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Written by Aoife Leddy
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Tuesday, 09 March 2010 08:13 |
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Motherhood; A lot more than the cooker of dinners, and the kisser of
scraped knees. She who is called “Mam” or “Mum”, or even “Ma”.
Often it is frightening in its intensity. To love another little human
being with such vigour that you would gladly commit savage acts of
violence to protect them from harm. At first, it’s all new and terrifying.
“What if I break it?!”, “Don’t I need a licence for this sort of responsibility,
or should I at least be made sit some sort of test.” Without even realising
it, in the first days, weeks and months, those ten little fingers wind their
way around your heart and ensnare it forever. Invisible ties will stretch
around the world if they have to, and can tug on heartstrings (and tear
ducts) as easily from 3000 miles away as the same room, the same chair.
Bedtime can bring promises of cuddles, of closeness. The day is for
playing and learning, too busy with bricks or paints to sit on Mam’s knee
and snuggle awhile. Bedtime though, fragrant after a bath, the most
independent stubborn toddler on the planet becomes an baby once more,
looking for cuddles. Perhaps to keep bed at bay, perhaps not, but always
one more story, one more sip of water, one more kiss. The eyes droop and
fists uncurl, and sleep finally comes. I watch him sleep a lot, even when
my own dreams are calling, I linger for another minute just to watch the
flutter of his eyelashes, the rise and fall of his chest.
Nobody told me I’d love him so much, I almost cry with joy when his
pudgy little hand grabs mine. I never knew that as I bury my nose in his
curls, it would become my favourite smell in this world. Sometimes when
I look at him, happiness so intense bubbles in my chest that it almost
becomes pain. Often, it is pain. Worry, about his future, if there will still
be trees and tigers and whales when he is older. Will he take after me and
rebel throughout his teens? I hope so.
Before I was given this wonderful gift, I didn’t appreciate my own
mother. Sure, she was someone who clothed and fed me, and educated
me, and loved me. Every mother’s day I dutifully got her a card and a gift
(usually dahlia bulbs, for some reason) and thought no more of it. Don’t
get me wrong, I love my mother as uniquely and unconditionally as any
daughter loves the woman that gave life to her. But now though, I get it. I
get the all consuming love that she has for all three of us. I know why she
wouldn’t let me stay out until all hours, or not do my maths homework, or
get a tattoo when I was fifteen. I am coming up to 31 and I am sure that if
my mother watched me sleep now, she’d remember how she felt about me
when I was small. Maybe it’s still as strong now. Maybe I should ask her.
This mother’s day mam, I’ll still get you a card and some dahlia bulbs,
but finally, finally, I understand what it’s all about. Thanks mam. |
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Written by Traci Burnett
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Tuesday, 09 March 2010 08:11 |
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A date I´ve been dreading is approaching; it means I
will have been without my Mum for a full year now.
Cancer getting one up, stealing her from me, my
Mum, my best friend and my big sister, even my
worst enemy at times! After so many emotions,
anyone who has ever lost someone they love will
fully understand. Rage, questioning, despair, physical
pain gripping your insides and twisting, and rivers of
tears! Being a Virgo, we like to have everything in
order, under control, but this was proving to be a
problem! We have to have a ´Thinking Time´ either
by walking, exercising, ironing even! A time where
your mind is free to wander. In this time we catalogue
and file things away in our mind. Things of urgent
attention to the front, things that can wait until
another day a little further back, things we now
realize were a mole hill, NOT a mountain after all!
They are even further down the ‘worry list’, but not
totally disregarded or dismissed! Yet this deep rooted
sadness didn't seem to have a compartment, a file, it
just sat heavy on my heart waiting for me, after that
initial split second after waking, when you actually
believe it happened at all, then WHAM! Its there,
physically hurting you a swell as mentally. So, what
should a Virgo do? There has to be a solution. Time
being a great healer is truly nonsense, (in my one
year’s experience of loss that is!) The more time
passed simply meant the longer it had been since I
last saw her.
THEN I FINALLY HAD A THOUGHT…
Life is split into chapters, the first being a young girl
growing up, being told to not be cheeky, get your
elbows off the table and mind your manners! (all
things to my utter horror I now preach to my own
children!) Then came the moods and spots chapter!!
Let’s skip that part…..
My first love, my first marriage, unfortunately not
to the latter! The birth of my beautiful son, and so
began a new chapter where it was my turn to be the
Mummy.
The divorce, then the successful, ( so far), second
marriage to FIRST LOVE! And so began another
chapter with another addition, my baby girl, and so
history repeats with the Mother-Daughter
relationship. However, through all these chapters,
spanning 37 years, my Mum was there to share in the
joy, wipe away the tears and always have the words
of wisdom.
