How on earth is McGuirk a West Brit Cunt? Is it because he is from Tyrone so yourself and wtb donât consider him Irish or something else? Call him a cunt if you want but really struggle how he could be called a West Brit Cunt
To be honest didnt even know he was from Tyrone, he disguises the accent pretty well. That is not to what I am referring. Despised his smug manner on the rugger ball show and epitomises the D4/Sindo/RTE/rugger ball west brit set.
Country on its knees and its the fault of the Greens. Rural life dying because those aping former landlords arent allowed to hunt deer. :rolleyes: Pass me the puke bucket FFS.
Anyone who had Miriam OâCallaghanâs best years canât be all bad! Jesus he must have had some fun there. Would never strike me as a West Brit though, I like his wry anchoring of rugby coverage though I wouldnât be much of a rugby fan.
Was she not incredibly average when younger? She is some mover and shaker though - first McGurk then the DG - Goan. She didnt move too far around the RTE canteen anyway. All she is, is a pair of tits. Think she even realises that herself as he flaunts them at every opportunity. After all her kids they are bound to be fairly saggy too.
Iâd be in the market for a picture of Miriam in her 20s to be honest. Do they exist? She canât be accused of only going out with lookers anyway, everyone would seem to have a chance with Miriam.
Would that have been the eighties? Itâd hardly be worth the effort.
I saw a clip from Reeling in the Years circa 1993 of OâCallaghan presenting Marketline maybe. Nothing great at all.
Anyway this is a thread about decent journalism - unfortunately mumsy oâcallaghan is unlikely to feature. Good one from Fintan OâToole below.
Where is the passion of TDs when âthe rural way of lifeâ is being slowly strangled by policies of more much consequence than stag-hunting?
BEFORE THE battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington surveyed the Irish troops who were his primary cannon fodder and remarked: âI donât know what theyâll do to the enemy but, by God, they surely terrify me.â
I canât help wondering when people in rural Ireland will have the good sense to be terrified by their own shock troops.
In the hoo-haa over John Gormleyâs relatively minor animal welfare legislation, deputies from Fianna FĂĄil, Fine Gael, Labour and Sinn FĂ©in have been queuing up to give performances of more overwrought melodramatic intensity than any fat lady dying in an opera.
TDs who usually make the boring priest in Father Ted sound like Oscar Wilde after a few too many absinthes have been working themselves up into the most lurid flights of oratorical fancy.
Thus, banning the Ward Union stag hunt (headed by Ray Burkeâs old pal and prominent Anglo Irish Bank client Mick Bailey) is âan attack on rural lifeâ (Bernard Durkan), on the âtraditions of those living in rural Irelandâ (Phil Hogan), on âordinary, decent people ⊠[who] are being terrorisedâ (Mattie McGrath), on ârural Ireland and its traditionsâ (Johnny Brady), and so on.
It is an assault by an alien (James Bannon pointed out darkly that Gormley âdoes not have a rural heritageâ) on the pure race of Gaels. Shane McEntee told the DĂĄil that the stag-hunters âare true Irishmen. There is not an ounce of English blood in them.â
It is an affront to the ancient Celts â Bernard Durkan pointed out that âFionn Mac Cumhaill was a great hunterâ.
It is, even, a prelude to genocide. Willie Penrose, who last time I looked was a barrister based in the elegant and sophisticated town of Mullingar, posed as the last of the Mohicans, plaintive voice of an ancient tribe being driven to extinction. âDoes the Minister want to get rid of us altogether? Will he take our blood and get rid of us altogether?â
It is amusing to listen to these middle-aged men working themselves up into paroxysms of passionate outrage in defence of endangered humanity. But one canât help wondering where all this passion goes when âthe rural way of lifeâ is being slowly strangled by policies that are much more mundane but also of infinitely more consequence.
The âtraditions of those living in rural Irelandâ surely include, for example, going to the post office. Post offices in rural villages donât just provide services, they are also part of the texture of social life. It is often the postmistress who notices that Johnny from the back of the hill hasnât been in to collect his pension and wonders if thereâs something wrong.
