A Small Cheer

As someone said in 1997: "A new day has dawned, has it not?"
Today hunting became illegal, a small step towards becoming a more humane and civilised society.
And a step towards making our laws on animal cruelty more consistent and logical.
It means that no longer will magistrates and judges who spend their weekends watching foxes being torn apart have to pass sentence on youths who kick a cat to death behind the council flats or tie a firework to a dog's tail.

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CORRECTION
Nobody has won an Amazon book token for pointing out the mistake in yesterday's blog. The lines I quoted from Ivor Novello were not from two different songs. They were both from the same song. Indeed, they follow each other:
"We'll gather lilacs in the spring again
And walk together down an English lane"
So I don't know what the second song was that I sang on that New Year's Eve long ago. Perhaps I sang a medley and threw in some Franz Lehar for good measure. As I said, I remember almost nothing about it. I can't ask the friend I was with because he was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie. I must remember to write about him next December. The greatest tribute to him is not that one of our leading composers wrote a requiem for him but that people like me who knew him only briefly still remember him with the deepest affection. None of us can ask for more than that. But now the tears are coming so I'll move hurriedly on.

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Although the school canings I described yesterday were a form of child abuse that is now illegal, they would register only 1 or 2 on the Richter scale of abuse. Anyone who suffered more severe child abuse, whether physical, sexual or emotional would rightly think them hardly worth mentioning. They had no lasting effect on me and I mentioned them mainly to point out that physical punishment used to be routinely meted out for the most trivial things and that a worrying proportion of teachers appeared to be at best bullies and at worst psychopaths.

On the subject of schools, why does the state allow parents to send very young children away to boarding institutions known as Preparatory Schools? Because it's the rich middle classes that do it, of course. If working class parents did it they'd be prosecuted and their children permanently removed and placed with foster parents.
I once saw a mother on a TV documentary tearfully watch an equally tearful eight year old boy disappear through the portals of a Prep School and say "I do hope that if anyone does anything beastly to Harry that he'll tell me about it."
To which the only answer is: 'well don't send him there, you stupid bitch, and don't have children if you're going to dump them in an institution at the first opportunity.'