  It will be a much greater risk just getting there.
We need to take some risks in life.

There was a pair of shoes in the letterbox

of the house belonging to one of the people on my regular pedalling route.
I thought this was a bit odd. They were sticking up leaving the flip lid open. The laces had been undone and they had been placed there neatly, side by side.
If someone had simply dumped the shoes there I doubted they would have been places there so neatly. I rather thought the laces would not have been undone.
The shoes were the usual sort of casual sports shoes that so many people wear. His? I thought so.
I thought about this as I pedalled on. The  curtains were open  but...
The man who lives in the house is someone I have mentioned before. He is an isolate. He doesn't mix. Why were his shoes in the letter box? 
I had never actually entered his property and I didn't feel comfortable about doing it then. It was too early to call on the neighbour. She would not be out of  bed  until I was on my way back.
No, I wasn't being curious. I was genuinely concerned.
I did the essential shopping and intended to call in on her on the way home but didn't need to  because the neighbour on the other corner saw me at the greengrocer and stopped me.
    "He's had a stroke. His brother-in-law came over and told us. Apparently he got quite violent."
The stroke does not surprise me but the "brother-in-law" did. We had no idea that he had any family at all. I said this to P.... 
    "Yes, really odd. I had the impression that they had not had contact for many years. The brother-in-law is a widower though. That might explain it. Oh well, it's none of our business."
No, perhaps not.
But, on the way home, I stopped. The shoes were still there in the letter box. My guess is that the ambulance men had put them there. To me it seemed like an advertisement - "nobody is home here".
I took the shoes out of the letter box and put the lid down. Then I took a deep breath and entered the property. I was trespassing and it didn't feel good but it did feel right. I put the shoes neatly by the front door and left.
I wonder what will happen to them...and to their owner.

If the coronavirus is "not serious"

then could someone please explain to me why the loo paper is going so quickly from the supermarket shelves?
Actually there was still plenty of paper in our local supermarket yesterday. It also had plenty of disinfectant and the like.
I had gone in to buy another box of those disposable gloves people use for food preparation. Anyone helping the Senior Cat have a shower uses a pair. It is one of those small things we need to be aware of these days....safer for him and safer for the person helping. The girl who served me knows what the situation is and suggested I get two boxes.
    "Most people who will buy them when the panic sets in won't need them. They just need to learn to wash their hands properly," she told me, "The real problem is going to be sourcing a supply."
I agreed. 
Perhaps the coronavirus situation will have one positive effect. It might make people aware that China has too much of the world's economic power for everyone, including them, to be safe. We get a lot of goods from China, many of them things we could live without if we had to do so. They get a lot of food from us and other places. If China had to feed people only on what they could grow themselves then people would starve - and those who did not starve would have a very limited diet. That wouldn't happen of course. The Chinese government would find ways of obtaining food from elsewhere - ways the rest of us would not want to contemplate. 
There are reports of people stockpiling other things too - pasta, rice, baby formula, tinned goods. I actually need more rice today...but most people don't buy the sort we like. Pasta? I have the usual quantity available. We don't use baby formula. We don't use much in the way of tinned goods. We will be okay.
I am sensibly concerned about the Senior Cat. If he caught  the virus he would not survive. I might but his immune system is already compromised by age if nothing else. All we can do is be sensible, take the sort of precautions we now take and hope nothing happens. I doubt we will run out of food or essential items like loo paper.
Goods are not leaving China. Their factories are not back operating at full capacity. There will be shortages of some things - but it won't be loo paper. We make that here in this state. 
 