Over 500 rural post offices have closed in the last eight years and at least another 200 more are under threat. Where are the hysterics in the DĂĄil, whereâs the high-flown rhetoric, whereâs the backbench revolt?
What about the winding down of Postbank, which was successfully building a decent business supplying financial services through those post offices? The destruction of this bank, which was filling the huge gap left by the withdrawal of services to many rural areas by the mainstream banks, has been met with a shrug of the shoulders.
Both this year and last year, Bus Ăireann has cut back substantially on rural bus routes. Fifty routes have been scrapped or greatly reduced and a further 47 are under threat.
Rural communities, which already have at best a minimal public transport service, have been worst affected yet the howls from TDs have been muted.
Have we ever had a backbench revolt over drinking water? If there actually were a conspiracy to wipe out rural Ireland, making people drink crud would be a good way to start.
During 2007, which is the most recent year for which we have full figures, almost a third of private group water schemes in rural Ireland were contaminated at least once by E.coli. As well as getting bullshit piped at them from the DĂĄil, rural dwellers have the privilege of having it delivered through their taps.
One could go on and on listing real issues that actually shape peopleâs lives in rural Ireland â access to decent quality broadband, the closure of village Garda stations, the scrapping of the Rural Environment Protection Scheme (Reps) scheme. None of them ever produces the kind of grandstanding to which we have been treated on the animal welfare legislation.
Why not? Because dealing with such issues involves actual political struggles over the choices we have to make and the way we use our collective resources. You have to talk about all of those embarrassing things like money and power and priorities.
You have to think about what it is that makes rural life sustainable and whether we have any real commitment to creating it.
It is much easier to feed rural people a diet of exaggerated self- pity and paranoia about âthemâ up in Dublin. As long as rural people keep lapping it up, they will not stop to wonder why their great champions actually do so little for them.
Headline of the week:
Tired Gay succumbs to Dix in 200 meters
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6622I420100703
Lies, damn lies
John Pilger
Published 23 July 2009
Murdochâs papers have relentlessly assaulted common truth and decency, but their most successful war has been on journalism itself
I met Eddie Spearritt in the Philharmonic pub, overlooking Liverpool. It was a few years after 96 Liverpool football fans had been crushed to death at Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, on 15 April 1989. Eddieâs son, Adam, aged 14, died in his arms. The âmain reason for the disasterâ, Lord Justice Taylor subsequently reported, was the âfailureâ of the police, who had herded fans into a lethal pen.
âAs I lay in my hospital bed," Eddie said, âthe hospital staff kept the Sun away from me. Itâs bad enough when you lose your 14-year-old son because youâre treating him to a football match. Nothing can be worse than that. But since then Iâve had to defend him against all the rubbish printed by the Sun about everyone there being a hooligan and drinking. There was no hooliganism. During 31 days of Lord Justice Taylorâs inquiry, no blame was attributed because of alcohol. Adam never touched it in his life."
Three days after the disaster, Kelvin MacKenzie, Rupert Murdochâs âfavourite editorâ, sat down and designed the Sun front page, scribbling âTHE TRUTHâ in huge letters. Beneath it, he wrote three subsidiary headlines: âSome fans picked pockets of victimsâ . . . âSome fans urinated on the brave copsâ . . . âSome fans beat up PC giving kiss of lifeâ. All of it was false; MacKenzie was banking on anti-Liverpool prejudice.
When sales of the Sun fell by almost 40 per cent on Merseyside, Murdoch ordered his favourite editor to feign penitence. BBC Radio 4 was chosen as his platform. The âsarf Londonâ accent that was integral to MacKenzieâs fake persona as an âordinary punterâ was now a contrite, middle-class voice that fitted Radio 4. âI made a rather serious error,â said MacKenzie, who has since been back on Radio 4 in a very different mood,aggressively claiming that the Sunâs treatment of Hillsborough was merely a âvehicle for othersâ.
