It’s been tough watching the news over the last few days. What with the horrific Baby P story, those two boys in Manchester and the Shannon Matthews trial, it does make you wonder what the hell is going on with the world. As Keanu Reeves memorably says in Parenthood: “You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car – hell, you even need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father.” Or, indeed, mother.
What I don’t understand though, is this obsession with apologies. From some time yesterday afternoon the focus of the Baby P story was that “Haringey hadn’t said sorry”. Now that someone has, that’s what’s being reported. Will them saying so make a difference to the families? The question is a genuine one, by the way. We’ve seen this in quite a lot of cases recently, and it goes from the cases where individuals are the victims, like Baby P, or the David Norris/Luke McCormick incident, to apologies for slavery or abusive priests, where thousands or even millions were affected. Put “apology” into Google News and you get reams of results, just in the last day or two. I guess I feel that actions are louder than words, and if I had been affected by something like this, my priority would be to see that something was actually being done about it not happening again. As I say, this is a genuine question and I’d be interested if anyone has any first-hand experience of this to share with me.
I’ve been asked to be on the national jury of the For Diversity Against Discrimination journalism award. Our jury meeting is next week, so I went through the articles today. There were quite a few entries, of varying quality, but I think there are a few potential winners in there.
We’re also gearing up for the EU Mock Council event, where schools will take on the roles of the different Member States to debate various issues. I’ve offered to help the schools that will take the roles of the Council Secretariat and European Commission, as I seem to be the only person in the office with much experience of going to Council of Ministers’ meetings (a somewhat dubious honour…!)
I missed my first OU tutorial last night to go to the BBC News channel for a live piece on the fruit and veg standards. It’s a real shame about missing the tutorial – when you’re learning a language, it’s important to talk it to people I think, and that’s not something I’m doing at the moment. Not that I can say very much yet!
Talking about the EU 