Waking up is hard to do. Alarming Alarms.

What time do you get up? And HOW the hell do you wake up?

Not being a morning person, I find it shockingly awful to wake up in the morning and get out of bed. My natural waking time is around 4:00- 4:30 am, but Satan can make hammer on my fanny* if anyone thinks I’m getting up at that time of the day, so I make myself go back to sleep and thus I am a cranky heavy-headed slug a few hours later when the alarm eventually goes off at 8am.

To combat the awfulness of this, my alarm is a soothing cello quartet that gently tugs me into consciousness with a jaunty optimistic tune. This is pleasing on the ear, allows one to swim slowly to the shallows of sleep and hey presto -0ne short slap of the snooze button later- I’m awake, if not entirely compos mentis.

The Paramour awakes earlier than me by the guts of an hour.  For some odd and entirely nothing to do with me honest reason, he programmed his alarm to scream last night. Yes scream, like a scream from a Hammer Horror film. A high-pitched blood curdling scream of sheer terror. Oh how we laughed, as we listened to it, last thing at night, awake, lights on, aware of the joke.

Fast forward seven hours and one blood curdling screaming session later and we were both flat on our backs clutching our hearts like a pair of terror-struck gobshites in the dark.

A very bad idea, and because it was so terrifying, the Paramour switched the bloody thing to off,  thus no snooze and thus a slight sleep in, which rather defeats the purpose of alarms in the first place, no?

Anyway, his search for the perfect alarm goes ever onwards. Me, I’m going to stick with the cello, for as ghastly as waking up is, at least being coaxed awake by soothing sounds beats the hell out of levitating upwards through the panicked realisation that the end was nigh and several of the four horseman were riding through the bedroom.

Alarming alarms, I am against them.

 

* Intolerable Cruelty

Oh Schadenfreude, how are ye.

If you, like me, occasionally enjoy watching a person hoist with their own petard, you might very well enjoy the following blog post.

Whitney is dead, Suarez is a knob and drama is vital.

Learning on Saturday night that Whitney Houston (48) had died was a bit sad. Not surprising I have to say, she’s clearly been struggling with a drug problem for some time now. But still, she was such a huge star and seems to have been around forever that it still gave me pause. Bloody drugs. Poor Whitney, whatever demons she had, it’s a sorry end to a talented individual.

But that wasn’t the real talk of the weekend, oh no. The REAL talk was of Luis Suarez and the hand shake that wasn’t. For those of you who don’t follow soccer, Liverpool player, Suarez, who recently finished an 8 game ban for making racist comments to Patrice Evra, Man United player, refused to shake Evra’s hand at the line up to the start of the game. Cue outrage, with EVERYONE pontificating in supposed shock that over paid  knobs behave like children. One Liverpool fan – no joke– actually compared Suarez to Nelson Mandela. Pundits were spluttering opinions, Kenny Dalglish, who almost savaged someone who questioned him about the incident in the post match interview, had to released the following statement - “When I went on TV after yesterday’s game I hadn’t seen what had happened, but I did not conduct myself in a way befitting of a Liverpool manager during that interview and I’d like to apologise for that.”  Suarez then released an apology yesterday and you could detect the lawyer hovering throughout it all.

Stuff and absolute drivel.  These are grown bloody men! The whole handshake thing needs to be done away with, what’s the point of it anyway? It’s not like it alters the way players behave in any shape or fashion. Stupid carry on.  Suarez’s future with Liverpool is now in question, and to be absolutely frank, it ought to have been when he was found guilty of making racial remarks in the first place. Instead players came out wearing t-shirts in support of Suarez, an odd message to be sending out don’t you agree?

Getting a dog, but not on Gingerday.

( a puggish Carrot Top, isn’t he dreamy?)

The loss of Puddy leaves a rather animal shaped hole in our domestic arrangement. Although there is a rather stinking stray cat called Broke Back Bob trying to muscle in, there has been talk in this household of getting a dog. The paramour and I are experienced dog owners and as I work from home it would mean there would be someone here 24/7. The talk now is what to get, if we get any.

Verily I have long wanted either a French Bull Dog or a pug. Frenchies are rare in Ireland, although I know of two excellent breeders. But being the sort of folk we are the likelihood is that should we take a dog we will most probably go the rescue route and rehome one.

But rehome what?

