Write-Place

The next Wentworth Valley Area Assembly (Rotherham, South Yorkshire) will be held on 8th January 2009, at 4pm at Wickersley School and Sports College, Wickersley, Rotherham. The theme of the meeting will be "DEMOCRACY". This should be a very interesting meeting with the "new chairman" Cllr C McMahon chairing the meeting after the completely UN - democratic way that the current Chair, Cllr Peter Thirlwall has been ousted from his post. Cllr Peter Thirlwall had the full support of the members of the assembly (public and cllrs) and yet has been thrown out of his post by the "democratic" labour members of RMBC. When a motion is carried despite the support of the opposing party for the support of a member, and the complete LACK of support by the electorate ...something has surely gone desperately wrong with our system. Wake up Rotherham to what is really happening with the governing of our town !

Someone posed the question on a writer’s forum today about whether they have got a few too many unfinished projects on the go. She has about eight different things that she is working on at the moment. She likes “ diversity” she says – I am not sure if this is a deadly serious comment or not - but finishing things can soon become a problem, if we let it. Some people only do one thing at a time (men, I usually find – but that’s a sexist remark which has no place on a blog such as this !) It’s got to be good to have a variety of things to be thinking about, lots of ideas to work on, lots of things on the go. You can then take a break from one and return to it refreshed and ready to move on with it, That’s the theory anyway, I suppose. Some people write lists - on a short, medium & long-term basis. Prioritising things. Some may not happen, depending on circumstances; some may get completed before their allocated time. I think the idea is to stop your mind from jumping from one thin...

What a joke some newspapers have now become - now the Daily Mail online is even more pathetic than it's hard copy version. Following the report and pics of the "contrite" and "slimline" Ross after his supposedly feeling the "pressure" of his latest ridiculous and overly paid antics...Daily Mail online then posts immediately "Ads By Google...Prank Call to your friend, Prank Calls"and best of all "Want a job in journalism" ! The Editor needs a job in reality, I think.

Yesterday I went on the first of an 8 week "Condition Management Programme". I knew how the day was going to be - been there done it loads of times over the years on various study courses, training things etc, but sometimes you just have to "play the game". The first "activity" was "breaking the ice". I immediately said - oh, are we going to ask each other what animal we would choose to be ? To which I was told..no, no ! Its not that sort of thing ! Well it was that sort of thing, only we told our partners our fave food, film, who we would like to meet, where we would choose to be and then reported back our partners info. I know I am cynical about most things (and I really have done this stuff TOO many times) but still can't get over how others define us, or why we feel the need to define people. By just chatting naturally, we could easily have broken the ice, I am sure, but now I am "Brenda who likes salad, would like to be in her back...

In a recent pub quiz (in which I had the dubious role of being question master) one of the trivia type questions was this – A Boeing 747 weighs approximately the same as how many African elephants ? 25, 55, 125, or 225 ? Yes, I know – a rather silly question that not many people need to know the answer to, except perhaps someone who has the task of transporting a couple of African Elephants on a Boeing 747 – but this was a pub quiz remember. Anyway, great consternation went around the room together with a discussion on what one elephant might possibly weigh (Ok, there was also discussion on whether the question master had gone totally doollally, but that’s a different blog topic) Some people said they had no idea and couldn’t even give a wild guess. Others started talking about what could they relate the weight to - how many “average” men/women would be the same weight as one average elephant? Could we translate this into how many people would be the same weight as a plane and work it...

Think of the word house. Should the indefinite article before it be “a” or “an”? And what about “a historic event”, or should that be “an historic “ ? Discussing this issue (recently on Writer’s News Talkback) it seems that general opinion is that “an house” sounds quite wrong, and that we use 'an' before words that begin with a vowel - apple, egg, icicle, umbrella …..you know what the vowels are ….but also before words that sound as if they begin with a vowel eg. hour, heir, honest and others that begin with a silent “h”. Then there’s words such as uniform and unit, that clearly begin with a vowel but are not pronounced as such , so “a” is used before them. "An hotel" is still used on some occasions. Which to me always was and still is ridiculous. By trying to say "an hotel" we end up dropping the aitch, and it comes out as "an 'otel" which can't be right - unless you are acting in "allo, allo". I used to have lengthy discussi...

What do you do with a group of people who continually rebel against you for putting up a twenty feet high concrete wall just feet away from their home, preventing them from getting to their land, their work, their family ? Well you could cut off their water and their electricity when ever you felt like it, without their knowledge. Or you could burst into people’s homes and arrest them for some alleged crime such as throwing rocks at your soldiers. If they try to intervene you could shoot them at close range with rubber- coated steel bullets. This might smash their jaw, fracture their skull or blind them if you get them right in the eye. This is what Israeli soldiers did to a man in the Palestinian West Bank town of Nilin, 3 weeks ago. It is a miracle that the man is alive – losing his sight in only one eye is little consolation, I think. After an “investigation” Israel has decided that the soldier acted properly in firing the shots, when the man tried to prevent his brother from being ...