WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Just talking the other day about words and phrases that have changed their meaning over the years or mean different things in different areas. For example, back in the early 70s, when I was about ten, I used to take a tranny to bed with me at night. My parents were well aware of this and nobody would have batted an eyelid. Nowadays I'd have a team of social workers at the door!

Then there's the old Glasgow word 'dogging.' This meant skiving off school and was used by the teachers as much as by the pupils. If you did not produce a note after being absent the teacher would shout at you that you had been 'dogging.' If a teacher accused a pupil of 'dogging' these days he'd have to have a damned good solicitor.

Even in Glasgow there were differences. In Castlemilk 'smoking the beef ' meant smoking a cigarette all the way down to the filter. When I lived in Springburn 'smoking the beef' meant something entirely different. I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out what!

I'm sure there must be more!

BIG BRO BORE

Happy New Year! So that's it. It's all over for another year. Christmas and New Year festivities are over and the shops are stocked up with Easter eggs. It also means that it's time for Channel 5 to wheel out Celebrity Big Brother. As usual, they take a very wide view of what it means to be a celebrity and the house is filled with folk, most of whom we've never heard of. 

I would probably avoid watching it altogether but marriage, or living together, among other things, means that a man has to watch what his wife watches. Escaping into the bedroom to watch something else brings accusations of not wanting to spend time together. So, like it or not, I'll have it on the TV in front of me and will find it hard to escape.

This got me thinking; why don't they put folk in that we know would hate each other on sight? The usual rules would still apply; ie no fighting or violence, but the arguments and tantrums would be great! How about this for a line-up:

Abu Hamza, Roy 'Chubby' Brown, Gary Glitter, Esther Rantzen, Jeremy Clarkson, Peter Tatchell...

I'm sure there could be more but I can't think of any at the moment. Any ideas? You decide!

Oh, I'd throw Julie Burchill in as well. She'd have a breakdown trying to remember who she's for and who she's against this week!

A CAUTIONARY CHRISTMAS TALE

I suffered toothache over the Christmas period and had to take painkillers until I could get treatment. I managed to get an emergency appointment at the Dental Hospital, where the offending molar had to be removed. I went home, took more painkillers, and had a sleep to get over things. I awoke to a pain-free mouth and all my troubles over; or so I thought.

I realised that, during my invalidity, I had not made my customary visits to the lavvy. I won't go into details, however there might have been a Christmas Number 1 this year, but no Number 2! An examination of the packaging of the painkillers I'd been taking, Co-Codamol, elicited the fact that one of the drug's side effects was constipation.

Now, I thought I had suffered constipation in the past but this was on a whole new level. I drank tons of water to help alleviate things, which it eventually did. This did not stop me, however, from grunting and squealing like a stuck pig and at one point screaming out for an epidural! A huge load finally off my mind, I thought that was that.

Now, however, I feel as if I have been gang-raped by a herd of elephants and have to walk gingerly and not make sudden movements. Even coughing makes me feel like I'm suffering a prolapse! Part of me longs for the good old days last week when I had the toothache.

The moral of the story? 
Read the packet BEFORE you take anything!

NO MORE MAGIC!

Like a lot of other people, I'll be watching Doctor Who on Christmas Day. No doubt I'll enjoy it as usual but, somehow, it's just not the same as the good old Doctor Who of days gone by. 

What I used to enjoy about Doctor Who was that it was all science-based. The Doctor would not heed the superstitious ramblings of those around him and usually proved that there was a perfectly logical explanation for everything that was happening. True, the monster was usually some guy dressed in tin-foil or bubble-wrap but that was compensated for by great stories and good scripts. 

I stuck by the programme even during the terrible days when Peter Davidson was the Doctor. The stories were getting worse and the characters were dreadful; for example, some old geezer with a seagull slapped on his napper called The White Guardian. I stuck with it and things improved when Colin Baker took over. Then it all started getting silly when Sylvester McCoy became the Doctor and the stories started to get so that you had no idea what was going on half the time!

Anyway, through it all the Doctor clung to his belief in science and that was what the programme was all about. Not like nowadays. Practically ever series with David Tennant involved some kind of 'prophecy,' whch began to get a bit boring. On top of that we've had the Devil, masonic Daleks, magic spells bringing The Master back to life and changing The Doctor back from the tiny thing he had been turned into. To be honest, some of the storylines belong in a pantomime rather than in Doctor Who!

Yes, it looks better nowadays with CGI monsters instead of a lump of plasticene but they really need to stop being so lazy with the stories. Like I said, The Doctor always used to use science and logic to sort things out. Nowadays something magical happens, which is just lazy writing. 

