Reading etc.

I had lunch with my friend R, the other day. He was just back from 6 weeks in Kabul. He spent almost all of that time in his hotel/office. When he left for a meeting, he went in an armoured vehicle. He was accompanied by another armoured vehicle, in case the first one exploded (though I don’t quite see how this would be useful to him) and a soft shell vehicle (what we would call, a car, I think) with four armed men. He said that he felt he was driving around shouting “target here, target here, kidnap me.” The only time he ever went out without armed support was the one time he was dropped to the wrong building. He rang the bodyguard people and they picked him up and dropped him to another wrong building. Realising that his actual destination was very nearby he decided to walk it. “Was he scared?” “Very scared.”

Not as scared though as the time he was at a meeting in the presidential compound and my friend’s bodyguard said, “We have to go now, there’s a suicide bomber outside.” He was the only non-Afghan in the building as it happened. I was a bit unclear about why the Afghans weren’t evacuated also, as was he, but he was not in a position to argue. When they got to the gate, the bodyguard told him to wait and went to get the armoured car. My friend did think, “Hey, a minute ago I was in a protected armoured building, now I’m standing at the gate, how is this better?” But all was well.

His most notable day was one when there were bombs in the morning, rats in his office in the afternoon and an earthquake in the middle of the night. In telling this story, he seemed equally shocked by each element which may, I think, show that he has been in war zones for too long. On his way back, he was stuck in Yerevan for five days [gasp of awe, if you can identify the country of which Yerevan is the capital without recourse to google]. Now, he is off to the Sudan for three months which should make a peaceful change after the rigours of Kabul. Since it’s all about me, me, me, I instantly asked whether we could stay in his house in Cork for Christmas as he will be in the Sudan and we could look after it for him. He very kindly said yes, tactfully not adverting to the fact that the last time we “looked after” his house we broke the washing machine. Good, good, good.

It’s November, so I will be posting every day. As I have done every November since 2006. Look at that, longevity, on the internet.

I have long been ambivalent about smacking children. I don’t smack my own children but I was dubious about any proposal to make smacking of children illegal.

Then two things changed my mind.

I heard a speech a couple of years ago. The speaker said that in the past a man could hit his wife, his servants, his animals and his children. Hitting children is the only one of these still allowed. This has been knocking around at the back of my head ever since. The more I think of it, the more I believe that it is never legitimate to hit a child and, really, the fact that it’s your child doesn’t matter at all.

I read an article about how we are only just starting to acknowledge and vindicate the rights of children. Just because their voices are less coherent and less audible than those of adults does not mean that their rights as human beings should be ignored. Making it illegal to assault children puts down a marker for society generally as to what is acceptable and what is not.

So, I would be in favour of making smacking children illegal including, yes, a slap across the back of the legs of a small child because he ran across the road without looking. What do you think?

Updated to add: The Office of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs has commissioned a study on “Parents’ Perspectives on Parenting Styles and Disciplining Children” which is worth a read, if you’re feeling enthusiastic. It’s a small enough sample but for what it’s worth, some 25% of parents reported using physical punishment in the previous 12 months and 42% of respondents said that smacking should be made illegal. Interestingly, 28% of respondents thought it was illegal already.

Health warning: You would want to be enthusiastic as it runs to over 100 pages.

I have paid an efficient man to update my blog. You can have no idea how happy this makes me. Inept, perhaps, but happy. Also, it now shows people who linked to me. If I didn’t do your meme, I’m sorry, I just never knew. A vast new universe yawns before me, lads.

From Saturday’s paper:

“Since the advent of digital cameras and camera phones we’ve all been snapping away to our heart’s content. But who actually tidies up, prints out, stores and captions this plethora of images? Unless you’re frighteningly anal-retentive, or have shockingly little to do, the chances are that your digital photos languish in your computer in an unloved and untended electronic heap.”

So if I have, tidied up, printed out, stored and captioned my pictures and do not have shockingly little to do, what is it that the IT is implying about me?