We Walk Straight So ...

When I was a boy at primary school, one of the activities that we would do in the playground was stand side-by-side with a friend, always another boy and cross over our arms so that we were locked together. We would then march around the playground saying loudly in unison ‘we walk straight so you’d better get out the way’ (enunciated so it sounded like ‘we want straitsa you’d bettah get out tha-way!). Generally we did not actually walk straight we would simply march into other boys who would often pair up just like us so they could march into us and the whole thing would descend into what was then termed ‘a bundle’. Where this ‘game’ originated from I do not know, presumably from the place most physical games did especially for children for whom kicking a ball around was forbidden as none of the playgrounds that I used while at primary school had less than one side which was a row of windows and in some cases three sides were windows. Why I was suddenly reminded of this game which I cannot have witnessed in over thirty years was as a result of trying to walk down a street in London.



I heard on BBC radio that officially Britain has become more polite than in recent decades, but as yet I have to see any evidence of this and one case in point is how difficult it is to move around as a pedestrian. Places like Oxford Circus and Leicester Square in central London have always been difficult not only from the numbers of people but the fact that many people on the street have no idea where they are going and/or have their attention distracted by everything that is going on around them. However, even in suburban areas of London, places like Ealing or Harrow or Richmond, you find it difficult. This is because on the pavement, as on the roads, no-one seems willing to yield even a few centimetres nor to wait even a matter of seconds to allow someone else to pass. I suppose if I see people in cars forcing their way out of side roads into the main flow of traffic and bullying people out of lanes, I should not be surprised that I see the equivalent of such behaviour on the pavement, especially as unlike car drivers, many pedestrians are young people. A television advertisement for an insurance company shows pedestrians behaving like cars and says we would not behave like drivers when walking. However, they are in fact wrong and most people do behave precisely like that replicating the scenes they show in their advertisement.



I am not going to go on demonising children and teenagers. However, it is probably unsurprising that witnessing what their parents and other adults do it should seem to them to be ‘weak’ to move even a fraction of a step. It is exacerbated by the fact that unlike older people, children and teenagers often travel in groups, and all want to walk side-by-side. Going along the pavement, even walking through pedestrian areas I find myself being pushed to the sides, hard up against buildings. No matter how large the space is, groups of pedestrians spread to fill it. Where I live during the week has broad pedestrianised areas but I find myself dodging between four or five family members or students strung out for a couple of metres across the space.



When I have run out of space and am squeezed against a shop window, even this does not seem enough and I get a tut or a sigh as if I have done something wrong as one person for a matter of seconds has to expend the effort to step around me. My journeys are lengthened by this constantly being squeezed to the side, having to pull my jacket or shoulder bag in, even having to turn side-on so the people can get by without having to adjust how they are walking. Often rather than be pushed into the wall, I am compelled to step into the road with all the risk that that entails. The difficulty is not only that the people I encounter have an utter unwillingness to move even a little, but they seemed exasperated that anyone should be walking in the opposite direction to them; they also tire of people moving too slowly in their direction too as she witness from the complaints about the elderly and disabled or parents with the off-road pushchairs if they are not proceeding fast enough for the bulk of pedestrians.



It often not the case that the people who are unwilling to move are aware that you are liable to collide with them. I have written before about how people are cut off from the world by their mp3 player and their mobile phone: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/08/mind-out-that-child-might-be-wearing.html
 Ever since mobile phones were invented no-one has seemed able to stand still while using them, I guess hence the name, it is not the phone but the user who is in fact mobile. The thing is now, with smartphones that there is so much to look at on the screen that using them takes the full extent of the owner’s vision. Yet, they do not stop, they keep ploughing on, gazing intently and fingering the screen of their phone, assuming that everyone will navigate around them. These people can be slow moving, giving you time to get out of their way. However, to me it rather seems an insult to the blind that people with sight do not use the faculty they have been blessed with. Maybe in the future mobile phones will be constructed with white sticks extending from them. Certainly someone needs to invent facilities that alert the user to other bodies within a certain proximity or even to allow the user to see in front of them as they are looking down at the screen, through having a camera in the top of the phone rather than on the back.



Despite all my ailments I can move freely and sufficiently speedily to avoid colliding with the ‘we walk straight’ pedestrians. However, this is not the case for all pavement users. The elderly, disabled people, people with small children or pets, are a lot less manoeuvrable and it appears that the message to them is simply that they should not be out walking at the times when ‘normal people’ wanting to walking in strict lines to get places. The issue of the we-walk-straighters is that they are symptomatic of a broader problem, the manifestation of the Thatcherite belief that there is no society just individuals and families (or their equivalent on the street, gangs of friends). Why it is so difficult to move around a British town on foot or by car is because so few people these days understand that to travel in an urban area is to become part of a machine or even an organism, one that has different components moving at different speeds.



I once saw an art installation which consisted of a video the artist had shot at a junction in Vietnam where five roads met. The range of traffic was incredibly diverse and included pedestrians, cyclists, mopeds, rickshaws, motorbikes, cars, vans and lorries all on the road rather than the pavement. The video was shot from an apartment overlooking the junction. What was startling was how soothing it was to watch. This is because despite all the variety of the traffic the different elements flowed so that no-one collided and no-one even held up someone else. To me it looked rather like blood flowing around the body. I am sure there are accidents and arguments in that city as anywhere but it is apparent that the Vietnamese in cities often far more crowded than London, had the necessary attributes to make such incidents rare rather than happening almost every minute.



To march through as a pedestrian is to disrupt the traffic ‘machinery’ to the extent that it causes jolts to the system, tensions and upsets. Things move far more smoothly when people look ahead, have patience and work in co-ordination with others. However, none of those attributes are now valued in British society so as a consequence we have all the huffing and puffing and the arguments, the need to squeeze against a wall to avoid a confrontation and the stresses that all this brings.

Catherine Hakim's Ancillism: The Darkness Beyond Post-Feminism

Back in January 2008, I wrote about my concerns for the position and behaviour of both women and men in British society as a result of the growing prevalence of post-Feminist views: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/01/hazards-of-post-feminism-going-awry.html  My concern, which does not seem to have been contradicted by anything which has happened since, was that with the dismissal of Feminist attitudes as too austere and inappropriate for our hyper-consumerist age.  Consequently, girls and women were feeling that they needed to return to old fashioned views of femininity evoking a submissiveness and domesticity, yet, contrary to previous decades, shot through with over-emphasised sexuality encompassing body shape, plastic surgery, sexualised clothing and behaviour, rather than a demure attitude.   Conversely boys and men are increasingly re-subscribing to outdated modes of masculinity particularly involving violence and the treatment of women as simply sex objects, needing protection, but ultimately disposable.

Some of these things seemed to have retracted a little in the intervening years.  Total pink now seems to be less de rigeur for girls and their mothers, but other elements such as platform-soled shoes with dangerously high heels as office wear and the return of skin-tight leggings across the age ranges suggest that while the issue might mutate it has not gone away.  Then I came across the work of Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics.  Her book released last month is entitled 'Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital'.  From reviews it seems poorly researched and repetitive.  However, what is alarming is that it creates a kind of ideology for the extreme elements of post-Feminism that I had highlighted before.  I guess this needs a new terminology as I imagine that even ardent supporters of post-Feminism would feel alarmed at going as far as Hakim.  She talks of 'sexonomics'.  Perhaps more accurately it should be termed something around female servitude, disempowerment, deference, let me propose 'Ancillism', taken from the Latin word for 'slave girl', ancilla.

Basically Hakim feels that British and American women, as opposed to French women, have entirely 'forgotten' that a way to success for them is to draw on their 'assets' to create a 'striking effect' (a term she takes from philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer).  She builds on Pierre Bourdieu's views of personal capital, i.e. those things that help us get on in life such as money; our intelligence, knowledge, training, education; and networks with friends, family, contacts, etc.  To this Hakim adds the blatantly titled 'erotic capital'.  Now, apparently, this has been used by American sociologists before, referring to physical appearance and sex appeal.  On top of those attributes Hakim adds charm, sociability and sexual 'expertise' into the mix. 

