My Secret Garden

I have been following this case with some interest and was relieved that the judge found in the way that he did. Now of course in defense The New of the World came across as if it's involvement in exposing Mr Mosely's sexuality was up there with the Dreyfus Case and 'All the President's Men' as a landmark in uncovering entrenched and powerful corruption rather than the petty and sordid exercise that it was.
Tne News of the World's lawyer maintained that his enjoyment of sado-masochstic sex deserved exposing because it made him unfit for the powerful position that he holds.
Why?
The erotic games that people play providing there is consent and that the people involved are old enough are no-ones business but the participants. If the News of the World seriously believe that enjoying a good spank makes you unfit for Office then I would guess it has a campaign in hand to remove half of all mps and 90% of the judiciary! In fact, perphaps there should be a clause in job applications for one to tick, something along the lines of
'I confirm that I only enjoy sex in the missionary position with my partner and have never fantasised about anything that may be considered in any way deviant as defined by the News of the World'.

Would the Mosely expose have carried as much weight if his Father hadn't been who he was? Which begs the question that should we carry some genetic stigma for the crimes of our forefathers?

As Suzee Moon points out in her excellent blog Mosely is not the most sympathetic of characters but it is his betrayal of his wife that is the flaw in his personality and not his pleasure in being whipped by a dominatrix singing Lily Marlene!

Just past Bolventor and the Jamaica Inn the A30 plunges downwards to cross the River Fowey at the point at which it changes from its sinuous and sedentary progress through marshland to becoming a fast flowing moorland river and for just a month during the summer the low lying grasslands here are carpeted in a white blanket of cotton grass.

Upstream from here, below the cairned ridge of Brown Willy are a series of deep pools within the river where my children used to swim in the peaty but surprisingly warm water on sticky Summer's Days.

In education we are now always to be guided by the agenda that

'Every Child Matters'

What a laudable aim, when you read it gives you that nice warm feeling inside as if by agreeing you are already on the side of the angels and not to be thrown in with that dark brood of reactionary forces who want to drag our children back to some terrible past when all teachers were vindictive sadists and lessons were dull repetitions of facts learnt by rote.

Looked at more closely perhaps 'Every Child Matters' seems a little vacuous, something along the lines of 'Freedom is Good'. Does it mean, for example, that all children matter equally or that all children matter a bit but some matter more than others?

In practice it feels more like the latter. Some children in the present system do matter more than others and they are the difficult and disruptive because they swallow inordinate amounts of time of those that teach. Sadly there is also a group of children who suffer at their hands and these are the academically weak but essentially nice kids who share their classrooms. Maybe if their parents were more vocal then the situation would begin to be dealt because Heads fear parent power almost as much as they fear OFSTED but because these parents are not confrontational themselves and because they are Working class and lack the braying certainties that being a member of the Middle Class brings then they don't make a fuss and their children drift through education never quite fulfilling themselves because of course who could when the adult standing at the front of the room is engaging in acts of appeasement that even Chamberlain would have balked at.

To be continued