When we met, Eddie Spearritt mentioned MacKenzie and Murdoch with a dignified anger. So did Joan Traynor, who lost two sons, Christopher and Kevin, whose funeral was invaded by MacKenzieâs photographers even though Joan had asked for her familyâs privacy to be respected. The picture of her sonsâ coffins on the front page of a paper that had lied about the circumstances of their death so deeply upset her that for years she could barely speak about it.
Such relentless inhumanity forms the iceberg beneath the Guardianâs current exposĂ© of Murdochâs alleged payment of ÂŁ1m hush money to those whose phones his News of the World reporters have criminally invaded. âA cultural Chernobyl,â is how the German investigative journalist Reiner Luyken, based in London, described Murdochâs effect on British life. Of course, there is a colourful Fleet Street history of lies, damn lies, but no proprietor ever attained the infectious power of Murdochâs putrescence. To public truth and decency and freedom, he is as the dunghill
is to the blowfly. The rich and famous can usually defend themselves with expensive libel actions; but most of Murdochâs victims are people like the Hillsborough parents, who suffer without recourse.
The Murdoch âethosâ was demonstrated right from the beginning of his career, as Richard Neville has documented. In 1964, his Sydney tabloid, the Daily Mirror, published the diary of a 14-year-old schoolgirl under the headline, âWE HAVE SCHOOLGIRLâS ORGY DIARYâ. A 13-year-old boy, who was identified, was expelled from the same school. Soon afterwards, he hanged himself from his motherâs clothesline. The âsex diaryâ was subsequently found to be fake. Soon after Murdoch bought the News of the World in 1971, a strikingly similar episode involving an adolescent diary led to the suicide of a 15-year-old girl. And Murdoch himself said, of the industrial killing of innocent men, women and children in Iraq: âThere is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now . . .â
His most successful war has been on journalism itself. A leading Murdoch retainer, Andrew Neil, the Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sunday Times, conducted one of his masterâs most notorious smear campaigns against ITV (like the BBC, a âmonopolyâ standing in Murdochâs way). In 1988, the ITV company Thames Television made Death on the Rock, an investigative documentary that lifted a veil on the British secret state under Margaret Thatcher, describing how an SAS team had murdered four unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar with their hands in the air.
The message was clear: Thatcher was willing to use death squads. The Sunday Times and the Sun, side by side in Murdochâs razor-wired Wapping fortress, echoed Thatcherâs scurrilous attacks on Thames Television and subjected the principal witness to the murders, Carmen Proetta, to a torrent of lies and personal abuse. She later won ÂŁ300,000 in libel damages, and a public inquiry vindicated the programmeâs accuracy and integrity. This did not prevent Thames, an innovative broadcaster, from losing its licence.
Murdochâs most obsequious supplicants are politicians, especially New Labour. Having ensured that Murdoch pays minimal tax, and having attended the farewell party of one editor of the Sun, Gordon Brown was recently in full fawn at the wedding of another editor of the same paper. Don Corleone expects nothing less.
The hypocrisy, however, is almost magical. In 1995, Murdoch flew Tony and Cherie Blair first-class to Hayman Island, Australia, where the aspiring war criminal spoke about âthe need for a new moral purpose in politicsâ, which included the lifting of government regulations on the media. Murdoch shook his hand warmly. The next day the Sun commented: âMr Blair has vision, he has purpose and he speaks our language on morality and family life.â
The two are devout Christians, after all.
Wanted to put this in the Sunday Indo are cunts thread but couldnât find it so might as well stick it in here.
Wasnât pushed on reading this article from the arch cunt but was persuaded to and itâs actually a very honest, thought provoking article from him, believe it or not, and well worth a read.
A prayer for my daughter
When Brendan OâConnor and Sarah Cadenâs daughter was born two weeks ago with Down Syndrome she broke their hearts, but every day, she mends them a little bit more
IT FEELS disloyal and unfair to Mary now, two weeks on, to look back on her birth, and how it was like a scary film. But that is where it started. That is where Maryâs story started and where our story took a fairly unexpected turn. Thursday two weeks ago, we went into Holles Street in the morning, tentative but full of hope; and by two oâclock, our hearts were broken and our lives were turned upside down.
