Willothewisp

Archive for the ‘United Kingdom’ Category

The news from Nina and Judith in the UK is that everything has gone as well as can be expected, which is a great relief to us all. The meetings with the lawyers were horrid as expected and as expected the other side have declined at this point to settle, so now the civil case against the young woman who assaulted Nicky and Judith, ruining Judith’s eyesight in the process, will proceed.  It is hard to believe that it has been two years since the original incident and in that time her eyesight has gone from perfect to bad, to worse, to near blindness and then to poor but workable and now……………………………….. Well let us just be positive and send good thoughts.

Our biggest worry with this trip was how Judith would cope so far from her home ground given her acute problems with anxiety. The reports from Nina are that it has been hard work, requiring much deep relaxation, a lot of reassurance but that taking Jette along (their god daughter) has helped a great deal. Jette is great with the children and has a knack with Judith’s anxiety, all this in a petite package that is about to turn sixteen. Our very grateful thanks to Jette, and to her dad the ever patient Nick, for letting her go.

Nina has often commented that moving their family is like moving an army regiment, and being an army nurse I guess she would  know ! In this case it is an army of two adults, a teenager, three children, a baby and two guide dogs. Judith spent the last week before their departure  in a frenzy of organizing, ensuring that the right things were all washed, clean and in the correct bag.  The guide dogs had their vet checks and their doggy passports stamped. There was also the long list of instructions to the gardener brought in to look after the farm in miniature that is their garden. I was given a list of herbs, fruits and vegetables that I was to go and pick each evening with a promise on my part to feeding them to our family and not to waste them. We also got their cat Pip Amadeus. Pip is a little sweety, a twenty year old Birmin with a heart murmur, failing kidneys, arthritis, and irony of ironies, deaf and a little blind.

All this activity was of course Judith’s way of covering her terror at the prospect of the trip. On the plus side, in payment for looking after Pip she made us a liter of her strawberry  (aardbei) ice cream and another of Melon (Meleon). Strawberries from their garden, cream from her parent’s farm made from raw milk so believe me when I say “Payment made in full !”.

I can see I am drifting from the point here, so back to the report____________

Nina, bless her, let Judith’s frenetic activity and irritability of the week wash over her as the clock counted down. The girl has an endless patience with Judith that appears to be such a consummate skill that it can only come from a deep connection at a spiritual level, she is rock solid.  Before they left I gave Nina a prescription for Judith for valium should the worst happen and her anxieties overcome her tough self discipline. To date it has not been needed, I suspect this is down to Nina’s knowledge of her love and soul mate.

The girls engaged the services of a professional nanny during the day times as they would have to be in meetings much of each day. Happily London has kept it’s tradition of quality nanny agencies and the lady they provided was used to children with special needs. According to Jette she has taken even the prickly and smart assed Hilke and her body guard Jos in her stride. Between Jette and the nanny the girls have not had to worry about the children during the days which has been a great help.

On Monday Judith must be examined by doctors of the other side to ensure that her neurologist, neurophysiologist , neurosurgeon, ophthalmologist and family doctor (me) have not lied in our reports about the damage done in the assault  and the subsequent intracranial bleeds. It will be a tough day for both of them, for differing reasons, but we have faith in them. Above all else that English girl must learn humility. She must learn that you cannot take something so precious as good eyesight from someone as you stagger through life utterly selfishly, my family will not tolerate it. We are going to ensure she is impoverished perhaps through the loss of what matters most to her (money) she will learn.

On that vengeful note  I will say goodnight. Nina and Judith, our thoughts are with you and the children, as always.

Love, Nonke and Tyjardia, xxx.

Our little trip to the UK is coming to an end and tomorrow we head home. I think on balance it has been a pretty good trip with no mishaps and it looks like we are returning with the same number of kids that we arrived with so I consider that a success.

The whole purpose of the trip was for me to give some talks about home birth in the Netherlands and exchange knowledge with other midwives. I got to mix with English midwives and learn about midwifery in the UK and the current struggle for change in the face official obstruction and a barrage of male doctor misogyny that is truly breathtaking. I am leaving with a much more positive view of the future for pregnant women in the UK than I arrived with and that is due entirely to the stubborn persistence of British Midwives who have recognised things have to change and are working hard to drive that change.

I was dismayed at the dreadfully high number of teenage pregnancies in the UK. I saw girls as young as TWELVE, and typically fifteen to seventeen presenting themselves at the practice, this came as something of a shock. I took a quick survey of figures in the UK and came to the conclusion that teenage pregnancies run at a little over six times that of the Netherlands. The reasons for this seem to be several fold. Firstly there is the anglo-saxon reluctance to talk about sex between parent and child, teacher and pupil, this leads to the second issue of extremely poor sex education in school and the home. Also there are the mixed messages about sex from the adult world, this is being compounded by the first. There is an interest in other people’s sex lives, such as celebrities’, to an extent, but people are more able to separate that from real life. In the UK they really into things like Celebrity Love Island, wondering whether these people are going to have sex on TV in an almost juvenile way. In the UK it seems that the young can deal with the fantasy but not what the reality is for young people, again all compounded by lack of thorough sex education at an early enough age.