We have a good-sized enclosed garden, I am the sort of person who runs daily, and would take said dog with me. But we have cats, so that might rule out say, a greyhound –poor things are crying out for homes –though. A collie might be too much work, same for a springer, a Lab or Lab cross might work, same too with any other mixed breeds, we are not averse to Staffys, or any other ‘restricted breed’ dog wither as having owned a Dobermann before I know how much hogwash that particular law is based on.

I think we might go with an older dog. Puppies are adorable and all that jazz, but they also chew, wee and poo with abandon. They don’t like to be left alone without planning great destruction. Also the cats might get uppity with a pup.

Well, I shall mull it over. Our animals tend to be long-lived, so I want to be sure I have 10-15 years to devote to a dog, because if I got one at all it would be for life. The really pathetic part though is I rather like the idea of unseating The Bigger of the Cats from his current position of King of All He Surveys.

That might teach him not to use me a his personal pin cushion.

Bombastic Tony Humphreys says he didn’t really say exactly what he said.

Clinical psychologist Tony Humphreys last week wrote a mind-boggling article for the Irish Examiner about autism, the content implying very strongly indeed that autism is a myth and that children are starved of affection from parents and as such behave in a manner resembling autism because rejection of love is simply too much for them. That’s the general gist of it as I see it, but you can take a gander below and see if you interpret it differently.

“

A team of researchers at Cambridge University is currently exploring the connection between high-achieving parents, such as engineers, scientists and computer programmers and the development of their children. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, who is the director of the Autism Research Centre at the university, says there are indications that adults who have careers in areas of science and math are more likely to have autistic children.

In studies in 1997 and 2001 it was found that the children and grandchildren of engineers were more likely to be autistic and that mathematicians had higher rates of autism than other professions. What is shocking is that Dr Baron-Cohen and the team of researchers are one: assuming that autism is a scientific fact and, two: missing the glaringly obvious fact that if the adults they researched live predominanently in their heads and possess few or no heart qualities, their children will need to find some way of defending themselves against the absence of expressed love and affection and emotional receptivity.

After all, the deepest need of every child is to be unconditionally loved and the absence of it results in children shutting down emotionally themselves because to continue to spontaneously reach out for love would be far too painful. 

Children’s wellbeing mostly depends on emotional security – a daily diet of nurture, love, affection, patience, warmth, tenderness, kindness and calm responses to their expressed welfare and emergency feelings. To say that these children have a genetic and/or neurobiological disorder called autism or ASD (autistic spectrum disorder) only adds further to their misery and condemns them to a relationship history where their every thought and action is interpreted as arising from their autism.

It is frequently the case that it is when these children go to school that their emotional and social withdrawal of eccentricities are noticed, mainly by teachers, who themselves can struggle with how best to respond to these children. An unconscious collusion can emerge between parents and teachers to have these children psychiatrically assessed so that the spotlight is put on the children and not their adult carers’ own emotional and social struggles. Regretfully, the relationship contexts of the childrens’ lives are not examined and their mature development is often sacrificed on the fires of the unresolved emotional defences of those adults who are responsible for their care.

It is important to hold to the fact that these carers do not consciously block their children’s wellbeing, but the unconscious hope of children is that other adults (teachers, relatives, educational psychologists, care workers) that when they are emotionally and socially troubled, it is their adult carers who often need more help than they do. 

Indeed, my experience in my own psychological practice is that when parents and teachers resolve their own fears and insecurities, children begin to express what they dare not express before their guardians resolved their own emotional turmoil.

A clear distinction needs to be made between the autism described by psychiatrist Leo Kanner in 1943 and the much more recently described ASD (autistic spectrum disorder, often referred to as Asperger’s syndrome). The former ‘condition’ was an attempt to understand severely emotionally withdrawn children, the latter concept, which is being used in an alarmingly and rapidly increasing way, is an attempt to explain children’s more moderate emotional and social difficulties. Curiously – and not at all explained by those health and educational professionals who believe that autism and ASD are genetic and/or neurobiological disorders – is the gender bias of being more diagnosed in boys (a ratio of four to one). This bias is also found with ADHD. Surely that gender phenomenon indicates the probability that boys are reared differently to girls and that due to social and cultural factors boys respond to the troubling behaviours of their adult carers in ways that are radically different to girls. 

What is equally distressing is that, as for ADHD, a whole industry involving research, assessment, screening, education and treatment has been developed, despite the absence of any scientific basis or test for either the originally ‘detected’ autism or for the broader construct of ASD.