It still upsets me a lot to think about that half-hour, but images from it are burned on my brain â only for now, hopefully. Sometimes, depending on what kind of a day I am having, it still makes me cry. At the moment, we cry a little bit more than we used to in our house. It can be anything from just looking at Anna, the toddler, to a kind word, to seeing someone with their baby â lots of everyday things.
When Mary came out, the anaesthetist actually said to one of the doctors to hold on to her because she was jumping around so much. Sarah, lying cut open on the table, said, so sheâs not floppy. It seemed she wasnât. And she was a girl.
Thank God, a girl. The irony is I had practised convincing myself it was going to be a boy, so that the first time he saw his dad I wouldnât look too disappointed. All those things make you feel foolish now, the cocky hopes and dreams of before. Sometimes, it can even make us cry just to be reminded about life before Mary, a different life indeed, when we were innocent and foolish and thought we knew what worries and troubles were.
I remember saying to the anaesthetist when Mary came out that we wanted a girl, and she said something like, well Iâm sure you just wanted a healthy baby. And now we had one. They seemed to look at her for a bit too long when they took her away over to the table. She cried sporadically, which I thought I remembered was a good thing. Then they weighed her â seven eight, a good weight compared to what they were expecting. And they showed her to us and I got an inkling, for some reason, that something was wrong.
Then they brought her back over to their observation table and they seemed to be looking worried. There were lots of them around her. I remember grasping on to the fact that one tall blonde doctor was looking down at her smiling and I thought, okay, sheâs okay.
But now I recognise that smile for what it was, a sad little smile, âthe poor petâ. Then there were phone calls and we kept asking is something wrong. Her oxygen levels had been a bit low, I think they said. They needed to check. And then the doctor came and told us that her ears were set low, which was indicative of certain chromosomal disorders. God bless my innocence, I didnât know what that meant, or what he meant when he said â what I now know â were the words Trisomy 21.
Eventually he said it. Down Syndrome. I tried to console Sarah, who was still being operated on. Whatever is wrong with her, she is our little girl, and we will love her and it will be fine.
But I didnât believe it myself. We still werenât 100 per cent positive at this point, but I think in reality I knew. I wasnât sure if Sarah knew. I came out while they stitched Sarah up. It was dawning more and more but I still couldnât believe it. It was genuinely like a nightmare, but it was real. And you have all the classic responses like not believing that this is meant to happen to you.
People ask now how we found out, did we not have tests done and so on (some people say the most appalling things to you. But you know, people donât know what to say. I wouldnât either.) How we found out wasnât ideal, but what were the alternatives? Would we have preferred to hang around for a few hours in a foolsâ paradise and then find out? Would we have preferred to have found out months before and come to terms with it during the pregnancy? There is no good way to find out. But they handled it as best anyone can handle it. And at least when we did find out we had the consolation of Mary being there, the consolation of having a baby whom we loved. If you found out in the abstract, you have months to worry about it, without the consolation of Mary being there and us knowing we love her. We were also in the right place.
I have learnt many things in the last few weeks. One thing is that kind words can be so important and such a consolation. I never gave much of a damn for kind words before. Dr Robson, Sarahâs consultant, came in to see how we were as I stood in the recovery room by Sarahâs bed. âMary is Mary,â he said. Iâm sure that Dr Robson wonât mind me saying that he is not the most gushing person. Part of the reason I liked him so much is that he was fairly straight and fairly male and didnât ever emote too much. He was nice and he was straight. But with those three words he came through for us in the most unexpected way. For some reason it soothed us as we stood there dazed, and in a waking nightmare.
Kind words from all sorts of doctors, nurses, friends and some unexpected sources would help get us through the next few days. When Michele at our elder childâs creche heard the news, she sent the most beautiful text about how they looked forward to welcoming Mary there. For Sarah, it meant a lot that these people, who have embraced Anna so much, were also going to embrace Mary. That text saved me for one of those dazed days. I sent it on to my mother and I think it got her through a day, too.