I thought, maybe at 38 years of age, it is time to
break free, be my own woman, make mistakes and
learn from them, try to improve myself and Thank my
amazing Mum for everything she taught me, and
everything she did for me, and file her away under
the heading ´A wonderful chapter of my life´, there
for me to draw on 37 years of memories and a million
words of wisdom, just there for the taking, for me to
rely on any time of any day, while I begin the next
chapter….Whatever that may bring? |
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Written by Paul Mutter
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Monday, 08 March 2010 23:42 |
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A column which takes a second look at some of the items that have occurred in the current and recent news; an opportunity to pause and ... reflect
It’s only a game
Bill Shankly, one of the most successful
managers of the modern game was
quoted as saying, “Some people think
football is a matter of life and death. I
assure you, it's much more serious than
that.” Judging by some of the financial
figures that have been released
recently about football clubs in the UK
and Europe and their current debt
levels, it seems that Bill’s words have
come back to haunt the game,
although not quite in the sense he
intended. According to a report by
UEFA, the controlling body for
European football, it is the Premier
League in the UK and the Spanish Liga
that lead the way as far as indebtedness
is concerned amongst European clubs.
To put the Premier leagues position
into focus, the total debts of its clubs at
3.4 billion pounds, is greater than the
debt of all the clubs in the other major
European leagues, 56% of the debt in
the whole of European football. Spain
comes next and followers of the game
may not be surprised after Real
Madrid’s mammoth spending for such
players as Ronaldo. The Spanish debt
stands at 858 million pounds but this is
compared with total assets which are
three times the debt level at 2.5 billion
pounds. If you now look at the asset
levels of Premier League clubs they
total 3.8 billion pounds, barely covering
their debts. When the detail of
individual clubs is examined some very
worrying figures are revealed.
Manchester United has been in the
news recently with a group of
interested supporters wanting to
launch a bid to rescue the club from the
clutches of the American Glazer
brothers who, as they see it, have
saddled the club with huge debt levels.
This enormously successful football
club has an admirable annual turnover
of 91.3 million pounds but a total debt
of 716 million pounds, almost three
quarters of a billion pounds. Some fans
are so worried and concerned by the
state of the club’s finances that they
have started wearing the green and
gold colours of Newton Heath the club
founded in 1878 that eventually
became the Manchester United of
today, a hearkening back to simpler
times perhaps. United fans are not the
only group to be concerned at the way
they see their club being managed. Just
along the M62 a group of Liverpool
fans has set up a group called ‘Spirit of
Shankly’ whose aims are to oust
Liverpool FC’s American owners. There
has even been talk of both groups
getting together when the teams meet
later this month for a joint protest, now
that would be something, Liverpool
and United fans agreeing about
something! It does though
demonstrate the force of feeling about
the issue and many fans of different
clubs are finding it hard to come to
terms with just where ‘big business’ has
taken football, leaving the game high
and dry on top of a pile of mounting
debt. Not only the fans are worried,
some club owners are also coming out
and talking openly about the need to
take some action, with one suggesting
that the Premier League should
introduce some controls to prevent the
sort of situation that clubs like
Portsmouth this year and Leeds some
seasons ago have found themselves in,
broke, being docked points and
suffering relegation.
What has happened to the game? The
desire to succeed at all costs and the
willingness to pay huge sums of money
for the privilege are partly to blame.
Millions have been gambled on the
abilities of individual players and
managers, some have been successful,
many have not and some have been
downright disastrous. To some extent
that will always be the case but ever
more complicated loans, the
availability of finance and a lemming
like attitude are threatening the game
at the highest level. What Pele once
called ‘the beautiful game’ may need to
start paying more attention to Mr
Micawber
‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual
expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen
and six, result happiness. Annual
income twenty pounds, annual
expenditure twenty pounds ought and
six, result misery.’
A picture is worth a thousand words
Every year World Press Photo organises
the world’s largest and most
prestigious annual press photography
contest. The prize winners from the
competition are put together in an
exhibition which visits over 40
countries in the world and a yearbook
is published of those winning entries.
Apart from the competition and
exhibitions, World Press Photo is
concerned to advance developments
in photojournalism. There are many
categories in the competition which
attracts some of the finest examples of
photojournalism available in the world
covering a very wide range of topics
from those you might expect, such as
covering war zones to calmer events
such as Inauguration day in the White
House. All of the pictures share one
common aim and that is to
communicate a story, normally through
one picture only, because it is not just
what you see but what is implied
before and after that single frame as
well as the image itself that can be so
powerful. Each is a record of an actual
event, not something invented. Many
show the darker side of human
existence and that is often where the
strongest most compelling images are
found. Within such situations though
there are also lighter humorous events
such as the picture of three American
soldiers in a bunker responding to
Taliban fire in Afghanistan. The picture
is shot from behind the soldiers and
shows one, clearly roused straight from
sleep in his bunk wearing red and pink
pyjamas!