Her entire list includes, as journalist Zoe Williams noted in 'The Guardian': 'beauty; sexual attractiveness; social skills like grace, charm and discreet flirtation; liveliness, which is a mixture of physical fitness, social energy and good humour; social presentation, including dress, jewellery and other adornments; and finally, sexuality itself, competence, energy, imagination.'  Now, a few of these sound like you might have expected from a finishing school, especially charm and sociability, but the others, especially a need to have 'competence, energy and imagination' in terms of sex, are where Hakim takes the steps way beyond Post-Feminism.

The reason why Hakim feels that women alone need to boost their erotic capital, is because of the imbalance in sexual desire between men and women, what she calls the 'male sex deficit'.  Consequently her simple premise is that the reason why women are not progressing well in business or in many cases to even get a job is that they are too frumpy and thus are not attracting male interest whether to be employed or be promoted.  As Will Self sharply noted in 'The Guardian' this suggests that Hakim feels that to get on women should stop focusing on their education or their networks and should simply focus on physical appearance and how they project themselves in a sexual manner.  This means that they will then be appealing to aged men with power who are desperate for easy sex and are willing to reward women for providing it.  Does the model not sound rather like prostitution?  At the minimum it seems to be the motives behind those women who aim to become a Playboy 'bunny' and end up married to superannuated Hugh Heffner. 

Despite Hakim's inclusion of 'competence, energy and imagination' in terms of sexual skills, these are all to be tailored not for the greater pleasure of the woman or a shared pleasure with a partner, but purely towards the needs of a man.  Why should not the man need 'competence, energy and imagination' when engaging in sex?  This is why I feel Hakim is putting the woman very much into the slave girl role: entirely a provider with only the man as consumer.  The thrust of Hakim's thesis also suggests that clothing, jewellery, other adornments (not clear what she means, does this mean cosmetics? Tattoos?  Branding?) and beauty itself however augmented are purely to allow the woman to 'buy' provision from the man, nothing about the woman herself potentially enjoying these aspects of herself.

Hakim's philosophy seems to be consumerism taken yet another step.  It is probably unsurprising that Self ends up quoting Marx in terms of sexual usage.  She is incredibly dismissive of overweight women, blaming them entirely for their condition.  To quote Lucy Kellaway in the 'Financial Times', Hakim's view is that '[o]besity is self-inflicted'; 'has no benefit and destroys erotic capital' and '[f]atties deserve no sympathy or special treatment as their girth "is unnecessary and indefensible".'  Apparently Hakim feels too many women, not simply the overweight, simply do not make 'enough effort' in how they appear and claims that they lose 10-15% of the income they could be earning as a result. You just wonder why she did not stop there and question whether it is right that women and not men, have salaries dependent on how much they sexualise themselves. Again it brings me back to the slave girl analogy.

Naturally as you can see by the references I make, Hakim has been condemned by a string or reviewers, Claire Black in 'The Scotsman' is another.  Hakim seems quite robust in challenging those who challenge her.  Williams notes that after interviewing Hakim, she telephoned Williams's boss questioning about Williams frame of mind, assuming that her negativity to her ideas must stem from a relationship break up.  To a great degree, something very bad for an academic, Hakim has sunk so deep into her view of the world that she has real difficulty in even envisaging what a different perspective on her ideas might look like.  I have not noticed 'The Sun' newspaper with its daily photo of a topless woman and the common advice to women who find their man losing interest to be more sexy for him, picking up on Hakim's work, though it seems to fit in perfectly with their philosophy towards women.  Whilst the 'Daily Mail' apparently warmed to earlier comments from Hakim that women need to be more ambitious and 'marry up' to achieve financial success (as if we all lived in the era of Jane Austen), they do not seem to have embraced this further step down the post-Feminist road to Ancillism.

This is not to say that in the media Hakim has been without support.   Bryony Gordon writing in 'Daily Telegraph' has bought right into the philosophy, even making changes in her own life, having her hair styled, running to make her buttocks more trim and shopping at LK Bennett whose opening webpage says 'Exude Glamour' (though in fact their styles are very old fashioned looking like they have arrived from somewhere between 1955 and 1983).  She claims in her youth she was tutored that to appear sexy as a woman was to reduce one's IQ and now seems to be a convert entirely to Hakim's line.  She feels  Nigella Lawson, Tamara Mellon, Samantha Cameron and Miriam Clegg fit into this category too.  When the latter two are the wives of the prime minister and deputy prime minister you do wonder if it will be long before post-Feminism if not Ancillism, becomes government policy, as it seems to have become under the Berlusconi administration in Italy. Gordon feels Hakim's philosophy should be made part of the curriculum for school girls.  More support comes from Sarah Vine writing in 'The Times'.  It is probably unsurprising that the right-wing press support Ancillism, for them having ranks of deferential, nubile young women servicing wealthy men, rather than spending the money to offer women real opportunities, probably seems some kind of solution to 'broken Britain'.

Of course, Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Clegg have adopted the traditional, pre- and post-Feminist approach of getting on through marrying rich men.  They like everyone in the public eye these days, have been packaged by image consultants.  In addition, possibly because they have no need, do not seem to tap into Hakim's list of attributes women should foster.  Perhaps this is because women make up more of the electorate than men.  The trouble is, not for those women like Gordon and those she mentions but for the everyday woman, trying to start a career or progress in a career in an ordinary business.  With people in the media supporting Hakim and suggesting other leading women do too (even without their consent) and her ideas seemingly coming with academic credentials, then a bright young woman could not be criticised for thinking she has to increase her 'erotic capital' through dressing, adorning, behaving and becoming expert in the ways that Hakim lists. 

On these bases one does wonder what 'employability' on university courses of the future might include if this insidious attitude takes?  What then for the women who do not have the chance of university?  In the context Hakim is trying so hard to foster, will they see no alternative but to comply, that offering themselves up to appeal to some man with a 'sexual deficit' is the only way to survive?  It is interesting that the image heading Self's review was not of a string of successful women in smart dresses but of Indonesian prostitutes, from whom apparently the term 'honey money' derives.

While I do not believe in censorship, we need to see quickly and vigorously ideas and statements that challenge Hakim's Ancillism if we are not to see young women already advised that their best bet is to become a domestic drudge to some man, take further steps and commodify themselves just as Hakim advices.  It seems incredible that in the space of forty years we have gone from women being told to aspire to be prime minister to being told that their best hope is to prostitute themselves.

Student Inflow/Outflow

This is something I guess been aware of since when I first moved to southern England in 2005, but has come home more to me now that for much of my time I am living in West London.  For some reason around where I am living are lots of educational institutions from primary school right up to universities and so simply travelling to work I see a cross-section of our being-educated public of all ages.  Of course, for the moment all of them, even the university students are on their summer holidays (though universities seem to be all Americanised now with semesters rather than terms and they have always had vacations rather than holidays).  However, I noticed that this did not seem to make the university campuses any quieter, in their place are literally thousands of young people who seem to range from about 12-16 years old.  Saying that I have seen some Chinese students who look about 9-10 years old.  That might be the case, I imagine a British mother would be loath to send their child 8,000 Km for the summer, but I might be wrong.  Anyway, the bulk of them seem to be teenagers.  The nationalities I can make out have included French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and some East Europeans, I am unfamiliar with East European languages so could not tell you whether they were Poles, Czechs or Russians, perhaps from the Baltic States.  It is heartening that the immigration policies that threatened to kill the language school trade in the UK have been bent sufficiently not to choke off this important industry.

Anyway, each university seems to have been colonised by a one or more language schools run by energetic young staff in bright teeshirts for the summer.  I guess this works well for all concerned.  The school gets a purpose built teaching space and accommodation with a convenience store and cafes that all universities seem to have and the university presumably gets lots of fees at a time when the campus would normally be empty.  It also seems to employ lots of young graduates as organisers and language teachers at a time when any jobs that can be created especially for people under 24, are desperately needed.  Though I did not really notice it at the time, I now realise I have witnessed the same occurrence in Hampshire and Devon too.  Madly I had forgotten the two students who lodged in my house last year, I somehow put them in a different box, perhaps because I was only seeing one of them rather than large clusters and generally I am not in areas where students or tourists go.  I guess that it is simply the draw of London and the scale of the operations in the capital that make it more apparent, maybe simply my route to work.  One point to note is how uniformly dressed so many of these students are, fitting in very much with what Niall Ferguson was saying in his series earlier in the year, that a teenager from Beijing now is a replica of one from Madrid in the clothing and electronic equipment that they have.