Normally, after a C-section, they would give the father the baby to take away while the mother recovered. But instead they left me with Sarah and minded Mary up in the unit. I went up to see her, and it actually made everything much better. Once Sarah was out of recovery, Mary was brought down to her and straightaway they bonded, in a way that I donât think either of us did initially with Anna. I donât buy that instant love thing with a baby. But actually something magical kicked in within Sarah once she got her hands on Mary.
The next few days were a bit of a fog. Youâre in shock, they tell you. And youâre grieving for the baby you didnât have. I didnât quite buy that. I was grieving for my life before, and for my dreams maybe. But we had a baby and she was very cute, and I also had a toddler to manage who didnât deserve any of this no more than I did, or Sarah did, or Mary did. So gradually, you tell people. You tell them Sarah had a beautiful baby girl and then you say, she has Down Syndrome.
First Lessons of Mary: Some people have a knack for saying the perfect thing, for being perfect to be around, for knowing just how to be, for knowing when to talk and when not to and when to pretend it doesnât exist for a few minutes. Those are the people you need.
Other people donât know what to say but will tell you that they donât know what to say â and that you can work with, because you can just tell them where you are at.
And some people say awful or really stupid things that you will find it hard to forgive. But Sarah says we must forgive them because itâs just that they donât know what to say, so they blurt out something really stupid and insensitive.
Other people handwring and sympathise and keep saying, is there anything I can do, but you know they donât mean it. And some people are positively ghoulish â grief junkies.
And then there are those people who, God love them, try to be nice and positive. But you see, we are gone beyond politeness these days. Lots of people, we just tell to eff off in various ways. We have agreed there are two words we need to use a lot now, if not always directly. Eff and off. One poor girl, who was very good in helping us with a particular problem, said to Sarah that one day Mary could be getting the bus home from school on her own. Sarah said to her she was thinking more that Mary would get the bus home from the Electric Picnic on her own.
After we had our first child, I thought I saw the world very clearly for a while â I saw clearly who my friends were and who I valued. After Mary, I thought I could almost see the difference between good and evil. And some people you just didnât want near you and some people you knew were good.
Second Lesson of Mary: I have an amazing family and some wonderful friends. I never really knew it so much before, because I wouldnât be one for needing people.
But sometimes you have to let people support you. One friend, who had problems of her own, practically singlehandedly got me through those first few days, and I will never forget her.
She bossed me around, jollied me and Anna along for the weekend, made sure we ate, drank with me, did all the internet searching and drip-fed me what I needed to know, laughed with me, let me cry a small bit, and generally kept an eye on everyone.
Others kept in touch, gently and normally, leaving us our space to come to terms with it but just being there. Another friend saved our lives by coming in each evening for the first few days that the girls were home from hospital, and just sitting there, holding Mary.
I now know what to do if anyone I know ever has a trauma. Just be there. And maybe give them some food.
My brother, whom I fight with the most, was there on the phone from San Francisco, but there, and we probably talked in ways we never have. And then sometimes we just talked about music. My mother, my dad, Sarahâs parents, everyone. Some people just do things like chit chat or gossip to you about trivial things, some people let you express the pain. And some people just give you food.
So now I know that people are amazing. And I have more of an idea what love and friendship and family and kindness are. Some days, in my more elated moments, I would think that having spent 40 years looking for the meaning of life, sometimes in the most self-destructive ways, Mary had taught it to me in a few days.
Sometimes I nearly pitied, or at least felt superior, to the people who didnât know what I knew, who this hadnât happened to. I donât know that I can put it in words yet but I think the meaning of life may be about now, and love, and not giving a damn about things that donât really matter.
Sometimes, I feel spectacularly liberated. A colleague sent me an email when I told him the news and his comment was that at least itâs not bullshit, like most other
things in this world. And heâs right. Real life has begun. I have woken up. Itâs not all easy but it is real. None of this is to say that I buy the notion that Mary is a little angel sent from God to teach us things. I donât really think there is any meaning to this, or any divine plan. Maryâs little issue is a glitch, a random hiccup of nature. But then, she is teaching us things.