This lack of sex education also showed up in the pregnant women I saw here. In Holland my job is being made increasingly easier as that generation that benefitted from the full course of sex-ed at school which started in the 1980s has been coming to have their own children. When you have clients who know much more about their own body and how it works reproductively speaking they are better equipped to have babies. It is easier to teach them how to work with what their own body provides them with in order to have better pregnancies, and better births with far less pain and distress. In the UK this knowledge is clearly not there, even in the teens who should have benefitted from the UK Labor Government’s “much improved sex education”.

The British government had a plan to cut teen pregnancies but it was a very expensive flop. In some areas of England and Wales one in 66 schoolgirls conceives. The cornerstone of this policy was providing free contraception and emergency birth control without parental knowledge. Rather than engage in a long term education program that educated children from age eight they went for closing the stable door after the horse had bolted. Talk about stupid!

Statistics from the Department for Children, Schools and Families, reveal that of the 21 girls under 16 who fall pregnant daily, nine go on to have the child. Around 60 per cent will opt for an abortion – meaning that of the 23,371 under-age conceptions in England and Wales in the last three years, 13,555 were aborted. The Government wanted to halve the teenage pregnancy rate– the number of girls in England who become pregnant before they are 18 – by 2010. A reduction of 15 per cent on rates in the base year 1998 was supposed to be achieved by 2004, but that extremely modest, almost pointless target was missed.

The UK needs to get to grips with sex-education in the full, frank and highly detailed way that the Netherlands has and teach both the biology of sex and the personal skills required to allow children to have self respect and self determination (amazingly a recent government edict stated that sex education classes should NOT included any mention of morality without defining what they meant by “morality”).
Britain already has the highest rates for sexually transmitted diseases in Europe and are top of the European league for teen pregnancies, clearly government actions indicate they are aiming to become world leaders! They need to force parents to become involved and talk to their children and it has to be compulsory, no bloody silly opt-outs on religious or cultural grounds because unless British politicians develop the (rather ironically) balls to do this the UK is heading for even more of a social mess.

The other factor in many of these teen pregnancies seems to be drink, but that is a whole other post for another day.

Author: Nina

We have been in England a couple of days and already I believe that the English are truly insane. By this I do not mean that the country as a whole is insane, I mean that the institutions of England are insane, the government is definitely in the grip of some sort of Mad-Cow epidemic and their Prime minister Gordon (I-do-not-know-how-to-say-sorry) Brown is their chief mad heifer. Common sense no longer exists, here it has been replaced with “Health & Safety Culture”, freedom of speech has departed these shores to be replaced with “It has to be politically correct”. I kid you not.

We were in the Grand Arcade in Cambridge, it is a new shopping area that runs between streets, rather like a covered street (much like Mosse in Maastricht). It is quite striking as a piece of architecture, though by no means ground breaking, it is rather what I would describe as pleasantly conservative.  I watched as a man who had been taking some pictures of the interior was pounced upon by three private security guards and after a few moments discussion was thrown out. I asked our escort to ask the guards why they had thrown him out. She returned a couple of minutes later to tell me that photography was not allowed in there in case the pictures were used to plan a terrorist attack. The next logical step is to place black hoods over everyone entering in case they remember what they have seen and use that to plan a terrorist attack. This is crazy on so many levels but to ban photography in a public space on that basis is ridiculous. The man in question was white, very English looking with a large round belly, grey hair and a walking stick, in other words he was so as bout as far from “terrorist” as you were going to get. I then watched as man of middle eastern appearance, complete with beard took a photograph of his burkha covered wife and two children with his camera phone. This time I went and I asked the guard myself there why he was not throwing that fellow out to be told “Its only a camera phone and besides he’s ethnic”. I think you can begin to see why I think this country is off it’s collective rocker!

Later on we were in front of one of the colleges here, I cannot recall which one, with a lot of other tourists. Hilke was getting rather tired so we sat on the low stone wall and open a bottle of water for Jos while we watched the world go by for a while.  Two policeman came walking down the street and our escort commented to me that, and here I quote “British cops are nothing more than lemon coated skin heads with the power of arrest”. Interesting.

It seems that under the current government’s rule the police have been handed ever increasing powers of search, seizure and arrest under the guise of anti-terrorist legislation. If you try to take a picture of a British cops these days you could find yourself arrested under anti terrorist laws, it has happened, go and look in YouTube. Under similar powers the British police have been carrying our surveillance of anyone taking part in a protest, rather ironically filming them, and often making that information and their criminal records available to private companies. This is a clear violation of European Law and also it turns out, English law. Most recently they have been beating the crap out of anyone near a protest regardless of them being a protester or not. One man, a newspaper seller, was recently beaten to death by police in London during the G20 event there. It seems they also beat up numerous other people regardless of them actually doing anything wrong or illegal or even part of any demonstration or protest.  I blame their political masters for instilling a culture that of “anyone who protests is therefore a criminal”.

