Nannying Robots

Yesterday was a bit eye opening. I was asked twice (by complete strangers on two separate occasions) if I am currently on benefits, and was also offered disabled facilities to make my life easier. Now, I’d like to pride myself in *currently having a reasonably fit and healthy physique (certainly not in need of any special treatment that I know of) and, although not doing the 9-5 thing every day at present, would always strive to do an honest day’s work, rather than spending all of your money. So what led to suddenly being branded as a needy individual borrowing money off the state, and in need of a bit of extra room and some grab handles in the toilet? Hmm, in my brief analysis of the aforementioned scenarios, I would say The Nanny State. Let me divulge.

In my current guise as a wannabe writer, I’m finding myself ensconced in front of the illuminated screen of my laptop fairly frequently and have, of late, been a little concerned about the health of my irises (and other eye-related parts), so thought I’d ask around to see how much an eye test costs. Popping into SpecSavers, I was quoted the going rate; then swiftly informed that, on benefits, I was entitled to a remarkably reduced fee. Great information for future reference maybe, but not that informatively useful for me. Then, just five minutes later, as I re-enacted self-same scenario in a competitor opticians, I am again asked if I am on benefits, as they can offer me a great deal. Slightly concerned as to what message I was giving off in the nature of my questions, I puzzled a little over the immediate assumptions of my unemployed status and my benefits drive. Just because I was not seemingly “at work” at 2pm on a Tuesday, and didn't have kids in tow or a blue rinse or pension, does that automatically mean I am therefore unemployed and (even more stereotyping-at-large) therefore claiming benefits? Why, even if unemployed, should it be assumed that I automatically ask the country for financial help, before bothering to earn money myself? One of the reasons I think that perhaps some people who were sharing the high-street with me yesterday afternoon (similarly not playing the 9-5 game today) could perhaps be claiming benefits is because it is made so darn easy to do so.  It is even branded as the ‘benefit’ or ‘profit’ of being unemployed. (Before you start getting nervous in your seat, this entry is not a rant about the benefit scheme of our country; I just need to refer at times to make a couple of analogies...)

A friend flippantly commented to me when I got back from Tanzania that I should claim benefits whilst waiting for the end of the school holidays; getting housing and unemployment aid to help me out for a while. The idea was a joke – I am, after all, perfectly capable of working and making my way in the world. Plus, there are a gazillion jobs out there in any number of directions, should I need to find extra income, and I would not for a second wish to rob the country of its funds, when the government can do a good job of spending it themselves. Shockingly, when my pal went to visit Mr Google to jokingly find out more, it transpired that I was indeed completely legitimate to receive aforementioned funds should I wish. Utterly bonkers. And so it got me thinking, again, about how much this country is pandering to its people; creating the Nanny State that we are ensconced in and making life far too nurtured and cared for. (Please don’t get me wrong here; I am not saying that benefits are a negative for so many people genuinely in need, but what I am saying is perhaps they are being dished out a little too merrily).

These thoughts also link to the other bizarre assumption made about me yesterday; that I was disabled. I went for a cup of tea after my optical investigations (totally revelling in a not-at-school-this-afternoon moment) and, when inquiring the location of the toilets, was told that the “disabled facilities” were at the back of the shop. When I asked where the standard Ladies was, I was told that “unfortunately” it was upstairs. Now, just to clarify, I had not gone for a brew on the ground floor of a skyscraper. I could, in fact, see the lady silhouette-symbol shining at the top of the five little stairs to the right of me. What, then, had made this lovely young lass think I was in some way disabled? Well, I can only assume that, being clad in my granny-stocking arm sleeve (the flesh coloured bandage I have to wear to control Lymphoedema symptoms), her attention was obviously drawn to the fact that I had some sort of arm-ailment. And, as the official Nanny State terms decree, one must always make sure that all elements of customer backlash are covered, and all protective employer elements fully impacted. Therefore, to avoid the possibility of a potential suing in the future when, unable to climb the five steps on my hands (as what other reason was there for my body to look like it couldn’t make it upstairs??), I turned the tables and took Mr Costa Coffee to court for not offering me toilets to suit my medical needs; the best option is to offer me the disabled facilities.

Ok, you may argue that I am taking both these mad moments to the extreme and reading far too much into people’s reactions to me yesterday. Maybe I was just giving off a slightly dodgy vibe (admittedly I have had elements of the Littlest Hobo hovering about me of late…) But the point remains that we are being more and more pandered to; wrapped in cotton wool and not allowed to just deal with life, and as a result, life is getting harder and harder to live as individuals.

