After coming out on the other side - and not unscathed - I believe that our job as parents is to raise mature, responsible, well-rounded adults. And you typically would not get a mature well-rounded responsible adult if your daily goal was to make sure your child is happy.

A badly behaved child probably leads to a unruly teenager

While a happy child would be nice, children need to learn how to live in a real world. They need to learn that life is demanding and hard, and definitely not always fair.

10 ways to not raise a brat:

1. Don’t call them more than once in the morning to wake up for school - could perhaps get them to set their own alarm clock.
2. Stop doing their laundry.
3. Make them clean up after themselves - or confiscate their stuff.
4. Expect them to help get dinner on the table, and to clean up afterwards.
5. Don’t buy them a “treat” every time you go shopping, etc.
6. Teach them how to be responsible for their own school work and make them be accountable.
7. Don’t allow or reward whining by giving in.
8. As often as possible, allow natural consequences to happen. Don’t intervene. These experiences can be some of the best teachers.
9. Teach them to be independent at an early age, and continue to let them mature into further independence.
10. While you should love your child, and let them know you are there for them as they grow, do not baby them - at age 3 or age 13. That makes for an awful 21 year old who feels entitled to everything and won’t get a job or consider moving out and being responsible for themselves.

Obviously this needs to be age relevant. I am not suggesting that you expect a four year old to do his laundry. However, he can learn to fix his own peanut butter sandwich, empty wastebaskets or help you sort the laundry.

Although this is think, this extract is from: http://thestressedmom.com/2012/02/how-to-not-raise-a-brat/

See also: http://thestressedmom.com/resource-center/simplifying-life/family-sized-minimalism/

1759

The year 1759 should really be as well known in British history as 1066, for this was when the British finally achieved the global supremacy they would maintain for at least another hundred years.  

This is the hypothesis of  Frank McLynn in his book '1759' (Pub: Pimlico in 2005).  He goes on to say that most of the other, better-known school history dates pale into insignificance.  The Magna Carta of 1215 changed nothing; Philip II of Spain launched other armadas after 1588; and 1688 ushered in what was a very precarious 'revolution' for the first fifty years.

The famous victories of Trafalgar in 1805 and Waterloo in 1815 are justly celebrated as outstanding feats of arms, but they changed little.  Napoleon had already abandoned his invasion attempts by the time Trafalgar was fought and, even if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, he could not have prevailed ultimately against a coalition of Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia.  

If we can trace the beginning of the British Empire to a single year, it must surely be 1759.  The defeat of the French that year paved the way for the Raj in India and made the emergence of the United States possible.

The entire history of the world would have been different but for the events of 1759.  If the French had prevailed in North America, there would have been no United States (at least in the form we know it), for it is inconceivable that France would ever had ceded any of its North American possessions and, without the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, even if we assume the thirteen British colonies had revolted successfully against the French overlords - a questionable assumption - they would have been hemmed in on the Atlantic seaboard, unable to expand westwards to the Pacific. 

If France had won in India, the global hegemony of the English language could never have happened.  Some say that the world-wide struggle for supremacy had to complete another chapter, in the Napoleonic era, before it could be assured.  

But Napoleon never looked remotely like solving the problems of seapower that prevented him from invading the British Isles.  He had no Jacobite fifth column to help him and, even if we posit the near-impossible - a successful invasion of England - the already independent United States would eventually have risen to world supremacy.  


To some extent this is a simple matter of chronology.  Napoleon's best chance for planting the French tricolour on the Tower of London came in 1805, but he had already sold the Louisiana Purchase (the vast territories on either side of the Mississippi River in what is now the south-central United States, see map) to Thomas Jefferson.

This book concentrates on the deadly duel between Britain and France in the climatic year of 1759.  I've just got this book out of the library, it looks quite fascinating and I'm looking forward to settling down to read it.  Here are a few happenings in that fateful year:


Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire was built
Handel died

Events: http://timelines.com/1759

Births: http://www.nndb.com/lists/758/000105443/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=1759+births&button=&title=Special%3ASearch

Deaths: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1759_deaths

When Britain was reborn

Britain in the late 1970s was a stagnant, dissatisfied place.  

Great swathes of indutry lay in the hands of the state, whose attempts to balance the demands of organised labour with economic stability had completely failed.  Inflation and unemployment were both rampant.   The government was a prisoner of the unions.  Despite the revolution of the Sixties social mores remained faintly stiff and old-fashioned.  Fashion was the pits.  

Society was divided, a fact mirrored by the absence of a meaningful centre-ground in politics, where the two main parties split beween Tory squirearchy and a Labour party whose instincts erred closed to Trotskyism than social democracy.


Then along came Mrs Thatcher.  Her improbable assumption of power in 1979, her even more unexpected retention of it in 1983 and her historic second re-election in 1987 brought about the most transformative period in British politics, culture and society since the WW2.