I have no idea how much it costs for a 14-year old to be sent from Beijing or Madrid to London for a number of weeks, I guess they come for a fortnight, perhaps it is more.  From what I can ascertain and referencing the other examples I now recognise I have witnessed, they seem to get teaching in English all morning and then trips out to the standards of British tourism, everything from Bath and Stonehenge to Windsor Castle and the London Eye.  Shepherded around I guess they never really encounter the London beyond the campus bounds.  It is probably a good thing.  Students are never particularly popular even with 42% of British 18-year olds attending university and these groups are certainly noisy as any cluster of teenagers is.  What is apparent is their wealth.  Sending anyone from China to the UK costs money and these students all seem to have the latest smartphones and fashions.  I guess it is something that only the rich middle class parents of various European countries could afford and that is rather alarming, because it shows that even the UK's middle class is lagging behind its neighbours and the Chinese in what is affordable to do.  This is of course no surprise given that the real incomes of 90% of the UK population have slid in the last 40 years.  Perhaps it would have been affordable in 1975 but not now.

I would like to think that in western Paris or western Madrid there are hundreds of British teenagers there for a fortnight or a month and being drilled in French or Spanish (let alone western Beijing learning Mandarin) mixed in with some sports and some sight-seeing, but know it is not happening.  How do I know?  Well simply because I read 'The Guardian' newspaper.  It is not the font of all knowledge but if you want to get inside the heads of what the Europeanised (and this is what marks 'The Guardian' out from 'The Times' and 'The Daily Telegraph' which are pretty Little England in attitude) middle class aspires to be doing you read 'The Guardian'.  I can see no features on packing your 14-year old, let alone 10-year old off to Paris for the summer (unless it is to relatives) to learn a foreign language. 

Partly, as I have intimated above, it is the cost: the fact that the British middle class is falling in terms of disposable incomes because very few in Britain are willing to insist on a greater share of the prosperity that heads of companies are clearly benefiting from and did not even before the credit crunch was allowed to happen.  I know that these days the middle class holiday is camping in the UK, something once left to the unimaginative and those with no money to go abroad.  The other factor seems to be the 'parent fear' that has taken parents by the throat and sends them into hysterics the moment they lose eyeline with their child let alone mobile phone contact.  More examples of this were revealed to me this week with accounts of a colleague at a child's birthday party with mothers running around frantically the moment one of their children was lost in the crowd (given there were 50 children in attendance, that was no doubt easy).  The middle class has never relished packing their children off to holiday camp the way that their US equivalents have always done, they have never trusted anyone to look after their children and even their trust in teachers has slumped, hence the terminal state of even term-time school trips.  The upper class, of course, have been happy to bundle their children off into the care of others almost from the moment they are born and certainly once they turn 8.  Even if somehow, middle class real incomes rose, you would never see the equivalent of what I witness with French children (France is nearer to where I am living now than Yorkshire) happening with their British counterparts.  The woman in my house worries over the 5-minute walk it would take her 9-year old son to reach school and has already ruled out him going on any trips which involve him sleeping away from home, not that she or I could afford to pay for him to go.

Does it really matter if there is an imbalance in the flow of teenaged language students?  Is it not better for the British economy that more are coming into the UK, spending money here, rather than it being balanced up by an outflow.  The cost in my view is human.  If we go back to Ian Duncan Smith's speech earlier in which he encouraged British employers to take on more British young people, the retort from the CBI was to ask why would any UK company want to do this when it could employ better qualified East Europeans with a real work ethic compared to ill-qualified British people with an attitude of looking out for what they can get from a company.  I have no desire for British young people to be compelled to forelock-tugging lackeys, but it does seem that there are skills that they are not getting to compete with people from other parts of Europe.  It is not only people from Eastern Europe, apparently around 300,000 French people live in London alone, more than the entire population of Southampton; 123,000 Poles over the age of 16 live in London with 398,000 in other parts of the UK. 

Now, I know many people from other parts of the EU returned to their home countries when the recession kicked in and we have not returned to the figures of 2007, but it does suggest there is something that enables such migrants to get work in the UK.  It may be that they are cheap labour, but even then 16 year olds have always tended to be cheaper to employ.  One clear thing is that the migrants have the confidence to get up and come into the UK and find work in a language which is not their own.  How many British 18-year olds or even 21-year olds with a degree in their backpack do that?  A key challenge is that they do not speak the language, another is that often they have not ever been in another country, these days, not even on holiday let alone to study.  It seems ironic that the Conservatives (and New Labour who are/were minimally different to them) with their occasional forays into attempts at discrimination, are in fact further reinforcing the conditions that hamstring British young people.  They have pandered to the tabloid media which have hyped up the fear that a child out of your sight is being abused by a paedophile.  They have allowed companies to distort the distribution of profits so whilst bosses' salaries have rocketed the real incomes of 90% of employees have continued to slump unabated.  Thus, they have engineered and are sustaining a situation in which a 14-year old from France or Spain or even China is getting the intellectual and personal skills to find work across the world and yet their British counterpart is closeted at home learning nothing beyond the distance between their home and the park.  Thus, when I see another coach disgorging a fifty or so teenagers ready for some weeks of language school, I do feel depressed knowing that if I was in one of the other capitals of Europe I would not be witnessing the equivalent with British students.

Sledge & Shakespeare: Polonius's Precepts and Other Advice for Children

Having advised that a lot of advice about how people will behave in terms of relationships can be gleaned from soul songs, I was reminded of an activity that the woman who lives in my house has been carrying out for the benefit of her son.  He is currently 8 years old meaning he is only 5 years from being a teenager.  Given that the advice from schools and the media is that discussions about sex begin with children from the age of 8 onwards (he has already found the delight of rubbing himself up against furniture and has crushes on characters he sees on the television) it seems apt that over the past year she has been assembling guidance on how to live as a teenager and an independent adult.  I noted a recent radio report about a hostel for homeless people aged 16-18 and one of the staff said that to help the young people to find and keep a home they trained them in how to cook and to run a household budget.  I would hope that in most houses this kind of training was going on from 13 if not from 11 onwards.  At 8 the boy in my house can already make toast, cook omlettes and prepare hot chocolate as well as simple emptying food preparations such as making cordials and dishing out cereals.  I suppose when so many adults have huge debts and the extent of their cooking skills are limited to microwaving a ready meal, they have little to pass on of much use.  I also remember overhearing a 19 year old woman saying she was looking forward to leaving home so that she could escape the fresh vegetables and fruit that her mother kept forcing on her and instead eat 'proper', i.e. processed food.  So I acknowledge that whilst you might teach a child good things whether they pay any attention to them is another issue. 

I have been draughted in to provide the sexual aspects from a male perspective.  Given that I did not have sex until I was 34, I imagine I am not best equipped for this.  However, knowing I was a latecomer, I did read a great deal and took advantage in the mid 1990s on all the programmes late at night especially on Channel 4 about how to do 'good' sex.  I certainly know women are all different and each is sensitive in different parts of her body (sometimes changing at different times of the month) and that the sex they generally want is not the kind you see in pornographic movies, which is often very focused purely on male pleasure, especially the fellatio followed by ejaculation into the woman's face.  While some women are happy to carry out oral sex usually this is on the assumption they will get the same in return and certainly they do not want to be showered in ejaculate, yet this is the image that is all too common in what young men watch. 

Though I sometimes squirm when I read advice from the USA because of the very confused moral stance there which is often about appearances than actual practical existence (I read one book which was supposed to be about coping with break ups but kept suggesting that if marriage was not on the cards then the woman should break a relationship anyway; it would not accept that an unmarried relationship can be a very good one and so drew attention from when you should break up, for example, when abuse is involved), but one piece of advice that I will pass on to the 8 year old in time is 'if you don't feel comfortable telling me [i.e. female partner] about it, then it is cheating'.  Saying that, men should be more confident about talking about non-sexual interaction with women.  Of my 14 employees, 13 are women.  There is nothing there I should be ashamed about, but I need to talk to them on the telephone and via email, and want to be able to do that without my girlfriend getting suspicious.  The same concern came up when I had genito-urinary problems, she would not listen to the causes and just assumed it must be a venereal disease, even though, aside from her, I have only had one sexual partner and that ended in 2003.  Building trust takes a long time and men have to realise they are not judged on their own terms they are judged by the last few men the woman had a relationship with (which clearly all came to an end) and what happened in her friends' relationships.

