ON NOT BLOGGING

I am pretty sure that hardly anyone purposely visits my little blog anymore. A lot of the bloggers who used to come here have packed up their own blogs and disappeared, and those who are left have no reason to come here anymore, seen as how I don't post anymore. So here's a post for anyone who pops by, because I feel I owe the blogosphere that at least.

After five years, I seem to have run out of things to say. Nothing sparks that thing off in my brain to make me want to blog anymore. I can read a newspaper, watch the news, observe the ebb and flow of life, and I just don't get that need to record my thoughts anymore.

I can do a Twitter. But Twittering is taking a quick snapshot of life, requiring nothing more than an ability to record a passing thought or action. Blogging requires a lot more of you and I don't have that to give since the kids came.

Also, I don't know quite who I am at the moment. I seem to have assumed the role of someone who is a parent, but I don't know who that someone is. I have thought that I could change the content of the blog from topical to personal. The intense waves of emotion that keep crashing into you post-adoption are something worthy of record. It is unlike any other experience to be had. But this blog doesn't feel very anonymous anymore and I feel it wouldn't be fair on the children somehow.

So, what to do. I don't know. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that this blog saved my sanity when I went through a bleak time and over the years I have been introduced to some great people and have learnt a lot. I love my little blog. But, clearly, I'm not blogging anymore.

I am working on a website where I'm putting up some of my creative writing, and if I ever get that in good enough shape, I'll let you know.

Other than that, I suspect that the rest is silence.

SNOW BLUES

Well, my snow post for 2010 wasn't worthy of the mini ice-age that the British Isles have just experienced. Especially as I had really gone to town in 2008, here, here, here and here.

Between you and me, I think I have gone off snow now that I have children, which is the exact opposite of how it should be.

This is because the snow caused me to worry, which is the main emotion I experience second only to guilt since becoming a mother.

I worried about the amount of school the kids would miss, because they have already missed so much school in moving from their Foster Home to our home. I worried because the kids get anxious when there is a change to the routine and we couldn't establish a routine post- Christmas holiday because we didn't know from one day to the next if they were going to be in school or not. I worried because we couldn't get out and see other people and so we were all starting to crowd in on each other as the two week holiday extended into a possible third and fourth. We really could have done without the coldest winter in 30 years coming along just now.

Now though that I don't have to spend twenty minutes scraping frozen snow off the car in sub-zero temperatures and risk death slide scenarios every time I need to leave the house, it's feels like I've been without arms and they've just grown back or something. With the thaw life just became easy and I feel like I can do it again.

I am ignoring the fact that more snow/sleet is predicted for Wednesday and started filling up my diary with appointments that have been two weeks in the waiting. I usually hate making phone calls to arrange anything, but this morning it was a relief to be able to get on with things.

I hate knowing that I have been so incapacitated by a bit of extreme weather. I wonder how that can be with recent events in Haiti, which should surely have put things in perspective for me. But it didn't. It just made me feel sad and helpless in addition.

DEC appeal here, if you can afford to give.

SNOW!

A band of snow is moving south from Scotland.

Country grinds to halt in 3... 2... 1...

MERRY CHRISTMAS

The kids are off school so I'm not getting much Internet time because the moment I get the laptop out the kids put away whatever they are doing, mope about, and mumble "I don't know what to do" over and over. A none too subtle ploy to get me to let them go on the CBeebies website.

I quite like being a mother, but I don't like the parenting. It's like being a Manager but with the knob turned up +5000 and in your own home. And children are really random. They like baked potatoes one week, scream their heads off when you give it to them the next week. They refuse to put coats, hats and scarves on before going out and then when they're out complain how cold they are. They happily ignore you engrossed in their play until you take a phone call / pop to the loo / start to read something, when suddenly they need nothing but oxygen and your immediate and absolute attention. Parentland - it's quite a culture shock to be here.

It should be quite an exciting time, our first Christmas with our children, but, tell you the truth, I feel quite sad tonight. These children have known us for two months and so are spending their Christmas this year with virtual strangers, even if they don't appear to see it that way. It should never have had to be like this for them.

Here's to us all getting to know each other in the coming New Year.

Merry Christmas everyone. Have a good one.

CADBURYS

If ever there was proof that the human race is not on a continuous course towards a better world it is the current story that Cadburys are cowering in a corner from big bad confectionery company, Kraft (who?).