Sami Timimi, a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and two colleagues rigorously examined over 5000 research articles on autism and ASD and found no scientific basis for what they now refer to as mythical disorders. They outline their findings in their book ‘The Myth of Autism’ (2011). The conclusion of their in-depth studies is that “there is no such thing as autism and the label should be abolished”.

The authors are not saying that the children are not emotionally and socially troubled. What they are saying is – and I concur with them – that focus needs to be on the relationship contexts of these children’s lives, and to take each child for the individual he or she is and to examine closely the family and community narratives and discover creative possibilities for change and for more dynamic and hopeful stories to emerge for both the children and their carers.”

Now, as you can imagine, this has caused outrage and grief for the many parents out there who love their children with all their hearts and have struggled to get recognition for their children in the face of mounting costs and disappearing resources. Joe Duffy has run this story all week, calling on Tony Humphreys to speak with the parents, Humphreys has declined, saying the Joe Duffy show was not a ‘maure platform’ to perform on.

After a lady yesterday declared that Tony once associated cancer in children with a lack of parental imput and love I did a little googling out of curiosity and found the following terrific site, and through it discovered that Tony has something of a pattern for selective science, unsupported statements and parent blaming finger-pointing.

Today’s examiner contains Tony’s attempt to obfuscate what he said, in fact it’s an interesting double down on his original piece.
But this is what struck me most- ‘Dr Humphreys said he simply wished to show research that had proposed a broader examination of autism rather than focusing on it as simply a genetic neurobiological disorder.

“There are complexities and intricacies of family life that didn’t come through in what has been said.

“What I wanted to inform people of is that we need to look at children in a broader sense and look at every aspect of their lives, every relationship they have, at their social and economic experiences, rather than just focusing on a hypothetical, neurobiological defect.

“I wanted to point out that we should look at every aspect of a child’s life in order to truly understand why children behave a certain way,” he said.

So no apology for the hurt and pain he has caused, check. Take a look up post to the bold sections I have highlighted again. Out of curiosity, and I did google, is Tony Humphreys a medical doctor? And if so, is he an expert on Autism in any way shape or form. And if he is not, why again is he pontificating on the subject on a nation newspaper?

Has a war on alcohol commenced?

 

‘THE average Irish adult is drinking the equivalent of a bottle of vodka a week — or downing 482 pints of lager a year.’

Culturally Irish people are renowned as being fond of the ‘craic’ or alcohol as ought to be its correct name. We’re fond of alcohol and the banter and shenanigans that surrounds have a few scoops. When dignitaries visit they are photographed sinking a ‘pint of the black’ as a matter of form. Our social and even religious celebrations revolve around drink and our weekends are often a licence to partake freely.

On the way to the airport this morning I listened to a news report that suggest our overall drinking, while still high, is down 17 percent, but there was a sense of ‘we got it on the run’ to the piece.  A number of times over the last few weeks there have been calls for stricter regulations, there are calls to change minimal pricing, there are calls to ban advertising before certain times, to remove the connection between drink and sporting events. Everywhere you turn drink seems to be maligned.

‘You know, it might go the way of smoking.’ I said to the paramour, who snorted, muttered something about the Vintners being close to Mafia. But think about it, alcohol has been moved in supermarkets to its own section, away from the real groceries, off licences are closed earlier than before and are facing introduction of a law that forbids home delivery. Who knows what measure they will think up next.

Is this, do you think, the end of our cultural hooch association? Will drinking eventually be frowned upon the way smoking is now? Can you ever see it happening in your lifetime or will the current boo hiss hooch make the blindest bit of difference to our long-standing entanglement with alcohol.

The adoption question.

‘What about adoption?’

“If women do not want a child then why not have it adopted? There are people crying out for children to adopt in this country. They are even going abroad to try to get them, yet we have people going to England to have an abortion. The stigma of having a child out of wedlock is long gone so why not give the child a chance at life? There is also the fact that while the woman may not want the child what about the rights of the father? Does he have any say in the matter? How long will it be before an injunction is taken out by a man to stop a woman aborting a child that he fathered? Now that will really put the cat among the pigeons.”

‘They should have it adopted if they don’t want it.’

Avast people, behold the logics. These are some of the comments queefed out in relation to the X-Case being discussed, tired tedious arguments are taken down from high moral shelves, dusted off and sent fort, on a sea of stupid.

