Here’s a few photos taken by son #1 while we were walking around Rochester Airport. I think he has a pretty good “eye” for the shot.
Rochester
Official Photo
This is a copy of my official OIC graduation photograph. It shows me receiving my Commission scroll [the actual one unlike my degree ceremony] from the Group Captain.
Powered Flying Log
I know, I know. This is just another list of stuff!
So very true, but this is the biggie. This is why you join the cadets. If you want to see the other communications in this series then click here.
Just before I enter the list you may or may not be interested to know that aerobatics really messes me up. I positively enjoy the experience of aero but it will make me sick and turns me into a useless lump of cells for a few hours as my body recovers. I will go green and then white, I have headaches and everything spins for ages. After anything up to five hours later I will become very hungry, that signals the start of my recovery. I really enjoy flying and aerobatics but I just have to be aware of the consequences.
My total time is just over 21 hours. That’s not bad even if it includes two flights to Cyprus which I’ve counted because I was flying “on duty”.
I also recently had a flight in a Grob Tutor while on camp at Brize Norton. I got around a 40 minute flight, it was a much better experience than the chipmunk.
It’s What Happens
I teach. It’s what I do. I teach teenagers. A lot of people I meet consider this to be a mad career. Teenagers are horrible. They wonder why I don’t teach younger kids. I teach because of a long series of accidents and uninformed choices throughout my life. However, after starting my teacher training in 1995 I found that I loved being in the classroom and working with kids. I consider myself utterly fortunate to have discovered a career that I enjoy so much. I have often said to myself that the day I “have to go to work” is the day I quit, at the moment I still get up every (working) day and “go to school”.
Teenagers are hilarious. They try to argue and make valid points, they are starting to learn the craft of putting together valid arguments and come to valid conclusions. Some can do this well, others take quite a bit longer. They often try to communicate their thoughts are struggle to do so. Daily I am involved in creating new thoughts and ideas and methods for explanation. This is great. It’s exciting and when the teenagers mess it up it’s just funny. I work with some of the brightest and [unintentionally] hilarious young people.
You’ll have to take this on trust but having a teenager try to explain his/her actions in a logical manner leaves me laughing (inside rather than in their face). Although my role is to teach mathematics I also aim to offer up techniques for questioning and finding out what really happens, how to get evidence, how to appraise arguments. I see this as far more important than the actual mathematics I teach. If I can help people seek their own evidence and make their own decisions then I have succeeded in improving their contributions to future society.
The title of this communication is “It’s What Happens”. I’d just like to point out that society seems to have a massive “downer” on teenagers.
Said Socrates [not the footballer]:
Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.
This is a quite well known quotation. It’s definitely gives the impression that we hate teenagers and have done for many years of society. There are often modern headlines in the newspapers and web-news-services where the implication is that modern society is going to ruin because of a type of behaviour of teenagers or young people. This is utter rubbish.
Here’s some cases of behaviour of the youth ruining society:
- Pinball machines in the 1940s
- Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 1950s
- Sex and drugs in the 1960s
- Punk in the 1970s
- Alcopops in the 1990s
- Mobile phones in the 2000s
Most of the people “corrupted” by these forms of behaviour are now the ESTABLISHMENT. I’m pretty sure that if you look hard enough you will see that society isn’t ruined. My theory is as follows:
People who write opinions and the news are jealous of teenagers. They don’t like the freedom, the care-less-ness, the risk taking, the fun that teenagers have. It reminds them of what they have lost and the dreams that have dimmed. It reminds them of mortgages, children and politics. They want to be young again.
The constant dislike of teenagers in the press is a constant of society, it will always be there. Are the youth terrible? Are the youth poorly behaved? No, not really. Teenagers are meant to be restless and care-free. It means they move on and develop in to fully functioning adults. It’s what happens.
L98A1 Shooting Record
Last communication on shooting for a while. Here continues my internetification of my Form 3822 Record Of Service book.
