C.E. Jottings

Camerons appeal for charities that helped their eldest child

What a coincidence! From writing a note on another forum about the press response to the death of Ivan Cameron, I went next to look at this morning's Independent online edition and found this: "Hospices where Ivan's legacy lives on: The Camerons make appeal for carers and charities that helped their eldest child" " .... few people realise the fragility of these centres' finances, the Spandau Ballet singer Tony Hadley told The Independent yesterday. Hadley has played in several fundraising... Read more →

Parent of a disabled child

In the media outpouring of sympathy and comment following the death of Ivan Cameron, two powerful accounts by parents caught my attention today sufficiently to want share them. The first, read whilst I was waiting this morning to meet a fellow parent in a Sheffield coffee shop, to discuss how to progress a network for fellow local parents, was from Ian Birrell, Deputy Editor of The Independent: Iona and Ivan – a tale of two children and two families. The... Read more →

Ivan, the Camerons' "beautiful boy", dies.

The death of a child - son, daughter; sister, brother; niece, nephew; grandson, grand-daughter - is always, always sad. The death of a child with a disability is particularly so; a child whose life has especially caught up the parents in the complexity of emotions involved in being a mother or father to that child. It is as parents ourselves that we can reach out and share the sadness of David and Samantha Cameron's loss in the death of Ivan,... Read more →

"I'm a complete failure. I'm useless at this"

Broadcaster and journalist, John Suchet, has been much in the news this past week. I heard him first on BBC Radio 4 Today last Tuesday. John speaks movingly of being a carer for his wife Bonnie, diagnosed 3 years ago with Alzheimers. He went, he said, “from lover to carer – a very, very difficult journey”. I recognised the ambiguities and uncertainties, familiar in the shifting relationship – sometime parent, sometime carer - my wife and I have with our... Read more →

Here comes everybody (2)

Just to keep the ball rolling ... In a comment on my earlier posting, Andrew asks 'Where are the people?" and "What is the cause?". The key points about social media, it seems to me, are that more and different people can interact in new and different ways for new and different purposes. There is a fluidity to this, somehow, that strikes me as fundamentally different, a kind of protean quality. The governance of a traditional community organisation requires the... Read more →

Hear Comes Everybody

One of my favourite book titles is “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky. For me, it sums up everything about what has become known as “Web 2.0” or “social media”. Do you remember the playground bullies and how when you taunted them they’d say: “You and whose army?” Well, social media, the power of social networking is your army. There’s a cleverer version of this: “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will change... Read more →

Parents, now grandparents unfit

I hesitate to call up the "Daily Mail" in support of anything. Indeed, I generally take the view that if I find the 'Mail' in agreement with something I have said or thought, to look again very carefully at where I am going wrong. To all things there are exceptions. In the Mail today, columnist Allison Pearson writes in defence of grandparents, Grandma knows far more than a nursery: Personally, I find it slightly sinister that this research by the... Read more →

And now failing grandparents!

It's not just failing parents who need training. Now it's grandparents. A bunch of academics at the Institute for Education, London, have been following 4800 children whose mothers had gone back to work by the time their children were just nine months old. According to today's Daily Telegraph, they concluded "those who had been cared for by grandparents were found to have more difficult relationships with other toddlers, with boys the worst behaved ..... This is thought to be because... Read more →

Wordle - something to amuse

A visual representation of this blog - just for fun. Don't ask me how I did it. Just go to Wordle.net and have fun creating your own. And just to compare, here's a wordle of Andrew Sutton's blog Read more →

Patient Opinion

Andrew Sutton's posting about Education Bulletin and Edusen reminds me of another website taking advantage of all that Web2.0 has to offer - Patient Opinion. FAQ: "Patient Opinion was founded by Paul Hodgkin a GP in Sheffield who wanted to make the wisdom and insights of patients, available to the NHS. The old ways of doing this – inviting a patient to sit on a working party or carrying out a survey – did not work very well so he... Read more →