Reading to children

is not merely good for them. It is essential.
T... and H... across the road are read to each night. Their mother will be away for a short while to be with her own mother who is facing the last few days of her life. It's a sad time. 
T.... is at the age where he "sort of" understands what is happening. He told me quietly that he didn't like his mother being away but knew she had to go and he wondered if his father would still have time to read to them. 
I told him that his father would try to make time and that I would help. No, I won't go over at bedtime but I will help in other ways. Bedtime and the bedtime story are a special time for T... and H... and it is even more important when things are a little up and down.
T... also wanted to know if I had read to my children. 
I explained that I did not have children. He considered this carefully and then asked,
    "Well did you read to somebody else's?"
The answer to that T... is "yes". I have done often and I will do it again.
When Ms W was young and still not boarding at school and her father was struggling to care for her and grieving the loss of his wife I read to Ms W when he could not. He tried to do it as often as he could but it wasn't always possible. So Ms W would cuddle into me instead and we would read together. She loved books then as she loves them now. Ms W is the only teen I know who genuinely prefers books to screens of any sort. Her idea of a holiday in this country is a remote place, a pile of books and her drawing materials. 
    "My friends think that is weird," she says.
No, it's good. She is self-sufficient. 
Long before that I also read to the only primary school class I ever taught. (I went into the school library after that where being read to was expected.) The only time we had was the last period on Friday afternoons but it was almost sacred. Nothing got in the way of that. I taught the entire class, boys as well as girls, to knit. They would get their knitting out and I would read to them. They were children who, for the most part, had not been read to at home. It was a foreign idea but one they took to instantly. They loved it. The worst collective punishment I could have given them was to say we would not have that time together. It was never necessary to even suggest that might happen. 
Whichever book we were reading would get discussed and argued about without any input from me. It helped that I actually knew some of the authors we read. Perhaps it made them feel as if the books really were written by real people. I didn't set any sort of tasks in relation to the books. I wanted them to feel that these were books which were simply to be enjoyed.
I don't know how many of them went on reading. The following year I took over the school library. Most of them came in to borrow books at lunch time so I have to assume they were reading.
I thought of all this when I was sent a death notice for someone I knew. He was a man with a severe disability, something which would have prevented most people from even having any sort of employment. His parents had read to him from the time he could look at a picture. People said they were "wasting" their time. Not at all. He went on to be a highly thought of solicitor, a partner in a well respected firm and much more. 
But there was something much more important in that tiny notice. There were three simple words.
     "He loved books."

Translating books into English

is something I would have no idea  how to do. To my shame I do not speak a second language although I can, with difficulty and a dictionary, read several others. I am self taught. Languages other than English were not taught in the rural schools I attended.  I did some Latin under the watchful eye of the Senior Cat. I did it as an extra subject and did not enjoy it. (The textbook was full of soldiers and war and spears and the like.)
I don't know how many books get translated into English every year. It is unlikely that we translate nearly as many as we should or even could. 
Yes, I know translation is expensive. I needed two words in Russian several years ago and the minimum charge was going to be $90 with a three week wait. (As it was a communication board needed immediately I put out a request to the small Russian speaking community here and a native speaker and former teacher translated both words and checked the entire board for the price of a coffee and conversation. I was grateful but it doesn't happen often.)
Good translation is also difficult. There are subtle differences that are almost impossible to convey.
But readers of English are lucky. There are more books published in English each month than anyone could hope to read in a lifetime.
I was talking to someone recently about education in a country like Syria. Quite apart from the war there and the lack of libraries there are very few books published in Arabic - and the various versions thereof.
I did a little research. There were only about 350 books published in Arabic last year. Compare that with Greece which published closer to 2000 in Greek. There are far more people who read Arabic than read Greek.  Since the 9thC there have apparently been only around 100,000 books translated into Arabic. Last year Spain translated about the same number of books alone into Spanish.  Children in Scandinavia are exposed to English language television from the earliest of ages.  When I was in Norway and Sweden many years ago every child, even those with disabilities and the profoundly deaf, were able to understand enough English for me to communicate with them. They also have access to books in English as well as Norwegian and Swedish. 
There is a vast amount of on-line material if you can read English but much, much less in Arabic. It is a major issue for universities in Arabian speaking countries.  Part of the problem is cultural and religious but it is also social and economic and environmental.
Yes, easy to say "everyone should learn English"  but each language on the planet has a different way of thinking too. We need that. The answer to a problem like that of climate change or the corona virus might come from someone who speaks Arabic as well as English - or something else.