The L98A1 Cadet rifle was introduced towards the end of the 1980s as a replacement for the SLR after the British military moved to using the SA80 rifle. I passed my training programme on 31 March 1989. My shooting record is as follows:
- 31 March 1989 – 15 rounds
- 16 August 1989 – 50 rounds [RAF Marksman achieved]
- ? December 1989 – ? rounds
- 17 March 1990 – ? rounds [RAF Marksman achieved]
Just reading the last entry I can vaguely remember being on a coach travelling to wherever the shooting was and celebrating my 18th birthday. I can remember cake and Alan buying me some suspenders. It was sunny. That is pretty much the sum of my memories of that day!
While at RAF Brize Norton camp I had 20 rounds on the L98A2 Cadet Rifle. I managed to get a pretty good grouping, considering I hadn’t shot a live gun in over 20 years.
7.62 SL Rifle Shooting
We are about half way through my record of service book! There’s some flying and a few band engagements to go! However, this communication concerns my relationship with the SLR.
The SLR felt like a proper gun. It was quite heavy, loud when fired and had a reasonable kick. Unlike the single shot No. 4 .303 rifle [which was bolt action] this one would load the next round automatically, hence: Self Loading Rifle. The cadet version of the weapon system was fixed to be semi-automatic only. Before I could fire this weapon I had to pass a safety test and learn how to strip the weapon down and clean it. I always enjoyed firing this weapon even if the kick still hurt quite a bit.
- 25 August 1987 – 20 rounds
- 27 August 1987 – 70 rounds
- 10 October 1987 – 50 rounds
- 12 April 1988 – 25 rounds
- 28 July 1988 – 10 rounds
After this date the SLR was replaced with the L98A1 rifle.
.303 Rifle Shooting Courses
This communication deals with the times I shot a full bore rifle. I am pretty sure the rifle used was a Lee-Enfield No. 4 rifle with a .303 round size. Before cadets were allowed to fire this weapon they had to be signed off in the 3822 by the CO saying that they were large and strong enough to handle the weapon.
I can remember that I had a couple of goes at firing this beast and I hated it. It was just after my 14th birthday and the recoil hurt, a lot.
- 22 March 1986 – 32 rounds
For more communications about my record of service, click here.
.22 Rifle Shooting Courses
What else am I going to do on a Sunday evening apart from write a couple of communications? Especially when Gold TV are broadcasting the Monty Python show from the O2. I’m not watching that because when they started to sing the Penis Song the television channel censored some of the words! I was so annoyed with this that I watched Veep, The 100 and am now writing this instead of watching the Pythons. To be honest I can listen to the Penis Song anytime.
I get a little confused over the next few entries in my Form 3822. The could be courses or they could be competitions. I know that I shot quite a bit with the Squadron and I enjoyed it thoroughly. If you want to see more about experiences of a teenager in the late 80s then click here.
There now follows a list of .22 rifle shooting events I attended and took part. All of these were on 25 yard ranges.
- 31 July 1986
- 5 December 1986
- 20 February 1987 [Mark Sykes Trophy competition]
- 20 March 1987 [Mark Sykes Trophy competition]
- 22 May 1987 [ATC Marksman achieved]
- 3 July 1987
- 26 August 1987 [ATC Marksman achieved]
- 27 August 1987
- 28 August 1987
- 14 November 1987
- 28 November 1987
- 28 February 1988 [Falklands Competition]
- 29 April 1988 [ATC Marksman achieved]
- 21 June 1988
- 22 July 1988 [ATC Marksman achieved]
- 26 July 1988
- 28 July 1988
- 1 December 1988
- 15 December 1988 [Battle of Britain Competition] 79/100 scored
- 3 July 1989 [Wing Field Day]
- 13 August 1989
- 29 December 1989 [ATC Marksman achieved]
- 11 February 1990
I was selected for the East Essex Wing Shooting Team one year but I couldn’t make the competition because I was on camp in Cyprus [or I may have been at a concert, I can’t quite remember].
