When you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance. [Lee Ann Womack - I Hope You Dance*]
Read More ...“I am available on most weeknights, not degree educated but well versed in matters of politics, economics, religion and the like. Personal disasters like career disappointments and failed romantic encounters can be discussed and I am not too averse to bouncing balls, kicking balls and hitting balls with a bat but much prefer the kind of play available at the local night club. I can hold my liquor quite well and am unlikely to return any curries eaten under the influence. Being a little on the large side enables me to fireman lift any friend to whom the excitement becomes too much. All this for the price of a taxi ride home! Bookings being take now, form an orderly queue please, we’re British.”
Read More ...My 60 year plus mother holds some very set view about certain sections of society that may have some basis in experience but most likely does not. Since she comes for the generation of the great –isms, I assumed that my siblings and I just brushed off these prejudices, sometimes with argument. Imagine my surprise when discussing a certain serious family issue with one of my siblings when they strongly expressed an opinion consistent with one of my mother’s which I know is not based in their experience.
Read More ...Single parent charity Gingerbread recently published a nationwide league table of child maintenance debt showing a child maintenance ‘debt mountain’ of £3,761 million owed to children by non-resident parents, mostly fathers, across the country. Gingerbread’s Chief Executive Fiona Weir urged the ‘Child Support Agency has to do its job too in collecting debts and enforcing payment’.
Read More ...We do not need to look for statistics to prove that the rate of marriage breakdowns is growing. Many of us have many have experienced it ourselves or have close family and friends who have and those of us with children will know that a significant proportion of their classmates come from ‘broken homes’. Some of those classmates will come from ‘single parent’ families where a marriage was never entered into in the first place but may have been a co-habitation or ‘break-up before marriage’ scenarios.
Read More ...“Set me free so that I may do to others what you did to me.”
Read More ...Here is one man's view of how the simple, not necessarily the easy, can make you happy. Though written from the sense of the simple home in the Brazilian favelas compared to the high life in the USA, it is the emphasis on simplicity, difficulty and community that the sense of wellbeing is being found - What is Home?
Read More ...A "big budget" pornographic film was shot in a London hospital when it hired out one of its wards to a film company. The movie generated "substantial income" for the hospital, Conservative MP Penny Mordaunt said BBC News - 'Big budget' porn film shot in London hospital.
Read More ..."MPs in Kenya have voted to boost their own salaries, making them among the world’s best paid politicians." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/10476388.stm. Apparently 'the vote has provoked anger from the general public and the media, correspondents say'. Well I’m not surprised. The Kenyan PM will earn more than the Uk Premier and the US President and this is a third world country with much lower costs of living.
Read More ...Nairobi has made it into the list of the worlds most expensive cities for expatriates, according to a new survey. The continued slide in the Nairobis ranking, experts warn, could make the East Africas hub less attractive to international workers.The cost of living index compiled by Mercer, an international human resource consultancy, has ranked the city at position 88 of the most expensive cities in the world-- the first time it has made it to the list of the top 100. It was ranked at no. 114 last year, meaning it has dropped 26 places to edge closer to the most costly city among the 214 polled. (allAfrica.com: Kenya: Nairobi Ranked Among Most Expensive Cities).
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