There are many pictures and
collections in the competition that I
could talk about and I urge you to have
a look yourself at
http://www.worldpressphoto.org but
one that I found particularly expressive
and impressive achieved a third prize in
the General News section. It is in many
ways a simple picture that encapsulates
so many issues. The photograph, by
Rina Castelnuovo, for The New York
Times was taken in Hebron in the West
Bank, Israel, and shows a young man,
an orthodox Jew by his dress, hurling
what seems to be wine at an old
Palestine woman as she struggles
along the pavement. A locked boarded
entrance nearby, of what is probably a
Palestinian business, has a Star of David
spray-painted on it. The callous lack of
respect by one human being for
another, the surety of youth in its own
wisdom and opinions, the barriers that
religion has created, all captured in one
frame. It is as if the whole of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict is summed up in
that brief fraction of a second that the
camera shutter was open to record the
scene.
Some of the winning entries are quite
harrowing, for example the stoning to
death of a man in Somalia and the
Bloodbath in Madagascar, reminders
that in many parts of the world it is a
fragile, thin dividing line between order
and chaos. Many of the images, for
example the pictures from a post
election rally in Tehran, make you
realise the other side of being a
journalist reporting from such
situations at close quarters. The
business of reporting on the news for
audiences around the world can be
extremely dangerous even life
threatening. 801 journalists have lost
their lives since 1992 and of those, 581
were murdered and 142 killed in
crossfire or combat.
Free thinking and free speech
The eminent evolutionary scientist and
author professor Richard Dawkins
created something of an internet
firestorm recently when he decided
that he would introduce what amounts
to a form of censorship in the forum on
his website. The problems arose when
it was proposed to change the website
and develop what he described as a
‘fully-integrated discussion
section...The new discussion area will
not be a new forum. It will be different.
We will be using a system of tags to
categorize items, instead of subforums.
Discussions can have multiple
tags, such as "Education", "Children",
and "Critical Thinking". Starting a new
discussion will require approval, so we
ask that you only submit new
discussions that are truly relevant to
reason and science. Subsequent
responses on the thread will not need
approval—however anything off topic
or violating the new terms of service
will be removed. The approval process
will be there to ensure the quality of
posts on the site. This is purely an
editorial exercise to help new visitors
find quality content quickly. We hope
this discussion area will reflect the
foundation's goals and values.
…….The aim of the letter is to describe
an exciting new revamping of our site,
one in which quality will take
precedence over quantity, where
original articles on reason and science,
on atheism and scepticism, will be
commissioned, where frivolous gossip
will be reduced.’
The old style forum was to be left in
place for 30 days to allow users to
archive any content they wanted, again
very fair but during that period it was
bombarded with a series of what can
only be described as foul mouthed
rants against the person of Richard
Dawkins himself. Fed up with this he
decided to close the forum to
comments earlier than intended
describing what had occurred as, ‘what
this remarkable bile suggests to me is
that there is something rotten in the
Internet culture that can vent it.’
Goodness knows how many forums
and discussion groups there are on the
internet, I could not even begin to
guess, and they can be a very useful
method of finding out information and
having questions answered. They can
also be a source of endless speculation,
gossip, falsehoods and innuendo that
can develop into cyber urban myths.
Speech and the written word can never
truly be free, at least not free of
implications of one sort or another.
With so-called free speech comes the
responsibility to use and exercise it
properly, within the law and with due
regard for what the impact may be on
those to whom it is directed. |
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Written by Laura Boyle
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Monday, 08 March 2010 23:36 |
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Dear Laura
Since moving to Spain I have been
reading your column every week and I
now wonder if you’d be able to give me
a free reading (as advertised in the
Coastrider). I have been very happy
since I moved here but don’t seem to
have made many friends. I split up with
my long-term boyfriend before moving
over to Spain so came over here on my
own with my 2 cats. I have tried some
of the internet dating sites but haven’t
met anyone on them who I am
attracted to. They are all too old or live
miles away (I am in my early forties.) I
am beginning to feel quite lonely over
here, the weather hasn’t been good for
ages and where I live is really quiet
(you could hear a pin drop!) I am
renting at the moment but have been
looking for an apartment to buy but
now I’m not so sure that I want to stay
in Spain. Do you think Spain is
finished? (as so many people seem to
think) Also I haven’t really looked for
work over here but think I need to do
something as Spain is proving to be
more expensive that I had imagined. I
don’t have many friends back in
England as when I split with N many of
our (so called) mutual friends sided
with him. I feel I’m in a bit of a rut at the
moment. Nothing seems to be
happening in my life and I feel a lack of
direction. I have always been a hard
worker and felt that I deserved a break
from the daily grind but now I’m not so
sure. Is it possible you could give me a
reading for say the next 6 months as
this will hopefully clear my head a bit
and help me make some decisions for
my future. Laura you are an Angel x W
Dear W
I get the feeling you were planning on
moving overseas with your ex partner until
things went wrong. I also feel there was
something to do with his work situation
which stopped him from moving with you
and I also feel your move happened very
quickly and the relationship ended abruptly.