Anyway, the woman in my house (I am beginning to worry that is becoming a phrase like 'her indoors' was in the 'Minder' television series (1979-94; 2009)) was laying down various lessons and principles that she has learnt in her life, having an alcoholic boyfriend, moving continents, running a pub, being a child minder and a single mother as well as day-to-day domestic stuff like cleaning and cooking which to so many young people, especially boys, seems a complete mystery.  While at university I was stunned at how incapable many other students were.  I knew I was not as adept as friends of mine who had been in the Scouts or trekked to remote areas with their families and, in particular, seemed poorly equipped to deal with the emotional aspects, but at least I could cook healthy food and clean and iron my clothes unlike many others.

Back to the thread.  As soul song lyrics are often overlooked as a source of guidance in terms of relationships I was reminded that other lines can help you out that people tend to forget and this brings us to Polonius, a character in William Shakespeare's play, 'Hamlet' (1603).  He is a rather silly, aged (well probably middle aged given the age of his son Laertes, just starting university) aide to the Danish royal family.  In Act 1, Scene 3 (lines 55-81) he gives advice to Laertes, laid out below.  Now, I have read commentaries which see this as satirical writing from Shakespeare regarding 'homespun wisdom', see Jem Bloomfield's article: http://shakespeareantheatre.suite101.com/article.cfm/polonius_speech_in_hamlet  I would contest the satirical aspect.  Shakespeare was a skilful reader of human character and behaviour which is why his plays are still so highly regarded four centuries later.  'Hamlet' is very much about the relationship between grown-up children and their parents and step-parents.  Whilst most adult children are not walking round considering whether to kill their step-father in revenge, a lot of the play is actually about mundane difficulties between parents and adult children.  Ask any divorced/widowed mother who has remarried when her children are adults about the challenges that she faces from those children and you will see parallels to Gertrude in 'Hamlet'.  The fact that their parents are having sex with whoever, let alone someone who is a stranger to them, is something that many adults find difficult to ever accept.

Thus, even if Polonius is silly at times, and he is generally well meaning and protective of his employer, Gertrude, what he says to Laertes, I believe is a good checklist for people going off to university today.  Given that 42% of UK 18 year olds are now going into higher education, these are lines that need to be wheeled out a bit more often.  This is the text:

There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character.
Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade.
Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be; 
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man. 
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!

Now, I do not agree with all of this.  I would certainly say that young people should speak up and express their opinions.  I also think that we should censure bad behaviour of others because otherwise they simply get away with it.  However, complaining in the UK has become a pastime as well as a daily activity and maybe it needs some tempering.  Not rising to the bait from men wanting to provoke a fight, is very tough, but we need more of it.  Spilling someone's drink in a crowded bar or simply your gaze looking over someone is no excuse for people to end up in casualty and with criminal records.  I would say these days, walk away the moment any trouble seems to be appearing.  In debate and intellectual discussion, which these days seems very rare given the demands from parents for students simply to be taught to complete the exam, certainly be adept and be well informed.  We have too much physical contesting in our society and too little intellectual.

The warning about clothing is interesting given our fashion conscious age (in many ways no different from the Elizabethan period, though with far fewer options for men).  I read of how so many students now look like clones because even before they arrive on campus they have been instructed on social networking sites what clothes they should wear.  I guess this is the Goth in me creeping in, bemoaning that every student is now in jeans, all the men in hooded tops and all the women in Ugg boots.  Students have to realise that their standard of living will be lower than that most have enjoyed at home.  They will wear fewer changes of clothes, live in poorer quality housing and have more mundane food.  Of course, many now live with their parents, and I think that is bad, they must make a break from the family home if they are to become true adults (this problem applies to people not becoming students too, the ridiculously high cost of even rented accommodation in the UK means many cannot move out until their mid-30s and I feel this is a big contributor to the juvenilisation of adult behaviour in the UK leading to so much debt, violence and other crime).

Other elements I support very strongly.  If you talk to anyone who has been to university you find that they still have friends from there decades later.  This may decrease as people tend increasingly to go to their local university and live at home, so are likely not to lose touch with local friends.  However, there is the bond of shared experience that can be as strong for friendships as say, serving in the armed forces together.  However, the percentage of people who will become life long friends compared to those you will meet and may become acquaintances is very small.  A lot of people have agendas and you can be forced into lots of corners by people who want something even if it is just not to be lonely.  Often the concerns out-strip the real hazard. People are very suspicious these days of anyone who seems remotely religious because they suspect they have an ulterior motive of seeking converts.  However, as advised here, tread carefully and check out people before they designating them life long friends (they might not want this anyway).  Saying this, I know two couples who met in their first week at university, still married 22 years after that.

The thing about borrowing is crucial.  Debt is seen as a fact of life now, especially for students who are compelled to incur thousands of pounds of debt to even begin a course.  However, there is different types of debt and the charges on a student loan are very different from a bank loan let alone credit card and especially store card borrowing (bringing us back to the gaudy clothes).  Certainly loans between individuals is an area that you have to be careful about.  Doing part-time work before going to university I had already learnt never to lend anyone any money that I could not afford to lose; I wrote it off the moment I handed it over and treated it as a bonus if it was ever paid back.  This means you have to refuse people and when I did that, their true character often appeared, one colleague simply then restrained me and stole the money from my pocket, which fortunately meant him being kicked off the job (one of the advantages of working in a petrol station with full CCTV coverage). 

As Polonius (i.e. Shakespeare) notes, borrowing money yourself disrupts friendships and also can lead you not to face up to the reality of your situation.  Being at university simply in terms of food and accommodation (including the innumerable utility bills) is very expensive, especially given what landlords and utility companies are allowed to get away with.  Then these days there is computer equipment (and do not forget the specialist software which you will be compared to buy, usually at reduced rate, but not typically free) before you even get on to the gigs and the beer and the odd play or movie and possibly a trip away somewhere.  Keep a real check on outgoings, but do not do like me and note down every time you buy a beer in a notebook, it makes you unpopular.  Assume money taken from a cash machine is lost to you.  Keep receipts from grocery shopping.  Pay as much as you can in cash as you are far more conscious of what you are spending than if you do it buy card, especially when around the shops.   I know companies try to compel you to put in standing orders, but instead try and do individual payments, (I do this with my council tax still) as you will be reminded, each time you pay, of how much is going out.

About being true to yourself, this is a life long mission and something very few of us achieve.  In this society you get very little credit it for it, we get much more for presenting ourselves as something/someone else.  However, if you want a genuine intimate relationship this is the area in which you certainly need to know yourself and be able to communicate it clearly to your partner.  A key worry is that your flaws will put them off, if that is the case then they were not worth having.  Going away from home, especially into higher education is when you can learn about yourself, what your sexuality truly is, what times of the day you work best, what food you actually like and what food is actually good for you, what kind of people you like to be with (not simply the ones you are dumped into the same space with) and you are likely to meet people from countries you have not even thought about and people with very different views (and with very similar views) to you on a whole range of things and not just religion, politics and football, but everything you can think of.  Sorry, I have spun off into very Polonius like mode myself now, I guess it is an affliction of the middle aged not to want people make the mistakes they have seen made so many times before.

Overall, then, I think that there is a lot of good advice out there and when the 8 year old in my house reaches 13 he is liable to be bombarded with a strange mix of Sledge and Shakespeare in the hope that some of it will penetrate his ipod-filled ears and he will be at least a little better equipped for the adult world than the bulk of young people living in the UK seem to be.

Online Behaviour: Greed and Need in The World of Warcraft

I have written previously about my lack of success in getting on one of the major social networking sites, Second Life, but it remains an area of interest to me. I was introduced to the World of Warcraft system by the woman who lives in my house. It has been running since 1994 and is what in the old days we would have called a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) though the acronyms have grown since then and according to Wikipedia it is a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), which in itself sounds like a beast from a Tolkien novel. Currently it has over 11.5 million subscribers making it a virtual country with a population more than many in Europe. You cannot interact with all of those players, because there are a variety of servers, parallel versions of the world. In Europe I know there is a French and a German server for players from those locations; the British server also hosts players from the Netherlands, Scandinavia and it appears, Poland, but the language tends to be English with some Scandinavian dialogue. When I say English, in fact, unless you know text speak, it might as well be a foreign language. This is unsurprising as when battling a dragon it can be tough to write grammatically correct sentences at the same time.