School ties

come in many forms.
Someone I know recently posted a picture of herself wearing a tie. It was interesting because it brought back memories of actual school ties I had to wear.
In primary school in the city we had navy school ties. Mine did not match the brown tunic my mother had made for me. I hated the brown tunic. The tie was simply a nuisance. I would stand there with my back facing my mother as she whisked it around my neck, around and through itself and pulled it up into a knot with a little jerk.
We moved to a remote part of the state. There were no ties. There was not even a uniform. Most of the children could not have afforded a uniform of any sort. They came to school dressed in clothes that were, like ours, hand me downs. I went on wearing the brown tunic in winter and nylon "drip-dry" dresses in summer. The nylon dresses might not needed ironing but they were very hot and uncomfortable. The tunic was tight under the arms by then. Even I had managed to grow a bit.
And then I started my secondary school years. We had moved again. I now had a new uniform. The brown tunic was too small. The tunic was grey now. It was not new. My mother would not have thought that necessary but the tie was new. It was maroon this time. I went from maroon, to navy with white stripes, to blue, to brown striped with blue...and I have not worn a tie since then. I could still tie one, indeed I tied the Senior Cat's the last time he wore a suit - to his grandson's wedding. I did it the way my mother did it to me - from behind. The Senior Cat has two ties. One is his winter tie - his clan tartan. The other is his summer tie - which has his clan crest on it. There might even be another tie in the wardrobe - his university one. We gave the other ties away long ago. He does not like ties.
But there are other sorts of school ties too. I have none of those. I do not belong to any "Old Scholar's Associations". I do not have any friends from my school days. Brother Cat and Middle Cat are the same. The Black Cat has one friend from her school days. We simply went to too many schools to make lasting friendships in the days before social media made it easier to keep up contact with other people.
I wonder sometimes what it is like to have those sort of friendships. Are they real and lasting friendships? I know two women, now both ninety-something. They met on the first day of school and  they have been friends ever since...and I mean friends. They travelled to and from school together. They kept up contact as they married and had children. They and their husbands went on holiday together. Yes, they do know one another well. 
School ties like that are rare.  They need to be cared for too.

Deporting criminals

to their home countries seems to make sense doesn't it?
Downunder deports criminals after they have served their time in prison. Other countries do it too.
It's a "double whammy" for some people...perhaps more than that.
You commit the crime. You do time. At the end of it if you are a full citizen of the country you committed the crime in then you go back into the community. Some people offend again. They end up inside again. Others don't and move on with their lives.
If you were born in another country though it is a different story. You commit the crime. You do time. At the end of it you are deported back to the country you were born in....even if you have been here since you were a baby.
They don't want you there of course. Why would they? You don't want to go there either. Your family is here. Your friends are here too. It might be that you don't even speak the language.
The government says "tough". 
Now I do have concerns that this means that some people are being punished more than others.  At the same time I know that it is a way of removing some highly undesirable people from the community.
The Prime Minister of New Zealand is not happy that we do this - although they also do it. She was complaining that we have sent "our people" and "our problems" to them. There were a couple of problems with this. First of all they are not "our people". The government here was (and is) removing people who are not citizens and have never made any effort to become citizens. You can have dual nationality between here and there so there is no reason for people not to become citizens. You can be stripped of acquired citizenship of course but if you have never become a citizen in the first place then you need to realise that you still belong to the other place - even if you came here as a baby. 
And yes, in a way, these criminals are "our problems" but they also brought those problems on themselves. These are people who have convictions for offences like drug dealing, sexual assault, robbery with violence and more. This is the individual's problem.

And then we have another interesting twist to all this. The High Court recently ruled that two criminals who were born overseas could not be deported because, as "indigenous" people, they are not subject to the same laws about immigration. The legal convolutions that led to this ruling will be the subject of much debate. It would make an interesting subject for the Jessup - the international mooting competition for law students.    
I know there are arguments for and against the deportation of criminals but  it is done by almost all the countries in the world - and those who don't deport you are more likely to execute you.
It is safer not to break the law.