There should be PICTURES in all of this but Google cannot work out how to show them.
Pictures before April 2006 are there,but none after...cannot put new ones either. Google pretends this is not happening.
I don't know why so many people are surprised at the UNICEF report. I think the UK, and particularly its cities and towns, is a hugely unpleasant place to grow up. We are inordinately lucky to be able to live in Wales where we, for the most part, can avoid all that is 'British'. Some people seem surprised, too, that France is not such a wonderful place to be a child...We thought living in Burgundy was dire! The comments in The Guardian are very interesting:
UNICEF
Mind you the following is reported entirely without any sense of Irony!:
From The Welsh Assembly’s Website:
Assembly's Play Strategy begins (no, no not for the civil servants and AMs more’s the pity)
Launching the proposals at the Museum of Welsh Life, Ms Davidson said: "Wales was the first country in the UK to recognise that play is vital to children's development and that we should take every opportunity to support it."…..Ho Hum. And what form did the ‘recognition’ take? Tell them to DO it! That in a country which is almost in its entireity a museum and singularly lacking in homo ludens.
A teacher said to me that what it really meant was that they were going to have to lock away all the books!
So what with all the clustering, federalising and other financially motivated shiftiness and interfering that is going on, poor little infant schools, one of the few zones of happiness in nthe UK, I should think are having a hard time of it.
Elodie tells me :
“Tomorrow is Saturday. I just going to ‘hang about’, ‘hang around’.” Where does she hear this in Thailand?!
That is not to say that growing up in Bangkok would be much fun, nor in rural Thailand without a decent family income.
We had as it happens been discussing the optimal size of communities. I am sure much has been written on this and so we are just speculative amateurs. In a while I shall do some research-but before that….I grew up in small villages and even smaller schools. I should think the population of the villages, including their outlying farms, was no more than 1-2,000 at the most. Even towns such as Welshpool and Newtown can hardly have topped 5,000.
The population of Pen Llyn or Dwyfor, the resident population that is, appears to be about 20,000 which is almost the same as the extended population of Sawankhalok. That suggests that a population, of at the most 10,000 more is sufficient to trigger an even more reasonable level of services and communality.
As Dwyfor has struggled to about that number it has generated a Somerfield and an Asda, so has Sawankhalok attracted a Tesco Lotus. Both have,too, quite vibrant societies with fairly extensive familiarity of people with each other.
English Towns with a similar population ?? Well Amersham, Broadstairs, Huntingdon
Elsewhere Ronda has a population of 35,000, Tralee 20,000 and Piazza Armerina in Sicily the same. In France Anonnay, Aubenas, Beaune. You see I have not tried hard to go down the ABC. Interestingly most German Administrative Region Towns have populations of around 20000 or less
Are the above towns places one would have no problem in living in? Maybe the problm with Beaune is that we neither came from there nor really licved there long enough.
Looks to me that is the optimum. Less-in the sticks-more-increasing population pressure and space is surely critical. Populations of France, UK, Thailand almost identical-size of country? Well, of course, large tracts of the UK are uninhabited.
And then there are house prices.....what kind of a society creates an income eating monster like UK mortgages?...and to live in those little boxes, too!
