Akela became Brown Owl yesterday!

Well kind of anyway, I ended up helping out with some Girl Guides for the afternoon who out doing some navigation practice. It was different to Cubs in some ways, they were generally a bit older and a bit more mature and I was very impressed with the more that capable patrol leaders. In others though it was just the same! There were still the leaders and the moaners and the loud ones and quiet ones and funny ones and I still loved it.

Souts and Guides, two great oragnisations often seperated by a common heritage. I really do wish we could work together that bit more.

What turns us in to the person we are? It's something I've been thinking about for a while now. There are many major events I can think of in my life that were pretty formative but there is one I wanted to write about simply because in some ways it seems so minor yet in others its quite fundamental, when you look further at it anyway and it something I've only just picked up on.

So what is it? Well basically its the view out of my parents toilet window! Seriously!

Now this might seem like not a lot to worry about it but picture this. The toilet is the smallest room in the house and is not heated. My Dad though isthe smelliest man in the world in the toilet so the window tended to be left open permanently when I was a kid. So any visit to the loo would mean looking out the window as I did what ever needed to be done. And what could I see? The M25 about quarter of a mile away that's what! That bloody motorway that goes round in circles, permanently snarled up and generally horrible.

So particularly in winter there I would be a in a freezing cold room able only to hear the constant roar of a faceless motorway, able to see not much than the cold orange glow of the lighting of the motorway and it used to make me feel so empty. It used to turn me really quite cold inside, this facelsss urban horror. And it is one of those things that I think helped shape me now, in to looking further and deeper and wanting something a bit more out of life than the materialistic rubbish I seem to be expected to look for.

Lessons Not Learned

I've been away with work for a few days so not been able to blog but I feel the need to rant now.

Earlier this week Manchester United played away to Lille in the Champions League. Not my favourite team, not my favourite competition, but something serious happened that needs commenting on.

Some how or another a crush developed in the stand that housed the United fans, some of them became crushed against the perimeter fence and tried to escape serious injury, or worse, by climbing over the fence on to the pitch. The reaction of the police was to treat it as a riot and fired tear gas in to the stand.

The exact circumstances of it are under investigation by UEFA, but what ever the cause, the fact that it happened and the reaction of the police were utterly inexcuseable. The Hillsborough disaster should have taught everyone, in this country or abroad, the dangers of crumbling stadiums, heavy handed policing and perimeter fencing. 96 people died on that sunny afternoon in South Yorkshire and 730 were injured, I remember watching it on the tv, aged just 10. It still makes me angry today reading about it, the missing crush barrier, the break down in crowd control outside the ground, the inadequate turnstiles, the open exit gate, the list of incompetence and negligence could go on for ever. It did though create a fundamental shift in how police behaved and how football fans were treated. Everything was swepted away and it is not possible to under estimate the fall out.

So the fact that anything like it has been allowed to happen again is staggering and it is difficult to describe just how angry I am about this.

One of the big stories of today is that an 11 year old boy is being threatened with prison due to being a bully.

As a bit of background I should probably add that I was bullied myself as a teenager. It was of the psychological, exlcuding type rather than the physical type but just as painful none the less. And yes, all these years on I would still find it difficult to fully forgive those who were responsible.

I am firmly of the opinion that when dealing with any kind of bad behaviour whether that is childish spats or serious violent crime, is that the victim must be protected as a priority. That must come first. If that means keeping the perpetrator away from others who they may harm then that is what we have to do and in the adult world that is essentially what prisons are for.

However we are talking about an 11 year old child here. Someone who has not fully developed mentally or emotionally, some one who has some way to go, some one who still has a chance. Prisons by their very nature concentrate the worst elements of society and deprive them of good influences. They may help protect us from those inside them but they do little or nothing for those inside them, reoffending rates of those imprissoned compared to those who are not tell their own story. To imprison someone at this age may well deny him any chance he still has.

I am not fully familiar with the details of this case, I am sure he must have done something pretty nasty to be threatened with prison at that age, but this is the 21sy century. To talk about encacerating a child like this smacks of desperation and a desire for vengence rather that solutions. I am deeply uncopmfortable with the whole thing and I would hope that you are too.

Very Proud!

So yesterday one of my Cubs organised a charity concert for homeless kids in Peru. he organised a gang of his friends to put on an hour's worth of entertainment, publicised it, sold tickets, organised refreshments.

This kid is ten years old.

Time and again the media want to tell us how rubbish kids are and how they do nothing for anyone. Maybe they need to look beyond the end of their noses. Just because a kid wears a hoddie doesn't make them a villian.