I see you turning your back on the UK and
starting to make your new life here, moving
onto the next chapter of your life. Things are
going to start changing for you and I feel
you will start doing either a course or taking
up employment which will involve a degree
of retraining. This will break down the
general lethargy you are experiencing at
present. There are 2 men who are going to
be involved in your life in the not too distant
future. One will be fair and portrays himself
as the Knight of Cups, the other man darker,
who portrays himself as the Knight of
Swords. The Knight of Swords is a more
dynamic personality, someone who is
impulsive. The Knight of Cups I believe is
your ex. I feel you would like to rekindle
things with your ex but I feel there has been
too much said and done over the past few
months but this other man could be just
who you’re looking for - for the moment.
You will be mixing in new circles, you will
start feeling happier and more secure in
your life over here too. I do see contracts
being signed and I do see a new home for
you. You may well find that you are not
alone when you move house as the 4 of
Cups portrays a happy, joyous couple
skipping towards the house in the distance.
I have drawn you an Angel Card which says
‘Be grateful for the chance to learn while
living’
Hi Laura
I don’t know what to do next. I
invested some money in my daughters
business, buying stock etc., and now
she has decided that she is not making
enough money and wants to close it
down. I have tried reasoning with her
but she is adamant that nothing is
going to improve and that she should
cut her losses now. The only problem
is most of her losses will be my loss as I
helped her to purchase the lease,
helped her decorate the shop and
helped her buy stock. I have even been
working in the shop when she has been
too tired herself. I can’t see my way out
of this. I don’t want to fall out with my
only daughter and I can’t afford to lose
the amount of money which is at stake.
I have even thought of running the
shop myself but she would then want
me to buy the lease to enable her to
move onto pastures new. This has
turned into a very expensive exercise
and I cannot afford to lose this money.
Do you feel there is any solution to our
problem in the foreseeable future? T
Dear T
I think you have to look at damage
limitation here. You have lost a lot of money
so far and you can either continue losing
more or you can try and recoup some of
what you have lost so far. I don’t see there
being a future in this business, you feel
cheated and upset but spending good
money after bad is not really going to help
the situation. Also in today’s climate, I feel
you really need to have a burning desire to
even have half a chance of a business
working and if your daughter has had
enough she certainly won’t be putting the
necessary energy and effort into it to try and
make it work. I feel once you have made a
decision, then stick to it. Look at how you
can sell the lease on, possibly you can sell it
as a ‘going concern’ complete with stock.
Try and advertise it on the ex-pat forums as
there are still many people wanting to
follow their Spanish dream. A mature man
with a fair complexion is evident in your
reading followed by the Wheel of Fortune.
The Wheel indicates that your life will move
in a completely different way – what goes
up, must go down etc. You have been down
now so the only way is up! The Magician
indicates that you will have a fresh start so
this tells me you will find a way to resolve
your problems and I do believe this man to
be instrumental. There will be new work
opportunities coming your way which will
be cause for celebration. Your finances will
also be healthier as a result. Your Angel
Card says ‘In the maze of life, call for God -
he will guide you’
Dear Laura
Everyone is finding life over here in
Spain hard at the moment including
me and my husband. We have enough
money to keep us going for the next
few years but are worried we might run
out eventually. One idea my son has is
to buy up some properties as they are
so plentiful and cheap at the moment
and then rent them out as holiday lets.
I wouldn’t mind doing this as it would
give me something to do. I feel I could
run them quite easily but my husband
isn’t so sure. He used to work in the
building trade back home so would be
able to do the day to day maintenance
if anything needed doing and it would
give us both an interest but he feels he
is too old to start taking on the
responsibility of properties. He says he
came out here to retire and doesn’t
want to have to start work again. I
really would like to have a project over
here to keep me occupied. What do you
think? Thanks P
Dear P
Spain is still very much in a recession so I
think you should exercise caution here.
What you don’t want to do is to buy lots of
bargain properties, tie up all your capital
and find you can’t rent them out, or find
they lie empty for most of the year. I suggest
you mention the idea of buying another
property to people in passing and I think
you will be surprised as how many people
have a ‘spare apartment’ which is lying
empty. Many people buy something small
as a holiday home then decide to move over
here permanently. They then decide that
the apartment is too small so look for a villa
to buy. My advice to you would be to set up
a small property management property.
Make money out of finding tenants for
other people’s property rather than tying up
your capital and then having to find tenants
for your own. I have drawn you an Angel
Card too which says ‘Creativity is the power
to transform little into much’
Email your questions to
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