Cadburys, who need no introduction to any person British, was started in 1824 by a family of Quakers. Chocolate was ethical you see and no Quakers wanted to make money out of anything that brought any harm to the world.

Cadburys not only brought us all chocolate, they gave their workers exceptionally good pay, conditions and pensions as well as building for them Bournville Village, which is still there not far from where I live. The people of Bournville had parks built for them, boating lakes, football, hockey and cricket pitches, bowling greens and swimming pools, as well as beautiful houses to live in the arts and craft design, with large gardens so that the occupiers could grow their own fruit and veg.

It was important to the Cadbury family that the emotional and physical well being of their workers, and they people they lived amongst, were taken care of. They cared about the quality of the lives of the Bournville residents.

The whole story is like a fantasy of mine where I come into lots of money and turn West Bromwich one of the best places to live in the country. At the very start I'd take a wrecking ball to the ridiculous waste of public money The Public and give the town its bloody swimming pool back, stock its library and bring back the heydays of Dartmouth Park.

Now although Cadburys can no longer be considered a Quaker company, it does still treat its workers well and the idea of a nasty American "snacks" company coming in to snatch it up so that it can be BIGGER and SELL MORE and MAKE MORE MONEY, as if there was nothing else in the world worth aiming for, could fair make one weep.

CLIMATE CHANGE CONFUSION. AGAIN

I've mentioned here and here what my confused thoughts are on the whole debate about whether or not humans are responsible for the earth's current changing of climate.

I am confused even more at this latest story that scientists at the University of East Anglia manipulated data to support the theory of man-made climate change.

A few e-mails taken out of time and context should not wipe out all the data, research and accumulative opinions of the scientific community about the cause of this phenomena. But in terms of political will and public faith, this news might be cataclysmic.

I don't know whether the leaking of these e-mails is all sound and fury signifying nothing or if it is the first blast of evidence that will show us that a small number of trusted and powerful scientists, with good or bad intentions, tried to dupe the world into believing something the evidence did not support.

However, I don't believe that asking why the earth's climate is changing is as important as the fact that it is - and that we need to make our environment capable of dealing with extreme weather. As the recent floods in Cumbria have shown us, the readiness is all.

RBS BOARD IN DENIAL ABOUT HOW VERY CRAP THEY ARE

The Guardian reports that:

"RBS said it had reluctantly agreed to government demands for control of its bonus pool, but ministers would limit its ability to make profits if it encouraged staff to leave for rival banks where bonus controls were absent. According to some reports, which the bank has not denied, its board has threatened to resign if the government slashes bonuses."

It's board has threatened to resign? Oh no! That must not happen! We can't have these incomptetant, narcisstic, greedy, reckless individuals leaving a major British bank ... er... erm... oh.

IN WHICH SCRIBBLES SOLVES THE WORLD'S ENERGY CRISIS

So, it would seem that the world is running out of oil a tad quicker than we were lead to believe, yet we are still dithering about wondering whether we should go coal, nuclear or wind as if we had a few more centuries before we needed to make up our minds. At this rate we'll be building the new power stations in the dark with hand tools.

I have a better idea however. Why don't we harness the natural energy of the planet's children? Have you ever studied one? They can go on and on and on and on, with hardly much more than a bowl of coco pops, a sandwich and a few turkey dinosaurs and french fries to fuel them up.

In a futile effort to 'wear our kids out' (every parent's dream, I find) we've been taking our kids to soft play areas - huge jungles of slides, ropes and playframes - and allowed them to go mad for a few hours. But it does nothing. It hardly takes a sip of their oceanic energy reserves. They come home and they want to play bowling on the wii. Whilst Mr Scribbles and I can barely keep our eyes open during tea-time, they want to play after they've eaten, with cars, with board games, with marbles, with dolls.

They don't even need sleep. I feel myself sliding down the slip-road to the land of nod even as I read Alice in Wonderland to them in bed, but their little heads won't even stay on the pillow and they want me to read more and more and more and more.

Instead of spilling this precious natural resource in the soft play centres of the world, why aren't we harnessing it? We could build special places where the kids are wired up to energy collecting machines as they run around "playing" whilst the parents get to sit nearby reading newspapers and drinking coffee (just to keep a eye on things). These centres would be cheaper to build than coal stations, safer the nuclear power stations (as long as the kids are not fed too many E numbers), and cheaper than both. The only running costs would be supplies of Frubes and Fruit Shoots.

I can't believe no one else has thought of this before now. We can all relax and bathe in oil if we wish because we don't need it anymore.