As the titles Dungeon and RPG suggest, the game owes a lot to the paper-and-dice based role-playing games of the 1970s-80s though they are still played now, they are less popular than when I was young. Many of the type of people who would have been avid 'Dungeons & Dragons' (D&D) fans twenty-five years ago are now on World of Warcraft (WoW), and some of us from those days are in it too. The basic premise is that you explore ruins, caves, dungeons, castles and battle with fantastical creatures and aggressive people to steal gold and artefacts. As you fight and discover, you gain Experience Points and rise in levels so getting access to higher abilities and even better equipment. As in the RPGs of old, you play a role, hence the name. You name the character and select the class, the types in WoW are like those of D&D: spellcasters - mages, warlocks, shamans, priests and druids and other types such as warriors, rogues and hunters. Each has their own special skills and can use different weapons and armour. You can tailor you face, your skin tone and general appearance and even get shaves and haircuts in the game. The avatars of female characters tend to be elegant, sometimes even sexy and the male characters either robust or mean looking.

There are also professions. Your character can become a tailor or a leatherworker or a blacksmith or an engineer or an alchemist and so on. Some players ignore these skills, but there can be a satisfaction in getting a raw commodity and creating an impressive robe or potion and of course all of the output can be sold or used by players, for example, weapons, armour, health potions, etc. The level of technology is like that of the PC game, 'Arcanum of Steamworks and Magic Obscura' (2001). There is magic but there is also flintlock guns, steampunk motorbikes and even dynamite alongside the longbows, skeletal horses and fire spells. The continents are linked by Zeppelins but within a continent you can fly from town to town on the back of a giant bat or a manticore. Players can also learn cooking, fishing and first aid and it is fascinating how many different fish you can catch in the seas and lakes and the range of recipes available. Each food has different characteristics usually to help boost health or mana (spell energy).

There are races that you can play, very much in the Tolkienesque genre: humans, dwarfs, gnomes, night elves, blood elves, orcs, trolls and undead. There are two races not from that kind of background, the Draenei, huge humanoid aliens from a different planet to Azeroth where the game is set and the ones I find most imaginative, the Taurens, large bovine humanoids very much in the style of Amerindian culture. Again the races have different strengths and weaknesses. One interesting element is the culture as shown by their homes and their accents. As noted, the Tauren live in tepees in areas looking like the plains, the Rockies and the mesas of North America. The trolls are clearly influenced by Jamaican and other Caribbean cultures and they live in sunny tropical locations. Most comic are the goblins, who you cannot play, but turn up as traders and engineers across Azeroth and all speak in New York taxi driver argot. Anyway, some of this draws on stereotypes but does make an effort to move a little away from the standard swords-and-sorcery elements. Many of the creatures are out of a range of Western mythologies, so there are centaurs, manticores and things like giant spiders and scorpions as well as simply ferocious wild animals like rheas, lions, wolves, bears and gorillas. Dinosaurs also survive, some as mounts for player characters. There are raptors and herbivores (some with the ability to fire lightning bolts, so very fantastical). Some creatures, such as the razormanes, who are humanoid boar-like people seem unique to the game, though I do remember some similar race from the 'Runequest' RPG of the 1980s.

You can kill the monsters, beasts, people but they 're-seed' meaning that within some set time they will come alive again to enable another player to complete their mission by killing them or you to try again if you failed before. Sometimes the re-seeding happens very fast. I was looting the corpse of one opponent only to find him standing over his own body trying again to kill me. Even player characters never die entirely. You find your spirit at a nearby graveyard and either resurrect there or find your corpse and get back into it, with penalties in either case. Sometimes in a tough area you can resurrect again only to be killed almost immediately. Also some graveyards are far apart and you can spend an evening as a ghost running across the landscape constantly trying to get back to your body!

There are many NPCs (Non-Player Characters) in all sorts of forms. They act as traders, trainers in various skills and to assign you missions. You do not have to interact with any human players to play in WoW as there are missions across the world appropriate for different levels. Different regions have monsters and creatures of different levels, so if you are starting out you do not face level 40 or even level 20 monsters until you are ready. Missions involve collecting artefacts, delivering messages, carrying out assassinations. Some of these revolve around the politics of Azeroth which is divided into two main camps: Alliance (humans, gnomes, dwarfs, night elves, draenei) and Horde (undead, orcs, trolls, blood elves and taurens) with camps and bases across the continents with no clear frontline. There are also racial battles such as between the tauren and the kolkars (centaurs). For me it is interesting to get involved in the politics of the place. There is also a nature vs. industry battle going on with the Venture Mining Co. despoiling areas of the plains and especially the forests and some missions are to try and stop them. In particular the taurens with their Amerindian culture, shamans and druids emphasise the environmental aspects.

One really winning element of the game is the landscape that your avatar can run or ride or drive around or fly over. You can adventure across every kind of setting from frozen wastes to forests of European or North American style to the veldt or badlands or desert or tropical islands. They are well realised. You can stand on a mountain top in the Barrens (very like the veldt of Africa) and watch the sunset. It rains, there are misty days and so on in different locations. The cities are incredibly imaginative too, ones I have visited (I play as Horde characters, it is the Goth influence) include in the ruins of a city, in sandy caves and atop mesas, connected by rope bridges. Each has its own culture and are really beautifully rendered with different districts for various traders and trainers to buy that vital sack to carry your loot or where you can learn to smelt mithril or whatever you need. It costs money and there is the standard D&D currency of copper, silver and gold, though simplified to 100:1 rise at each step.

In most regions there are also 'instances' which are like classic 'dungeons' from RPGs and these are for groups to attack and have numerous corridors and rooms to explore and there is, of course treasure and artefacts to loot as well as experience to gain. Now, these are very like the kind of missions done with the paper-and-dice RPGs. You need a balanced team with fighters, magic users, healers, etc. and generally you need to collaborate if you are going to survive. You can join a guild, a kind of club, with its own communications channels. There are trade and general channels. Guilds have insignia and a tabard. Guilds vary, some consist of friends from the real world, some of people from a particular country (especially the Dutch and Scandinavians who probably feel outnumbered by British players), some have a focus on fun and many have a focus on getting their members to rise through the levels very quickly. There is a technique called 'boosting' in which a very high level character (the current highest level is 80) leads the way and simply slaughters everything that moves leaving the lower-level characters to pick up the experience points and the treasure. I have participated in one of these, not knowing it was going to be like that (you often get invited to go on a mission especially if you character can 'tank', i.e. is a tough warrior or can heal) and it was really tedious, I might have risen in standing, but simply by being the equivalent of a refuse man tidying up after the carnage. High characters can be good to help you out, but when there is no challenge there is no fun. However, for many players getting high level characters is the prime goal. The fact that being able to buy software that gives you gold in the game for money in the real world, and allows you to easily complete missions shows how far people are obssessed with 'levelling', i.e. raising up their characters.

Finally having set the background I come to my main point. Of course where WoW goes beyond PC games is that even with the richness of the various NPCs, you get to play with real people from across your country and other countries. However, as has often been noted, for all the fantasy names and the avatars, in the online environment people in fact reveal their real selves and that is in part what is alarming. If I had got into Second Life then I might have had personal confirmation of this fact sooner, but it has been in WoW that I have found it out myself. I think this fact first came to popular attention with the PC game, 'Black & White' (2001) in which players played a god running various primitive settlements and it soon became apparent that however hard you tried to dissemble how the people ended up would reflect your personality. I do not know if this kind of thing is used in scientific analysis but it does seem to work.

It is interesting how, even when packaged in a fantasy setting, the real you comes out. My girlfriend notes that when I play with her online I always step into protect her or heal her character. I find she runs off in a random direction without telling me and I am uncertain what her intentions are. As in real life, her character will not be constrained. It is all via computer, but the behaviour mirrors who we are in reality. Interestingly one of the greatest controversies in WoW was in January 2006 around gay guilds for characters and Blizzard had to drop its condemnation of such guilds.