So I'll be watching on Christmas Day but I'll be hankering for the good old days of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker!

LOVING THE ALIEN?

I can't be the only one that hates those furry alien puppets on the Argos adverts. Every time they're on I want to wring their scrawny necks! As far as I can remember they've been on the go for two or three years now and they still have the capacity to make me sick.

So why has a family of puppets got me riled? It's those annoying, twee, middle-class voices that get me. It's obvious that they're based on that programme 'Outnumbered,' a programme I've managed to avoid since it has started. I've seen one or two excerpts and trailers and that's enough to convince me that I'm right to avoid it. It's hard to dodge the Argos adverts, though. You can't turn over if you're in the middle of watching a programme!

Fans of 'Outnumbered' always go on about the girl in the programme; she's so confident and funny and such a character. Brats like that in middle-class families are seen as wonderful children and everyone laughs along at how clever and precocious they are. Such a child from a working-class family, however, is viewed as nothing more than a cheeky little sod! 

Such is our class-ridden society. I used to live in Edinburgh and when there was a rugby match at Murrayfield it was often best to avoid city-centre pubs. Drunken louts with posh voices would throw pint glasses around, grab women's breasts, trip people up, shout out obscenities and racial abuse and often fight with one another. Never did I see them thrown out, the police called or such behaviour reported in the press. If these were football fans it would be a completely different story. Football fans that behave in this manner are classed as hooligans, while with the rugby fans it's just high spirits.

You might think it's a huge leap from an Argos advert to class politics, but it's all part-and-parcel of the same thing. Get those middle-class aliens off my TV now!

 THE RANK GENERATION

There is a swing park near me and I was amazed that it is completely unscathed; no broken seats on the swings, no twisted chains, no muck on the chute and no painted slogans anywhere. I began to wonder if the teenagers in the area were all angels but soon discovered the real reason why none of them vandalised the swing park. They need it for their own kids!

This led me to think about teenagers nowadays. At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, which I actually am, it's not like it was in my day! In my teenage years, and well into my twenties, I, and most other folk my age, revelled in not having any responsibilities. All you had to worry about was money for going out. You handed 'keep' money to your parents and never worried about food, electricity, rent or any of the other things that 'grown-ups' needed to panic about. Whether you were working, on the dole, at college or at university your main concerns were drinking, smoking, records and going to see bands. Oh, and the opposite sex; but I never had much luck in that direction.

What is worrying about teenagers these days is that they are so boring! My parents used to get all worked-up about me going out with old clothes, held together with safety-pins and festooned with zips and chains. The music we liked sparked debates on TV and the papers were full of shocking stories about Punk Rock. It was great! Our parents understood nothing and we were never going to turn out like them, even though we did.

Equally, our parents' parents were up to ninety about Rock and Roll, Elvis, Teddy Boys. It was the end of civilisation. The same thing happened in the sixties with hippies.

The thing is that each post-war generation found a voice through their music and clothes and frightened their parents to death in the process. But now? The music's boring, the way they dress is boring and they're interested in nothing. We had things like Rock Against Racism; the hippies had the Vietnam War to demonstrate against. To listen to a lot of teenagers now they're actually riled about the kinds of things that our parents worried about: immigrants, dole-spongers etc etc. The sorts of things that old men that read the Daily Mail usually moan about.

I might be doing teenagers a disservice and there might be some just as radical and fancy-free as we were. But most of the youngsters that I've encountered, I'm afraid, fit perfectly into the stereotype that I've painted here!

REVIEW OF MIGHTY PETE AND THE SCHOOL BULLY SCHOOL

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You don’t need more than 10.000 words to send a great message. And Mighty Pete and The School Bully School is the perfect example of that.

I would recommend this book to kids and also for people of all ages, because it has an important lesson. And more important is easy to understand and very funny.

Here we got Pete a nine-year-old who has been bullied by a classmate and his gang. Bullying is a topic we all know and some have to deal with. Is really important to take the lessons that this book have and spread the voice.

After her mother finds a helmet which her aunt gave to him everything changes. In a few chapters we see Pete become a superhero. Something every child dreams once in a while.

This book shows us that we all have the power in us to change our situation; we only have to find the strength inside us and ask for help. It’s alright to ask for help and it shouldn’t ashamed us.

Pete finds that he can beat anybody because he has all the powers he needs and he can help others by speaking out. Bullies have to be reported.

As a future teacher is important for me to read this kind of books. And no matter if you are also a teacher, a mother, a father, an aunt, an uncle, a brother or sister, or a friend, you have to be attent for any signs of bullying.

I loved this book is funny, short, cleaver, and very enjoyable.



READ RUTI'S BLOG:  READING...DREAMING