The what about adoption trope is an age-old gambit by those who don’t even understand the concept of ‘unwanted pregnancy’.  Women are fickle-minded hussies see, they don’t know their own minds, let alone their own bodies. Pregnant women are the avowed property of real people, fetuses, the religious, men, childless couples. At no point can they– selsfishly– make a decision what to do with their own bodies when lofty noble idea abound about what they SHOULD do if they still want to be regarded as people.

By fuck, NOTHING annoys me more than the ‘they should give it up for adoption’ as though carrying a fetus to term, going through labour, then handing it off to strangers was some kind of cake walk.  As to the twat who thinks men should take out an injunction to remind women that their bodies are not their own, well…what can anyone say to tautology of this kind.

Except- Women are NOT incubators for the childless!

Seriously, if you want to be taken seriously, drop the fucking adoption fairytale. Unwanted pregnancy is not about the Disney end, but all about the dark lonely journey into Mordor. It’s a journey women make, women, women WOMEN.

/snarls/

20 Years since the X-Case.

Bloody hell, I can’t believe it has been twenty-years since the X-Case. I remember it as though it was yesterday. I remember the fury I felt at the hand wringing and finger-pointing while a young blameless girl went through the wringer, how her views, her torture were dismissed so easily by so many.

And yet here we are, still exporting our problems to the UK, twenty years on. Still content to sit back and warm our hands by the moral fire while over 4000 women a year travel abroad to terminate their pregnancies. Not our problem, head in the sand. Cowardly.

 

I doubt Enda or his cohorts have the stomach to introduce legislation, but I suppose I could be wrong. We’ll see.  I wonder how many women travelled today. Poor women.

Regrets, I’ve had a few, but not about love and not on Gingerday.

I worked until late last night, dotting the occasional i, crossing the occasional t, threatening to throttle the Bigger of the Cats if he didn’t remove his hairy arse off my paperwork – to no avail I might add, when a pal sent me a link to a piece in the Guardian on ‘Regrets of the Dying’ and phoned not long after, slightly sqiffy I might add.

This friend has recently broken up with a girl he was destined to marry and in a fairly upsetting and heated argument she told him she regretted ever meeting him, and regretted that she had ‘allowed him to string’ her along for so many years.

The latter accusation in particular had buried under his skin the most and he wanted the Fatcat Oracle that is me to dig it to the surface. Had he strung her along? Was it obvious he was never going to tie the knot with her? Why would he do that? Was he that guy?

Well, I had no real answers, I cannot see into men’s hearts. My theory on love is the same now as it ever was; love is not a word, it is an action.  You love someone, you want to make them happy, you want them to be happy, you want to feel happy, you do everything in your power to make this want a reality.  Was he happy? No. Was his ex? No. Was that love? To my mind I’d say no. But like I say, that’s just my view, and he asked for it.

After I had thrown both cat and phone onto the sofa and retired to my reading chair, where the accursed cat then rejoined me, I couldn’t quite put our conversation out of my head. I laid down my book and pondered awhile on regret. It’s such a waste of energy, isnt’ it? A pointless exercise. What does it mean to regret? What can one do about the past, it’s the past, it cannot be altered or changed so why bother with regret?

I thought I had some regrets, I thought I regretted that I never studied to become a vet, but actually I don’t really because I like my career and it’s getting more interesting every year.  I used to think I regretted some of my earlier decisions in life, but it turns out I don’t, now I see that they were made honestly with the information I had at the time, pertaining to the situations I found myself in,  and had I made different ones I would not be the person I am today.  Frankly, as I totter towards fourty, I’m okay being me.

My friend is not okay being him at the moment, mostly because he feels regret and guilt, another pointless waste of time.  Mostly, I’d wager, because deep down he knows some of the accusations leveled at him are true and that arrow into his character is wounding. Too bad, he’s going to need to deal with it, accept the wound, let it heal. No festering.

Do or do not, Yoda warned a young Sky Walker, there is no try.  There ought not to be regret either. Make your decisions in life, take the outcome on the chin. Be sure, be firm, leave the past behind, hakuna matada, spread some ginger love, fuck regret. Fuck it right out the window. And on that note let us gaze upon the Ginger Stud Love Muffin so that  our Gingerday can get off to a fine start.

Twitter is GOLD when it comes to politics.

Fresh on the heels of yesterday’s indo piece, here by entitled by me, Magda, fact or fiction, we have Jimmy Harte doing damage ( control? oh no, not he)

 

My favourite? ‘Go Back to D4′

 

 

Oh by golly, nowt like a bit of D4ism to rile the troops.