Thatcher's government brought monetarist economics, an aggressive foreign policy, the privatisation of industry and a commitment to shrinking the state and empowering enterprise - or as her detractors had it, encouraging greed.

Her government was as transformative as it was divisive.  Inflation was eventually tamed, but it was a ruinously painful process.  Unemployment was also controlled, after a fashion, although it was entrenched for generations in those areas of the country where heavy industry was forcibly abandoned.  


Victory in the Falklands was a tonic for the nation's self-importance, but it marked the end of Britain's ability to take unilateral military action overseas.


The sell-off of industry (and North Sea oil) certainly shrank the size of the state's broadest economic obligations, but the national budget was bloated, as is now apparent, by a permanently expanded welfare sector.  

Most famously, Thatcher created a generation of home owners and a booming financial sector - the two factors that probably had the greatest direct effect on national prosperity until the crash of 1007/08. 

Now, though, home owning is once again impossible for many young people, and the fact that Britain's economy is so reliant on the City seems increasingly a source of imbalance rather than strength.

So the legacy of the Eighties is still stamped on Britain, for better or worse.  To those who hated Thatcher and everything she stood for, she remains ther symbol of Tory heartlessness.  Yet politically, Thatcher's way is now effectively the ecntre ground, and has been ever since 1997 when Blair, who was Labour's Thatcher, inherited power.

All this, and more, are all described in Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s by Graham Stewart (pub Atlantic), an accomplished, politically minded history of a decade in which Britain was painfully reborn.

The 10 Best Opera Recordings

Princess Margaret once described opera as fat people shouting at each other.  Opera gets a lot of bad press, but contrary to popular belief, opera isn't that expensive, or very highfalutin, much of it, being pretty accessible.  And once you're heard a piece a few times it gradually grows on you, I assure you ...

Beethoven Fidelio
Must buy: EMI recording featuring Otto Klemperer.  Beethoven's opera is heart-stopping in the theatre but also a sublime, uplifting musical experience without that staging; not many operas convey as much of a message in 'tone' alon. Few recordings stand out as this one continues to, nearly half a century afte rit was first captured in stereo.  This recording is timeless.

Mozart Cosi fan tutte
EMI with Conductor Bernard Haitink.  Beneath its unruffled Mediterranean surface, Mozart's sublime yet cruel comedy comes to life in ernard Haitink's interpretation from Glyndebourne.

Mozart Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute)
EMI with Otto Klemperer. The dialogue may be cut, but no collection should be without Mozart's 'opera for everybody', The Magic Flute.


Puccini Tosca
EMI with Victor de Sabata
The greatest of all Toscas, Maria Callas is captured at her legendary best, urged on by a distinguished cast and conducting of dramatic sweep.

Rossini La Cenerentola
Decca with Riccardo Chailly.  From high spirits to deep pathos, La Cenerentola (Cinderella) holds in perfect balance everything we love most about Rossini.  



Strauss Der Rosenkavalier
Decca with Erich Kleiber.  Witty yet wistful, this interpretation with the Vienna Philharmonic of Strauss's masterpiece is a classic boating a dream cast.

Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin
Philips with Semyon Bychkov.  Russia's greatest opera, amid strong competition, this recording is the one to go for.

Verdi Don Carlos
DG with Claudio Abbado. The most epic, yet most human of Verdi's operas, DonCarlos exists in multiple versions but this (in its original French) is one of the best.

Verdi Falstaff
EMI with Herbert von Karajan.  
The richly detailed orchestration of Verdi's final opera blazes out under von Karajan's baton.



Wagner Der Ring des Nibelungen
Warner with Daniel Barenboim.  One of the greatest works of art ever conceived.

Colour versus neutrals*


I can still picture myself as a youngster sitting with my mother in a large darkened cinema, watching the movies.  It was thrilling!  At the time my favourites were colourful period pieces and Hollywood musicals, and I remember thinking that the serious dramas were (and still are to a degree) always in black and white.

Films in Technicolour were invariably lively and exuberant, wherreas murder mysteries and documentary films about poverty or hard times were shot in black and white.  It's almost as if people though that colour was more frivolous than white, black and grey.

Certainly, when the fashion for minimalism was at its height, architects and interior designers would have had us living in white houses, furnished with perhaps a black leather couch and one grey painting. To be surrounded by colour was in some way undiscerning or flashy.

Padua

Personally, I find myself draw to paintings and drawings that rely on stark tonal contrasts for their impact.  I greatly admire the work of American abstract expressionists, for example, with their huge black gestural marks on white backgrounds.  But simply being excited by another artist's work doesn't mean one can or should paint like that.  
In a real sense an artist does not have that choice; one is not free to decide what one does best, which may well turn out to be different from what one imagined.  It came as a something of a surprise when I found myself painting with bright colours instead of concentrating on black and white.  Nevertheless, neutrals are important for creating atmosphere and diversity in my paintings.

