Fifty things to do before you're 11 3/4

I was really pleased to see the National Trust's recent debate about kids playing outside rather than turning into living sofa's, playing computer games and calling for cans for Coke. It saddens me to see how many kids are indoor spuds who never get to lick cow salt-licks or put sticks in the eye-holes of dead sheep, let alone trick their younger sisters into jumping into cow pats.

I therefore looked with interest at the NT's "Fifty things to do before you're 11 3/4". There were some obvious things - climbing trees, rolling down hills or going on a night nature walk. Yeah, I thought, these are things that kids should do - as long as they do the cow-shit thing too of course.

There were others that suggested that the team were beginning to consider cutting it to "45 things to do before you're 11 3/4" - such as Balance on a fallen tree or Throw some snow. Although I did think it sad that people need lists telling them that they might get something out of throwing snow, when their instincts surely tell them to ram piles of it down their mate's neck, but I did appreciate the effort behind it.

But then it all went wrong: attached to each suggestion was a list of health and safety rules. Rolling down a hill? check for recent evidence of livestock first. Wanting to eat an apple straight off the tree? Check it for maggot holes and wash it.

Surely the point of getting the kids to do more exciting things is to give them a bit more excitement in their sofa-lives - even if that includes scoffing the occasional maggot or rolling through the occasional cow-pat - and let's face it, what are brothers for if they're not to steer you into shite? It simply turns all the effort into more sterile bland activities that your mum might organise.

I instead offer suggestions based on my own experience: try and add health and safety rules to these... 1. Strap a dead hedgehog to your bike rack for a week.
2. Throw sheep shit at your friend.
3. Light a fire and cook a swede.
4. Be the first to try a death-slide set up by stupid people.
5. Get humped by the local Labrador.
6.Play any version of Chicken.

https://www.50things.org.uk/parents-area.aspx

How to Increase Traffic to your Blog...

How to Increase traffic to your blog  

 Writing a blog should be an art form, and in the same way that some artists are good and some rubbish, blogs will be the same. However, in the same way that some artists have loads of people wanting to see their work and others sit in dark sheds in their gardens resting their chips on stacks of masterpieces , the same is with blogs. One would question the point of writing a blog that no-one ever reads, so the quest is to get more people to read them.

I recently had a spate of trying hard, and in doing so I analysed my blog-readers’ statistics (HELLO CANADA! NICE TO SEE YOU FOLKS!). It was good to see that people all over the world are reading it and hopefully enjoying it, but I couldn’t work out how Ukranian people (HELLO UKRANIAN PEOPLE!) found it. If I could only work out how they spotted it, then maybe I could work on those elements – clearly that banner with “READ MY BLUG” tied to the tree in the garden would not be the source.

The referring sources were the usual suspects – Google, Ask etc. Then I looked at which posts people were heading for: for yesterday, it was the one on February 23rd, named “Smacking Bottoms”… Now, this had intended to be a sensible blog about the merits or otherwise of smacking our kids – maybe on the bottom, or maybe on the leg. What I hadn’t thought that it might be would be a means of “release” for people.

I thought about it. I felt a bit miffed, then I sniggered a bit at those people finding my blog being really hacked off. Then I thought, maybe, just maybe I could capitalise on these people…

So please excuse me while I increase a little traffic to my blog: Big Bottoms, Get Your Free Sex Here, Increase the Size Of Your Manhood for Free,  Pizzas for 99p.

And they say that the economy is in a bad state.  

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Save Water Now, Save Suffering Later…

One of my first proper memories is sitting on our step in my best red squiggly pants, in the drought of 1976 feeling hot. My mum was experimenting with cooking on top of the water butt, sun cream hadn’t been invented and the step I was sitting on was made of slate and was baking, but I was too hot to be bothered to move and so sat and burned to a husk.

                We had stickers everywhere at school saying, “Save water now, save suffering later” and I took them very seriously. The school took them seriously too as they were never washed off – I expect if I ever went back, they’d still be there. It was so simple then - if we saved water, we saved our standard of living for the future. Of course now, if we save water, we free up some fantastic dividends for water supplier’s shareholders: it doesn’t have the same impetus.

                I was in Peru for a while and stayed with a family on an island in Lake Titicaca. Everything was very basic and water wasn’t an exception. Drinking water came out of an open barrel that was filled by a dripping gutter from a dirty roof. Toilet water wasn’t an issue as one wee’d amongst the broad beans. I couldn’t work out the shower and so was happy to ignore it, but eventually even I needed to wash a bit.

                It turned out that I had to traipse for 300 yards through the fields, fill up a bucket and lug it back up again. I then had to find a medium-sized child and send him up on to the “shower block” roof where he would pour the water into another bucket. The water would then trickle down through a zig-zagged drain-pipe into the shower head. This was the solar-heating of the water. After I’d lugged three bucket’s worth up, the medium-sized child had got bored and had buggered off back to his goats and I decided that the lugging of the water was counter-productive as I was actually getting sweatier and grubbier with each trip.

I went into the shower-block, stripped off and slung my clothes onto the floor (no point in Peru in mentioning to the host that there were no hooks on the back of the door). I’d hoped that the time I’d spent dragging more water up the hill would have allowed the solar-system to do its job: it hadn’t. Freezing cold water poured out of the shower head over me and I gasped for breath. By the time I had lathered up, my three buckets of water ran out and I was left with a head full of suds and ice-cream headache.

The moral of the story was to grow my hair long, dye it black and put it into two plaits…

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