Christopher John Myers

Mark Twain gives the lie to the idea of Victorian Dad as a staid, humourless parent who wanted his children in bed, asleep when he came home. Here he is talking to tough army types at AT THE BANQUET, IN CHICAGO, GIVEN BY THE ARMY OF THE TENNESSEE TO THEIR FIRST COMMANDER, GENERAL U. S. GRANT, NOVEMBER, 1879 (That's Ulysses S. Grant, by the way) "You soldiers all know that when the little fellow arrived at family headquarters you had to hand in your resignation. He took entire command. You became his lackey, his mere body servant, and you had to stand around, too. You had to execute his order whether it was possible or not. And there was only one form of marching in his manual of tactics, and that was the double-quick. He treated you with every sort of insolence and disrespect, and the bravest of you didn't dare to say a word. You could face the death-storm .... and give back blow for blow; but when he clawed your whiskers, and pulled your hair, and twisted your n...

Croydon Council says residents aren’t interested in their new £73.5m computer contract. And that, says Sara Bashford, cabinet member for corporate services, was why they didn’t make it public. The Croydon Advertiser’s Gareth Davies quotes Cllr Bashford speaking these surreal words: “This is very much an internal contract. It’s not really of very much interest to the general public, apart from the value. “The residents of Croydon know we have to have IT. If someone really wanted to know [how much it cost] they could ask and we would tell them. “I just don’t think that this is particularly interesting to most people.” The contract with outsourcing specialists Capita will see staff getting shiny new smartphones, tablets and PCs. I can’t resist continuing Gareth Davies’ quote from Cllr Bashford, “It’s a huge amount of money.   “When I looked at it I thought ‘My goodness’. It’s probably our biggest single contract, but it is the most important one because if tha...

 David Blunkett in riot warning over Roma migrants EXTRAORDINARY 1 – Former Home Secretary and well-loved leftie David Blunkett fears that tensions between local people and Roma migrants in his town of Sheffield could escalate into rioting unless action is taken to improve integration, David Blunkett has warned. EXTRAORDINARY 2: Story run, relatively straight, in the BBC EXTRAORDINARY 3: His comments are dismissed as ‘fuelling Romaphobia’ in the Guardian . PREDICTABLE: The Daily Mail reports Pakistani community members in Sheffield are organising patrols to ‘educate the Roma about British ways and not littering the streets’! The former home secretary fears a repeat of race riots that hit northern cities in 2001. David Blunkett’s concerns centre on the Page Hall area of Sheffield, where Roma migrants from Slovakia have set up.   But, in an interview with BBC Radio Sheffield, he also accused the government of "burying their head in the sand" over the sc...

Seen this terrifying letter in the Torygraph? I've heard of staff shortages, but this APPEARS to be a terrifying confluence of weak management, poor training, institutional problems and a kind of warped feminism ... Failing midwives SIR – As a paediatrician specialising in children with disabilities, I am often asked to examine forensically the medical records of children who have died or have severe disability possibly related to events around birth . Often the baby’s heart rate showed obvious signs of worsening distress in labour, yet nothing was done by the midwives to alert the obstetrician until it was too late. The midwives seem to take it as a personal failure if they cannot deliver the baby without medical help. When they are called, junior obstetricians seem to fear they will be accused of medical interference if they intervene. Numerous parents, junior doctors and medical students have told me that they have heard midwives make der...

Not sure about the new 'Face of Nike'