MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Time for our annual Christmas rant so I hope you’re sitting comfortably. Did you notice the accurate apostrophe? This year’s BEST SELLING CHRISTMAS BOOK is a thing called Eats shoots and leaves (with or without commas) and is all about the humble apostrophe and other assorted punctuation marks. FINALLY we’ve moved on from wizards, elves and schoolboys. Great stuff. I’ve been advised not to buy it for my dear lady wife, so I kinda think it might be coming down the chimney on the 24^th.

I’ve been thinking about broadband. Jeez there are some crooks around. Tiscali is selling 100Kb+ as broadband (think two phone lines) and even AOL’s latest (so called premium) offering is only 1Mb. This means no streaming video, no competition for TV or cinema. DVDs need 10 and even the best compression still needs the full 1 Mb. But at least you can now use the phone over it. It’s not perfect yet but you’re talking service levels; things like availability and random bad connections; quality levels are fine when you get a good ‘line’. And all at a third the price of discount service providers so at least we’re moving.

But that’s not the rant. I’ve just been on a management training course so this year’s rant is about management. Wake up at the back there. The thing is; why don’t politicians ever manage anything?? We give them around half of all our money and they p**s it away (note the apostrophe type things), it’s insane. In the UK we throw out all hereditary peers (The Lords), which may or may not make sense, but we don’t think of anything to put in its place. Is that planning? Is that organised? We decide that 50% of our kids really should go to university but do we think about how it’s going to be paid for? No. And the worst of it is, nothing changes. Over 35 years ago we decided that grammar schools were elitist and a bad thing and instead we guaranteed that all workers’ children would go to school in working class areas. Great move. No choice. Kids with the greatest needs go to the worst schools. But not if you’re our favourite PM; and not if your name is Abbot. Actually Abbot is an instructive example for us all. She demonstrates absolutely conclusively that you can hold two diametrically opposed opinions in the same skull. Now many of us have read this stuff on management training courses, but we tend to think things like ‘psychobabble’ and ‘schizophrenic’, and move on. Abbot proves it’s true. And she’s not obviously a complete nutter, so it’s possible, just possible, that you might have the same spooky ability. Watch yourself. (Micros**t’s spell checker just offered me ‘neuter’ for ‘nutter’ which may or may not be relevant)

Total disaster. http://www.egg-prescott.co.uk has closed down. Actually I’d been thinking he was pretty quiet this year. He didn’t do any more good things. (Mathematical note, 0=0) but he didn’t seem to put his fist in it quite so often either. (STOP PRESS: extensive research on google has revealed it’s just renamed. Go to http://www.oshingler.clara.co.uk/egg/index.htm)

So what other news is there. Well, we’ve had a war. There never was much doubt that that was going to happen, not much doubt who’d win, and not much doubt that there’d be a major mess afterwards. But it’s still news. The fact that New York’s death rate from guns compares with that of Iraq doesn’t seem to stop the media concentrating on Iraq. Not sure why that is… I’m sure media moguls could explain that to me.

Men like Rupert Murdoch for example. You may have seen his son took over Sky (the only real digital distribution medium in UK). Of course everyone cried foul but then the papers reported a big argument between père et fils. So clearly he wasn’t just the chairman’s stooge. Which paper? The Sunday Times. No other paper. The Sunday Times is Murdoch’s.

Ok rant over. I’m sure you’re all agog to hear how the kiddiwinks are doing.

Stephanie is now in her 3^rd decade. Frightening isn’t it? Well into her third year of pharmacy studies at Trinity and apparently enjoying herself. She spent the summer in Newport, Rhode Island, working in a coffee shop. We were lucky enough to be able to get over and see her for a couple of days. The group of them were seriously well organised. A well stocked fridge (full of beer) and blow up beds. Nice to see the younger generation has its priorities right.

Sophie will be 18 in January and is away at university in Edinburgh studying landscape architecture. It’s hard to be sure from a distance but it seems the course is interesting and she’s working hard at it; she certainly got lots of hard work practice last year making the necessary grades, so she should be used to it.

Sebastian is in Junior Cert year (O levels). One might have expected him to be feeling a bit of pressure because of this but, as usual, it’s water off a duck’s back. He seems well into the rugby and is now 6 feet 4 inches tall. Yes, you read right, that’s 1.93 metres to those of you of a metric disposition. Scary stuff. Maybe we’d better back off on the growth hormone tablets a bit.

Time for me to add a bit to the rant. Our best news this year was Sophie’s excellent results in the summer. She had worked so hard, it was a relief for us to know that she would be able to go on the only course she wanted. She has been very keen on gardening since aged six, this summer she also convinced us to redesign our garden with a plan made years ago. The work is still ongoing but the results are very nice. Now I have only Sebastian left at home, it is strange and I have yet to master the art of cooking for two! I definitely need some smaller pans. Sebastian is a really pleasant teenager, he even takes the role of the man of the house when Peter is away. A few weeks ago we attended his prize giving ceremony as he received a merit prize, his teachers must also think he is doing well. Stephanie comes home regularly at the weekend as her boy friend studies in Cork, so I still cook for three hungry ones then. I cannot wait to have them all back next week, to have the noise, the chatter, the fights back for a few weeks. I am still working on and off as translator, I would like to go back to teaching to get out of the house and meet more people. I have sent a few CVs and I will see what they bring. Teaching jobs are not easy to get in Ireland. Hope you have a nice Christmas. Annie

     Peter and Annie Barwich

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