* Extract from Shirley Trevena's book Vibrant Watercolours, page 49

A rough guide to the solar system

This article is going to explore the Sun and its family, the one place where we know life thrives in the universe.  Our Solar System was born in a turbulent cloud of dust and gas.  About 4,570 million years ago, the ortating cloud collapsed, and dust and gas started to spiral inwards.  The heart of the cloud became extremely hot as the gas compacted; eventually, it was so hot that the gas (hydrogen) started to burn.  Our Sun was born.


Leftover dust and gas formed clumps.  Dust was dragged in towards the Sun, forming the rocky planets.  Jupiter and Saturn accumulated gas left behind as dust fell inwards.  Even farther out, Uranus and neptune built up from ice and the gas left over from Jupiter and Saturn.

Earth: When it first formed, nothing could have lived on Earth's surface, kept molten by collisions of asteroids and coments.

Over the past 4.5 billion years, it's gradually cooled.  But it isn't totally cold- volcanoes and earthquakes are signs that Earth is an active planet.  This activity is powered by the metallic core.  The inner core is solid, but the outer core molten.  Above are layers of hot, mobile rock - the mantle.

The skin of the Earth, or its crust, is a series of plates that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.  They're in constant motion, floating on the partially molten rocky mantle.  Plates rub against each other, collide, move apart or on top of each other.  This leads to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Our pale blue planet has an atmosphere that acts as a safety blanket.  It provides us with the oxygen we need to breathe.  It also protects us from the worst of the Sun's ultraviolet rays and cosmic radiation, while trapping heat.
Earth also has a magnetic field, generated by currents in its mobile inner layers.  The Earth has a 'top' and a 'bottom', a north and a south pole.  As well as helping homing pigeons, bees and colonies of bacteria to point in the right direction, this field has helped life to thrive because it deflects charged particles, from cosmic rays to the solar wind.

Moon:  One of the other unusual things about Earth is its enormous satellite.  The Moon always seems to have the same side turned towards us because the time it takes to rotate on its axis is the same as the time it takes to orbit the Earth.  The Moon formed in a giant impact between the newly made Earth and anothe rproto planet about the size of Mars.

http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2012/articles/ttt_73.php

Venus:  The surface of Venus is about 460C, the hottest planetary surface, and its atmosphere mainly carbon dioxide and incredibly thick, about 90 times the pressure of Earth's.  The atmosphere is the key to why Venue is so hot - it traps the Sun's heat, an extreme example of a runaway greenhouse effect and a sombre warning to what might happen if we let global waming from industrial pollutants get out of hand.

Mercury:  The closest planet to the Sun.   The say side of this heavily cratered planet is baked and cracked by the heat of the Sun, with temperatures up to 450C.  The night side is bitterly cold, temperatures down to -180C. It has no atmosphere, so its surface is scorched by ultraviolet.

Mars:  This cold, rocky planet has ltitle atmosphere.  But its more distant location from the Sun encures that its surface temperatures rarely rises above 0C.  Mars is distinguished by its huge volcanoes, a massive rift valley and channels carved by water or ice.  The red dust on its surface is scoured from the surface rocks, and has been oxidised by the Sun's rays.

Asteroid Belt:  Now we navigate through this belt of rocky debris.  The asteroids look like clumps of the dust left over from the birth of the Solar System that n4ever got built into a planet.  And that is what they are.  As the asteroids tried to clump together, the gravitational pull from Jupiter would drag them apart - so a full planet was never built.  Asteroids are odd shapes and covered in craters, testament to a long history of collisions.
Occasionally, one breaks free from the belt, and is catapulted towards the Sun.  If it lands on Earth it is a meteorite.

Beyond the Asteroid Velt, we encounter the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn.

Jupiter:  The biggest planet in the Solar System is made of gas (hydrogen and helium), with a small rocky core, and it is orbited by rocky and icy satellites, 60 of them at the last count.  Jupiter is a failed star - it is just below the size that would have allowed it to shine like the Sun.  Its diameter is 11 times as wide as Earth, and it weighs 320 times as much.  If all the mass of Jupiter were squeezed into a planet the size of Earth, then a tin of beans would weigh 320 times as much as it does on Earth.
Thanks to the vast gravitational tug, Jupiter acts as a cosmic vacuum cleaner, hoovering up comets and asteroids if they pass too close.  This shields the Earth from many potential hazards.  The horizontal stripes around its surface are belts of clouds, moved by winds blowing at up to 400kph.  One obvious feature is the Great Red Spot - a vigorous storm  that has been raging for at least a century.  The spot is about as wide as the Earth.