Storm
The 18th July was a good day. It was the end of my twentieth year of my teaching career. It was also the hottest day of the year. My car said 33C at one point.
Phew! Just been for a 20 minute drive so I could feel vaguely human. Sorry earth, I will plant some trees! pic.twitter.com/KUxvlTt6iP
— Ian Parish (@iparish) July 18, 2014
That night there was also the most almighty storm. I was sitting watching television when it went darker than normal and so I went into the garden. I saw a sight I can tell you. The sun was setting in the west and it was bright in that direction but to the east and south it was dark and foreboding. There was no noise but there was a lot of lightning over towards Maidstone.
After a while I could hear what I thought, at first, was rain but it was a slight breeze going through the nearby trees. Then all of a sudden the wind really picked up. It became a constant driving wind and then the rain came, large spots at first and then torrential. The lightning and thunder was just spectacular.
These are two videos I took to show the electric storm over the Weald of Kent.
Rage
I titled this communication Rage. Using that word is wrong, this should really be titled “makes me slightly annoyed with modern life until I forget I saw it”, but that isn’t snappy and so I thought I’d follow the Dail Fail headline writers’ rules.
The following picture gives the options I found on a questionnaire for a company that rates childcare nurseries.
I am happy with the questions. I am very disappointed with the options for answers. This grading system is a bit like Ofsted criteria where satisfactory is bad and good is bad and excellent is the only thing that’s good. My issues are:
- Only three answer options – never give an odd number of possible answers people choose the middle value.
- Poor options – what if I want to say something is poor or bad?
- Poor criteria – what is the difference between good and excellent? This is all very subjective.
These sorts of thoughtless things make my head hurt when trying to figure out what they mean. I dislike things like this and would, if I cared enough, write to them and suggest how to improve their options. It is now time to forget about this questionnaire and to move on to things that are really annoying.
I ought to explain my hatred of the Daily Fail. If I ignore that fact that the company behind the Daily Fail probably doesn’t pay its share of tax (which might not be illegal but is definitely immoral) and ignoring the fact that the newspaper supported the fascists in the 1930s it is still a shockingly bad news website. The newspaper purports to be the moral and ethical backbone of the UK and yet it portrays all manner of poor behaviour and encourages readers to click on the right hand column.
I have big issues with headline writing in the online version of the Daily Fail which is one of the MOST visited websites in the WORLD [sad face]. I rarely read the print version because I get so annoyed by it I want to cause serious damage to the fabric of society that actually buys this shitpaper.
Here’s an example and a link to the original page if you want to:
Loom bands are small coloured rubber bands that people are weaving together to make bracelets and more. They are a productive, creative thing for people to do and I hope the manufacturers are making lots of money from them.
The headline states that a boy was blinded by a loom band.
When you then read the bullet points it turns out that he might be ok after surgery which is still pretty bad but not utter blindness. It also turns out that the boy was struck in his eye after his brother “accidentally” pinged a band at him. So it was the brother’s fault, and therefore, because the brother was young, this was the fault of the supervision of the child not the loom band itself. This is headline writing at its worst. It’s also making a “news” story out of nothing.
This article was written by Mr or Mrs Daily Mail Reporter. Even the staff know this is such a non-story and misleading that they don’t want their name attached to the story.
As for the boy who fell asleep with the bands on his fingers, he’s ok now. His mum took them off and his fingers are fine.
If you read this article [click on the picture] you will notice that the father took PHOTOS before taking off the loom bands. He can’t have been too worried then. If this had happened with boring office rubber bands do you think this would be in the news? No, it’s there because it’s a new children’s fad that Daily Fail writers don’t understand and so they fear the *new*.
Rage and anger and outrage at how such a rubbish website can be one of the most visited. Perhaps I judge by standards that are too high but I would like to think that there is a market for raising the intellectual game and making people *think*.