TV Dreams

I used to pick up hitchers on a fairly regular basis back in the late seventies and eighties, mostly young folk, students etc. But time goes by, families come along and we become more sensible, more safe, more limited in our outlooks maybe?

Well I was coming back from town today and saw I hitcher thumbing it. Decided he looked OK and pulled over. How you can tell by looking at someone whether they’re OK beats me, but alot of us do it, don’t we?

Anyway I made the right decision as he’d just got out of prison and only had ten pounds in his pocket. The road out of Lincoln he needed was only half a mile further on from my house so it was no problem dropping him off.

Turns out he’d gone to jail for a fortnight for swearing at a judge and telling him what he thought of his decision. And only a County Court judge at that.

He was in court for sending his youngest a Blur CD and his eldest some other rock group as Easter presents. WOW! I didn’t know courts could sever relations like that. Neither can he send emails to his children.

His wife claimed he was violent, but he said she was the violent one and had gone to the police after she’d slashed him with a knife, they’d put him in touch with a victim support group, but his wife got in first claiming he’d been violent to her. He claims she lied in court and got custody.

Of course, one can’t make too many assumptions from hearing only one side and not seeing/hearing the evidence. But stopping a father giving presents to his children and banning email contact seems very harsh. I could understand his communications possibly having to be monitored. But s

Sometimes it makes me wonder when the pendulum of parents rights is going to start swinging the other way?

There’s always someone worse off than oneself, yeah?

Gotta go now.

Well I wouldn’t know what that would be, would I? So I’m going to tell you about mine.

Monday, 14 May 2007.

I’d started work at my computer, the children had gone off to school. My wife came to the door and asked if I could spare a moment. Ominous, because she normally just launches into what she has to say.

I turned and said, “Go ahead”. She came over and handed me a purple notebook, asking me to read the entry marked “May & June”, referring to last year.

Three pages described how she’d been sexually assaulted by a youth that we guessed would be anywhere between 15-18, but we had no way of knowing. The youth couldn’t be identified because my daughter only described him as “he”. The incident seemed to be protracted, and there was insufficient detail to be able to establish exactly what had happened.

What was more harrowing was the description of her feelings a year after the event (she would have been 12 at the time) and the fact that she had started cutting herself to relieve the pain of what had happened to her. We had found evidence of this and had talked to her about it - at the time it seemed to be because she was going along with her emo boyfriend, and we were keeping our eyes open for tell-tale signs, but hadn’t seen any more cuts.

She described how she’d moved on from compasses to scissors, to blades. She wrote how a 12 year old shouldn’t have to go through what shed been through, threatened with rape unless she did what “he” wanted her to do… several times.

There was other stuff which I’m going to leave out, but she concluded that sleep was her only escape.

This is a girl who is very popular with her peers, and has many older friends too, she’s flirty and fun and we’ve always considered she was verging on the “wild child” side. We always joked that she needed keeping on a tight rein ever since she was two or three and would disappear off in shops on a frolick of her own, oblivious to where her parents might be. We were forever calling her back and having to keep a sharp eye on her lest she “got away”.

And now this. My wife had to go to work so I spent the morning checking out web sites for information on how to deal with it. Most of the helplines were closed - obviously people didn’t need help on a Monday morning. But I did find one organisation that answered and we had a long talk. After I’d calmed down having first read the entry in the notebook, you know, going through feelings such as shopping for a baseball bat, calling the police we discussed these and we agreed that the first priority was how my daughter wanted to handle the situation. She obviously needed to talk as she’d mentioned she couldn’t say anything to her best girlfriends, because they’d say how come she’d been so stupid to get into such a situation.

When my wife returned from work at lunchtime we decided she would talk to my daughter on her own first.

So when my daughter returned from school my wife took her to her bedroom, and explained that we had seen her entry in the notebook and asked her what had happened. You can imagine how delicately my wife was treading.

My daughter just smiled her cheeky grin and said that it was only a story cobbled together from incidents her friends had talked about - one of her friends had been abused by her father who ended up in prision and had talked to my daughter about it. Other people we knew in my daughter’s circle of friends had been mentioned in the entry and this made it all the more plausible. She said she was sorry we’d been so upset. Of course, I know this raises the whole question of whether parents should look at what might be considered to be private affairs, but when your daughter is 14 and mixing with friends three years older than her, has a boyfriend of 15 who she’s been going out with for a year we do worry.

All that aside, my wife said she always thought that when incidents of this nature were brought to light in the media that she thought she knew how the parents would be feeling, but it turns out neither of us had any idea of the depths of emotion we would go through. We were both emotionally drained and shattered by the end of the day… but sooooooooo relieved.

Just pray that if you have sons or daughters you never get to experience anything like this.

It’s a long time since I cried like I did last Monday. But at least it had a happy ending. My god, my daughter has a dark side. It obviously stems from her talented creative side. Scary.

Apple Computer announced today that it has developed a computer chip that can store and play music in women’s breast implants.

The iBreast will cost £499 or £599 depending on size.

This is considered to be a major breakthrough because women are always complaining about men staring at their breasts and not listening to them.