Promoting Adoptions

Just as there is Godwin's Law stating that every argument will eventually wind up with a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis, so there should also be a law that all idle Internet meanderings will result in watching an Ellen DeGeneres video on YouTube.

The last few days have seen me trawling the Internet even more so than usual, thanks to picking up a whole litany of lurgies simultaneously: an ear infection accompanied by a chest infection and tonsillitis does not a Happy Jane make. Battling just the one is hard enough, but the unHoly Trinity is genuinely exhausting. I'm shattered.

Incidentally – going spectacularly off-topic here, but all in a good cause – I was urgently googling in the middle of Friday night for 'home remedies' to cure an ear ache. For reasons I cannot fathom, one of them actually worked: if you're ever wanting to claw your own ear off thanks to an infernal pain inside, take a small piece of onion, warm it in the microwave, and pop it in your ear. Leave it there for a few minutes and you will soon forget your ear ever had an issue. An equally pungent alternative is to create some garlic oil (chopped garlic and olive oil) and pop a few drops of that into the lug hole. (What the devil did we do pre-Internet?)

And now swerving sharply back towards my topic of the moment...

There was a DeGeneres clip that was something or another to do with adoption, and via a series of twists and turns I ended up on the website of an American couple asking for donations to help them adopt a Russian child. More specifically, a little girl with Down's Syndrome who had been abandoned at birth. My immediate reaction was to proffer up a mental face-palm to a site asking for donations for this cause, before I bothered to read on a little. They've broken down the costings and, in doses of $100 or so dollars at a time, demonstrated why it costs around US$40,000 for an American to adopt a child from Russia. (Bear in mind that thanks to Putin it is now impossible for any American to do so, but this is harking back to the good old pre-2013 days.)

Out of curiosity, I googled the cost of IVF treatment. In a nutshell, the sum is unlimited: you could be lucky and have success on the first course of treatment, or it could take you many cycles. And don't forget that what the clinic quotes is only a fraction of what you'll really pay: there is the time needed off work, the travelling to and from appointments, the scans, the tests, the checks, the drugs – and the emotional strain it inevitably puts a couple under.

Did you know that, in the UK at least, one in seven couples struggle to conceive? That's a far higher figure than I ever imagined it to be, and rather marginalises the typical argument of, 'it's so unfair that we can't have a child – everybody else can'.

There are two aspects of this wretched situation that are playing on my mind: 1) why don't more couples readily accept their inability to create a child between them and move towards the adoption route? There are literally hundreds of thousands of children already hanging around in desperate need of loving parents. 2) why on earth is it so damn difficult for people to adopt? Never mind the rather complex relations of the Russia/America controversy, it's difficult enough in your own country to adopt a child. Why? Who the devil is creating these rules and regulations?

Regarding the latter, I know of a couple – both solicitors, both respectable, hard-working and high-earning individuals – who struggled to conceive and so decided to adopt. They battled for years, having to prove themselves to squadrons of social workers, and finally, finally, they have a little boy. Even then, they didn't actually know until the day they picked him up whether they would be allowed to walk away with him.

That one in seven statistic is still knocking me sideways. Why don't more of these couples head down the adoption route? However stressful, it is infinitely preferable to the prodding and probing involved in IVF – and at a mere £160 in the UK it is a bargain in comparison. Women also have the benefit of not needing to go through that whole pregnancy and birth business: no stretch marks, no aching back, no impossible decisions between slicing or splitting. Yes, it might seem tough that you are unable to have a child of your own – but those are the cards you've been dealt, and those are the cards you must play with.

People are always so intent on fighting for their human rights that they forget to be human themselves. Maya Angelou – a phenomenal woman who, along with the likes of Ellen DeGeneres, raises the bar for the rest of us – reminds us that, 'People will forget what you said; people will forget what you did – but people will never forget how you made them feel'. It's a simple but profound truth that if people stopped demanding for themselves and rather thought what they could do for others, life would be rather more worth living for all of us.

I am fully aware of my own faults and I know the areas I need to work on. But I am often entertained by those who sigh and say, 'my, you always meet such interesting people! I never manage that!' The trick is to genuinely believe that everyone has a story worth telling and to ease it out of them. They say that art of pleasing is to be pleased, and I would add that the art of seeing someone as interesting is to be interested.

'Trust that little voice in your head that says, 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...' - and then do it.'

Lazy Blogging

[This was written last August as I meandered around Italy; it's still vaguely relevant and I haven't the time just now to create an entry about what has been flitting through my mind of late.]

Yet another return to the abandoned blog – I wonder how long it will be resurrected for this time? As a general rule, I start blogging when I am dealing with something significant in my life. Chances are that I won't directly write about the relevant event, but reaching out the odd feeler into the virtual stratosphere is a way of becoming reconnected once more.

I have often thought that some people appear in your world for a brief period, to serve a particular – not necessarily identifiable – purpose. And writing this makes me remember waiting for a friend in a bar in London a few years back. It was relatively busy, but I managed to get a table to myself and settled down to watch whatever it was on the television. I think it might have been Wimbledon. Anyhow, an elderly gentleman was looking around for somewhere to sit, pint in hand, and I offered him the spare seat at my table. I had been feeling particularly anti-social at that point, wrapped up in whatever was bothering me. But we started talking; I remember he was visiting from Ireland, and had spent the last few days in the archives at the British Library.