In WoW you have to remember that whilst players are drawn from all ages and both genders, the bulk of participants are as they were for the paper-and-dice RPGs of the 1980s, teenaged boys. There is nothing wrong with that. I had rather they played WoW that shoplift or take drugs. However, with them in predominance it tends to soil the collaborative nature that Blizzard, the producers of WoW want to foster. It is striking that when you log on you get a 'tip' about play, sometimes this is technical, but often the Blizzard include a homily such as 'a little kindness goes a long way' or 'if you talk to someone before trying to trade or invite them to join a group, they are more like to do so'. To explain, 'trading' and 'inviting' are technical functions rather than dialogue. However, the fact that such tips turn up so commonly reflects the terse, demanding nature of many players. Reflect on the teenaged male players. They probably lack self-esteem in the real world, put down by society, their teachers and parents, and yet in WoW they can be a level 80 Death Knight called Ikillyouall and ride around on a dinosaur with a huge sword. They can extol their knowledge and show up older players. They can bully without ever facing consequences, they are literally immortal. No wonder they are obsessed by raising themselves to the highest level as quickly as possible and set up guilds, often with very strict rules, to achieve this. When you meet a lower-level character the player will often quickly tell you 'this may only be level 20, but I have four level 80 characters already' to show you that they must know more than you.

This sort of behaviour has always occurred in RPGs, I remember back in the early 1980s running a 'dungeon' in D&D for friends' low-level characters, but of course one boy with a level 4 character happened to have befriended a gold dragon, only the most powerful monster in that version of the game. His name was Jason Comfort, ironic because he was one of the most unpleasant people I have ever met. Last I heard he was with the RAF; just so I know I get the right one as there seem to be scores of them out there with that name. He insisted on bringing it to an adventure which was for far lower level characters than that dragon and wiped out everything with ease. He loved lauding it over the other players and demanded they behave in a certain way, even forcing one to sacrifice himself. So, this behaviour has always been around. I suppose what makes it worse, whereas in the past a boy like Jason would be one among a few, now they can band together through the wonders of the internet and that seems to make them feel that their behaviour is vindicated and thus 'right'.

Where tensions reach the highest level is in the 'instances' as the rewards are so much higher and there are often items that cannot be secured or bought anywhere else. When the fighting has stopped and the bodies are looted, special items are rolled for among the players, through and automatic system. You can 'Pass' if it is an item you have no interest in, you can select 'Need' or 'Greed' which has a bearing on the outcome. As you can imagine this causes immense tension. Of course the bulk of items could be traded later between characters (there are also auction houses in the cities, funnily very much like eBay but in medieval setting), but for many players that is too late.

Many of the hard levellers do no professions so do not understand that to make a potion or a piece of armour often needs an exotic range of ingredients. I clicked 'Need' for a piece of moss agate, a semi-precious stone used in metalworking worth a few silver and it was as if I had gone round these players houses and insulted their mothers. I offered to pay anyone for any item they felt I had 'Need'ed wrongly. Something similar happened on another mission and I was accused of being a 'ninja' looter, because again I had put 'Need' for some armour. Being the only warrior in the party it seemed not unusual that I should ask for armour or weapons that only my character could use. However, clearly that broke etiquette, more of that in a moment. Being called a 'ninja' looter means you are condemned by other players who will not go on missions with you. I asked if they wanted me to leave the instance if they felt so badly and they said not to. In fact I had 'Pass'ed on the bulk of the items and of course dared not touch any others and I realised that had been the point. The players who moan the most and condemn others are the greediest taking everything they can even if they cannot use, simply to sell off later. In some cases a player who takes an item the party leader wants, sometimes by simply clicking the wrong key, finds themselves dumped out of the instance. I suppose it is unsurprising that when mixing with teenagers you find them squabbling like children.

A lot of the dialogue goes on in text speak. Players have to type in to speak to each other, so this is no surprise. OK is reduced to 'k' and ready to 'r'; 'omfg' is popular to get around the system's built in swearword detector. A lot of smilies are used, again no surprise. Capital letters seem unknown to many players and a lot of discussions can become a string of consonants. If you cannot keep up or use full sentences for clarity (often necessary when planning tactics) you are condemned. In fact there is very little tolerance of difference. Everyone is expected to know how these players see things and if they do not they are patronised. 'Noob' from newbie, i.e. a newcomer is another insult, that is hardly likely to endear players not having played for the past 3-4 years. There is similar intolerance for players who have slow internet connection or have characters that do not hare around. As a warrior with a full suit of chainmail armour of course my character moves slower than a rogue in leather or a mage in cloth robes. Yet you are expected to be constantly at the front. There is no thought of the differences and any reference to them is taken as an insult or you somehow trying to trick the other players.

Of course, at the end of the day, it is only a game and the items are just electrons, though many players treat it almost as if was reality. It is an environment of constant warfare, disease and brutality like any pseudo-medieval setting, so I suppose in such a context you would expect selfishness. However, what is more worrying, aside from reducing the enjoyment of newcomers, is how behaviour in the game reflects so badly on the behaviour of these numerous players in real life. It is clear that greed is dominant and that it is seen as far more legitimate than need. Furthermone anyone even questioning that greed let alone contesting it is seen as illegitimate and offensive in trying to curtail the person's taking of everything. There is no sense that there can be negotiation and trading even though the system has such easy facilities for these things. They seem to entirely miss the point that collaboration actually helps you win through better than a lot of clashing egos.

Boastfulness, an easy access to wealth and rewards without effort, intolerance of any difference, unwillingness to listen to explanation all seem to be the expected norm. Of course, they need my character, otherwise they would not bother trying to recruit me to help, but there is no sense at all of quid pro quo, I am to be their servant and if I question that, they eject me. Given the numerous tips about behaviour provided by Blizzard it is clear they would prefer collaborative activity; partly because they know if newcomers feel they are entering into a hostile environment they will leave, as happens to people bullied in Second Life, and for the company that damages their revenue.

Of course there are good people in WoW and if you look carefully you will find guilds that promote the fact that much of the fun comes from the participation rather than a hard nosed drive to reach level 80 in a fortnight. Doing so means you miss out on the interest of a very complex fantasy world to explore and the interactions that are possible in what is a game but concealed beneath that is actually a very vibrant social network. Yes, it is escapist, but that is nice. If you are downtrodden in the real world, it can be good to take out your frustration killing a giant scorpion. However, what I also think it reveals, if we did not already know it anyway from driving on the UK's roads, is that a lot of young men are terribly rude, greedy, hugely ambitious, intolerant and self-obsessed and I am not keen to be an elderly person in a country where these men will be in charge very soon.

Putting Young People in Demonised Categories

One thing which is noticeable when talking to the 6-year old who lives in my house, is how his school demonises 'teenagers'. His school only takes children up to the age of 11 so seems to feel free to portray teenagers as responsible for all the crime in the local neighbourhood. This has been done to such an extent that to this boy and his friends the term no longer designates a period of life most of us go through, but has become synonymous with the word 'criminal' or at least 'delinquent'. In the past we clarified our labelling and they were called 'teenage delinquents' to distinguish them from normal teenagers, but that distinction seems to have disappeared. Of course some of the crime in the neighbourhood is committed by teenagers but a lot of it is not. When a bench was stolen from the school playground, teenagers were blamed. If it had been found turned upside down in the nearby park with tags sprayed all over it, I might have agreed, but it entirely disappeared from the district. No teenagers could be bothered to carry a heavy wooden bench for three miles. It is clear it was stolen to order by people with access to a van and able to leave no trace, this does not sound like teenagers. Yet, the school somehow feels it has to be teenagers and not older criminals.