Saturn: Like Jupiter, Saturn is made of gas with a rocky core, and has many satellites (at least 30).  Saturn's special feature is its rings - millions and millions of fragments of ice and rock, probably formed as the result of collisions between asteroids early in Solar System history.

Uranus & Neptune:  Although they are still about 50% gas, most of the rest is ice - not just water ice, but methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia.  Like Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are enormous planets surrounded by rocky and icy satellites.  Strong winds blow on the planets - Neptune has a great white spot called the Scooter that circumnavigates the planet every 16 hours.
Why do the giant planets have so many satellites between them?  It is partly because as they formed from gas, dust and ice, they produced their own spinning dust disc, each planet acting as a mini Solar System, and partly because their huge gravitational pulls attracted and captured wandering asteroids and comets.

Pluto:  Because of its small size and low density, some astronomers view the planet Pluto (2330 kilometers in diameter and just 1/6th our Moon's mass; on the left in the image above) as just a large comet. In addition to its size and density, the orbital characteristics of Pluto and its moon, Charon (1200 kilometers in diameter; on the right in the image above) around the Sun clearly show that they are members of the Kuiper Belt.  (from: http://www.astronomynotes.com/solfluf/s8.htm)


Having journeyed to the fringes of the Solar System, here's the largest object within it.

The Sun:  This is the powerhouse that runs the Solar System, giving out 400 billion billion billion watts of power - equivalent to 4 billion billion billion light bulbs.
Although the star seems to shine steadily, the solar surface is actually a boiling, heaving mass, throwing out massive jets of charged particles and gas.
The Sun as been burning hydrogen into helium for 4,567 million years - and it has enough fuel left to keep going for about the same time again.  We need not worry about running out of solar energy.






From a talk by Dr Grady, of the Natural History Museum, London.

RUBY CELEBRATION

The Annual Craft4Crafters Show* is on later this month at Westpoint, near Exeter.  

We at Westcountry Embroiderers** are exhibiting work to commemorate 40 years of WCE, with articles on the theme of 'Ruby Celebration'.  I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone has made as members of the group are an eclectic bunch and we each have our own areas of interest and expertise.

My entry is a crazy patchwork piece which I chose to represent the patchwork of skills, interests and ideas of our group.  

On this patchwork piece are many of the stitches I've learned over the past few years as a member of the friendly Paignton group.  

Having exhibitions like this is very good for us as it reduces the number of UFOs (unfinished objects) carefully put away in drawers which never see the light of day.  It encourages us to actually finish things!

* http://www.craft4crafters.co.uk/
** http://www.westcountryembroiderers.co.uk/

Here are some photos from our trip down to St Ives last week

Image of the harbour at St Ives

The Island at St Ives (see: http://www.pznow.co.uk/locplace1/stives5.html)

view from our bedroom window!

We stayed at the excellent Chy-an-Albany Hotel (http://www.chyanalbanyhotel.com/) which would have had a fabulous view of the bay, had the weather been more clement.  Unfortunately, from our room we wouldn't have seen the sea anyway as we faced the back and overlooked the kitchen fans!  The food and service were excellent and, although it rained most of the time every day, the hotel was lovely and warm.

There are many picturesque lanes in the centre of St Ives with old fishermen's cottages, some of which are now arty-type shops.  These shops sell an amazing variety of good quality mainly hand-made products that are not easy to find elsewhere.  Here are a few which caught my eye.

Mr Lion peeps through

An inspiring shop window

Stained glass window of the Castle pub

On the last day we went to the lovely Art Cafe with friendly owners in Court Arcade, off Royal Square, St Ives (http://www.stivescornwallblog.co.uk/2010/08/cafe-art-royal-square-st-ives-cornwall.html).  In the arcade there are several shops, including a wonderful knitting shop with knowledgeable proprietor, Kay Bartlett (http://www.thisiscornwall.co.uk/shopping/wool-shops/house-bartlett/business-12840557-detail/business.html).  I wish we'd discovered that area earlier as would like to have seen more.  We enjoyed a delicious lunch at the friendly the CafeArt, The Drill Hall, in Chapel Street.

We found this arcade whilst on our way back from visiting the Leach Pottery (http://www.leachpottery.com/) one of the must-see places to visit when in St Ives.  The Leach Pottery is part of the Art Pass scheme (Art Pass ticket costs £14.50 (£8.50 concessions for joint entry to Tate St Ives, Penlee House and Hepworth Museum for 7 days)

by Barbara Hepworth

An intricate Hepworth sculpture

We spent some time at the Tate St Ives and also, in between showers we wandered round the Hepworth Sculpture Garden.  




The miracle is how some of the huge sculptures were moved into the garden, once they'd been up to London to be bronzed.

Gun emplacement dating back to WW2, on The Island at St Ives

Porthgwidden Beach, at St Ives, see from The Island

Painting by Richard Tuff