June 29th

This morning I awoke to disturbing news that some kid in a town called Cranleigh down here in the South, has successfully campaigned for a change in government policy because he damaged his eyes at school by looking at the Sun during a solar eclipse. His teachers warned him and the other kids of the dangers of looking directly at the Sun but the wee scamp believes the advice should have been more specific. Now I’m almost certainly going to get shot down in flames for what I’m going to say but this kind of thing worries me. He’s a sweet little 10 year old and (scientific medical advances not withstanding) he’s potentially damaged his eyesight for life, which is a terrible and tragic thing and I feel for him and his folks, but isn’t it his fault? If a teacher says to a child, “Now don’t look at the Sun because it’ll damage your eyes.”, and they go ahead and look then surely that’s down to them. We all make endless mistakes as kids and learning and pushing the boundaries is all part of the fun and adventure of being a child. Sometimes it goes wrong and it’s always a shame when something bad happens to a youngster but that’s life. We should accept responsibility for our own actions (to a point of course).
Now what worries me is what’s going to happen because of this kind of thinking. A while back one winter there were reports of a school where the Headmaster had banned the throwing of snowballs because of the attached danger. There was also outrage in the tabloid newspapers when a different school head outlawed the playing of that most traditional of schoolboys’ game conkers.
Both of these events were probably preceded by a child getting hurt and his parents complaining. I hope this new development doesn’t peel away another layer of childhood, I also hope young Connor gets his sight back and his parents let him go outside to play and make loads more mistakes.
There was also news that in the next ‘Harry Potter’ book there will be two main characters killed off. This has caused a landslide of speculation in the press and just about every named character has been thrown up as a possibility. Personally I reckon it’ll be Voldemort (surely a given) and someone like Snape or one of the ‘lesser’ main characters like Neville or Luna Lovegood. There is the possibility that it could be Harry himself as J. K. Rowling has said that she won’t be writing any more once the series has come to a close, neither does she like the idea of a raft of fan-written books appearing on the shelves. Rightly so I think, he’s her creation and she should decide what happens to him.
Another news article that caught my eye was that 2/3rds of credit cards in Europe are owned by us here in the UK. We owe over £56 billion on these cards and that here in Britain there are actually more credit cards in circulation than there are people and we’re the only country in the EU in which that’s the case. Scary huh?
Other than an interesting morning of news reading, not a great deal happened today. I found a handful of jobs on the website of one of the agencies I’m on the books of that I couldn’t work out why I’d not been put forward for and I watched ‘Aliens’ on DVD.

Tea drunk: 5
News stories sniffed and shaken my head at: 4
Free Guardian wall charts now owned: 6