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.

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?

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.

OVERPAID PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALLERS
Less than one hundred days to the start of the soccer World Cup in ‘Seth Efricker’ and England have a decent team with some players who are world class, on their day. I wish them well, and they have a good chance of putting on an impressive performance, provided that they do not follow the typical path down which so many Scottish teams have run, and self destruct by imploding.
It seems that Tiger Woods is not alone in trying to sink a putt in the wrong hole; John Terry may score occasionally on the field, but his success rate off it seems to be equally impressive, as does Ashley Cole‘s. Why do ‘celebrities’ think that they can get away with it, do what they like, never get caught, and when they do, take out injunctions to silence free speech, and when that fails, after shunning publicity, call in the publicists to advise on how to get as much positive publicity as possible while limiting the damage in what is obviously a seriously flawed relationship?
England manager Fabio Capello is known to be a bit of a disciplinarian, and one of his first actions as manager was to clear the ‘WAGS,’ wives and girlfriends, out of the dressing room, training centre and hotels to minimise their disruptive influence, and a good thing too. Give them the Platinum credit cards and point them in the direction of the nearest designer shopping mall to keep them occupied. He has blamed the bad, off field behaviour of a few of his squad members on their huge salaries. Remind me, Fab, how much are you on? Six million quid a year. However, he has a valid point. Add to the huge sums the footballers are paid at the top of the profession, their lack of brains and common sense which seem to be compulsory in the job description, and it is a recipe for disaster. Throw in a queue of drop dead gorgeous, silicon enhanced, pouting Barbie dolls waiting for an opportunity to ensnare a big money footballer either to be her husband or as an opportunity to make money for her kiss and tell story in the tabloids, and these egotistical young men are going to stray, although, having totty flaunting provocatively in front of you everywhere you go is no defence if you are in a committed relationship; better to avoid places where you are likely to get into trouble. The behaviour of professional footballers, and celebrities in general, has such a great influence on the young, impressionable minds of kids and teenagers, and they ought to take responsibility for their actions. In the wake of Terry’s gut wrenching, stage managed, kiss and make up photo shoot with his wife, now rumour has it that Cheryl Cole has been persuaded to talk to her errant husband Ashley about a reconciliation. Somehow, she has been persuaded that she is partly to blame for the break up of the marriage. Another case of the victim becoming the guilty party? Yep.
Who knows; maybe she turned off the sex tap, but the simple solution to that happening is for the couple to talk about it and decide that if the valve is going to remain shut tightly, bonking someone else is allowed, rather than try to conceal it as a secret. Given my liberal attitude towards, sex, am I a pot calling the kettle black? No; I am not in a committed relationship. Once upon a time, in an interview, the gangly giraffe that goes by the name of Peter Crouch, and how I wish he could play for Scotland and give us a bit of height and skill up front in the goalmouth, was asked what he might have been had he not been a Premier League footballer and an England player. His reply? “A virgin!”
Yep, a man with a sense of humour and an understanding of the real world beyond kicking the modern, plastic equivalent of a pig’s bladder around a field for ridiculous amounts of money. Be honest girls; would you give Crouch a second glance if he was your gardener?
Nope! However, as a top footballer, he becomes very eligible, especially when you look at his bank balance.
Being a model and snaring your man is only half the battle; the biggest task of all is hanging on to him and not letting another Barbie snatch him away from under your cosmetically enhanced nose. John Terry; here are a few words of advice from a wise, old man for you, and any of your team mates considering copying your loutish behaviour. Stay away from expensive nightclubs where the paparazzi are only outnumbered by the scantily clad models with an eye for an opportunity. Instead, try sitting at home and talking to your missus while you put the kids to bed if you want to be daddy of the year. If a tart throws herself at you, walk away; like buses, there’ll be another one along in a few seconds, but don’t jump on her either! Understand this; if you misbehave in the modern age, you will get caught, firstly, because almost everyone has a good camera built into their phones and they know how to use them, so you will be photographed with your pants down, and secondly, your lover will kiss and tell in the tabloids. I am one of the few people on the planet who forgives, walks away and turns the other cheek; the rest of the world is not so forgiving, especially an aggrieved partner who has been humiliated in the media.
Portsmouth Football Club is in administration, the first Premier League club to enjoy this fate but surely not the last. Football clubs have learned nothing from the crash of the world’s financial markets, and they continue to spend as if the money they were using was printed on the office photocopier. Some of the major clubs are saddled with debt, fuelled partly by greedy owners looking to the money to be gained from television rights and sponsorship if they can stay in the big time, and partly by ridiculous salaries given to young men, who take on the status of legends in their own eyes and in the eyes of the next Barbie doll on the take willing to remove her underwear, assuming she bothered to put any on, and try and sleep with someone famous in the hope that she too, for about ten minutes, will be equally famous. Just as I predicted the economic crash, after studying forecasts by the few economists who had the testiculos to stand up and scream a warning, so too I am predicting the economic crash that will hit Premier League football in two to three years. One by one, the dominoes will fall, and it cooud be some of the biggest clubs that disappear under an insurmountable mountain of debt.
Sing along lads, “Three lions on a shirt….”