In my opinion (poured out liberally in huge dollops all over today’s blog post), our country is suffering the problem of over-protection; a branding that has been surmised by that well known phrase: The Nanny State. We are becoming a nation of wimps and wet blankets because the world around us is too scared to allow us to take risks. Health warnings about the danger of heat on cups of tea; just in case we burn our lips when sipping a hot liquid. Announcements on the underground when it’s hot that, ironically, “It’s hot today, make sure you drink lots of water and keep cool…” Risk Assessment madness infiltrating schools across the country: playing with conkers and throwing snowballs ranked on a par with juggling machetes and eating glass, thus earning them both the heinous crime-status of “BANNED”. This hard-to-believe-but-very-true picture below was in the Guardian a while ago when this ludicrous furore first started.

I remember in my previous teaching post, at a school in Bath, wanting to take my tutor group on a picnic on their last afternoon of school to the bottom of the school grounds by the lake (it was a pretty lush school).  I had to fill out a risk assessment form to be granted official permission. Having huffed and puffed my way through something in the region of twenty five mind-numbing questions about who, what, where, when, how, why, why not etc, my risk factor came back as “Extreme”, resulting in me not being allowed to take the kids out. Now, the picnic spot was about 100 yards from the school building, on school grounds, in daylight, with responsible adults present. But it seems that the risk from drowning in lake, choking on sandwiches, inhaling too much pollen from flowers, dying from random nut allergies (despite no nuts being invited), falling down the grassy bank, being stung by bees, attacked by badgers and potentially self-combusting from too much excitement meant that we had to have it instead sitting on the classroom floor. Serene.

I opened a packet of nuts a few weeks ago that had written on the packet: May contain traces of nuts. I went to the station yesterday and there were four announcements in the space of possibly thirty seconds to MIND THE GAP. I did.  Notices on the escalator to not run; notices on the taps in the toilets to wash your hands; announcements on shop windows to keep my mobile phone hidden away from potential thieves lurking in the area. The more the world around us closes ranks and limits the freedom of having common sense, the more robotic we are being made to feel. Instruct, compute, respond. The ability to actually get on with things yourself; to just be and do is being eradicated and a trust issue is emerging. Society no longer trusts us to live without giving us help. It does not trust us to get a job so it gives us money instead; it does not trust us to not sue people for just doing their job, so it gives us every clause and small print to cover tracks; it does not trust us to not burn ourselves; to not slip, or choke, or get too hot, or cold, or allow our little children to play with snow in a happy way or even (this I find so hilarious in its madness) run in the playground. “Walk at all times when playing children, it’s much too dangerous to have fun.”

More and more these days, we are simply not to be trusted. And, as a consequence, we are perhaps losing trust in our society around us, as society no longer trusts us. The Nanny State is growing stronger and closing in and we are being asked more and more to adopt a robotic state of controlled existence. Yet disappointingly, in this state of pampering, we are not being cared for by nannies such as no-nonsense Mary Poppins or that lovely dog from Peter Pan; oh no...

...our nannies are men in suits who love ministering and bossing and ordering and filing and form filling and box ticking, and don’t really enjoy the squirmy little people they have to keep in line every day. How best to get the country working and ordered and safe? Treat us all in the same way; push us into boxes and keep us quiet.

Click for a little ditty

When I think of all the places I’ve been and the travel I’ve done in non-nannying lands, I feel very liberated. I would not have seen and experienced half of what I have cherished on my travels, were Risk Assessments in operation. One of the happiest memories of all my travels is a day spent with friends in Cuzamá (a remote area in the Yucatan region of Mexico) visiting some idyllic cenotes in the rainforest. We awoke early and squeezed on a “colectivo” (over-crowded mini-van) that drove us out to a small town in the middle of nowhere. From there we jumped onto rather wonderful bicycle-taxi; the drivers whizzing us off through the dust and emptiness into goodness knows where.

Fifteen minutes later, we arrived in a dusty square at the edge of a forest, with some tired and rather thin looking horses chilling out in the shade standing next to some old and rusty train tracks running into the forest.

Attached to each horse was a plank of wood on train-wheels and a man sitting holding the reigns. We clambered on and wobbled our way into the depths of the forest.

After an hour of the most serene and surreal travel through the tracks, we stopped randomly. Not quite sure what was there, I suddenly noticed a small hole in the ground, with the tips of a wobbling ladder poking out of the top.

A nerve-wracking clamber down the rusting rungs, and a world of beauty and magic opened itself up to us.

The rest of the day was spent visiting other cenotes (water holes) hidden in the depths of the forest and swinging like Tarzan from fraying ropes into the cool turquoise waters. Unbelievable. And exquisitely unforgettable.

Let’s just imagine for a second that self-same day happening in the UK…

...Actually, that’s quite impossible to do; it would have been shut down from the very beginning; Point A being a massive infringement of health-and-safety rules, as the mini-van would have been deemed over-crowded and unsafe for the road (never mind broken-ladder ville at point F…) Risk factor 10 billion, a red-tape no-go zone; natural beauty and life-long memory shut down.