And then, there are times when I think my whole life has been shattered into pieces â all our plans and our ideas of how the second half of our life was going to be. A friend of my wifeâs told her that a mother of a child with DS said that the one piece of advice she would give us was to remember always that Mary is our baby, one half of each of us, and not a member of some tribe of Downâs people, a membership that sets her apart from us. That was a very helpful insight. And Mary reminds us all the time that she is one of us. Like her sister when she was a baby, she is one of the bird people, chirruping and quacking. I thought all babies do this. Iâm told they donât. I also fancy that Mary looks like me (no smart comments). Anna looked like me, too, as a baby and she has turned out okay. But I wonât ignore that Mary will be a little bit other. But then, we are all a little bit odd in my little family so sheâll be okay. And hopefully we will celebrate her otherness and the exotic looks that will no doubt develop. Everyone says she is a pretty little thing. I certainly think so. But Iâm her Dad. The first time I called her Catâs Eyes Iâm not sure Sarah knew what to think. But she does have catâs eyes. And letâs not pretend she doesnât.
Mary is Mary, and part of that is the little signs of her extra chromosome. So I need to make them part of who she is to me. Her catâs eyes are not a symptom of her tribe, but part of Mary.
Everyone tells you to try not to think too far into the future. You donât do it with your other kids, apparently. So we try not to. But we have made a few decisions. My wife does not want anyoneâs sympathy and she is not going to become a campaigner. For me, I am determined that Mary will have a great haircut and great clothes and she may even go to one of those posh schools I profess to hate if itâs what works best for her.
Some people tell us we are remarkable how we are dealing with this. Weâre not. But what else are you going to do? I always wondered how people cope with this kind of shock. But you have to, so you do. And we will do more than cope. I am determined our lives or Maryâs will not be defined by this. I am not going to become the parent of a handicapped child and my wife the martyr mother of a special little angel. People keep telling us, too, that we will make great friends with other people in the same boat as us. But while there are certain people I look forward to talking to, friends of friends and acquaintances who have kids like Mary, I donât hugely see myself basing my social life around other parents of kids like Mary. Iâm not really a joiner and as life goes on, like most men, Iâm becoming less social. I also imagine weâre not the type. Iâm sure Iâll be eating my words on that one soon enough.
Other people say those awful things like God wouldnât have given us Mary if we werenât great people who deserved it and could handle it. We donât deserve it and weâre actually not the right kind of people to handle something like this. I am not patient or good, or steady, or any of those things. My wife is more so but still, sheâs fairly superficial when it comes down to it. I tease her that I am going to become a saintly type now, a good and wise person, and that I will get really into the religion. Funnily enough, whatever faith I had in anything is gone for now. But weâll see.
People tell us now that Mary will bring a lot of joy. Everyone with a kid with DS will tell you this. I donât think they are all lying but it can be hard to see at the beginning. But then, each day I can see it more. It helps that Mary is very good and that my wife is a Nazi for routine and it is kicking in already.
It helps, too, that Maryâs health is largely fairly good so far and she doesnât have any of the major problems that can be associated with her tribe. Weâve been in and out a bit to Crumlin and Temple Street and let me tell you, it would put manners on you. There are people with far worse things to cope with than we have. Nevertheless you find yourself saying variations on something someone summed up for me in a line by Philip Larkin: Your life is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me.
Dr Murphy, the paediatrician, another angel disguised as a straight-talking Corkman, told us before we brought Mary home that now that we had ticked the boxes on many of the health problems, we were essentially dealing with a child with an educational difficulty. Minimise it, he said. You mean in our heads? I asked. Yes, just minimise it. And he was right. And again, those words meant so much to us, that small bit of advice. You see, a sick child brings with it a whole other series of challenges to a family. Mary is not sick, for now anyway. Hopefully, this will mean her development isnât further hampered; and she should also, Murphy told us, fit very well into the family. For now, itâs like having an âordinaryâ, very good baby â a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes in the middle of the night, but all worth it. And her sister is bonkers about her.
