Walking past the church this morning the Gospel girls walked by with a pretty palomino pony on a halter. Apparently this pony had been left for years in a field neglected and then the owner of the pony had phoned up the owner of the field to ask her to send the pony to the knackers yard. Luckily not all people are callous, and after a bit of negotiation, the pony (25 years old) has ended up with Anna. Who says that she will train the pony for disabled riders, a nice end for an old pony.
Yorkshire Pudding in a heartfelt manner is singing the praises of all those who care for disabled children which of course we should all do. And coincidentally enough I had an acknowledgement this morning from a government petition form I had signed that they were looking into it and (when all the reports come in) will agree on what to do.
We value the support unpaid carers give to caring for family or friends. We will spend around £3bn in 2020-21 on Carer’s Allowance, and by 2024-25, forecast real spend is over £3.6bn.
But still no money on the table for unpaid carers. There is a lot of written words on how employers, charities etc can help.
However, the support unpaid carers need extends far beyond financial help and can’t just come from Government. We also need businesses, local communities, the voluntary sector and individuals to play their part.
Given the amount of debt the country is in as a whole, such matters will no doubt be quietly sidelined but it is a good thing that we can sign these petition forms and when a certain number of signatures are reached it forces a discussion in government.
History is an academic discipline, with its own rules and procedures. Teaching it in schools means getting pupils to read historical documents critically, assess interpretations of past events and processes intelligently, and make up their own minds about key historical topics so that, at the very least, they will emerge as independently thinking citizens when they leave school.
It is not the same as memory – not individual memory, that is, but national, or collective, or cultural memory. Nor is history a matter of awarding ticks and crosses to the people of the past, canonising some as heroes and damning others as villains. Arguing about whether the British empire was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing is puerile and has nothing to do with the serious study of the past: such crude moralising should have been disposed of forever by WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman’s withering satire on the school history textbooks of their own day, 1066 and All That (1930).
I liked your expression: "the short term spitting out of social media". That's often what it is like - gobs of spittle on the pavement. Not a proper substitute for patient enquiry and the weighing up of evidence. I feel that way about Captain Cook's recent treatment by some ill-informed finger pointers. In the world we live in it seems that those who accuse gain credence simply by accusing.
ReplyDeleteI know you got upset about Captain Cook and explained his history. The statue in Whitby is being protected by locals, though as my daughter and I talked about it, we had not seen many black people in Whitby. Sadly this affair brings out the worst on both sides.
DeleteHistory has a lot to answer for Thelma and it seems to me it becomes more and more distorted as more and more folk jump on the bandwagon. In the case of the BLM movement - what a wonderful idea and how much it is needed but now it is becoming distorted - true to form.
ReplyDeleteIn fact as Evans has pointed out what we are experiencing is something very different it is our emotional response to how we view things. Actually I found a funny meme today about. Should we not knock down The Thinker statue because it is offensive to non thinkers. But then my grasp of the absurd does not always go down well.
ReplyDelete