I grew up on a farm, eating worms, mud and a whole heap of other germy items (don’t worry, my parents fed me real food as well). Point being, though, that now I have a sturdy stomach and a fairly dandy immune system to boot, plus a relatively sane and rational sense of fear and danger. Poor kiddies in the UK nowadays are being told by The Nannies not to be allowed near germs, or danger, or mud and worms: I have even discovered that there are, on the retail market, crash helmets for babies to wear when learning to walk to prevent them from banging their heads… Not sure where to even start with commentary on that one.

We, as humans, are all utterly unique in our ways, our directions, our talents and our thinking. And yet governments are pushing us more and more to mould us to be the same; a mono-culture, with the rest of the “developing world” encouraged to follow suit and copy our fine ways. Yet, I have to wonder how much wisdom is emerging from our Nannies. Mr Gove is a fine example. King Nanny of the nurturing of young minds and future opportunities, I worry about his credentials and his thinking. Nanny Gove’s latest educational master-plan for educational enlightenment that emerged last week is a troublesome example. He plans to not allow students to leave school until they take with them a GCSE Grade C in Mathematics and English. Here is a wonderfully brilliant new bonkers idea. Make everyone in the country leave school with the exact same qualification. Forget the fact that:

a)    It is not going to do anything to improve the nation’s literacy and numeracy, as you can quite easily pass GCSE English without needing to spell or read and write with any great skill or fluency (yes, sadly that is true).

b)    The gaining of skills in specific areas of expertise is fundamentally irrelevant to all those people in society who simply do not need to use these “skills” or qualifications for what they wish to do in life. Surely the whole point of school is to learn what you are good at or not good at and use that knowledge to shape your journey...?

c)    If the whole country gets the same level of success, does that not somehow remove the level of success? I mean, if you can’t fail, or are not allowed to fail (e.g. everyone has to get a C, which is a pass), then surely a pass means nothing as the scale of success has simply dissolved?

d)    Why do we all need to be judged as having the same mental abilities when our other abilities are not taken into account?

e) I could go on…but I’ll save it for now.

Whenever I read of new harebrained schemes to “develop” education, I wonder whether our Nanny Gove is in fact duly qualified for the ultimate nurturing post of tending the nation’s children. After all, the ministers in parliament are excellent ministers, very good at ministering yes, but how much nounce do they have in the areas of “expertise” they are in charge of maintaining, when they so frequently fluctuate between posts of specialism? And why is it that they are more and more intent on nurturing our children to all turn out exactly the same? A robot-ville future awaits.

I am reminded through these thoughts of a lecture I heard recently called The Danger of A Single Story; how the world is told through western media just one story about Africa and Africans, and how it is repeated over and over to the point of wiping out the ability to expand the mind to allow other concepts to enter.

The Single Story

The Single Story: branding an entire continent with the same brush, thus eradicating individualism and uniqueness and other versions from existence. What is happening in this country has gone so far the other way, that ironically we are now actually doing the same. There is so much anxiety now about making sure we are catering for every unique and decipherable element of a person’s quirks and problems. Everybody and everything is catered for and cared for and worried about and insured against to the point that nothing can just be outside of a known and controlled state. The Nanny State has wrapped the cotton wool so tightly, we can no longer breathe and exist as free, quirky individuals; we have been branded. Now, maybe ours is not the Single Story, but the Sixty Million People Moulded into A Single Soul Story. It amounts to the same thing: we are no longer trusted to live and therefore are losing trust in our own ability to live. We are being moulded into a nation of robots, no longer allowed to think for ourselves.

In other news…

Outside of these frustrated thoughts, I’ve had a merry few weeks. A move to an idyllic country cottage in Bury St Edmunds brought with it a delightful week of sunshine, country walks with kindly neighbours and their dogs, and moments reminiscent of scenes from the film The Holiday (alas sadly lacking in a dashing Jude Law knocking on the cottage door in the middle of the night. Shucks.) Sadly the plan to live there for a while was just not geographically and transportationally practical, so the bag was packed once again. After popping back to the parents’ for a weekend to revel in some incredible sunsets

a week followed ensconced in my friend Lucy’s house in Christchurch; working in schools in the south, taking daily walks on the marshes and developing new programmes for Bright Green Enterprise (as well as re-writing the website. Check it out; it’s looking snazzy.)

Bright Green Enterprise

I am now in the beautiful depths of Egham, Greater London; house-sitting for some friends until I nip off to Tanzania again in the new year. Bag finally unpacked (hip hip hooray!) and the promise of the same bed for the next few months firmly established. I realised the other day that I’ve slept in 19 different beds since I got back from my travels (no, I’ve not taken up work as a Lady of the Night; I’ve simply been catching up with friends and family who happen to have scattered themselves all over the place.) So all is good, as I sit here merrily tapping, watching the parakeets flying around the garden and the apples falling off the tree (health and safety hazards ahoy, so many things that could bonk me on the head falling from trees in this garden!) Not a bad view for a spot of literary inspiration as I sit here working on my book. My only concern is that I don’t have anyone here telling me what to write…