We think we are over the immediate shock and upset. But we worry that we are kidding ourselves. I wonder some days if I am in denial. And there are good days and bad days, but the general trajectory is up. Having a new baby is fairly traumatic anyway, and much of our stuff right now is probably down to the mundane things like sleep and the fact that we now have two, one of them who never goes away even for a second.
We are sad sometimes and I have no doubt there will be more sad days into the future. But I thought that joy had died for us that Thursday lunchtime, and it turns out it hadnât. You will hear real laughter and see real smiles in our house again now. And when I take off my shirt in the evening and lie on the couch and lie Mary on me like I used to do with her sister, all is well. Could I say yet I wouldnât swap her for anything? No. I maybe would swap her for Mary without Down Syndrome, but thatâs just my prejudice from before and Iâll get over it fairly fast I think. But do I wish she had never been born? Do I wish that we had just been happy with one? Do I wish we could have our old life â which I have idealised out of all proportion â back? Not any more. Sheâs here now, a part of our little family. And weâd be lost without her. She has burrowed her way into our hearts so there is no imagining the world any other way. And even if she broke our hearts a bit when she came first, sheâs fixing them up a bit every day. And I canât wait for the day I teach her the two most important words she is going to need in this life for whenever we or Anna arenât around to say it for her. Eff off.
It would be foolish to think that things are normal in the way they were normal before. But you know, I think we are happy. Some days now I can even look to the future. I wonder, as I did with Anna, who Mary will be. Each day she opens her eyes a bit more, a little more alert, and I feel I know her more and she is unveiling her little self to me and I think I like her. She has great muscle tone, is 10 times the feeder her sister was, prefers when she is in control of the bottle, likes music and I suspect sheâs going to be a laugh. In short, I think sheâs an OâConnor. I had a feeling before she was born that this one would be a writer, and not just a scribbler like her dad; a real writer, more like her mother. I still think it. And while it begins with a slight surprise, I think sheâll have a great story to tell.
In the meantime, I hope I can teach her a lesson, too. I think Iâve learnt one really important thing in the past two weeks. Iâve got my cross to bear now, so I wonât be looking for any more, anywhere else. Everything else now has to be about joy. My family is going to have the joy imperative, and that means we might have to travel the world and go to lots of amazing places and eat lots of food and drink lots of wine, but thatâs the joy imperative for you.
The funny thing is, you know very quickly when something happens whether everything is going to be okay. And even in my shock and agony in that operating theatre, I think I suddenly knew everything was going to be okay. And it is. There might be sadness ahead and there might be challenges ahead. But everything is going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay. Better than okay.
great article & heartbreaking stuff & scary stuff
i know there is a test you can do to see will the baby have DS in early pregnancy .
Youâve kids yerself donât you? it really is as good an article as Iâve read on a subject like that.
Iâd say itâs the kind of thing that could actually change a man completely. Be interesting to see if heâs as much of a cunt as ever after it.
just the one for now-
you can get that test done but if the results are positive you are faced with a horrible choice, on the other hand though the shock of something like that would be hard to take
its a fairly sobering article
wouldnt begrudge him if he was still a cunt in his articles as why should he change in anyway - he could be th greatest dad in the world but still write shit in his articles
A bit like you on here?
I was more talking about his personality than his articles. Heâs meant to be a woefully sneery,cynical, arrogant cunt in person. Hard to see that changing too much I suppose.
He is as you say gola, an arch cunt, but you couldnât but feel basic human sympathy for their situation reading that.
But hereâs the truth. In different circumstances, that same cunt would ridicule and dismiss people campaigning for special needs care if that was his paperâs agenda. He wouldnât lose much sleep over it either.
:rolleyes:
Oh without doubt. He wouldnât do it now though. Thatâs what I was on about a situation like this having the potential to profoundly change a man.
Yeah, youâd have to laugh at people asking do you want a boy or a girl or people hoping for one or tâother. Iâd just be praying to fcuk everything would be ok.
Thatâs a very defeatist attitude.