What situation does this leave the 6-year old and I imagine all the other children in the school as they edge towards becoming teenagers themselves? I know in comedy, notably Harry Enfield's teenage character, Kevin, they mutate into a surly, argumentative being. However, now these children also imagine that they turn into criminals automatically too. This has grown to the extent that when the six year old sees teenagers he assumes they are committing a crime. We saw three boys probably ages 12-14 carrying a sofa and he said they must have stolen it. Then we saw them stopping at the house of an elderly woman and delivering it to her. It became clear she had bought it from a nearby second hand store but had been unable to transport it home. These boys were actually aiding their community but the view of the 6-year old had been so distorted he simply assumed a crime was being committed. Becoming a teenager is very tough anyway, you go through puberty and have all the issues of peer pressure, developing interest in the opposite sex (or the same sex) in a sexual way, acne, deciding what academic path you are going to go down, image issues and so on. There is often pressure to commit crime petty or more serious. However, the way that the school has been educating these pupils is that, well of course they will all commit crime because that is what teenagers do, they cannot help themselves. Coming from a Christian school this is a terrible abdication of direction for their pupils.

The bulk of teenagers never commit a crime, just as the bulk of the population never commits a crime. So why is the school not pointing out role models of teenagers who make a positive contribution? In the district there are Scouts, Guides, Boys' Brigade, martial arts, sports, dancing and drama clubs and other societies through which teenagers do a great deal. Why are they not pointing to them so that in the next few years when their pupils are fed along the conveyor belt of life into being teenagers they can see that crime is not the only option and that they can make moral judgements which are surely part of what being a Christian is about, if not simply about being a human in a civilised society. The school offers to alternative to the pupils, it is almost as if they have been damned to being criminal teenagers and nothing they can do with get them away from this predestined path. They do not even do what private schools are and try to create 'young fogeys', i.e. children with middle-aged attitudes, you know the sort, painfully apparent in the UK certainly, and from what I have seen New England too, they are 40 at 14 and miss out on the important challenges and test of character during their teenage years and ultimately find coping with life difficult even if they have avoided the seemingly inevitable criminal path.

Even when young people have managed to get to the end of their teenage years having been condemned as inherently criminal throughout, they are then beaten with the stick of being a 'student'. Of course those who do not continue study can end up in criminal circumstances, but it seems ironic that in the UK those who try to improve themselves are condemned almost as severely as those who try to find unskilled work and are blamed for living off state benefits. This whole attitude seems weird. Where does the population want people aged 13-26 to go for that period? They seem to simply want them to disappear into thin air and reappear in their late 20s. There is a meeting I saw advertised this week in a town in the South of England, it begins with the line 'due to an unprecedented influx of students into this area', which immediately is a lie. The university has been there for a couple of decades and students have always lived near it. The large increase in numbers going to university was in the late 1990s and early 2000s and whilst there are year-on-year fluctuations, there has been no huge leap, it is just the locals are becoming resentful of students. Anyway, they are going to seek a 'solution'. Students have become so demonised in this area that the approach is beginning to smack of persecution. The only tolerable option seems to be simply to drive them out of the town.

It seems that the only council I am aware of who know what financial benefit students bring to a town is Portsmouth. Neighbouring Southampton wants to restrict the amount of student accommodation in the city and Bournemouth farther West along the coast is beginning to behave the same. The attitude towards students is now becoming like that towards prisons or needle exchange centres or even wind turbines. People want more of them to be built, as long as they are not in their area. Britain's development is being slowed by this attitude.

In Bournemouth the university suggested that it buy and develop a derelict retail site be turned into a new student hall even though it is a number of miles from the university campus. It would hold 7-800 students, equivalent to, say, 160 households of students removed from houses across the town. However, complaints have been raised about this scheme too. So what do people want? They do not want students living in their streets and they do not want them in an area away from residential houses. Again they simply want them to disappear into thin air. If they did, suddenly a lot of the shops that those people like would lose a great deal of custom. Bournemouth University has 16,000 students who literally pump millions of pounds into the local economy, but the local population would rather forego that and gripe about young people. They will neither assimilate the students nor ghettoise them, they just want them gone. I can understand that the seasonal pattern of students do disrupt the nature of a locale. Partly this is caused by landlords simply buying up as many properties as they can to rent out to students. I know one road where six houses in a row are owned by a single landlord and rented to students, they lie empty all Summer. Of course no-one would dare say that the patterns of purchase of landlords should be restricted, because, that would be restriction of free exploitative capitalism, so, instead the blame has to be put on the tenants (as always!), who in this case are students.

Of course there are students who behave badly. Then again there are people aged 18-21, students or not who behave badly. A lot of that stems from Britain's appallingly immature approach to alcohol consumption which marks us out sharply from our European neighbours. Every weekend though I can see men and especially women in their 30s and 40s vomiting into gutters just like younger people, in fact often worse, because they have more money than the students trying to work their way through university. In fact in a pub these days the student is far more likely to be behind the bar working than in front of it consuming as almost all UK students now do many hours of paid work each week to keep down their vast debts. So, I accept there are bad students, but as with teenagers they remain the minority. The ironic thing I have found over the past few years is the sharp criticism of students during the Summer and around Christmas. People portray them as 'outsiders' coming to their town and causing problems, without thinking that at those times of the year, the students around are actually the children of the local population who have come home from university for the vacation. Of course, the reality never gets in the way of demonising young people.

The UK population needs to rethink how it interacts with teenagers and students. At the moment the approach is to condemn them all as criminals and rowdy louts. No positive role models of young people that accept that it is hard being young especially in these times when so many opportunities are being snuffed out and young people face so much pressure to behave in ways that are deemed 'tolerable'. Even when they behave perfectly fine there is no credit given, which produces a terribly nihilistic attitude among the young people. Why should they bother to try if they are still going to be lumped into a huge demonised category? That is not going to resolve tensions in communities. You might as well say, that because old people move slowly and smell, and take up the pavements with their walking frames and their electric wheelchairs, and because they play their television so loud you can hear it doors away and yappy dogs, that they must be banned from town centres. This is the ridiculous level to which young people are being categorised negatively. The UK police and local authorities have more powers to prevent 'anti-social' behaviour than probably any other state in the EU (possibly excepting Germany) and so if there is wrong or disruptive behaviour by people, no matter what their age, it can be stopped, there is no need to keep rubbing in the complaints, which generally impact most against the teenagers and students who are not behaving badly. Being a teenager or a student is not a bad thing in itself, it is individuals who decide to behave, to say otherwise is no different to the Nazis saying that Jews were evil, or apartheid South Africa that blacks were stupid and lazy. See individuals for what they are, do not simply read the negative label you assign all the people of that type.

P.P. 18/11/2008 I posted this just at the right time. Today I read a report on the BBC website which highlights a Barnardo's research which shows young people are 'casually condemned' with 54% of adults thinking children 'behave like animals', 43% said they felt adults needed to be protected from children and over a third thought the streets were 'infested' with children. Comments on websites of national newspapers said teenagers were 'feral' and should be 'shot'. Taking up this line, Barnardo's is running an advertisement in which adults are shown as hunting down 'vermin', i.e. teenagers. There is no denying that there are young people who do commit crime. However, whereas people think teenagers commit 50% of crime, in fact they only commit 12%. You are at more danger by far from adults than from teenagers. The United Nations last month highlighted Britain's intolerance to young people. This is unsurprising given that even schools who should be highlighting the achievements of good children are simply putting out the same negative stereotypes. Consequently it is unsurprising the attitudes shown up by this research suggests that the only solution many adults can think of is violence. None of them take responsibility for the fact that some children end up this way. The whole response is irrational, you cannot eliminate a whole generation and in fact they are far less of a problem than is assumed. Alienating young people just exacerbates the problem. Adults who can make their voices heard are just scapegoating young people who cannot.

Not A Lone Voice On UK Society

Seeing how the UK seems to be falling rapidly into some cyberpunk scenario with a police state politcially and constant violence on our streets can be really disheartening. What makes it worse is the fact that the responses from average people are things which do not address these issues but exacerbate them: stronger legislation, more prisons, armed police, carrying weapons, etc. The populist-nationalist attitude that is really how the bulk of British people think will never blame the behaviour it fosters for so many of the problems it creates. Thus, these days it is seen as a God-given right to be able to speed in a car and consume everything with no restraint. Very few people see that they reap what they sow and the reason why they are mugged for their mobile phone or have their 4x4 broken into for the sat nav is because of the country they have helped to create. Above all, they condemn the 1960s permissiveness and laud the hard-nosed Thatcher years of the 1980s, without realising, it seems, that it was that latter decade that has caused these problems. People forget the 1960s (they are a decade that I do not like, but in comparison to the 1980s caused less long-term harm to UK society) meant greater availability to contraception and a beginning of more standing for women, so a move against underage pregnancy. It is the 1980s 'I don't give a damn' attitude especially among men which has led to the UK having the highest level of underage pregnancies in the Europe. People blame the welfare state, but in fact anyone who has lived on benefits knows that they do not make you complacent, they actually force you to work hard to get a better life. It is the greed that is so lionised in the UK that makes things worse as it is not about having a 'decent' or 'comfortable' life any more it is about 'having it all' or feeling you are failing. At no stage in history have all but a small slice of any society been able to 'have it all', the rest of us should be striving to 'having it decent' and feel successful if we achieve that.