There is also the distortion on policing brought about by a government obsessed with “performance targets” . They set the police targets for arrests which has had the effect of the British police now preferring to pursue people for petty offences as these require far less effort than going after real bad people. They still count as an arrest  and have the bonus that they are usually far easier to prosecute because the offenders are invariably middle class citizens rather than the hardened criminal class. As a result what used to be the police’s biggest supporters now feel alienated, persecuted and living in fear that they will have their door kicked in by police wielding video evidence of a littering offence (it has happened).

The country  has definitely lost the plot, they give asylum to known war criminals, genocidal maniacs, murderers and rapists while arresting people for non-crimes and stifling legitimate protest by beating people up. The criminals are the ones who are running this country and their lick-spittles in the now highly politicised civil service. It disgusts me that the UK under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have colluded in the USA’s torture of  human beings (not to mention an illegal war), it sickens me that now Brown’s government (if you can call it that) have been proven to have lied and with held evidence of this collusion from their own courts. But it has been the witnessing for myself how far down into every day British society this culture of dishonesty and official oppression has pervaded that has most affected me. I can actually feel the depression bubbling up inside me.

Author Judith

 

Nina has been invited to speak to English Midwives about how she and her practice provide home birth services in Holland. So with three children, two guide dogs and us two adults we have decided to make it a little adventure for the children. To make it as fun as possible we have eschewed the usual ritual of flying in favour of taking the train and a ferry, it is somewhat easier than flying and so much more civilised. We took the intercity trains from Maastricht to Rotterdam and the local train to the Hoek van Holland to board the Ferry to Harwich in the UK. Our Ferry was the Stena Britannica, a pretty big ship at some 55,000 gross tonnes and well over 200meters long,  much larger than the ships that served this route in my childhood – The Princess Beatrix, The Koningin Juliana (6,600gross tonnes).

 

I thought we would be given the official run around regarding our  guide dogs but once they had their ID chips scanned and passport examined we were escorted on board by Stena Line who were very helpful. As soon as we were onboard the two oldest children wanted to be off exploring and I could see Nina was itching to go play as well so I let them go while our Stena Line escort and I settled our things into our cabin for the overnight trip. The cabin was a decent size with four beds, fortunately Mariaske is small enough to settled down with one of us. I should thank Stena Line for offering us a second cabin gratis so we could spread the seven of us between, it was a very kind offer but I thought squeezing up would add to the fun. 

 

As Mariaske did not seem in any mood to settle down for a sleep, and Sissie was fussing to get onto the deck for a pee I decide to go up and see if I could find the others, eventually locating them having ice cream in the restaurant. We joined and and Nina and I dealt with a few messages and then the ship was ready to depart so we went up to wave the Dutch coast and Europort goodbye. One clear of the coast there was nothing to see in the dark, especially for me so it was back to exploring the ship. Eventually we persauded the children to try sleeping. The dogs were only to happy to crash out, though in the end Jos joined Hilke on her bunk, and Sissie fought Nicholas for space on his, he lost. Mariaske was easiest to settle, tucking up with me and going straight to sleep. While the children did eventually drop off to sleep followed quickly by Nina it was me who remained awake, unable to find sleep until about 4am only to be woken by Mariaske rooting about my night shirt at 5am looking for an early breakfast. At least it was one hungry mouth that was easily taken care of.

The rest woke at 05.30 and for once it was no problem getting Nina to wake up (she is not a morning person!), she was as excited as the children. We had everyone washed and up in the restaurant for breakfast. The food available was not our usual healthy fare but it was OK, unless you choose the “Full English” which consisted or sausages of doubtful provenance, bacon dripping in fat and other unpleasant looking accessories. We opted for living a long life and went Dutch style.

 

As we finished up the ship was entering port so it was out onto the deck for the children’s first look at England as we passed the container port of Felixstowe before docking in Harwich. The port of Harwich, like most ports, is not pretty but the children were just seeing the adventure not the scenery so that was OK. Back at our cabin our escort of the night before was waiting to help us off the ship and through customs and it was most appreciated. Our children’s disabilities are not major but it does add an element to travel where small assistance can make a lot of difference, and it made disembarking a painless process. Buying our rail tickets to Cambridge was interesting. In The Netherlands it is easy as there is just one price for the trip for first class, one for second but here in England it seems there are a dozen different tariffs depending on if there is a full moon and other such silliness. In the end Nina asked for the price for two Dutch lesbian adults, three children and two guide dogs, amazingly enough they had a tariff ! Then we were off to Cambridge, but that is another post for later.

 

Author: Judith