Honestly, I don't recall much else. Other than he made some very perceptive remarks to me, comments that for some reason I needed to hear at that point. It was as if a guardian angel had temporarily popped down for a pint. I have met such people on trains and planes, people you have a particular and utterly unexpected conversation with that reveals something about yourself or the world that makes it all become crystal clear for a moment.

On a recent flight, I was parked next to a large ginger guy armed with a McDonald's paper bag – the sort of person you eye up in the departure lounge and quietly hope you aren't seated next to. He turned out to be the most harmless and charming of geeks (a commentator for a card game called Magic The Gathering...), although that image was somewhat shattered when 'Fifty Shades of Grey' somehow came into conversation and it was revealed he is also, and I quote, a 'sex therapist for S&M couples'. The presence of two young children just across the aisle fortunately forestalled any in-depth information about this side-line of his.

There was a point to mentioning him. (Good God, my blogging skills have gone downhill in the past two years. I hope I remember how to write before you all get bored of such postings.) Oh yes. I said to him that I was off to Italy to check out a cottage, somewhere to put down some roots. And store my vast supply of books. He loved this – the fact that I could see nothing unusual or untoward about 'putting down roots' in a country that was not my own. And he understood it.

You see, the way I live my life makes perfect sense to me. My seemingly erratic bouncing from pillar to post. If I take the last year, I have – without so much as a second thought – sidled between four continents. I was pretty taken aback when someone I had thought of as a friend said to me angrily that I never followed anything through, and why should I ever expect to get anywhere that mattered with that sort of attitude?

She proved a few things to me with that remark. First off, that yes, some people do only enter your life for a specific time period. Without her kindness and friendship, I wouldn't have dealt with Hong Kong. And secondly, that I am capable of producing pretty strong reactions in people. I am, ha, Marmite Woman.

The problem with Marmite is that, however much you love it, too much might be a bad thing.

This posting is dedicated to all those fleeting glimpses of guardian angels, and to the people who will stick with me through the years. 'No man is an island, entire of itself', wrote Donne. I think I'm a pretty isolated peninsular of a person, but am always grateful for the narrow causeway linking me to the mainland.

On Education, Education, Education

The depressing reality is, I created my best piece of writing at the age of 15. Typical teenage existential angst drove me towards reading anything and everything related to WW2, and I wound up on a school trip to Auschwitz. I never studied history at school – well, the first couple of years we were forced to attend classes but all I can remember is a teacher who was either drunk or hungover, and my friend creating a poster entitled 'Roman Life was Hard' depicting a group of guys lining up miserably alongside what was meant to be a drawing of grain bins but looked suspiciously like a communal ablution facility.

That's it. That's what I remember from three years of History classes in a grammar school. Oh, and a line from a poem that had all these ideas about, 'When you are sick you are green/ When you are angry you are red' – that sort of thing – with the last line, 'And you have the cheek to call me coloured?' I thought at the time it was quite neat, but after three years in Africa you come to realise that people here who are coloured are damn insulted to be called anything other than coloured. I'm pretty sure the most useful thing I learned in school was how to use a band saw.

I read Rimbaud and Sartre the way kids today read 'Twilight' and 'Harry Potter'. Is it any wonder I produced such a perfect piece after my Auschwitz visit – wasted as part of my English Language GCSE Portfolio. It was the year after Diana died and we were all expected to write about how that made us feel; I informed my teacher that, lovely lady though I'm sure the self-titled 'People's Princess' was, I had no opinions whatsoever worth considering and would much rather choose my own topic. The poor guy had long ago concluded it was far easier just to let me have my way...

And now, thanks to the Internet and a hefty dose of good fortune, I earn my living by writing. Some of it is diabolical, it really is. Worse than the drivel I inflict on blog readers. This morning I wrote about China's only female monarch, Wu Zetian. Someone who loved poetry, and cheerfully killed a bunch of concubines in order to be successful. Oh, and her daughter (just incase she grew up to be an even more obnoxious, ambitious little tart). I think Lady Macbeth was modelled on her. Last week, I focussed on smartphones and how they have changed the work place. And Sappho, I wrote about Sappho.

When I wrote about Auschwitz, I didn't really care about the end product. I didn't know what 'alliteration' meant; I hadn't studied speeches and the art of rhetoric. A few years earlier I wrote a couple of poems, one of which was about child abuse and I am proud to say disturbed my psychologist mother to such an extent she charged off to the nearest Abuse Expert and begged their opinion. For none of these pieces did I, in theory, know what I was doing – I just wrote what flowed from the pen.

I'm worried that I've lost that ability, irretrievably. The chance to perfectly capture a moment, to weigh words against each other somewhere inside of me, to know instinctively how something should be. I taught myself to read – I don't remember doing this, and my mother certainly doesn't remember teaching me, but she knows I picked up a book one day and read it aloud. Formal education is something that is supposed to expand our horizons but all it has done is limit mine. It forces us into ever tighter corners, limiting our possibilities and futures and dreams. It stamps out creativity and difference and originality because these are 'difficult' for teachers to deal with. As long as we allow teachers into our classrooms who are scared to encounter a student smarter than themselves, the education system is fundamentally flawed.

I've struggled to end this – education and writing are both subjects close to my heart and I could produce reams on either. But I think I'll close with the words of Ken Robinson; if you haven't yet seen his TED talks then go there immediately. I just wish that governments would acknowledge the importance of what he is saying and make the changes before it is too late – before we have created a system whereby nobody cares any more, and nobody sees anything wrong with the way things are.

“Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardising in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”