Anyway, having been wittering on about this for so many, many years, I am finally glad to see some media coverage in step with my views. Have a look at this BBC website story from last week about greedy society: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7502057.stm It looks at the report from Sir Alan Steer who has been investigating the issues since 2005. He shows that all adults have a role to play, not just parents, because so many of us indulge in greedy and violent behaviour as a norm. How, then, can we expect children to behave any differently. Bad pupil behaviour is the main reason why teachers leave the profession, and 40% leave after working for 2 years, so we get into an even worse spiral. Are we then surprised that there is so many stabbings of and by young people? Interesting it seemed to chime with another report from the same website about what girls attending the Girl Guides are now trained in: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7502678.stm Organisers of the movement have noticed how girls feel compelled to dress older than they are, have the latest gadgets and indulge in fashionable neuroses such as self-harm and eating disorders in order to feel part of the 'in-crowd'. Again, they demonstrate how little the 'norm' is actually normal. We have got British society into such a state in the last 20 years that it may be impossible to pull it back from the crisis it is facing. I know things are not perfect in French, Belgian, Dutch or German societies, but it seems incredible that within an hour's journey of the UK are countries where things are not so dire as here. British people are so wrapped up in their own lives and whining about what is happening to them, that they do not see that it is they who have brought about the problems they are experiencing. Why is it alright for you to speed and to consume without end and then somehow not for a young man to try to do the same? UK is an archetypal 'do as I say, not do as I do', but in fact unsurprisingly young people behave just as we do and the whole of society pays the price.

Cars as Weapons

Earlier this year I produced a posting asking 'When Will Cars Be Considered the Weapons They Are?' because I noted that in contrast to using a gun or a knife, which kill far fewer people in the UK, you were likely to get only 4 years imprisonment at most, often less for killing someone with a car (and only a £2,200 fine if you run them over and kill them with a bicycle - see the death of Rhiannon Bennett killed by cyclist Jason Howard, but that is a far less common occurrence). Last week I came across an article in a magazine in Hampshire by a man called Professor Colin Pritchard who has a long line of titles. His article was actually about how the media distorts our perceptions of British society. It alerted me to something I had not realised that the US media apparently portrays UK society as facing 'social collapse' though our in 2007 we had 64 males murdered aged 15-24 compared to 4,191 in the USA (which has a population about four times larger), the rate is 17 per million in the age group, in the UK compared to 209 per million in the age group in the USA. Apparently such reports are continuing to make older people fearful. Last year 98 people over the age of 65 were murdered, one third of them by members of their family, given that being over 65 is a much bigger category in fact the rate is only 7 per million per year compared to the US rate of 27 per million per year.

Anyway, this posting was not intended to bring out the fact that Americans should stop condemning Britain as being a hazardous place to live when in fact their country is far more dangerous, it was to back up my points about the fatalities from death from motor vehicles which I outlined earlier in the year with someone else's analysis. Professor Pritchard rightly says 'UK youth road deaths, which the media at the national-level virtually "air-brushes" out of the news'. I think this is as with the American media talking about gun crime, that many British readers, especially men, see it as offensive to even raise the issue of deaths caused by the thing they love: cars in the UK, guns in the USA. Any news programme or newspaper which started going on about how many people are killed by speeding would soon lose viewers/readers. As I noted before there are websites dedicated to trying to demonstrate that most it is 'the fault' of most pedestrians when they are killed or severely injured by a car and that proper speed limits in towns is somehow more dangerous than no speed limits because drivers are always checking their speedometers (suggesting they are indeed very poor drivers if by now they have no idea of how fast they are going if they are not reading it off their speedometer!). According to Professor Pritchard the number of people aged 15-24 in the UK killed by vehicles was 630 in 2007, which works out at 169 per million per year, compared to 17 per million per year for all other forms of murder. (The USA has 7,325 deaths from road accidents of people aged 15-24 last year: 365 per million per year, still higher than their deaths from other murders, but by a far smaller factor than in the UK).

As Pritchard outlines, one reason why the road deaths are so much higher than other forms of murder is because the UK is actually a very safe place, even given the rapid rise in attacks with knives. However, it is not portrayed as such. We have regular crime programmes but possibly one programme per year on driving safely. In fact dangerous driving is lionised by weekly programmes notably 'Top Gear' on BBC2 which has become the home of laddish behaviour leading to one of its presenters Jeremy Clarkson becoming the voice of populist, conservative, slightly bigoted politics in numerous articles and now books. The presenters keep striving to do more dangerous stunts with motor vehicles under the pretence that it is a 'normal' car show, which it used to be when it started back in 1970. It entered its current laddish format in a (what has proven successful) bid to gain more viewers, in 2002. It has been criticised for showing presenters drinking gin while driving and presenter Richard Hammond was almost killed in October 2006 when a car he was driving crashed at high speed. This is how so many UK drivers envisage themselves when they are behind the wheel, with real arrogance and a very self-centred approach. Contrast this to the 1970s when there were regular 'public information films' of a couple of minutes showing the consequences of hitting pedestrians (they used a hammer and a peach to good effect) and interviews with people crippled after crashing a car while not wearing a seatbelt. We need hard-hitting broadcasting like that which shows the tragedy not the glamour of bad driving.

Proper sentencing which treats murdering someone with a car equal to murdering them with a gun or a knife is also needed, i.e. a minimum of 14 years for manslaughter and 30 years for murder, this would concentrate the minds of men in their 30s and 40s to realise they would not be driving again until they had passed retirement age. Getting a maximum of 4 years and in most cases 2 years or less, is totally insufficient. As so much of the US media is cowed by the gun-owning lobby so is much of the UK media by the bad-driving lobby. I know these people pretend they are good drivers, but in fact that is a lie as anyone who drives down our major roads regularly knows. Even if there was not another single vehicle on the road, these people (and they are women as well as men) would be a danger, but mixed in with the average level of rush hour traffic they are as dangerous as someone running around a shopping centre with a pistol with no safety catch.

Maybe there is hope for the future. Pritchard's article notes that statistics show that 14-15 year olds in 2005 were less likely to be involved either in smoking tobacco, taking narcotics or having sex below the legal age of consent (16 years old) than their counterparts in 1985. This seems contrary to what we are told in the media. Of course, I have come to realise much of the media tells us what it thinks we want to hear rather than attempting to relay the truth. So possibly 10-15 years from now we might find slightly more considerate drivers prevalent on the roads, but in the meantime many more hundreds of people in the UK will be murdered and maimed by drivers.

P.P. The saga seems to persist. Today (18th July) I heard that a 19-year old man driving an uninsured car was given a 20-month sentence for killing an 11-year old by running him over. The man fled the scene and did not report the murder and he gets less than 2 years in prison. If he had stabbed the boy he would have got 14 years. In Northern Ireland though I noted this week one man had his sentence increased from 4 years to 7 years for killing two men while drunk driving.

In addition, courts are now being advised to be tougher. The BBC reported this week that causing death while holding a mobile phone could now get 7 years (rather than 4 years) and drunk or drugged driving leading to death can get 14 years, the same as for manslaughter committed whilst on foot. However, death by 'careless' driving as opposed to 'reckless' is still likely only to get a maximum of 3 years but 'careless' will now be treated as 'reckless' if drugs or drink are involved. Unsurprisingly people feel this guidance is still not going far enough. If you want to kill someone and get away with a far shorter sentence, run them down with a car when you are sober and you will be out in 3 years, stab them to death and it will probably be 14 years and shoot them and it will probably be 30 years. No wonder more people are killed in the UK by cars than guns or knives or any other weapon.

Link to BBC story about sentencing guidance: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7506668.stm