Public parenting

Today I got on a train.

I even got to sit down, with my own little table sat viewing the English countryside whizz by outside. There were a couple of children with their young(ish) looking parents nearby. The mum sat on her phone, the dad relaxing with sunglasses on, a position he didn't move from the whole duration of my voyage.

These children were happily chattering away, crawling over their seats and playing with each other, an elderly couple a few seats down were smiling as they watched.

I happily sat down, looking forward to a calm, swift voyage home and possibly a mint or two; and then I realised the mistake I'd made choosing this particular carriage.

The mum started screaming at her kids to be quiet, so loud my eardrums actually hurt. The children were making noise sure, but their mother's response was so bizarrely disproportionate it took me by complete surprise, and by the shocked looks on the other passengers' faces, them too. This continued until I escaped at my stop, 40 minutes later, my eardrums possibly perforated and my head aching. Each time she'd yell, grab her kids and muscle them back into position, then promptly ignore then and return to her phone, at which point the children would start getting more energetic, restarting the cycle.

I'm young, I'm not a parent, but is this a normal way to react to children noisily playing around? Because to me this seems like a very ineffective way to discipline children, all she seemed to achieve was thoroughly annoying all those around her.

Nature in a city

I was walking home back up the hill when I reached the Circus in Bath. I paused to take a photo of the trees that take up the centre of the Circus and was struck by the sheer size of the trees. In my first year of university my flatmates and I drunkenly ended up there by accident, and attempted to get our arms all around a tree, linked arm in arm. These trees are so large, is this what a forested England would look like? If more of our world's natural beauty were allowed to flourish?

 This picture, taken from the window of my flat shows those same huge, majestic trees, only now it looks different. Rather than the natural beauty you get from seeing them, it conveys the feel that they are a relic of a long gone past, a single green fleck in an urban sprawl, allowed to remain simply because it creates an illusion of beauty and nature.
And yet, despite the many, many yellow stoned buildings it is surrounded by, these trees are still clearly visible, rising above the rooftops. Even though, over the course of history, England's natural landscapes have vanished, these trees serve as a reminder to me, that although mankind can achieve much, so can nature, and remembering this seems important to me. We have just one world, one chance, let's try and keep those trees alive, and through that, the rest of us.

Getting older

As I lie awake, I'm remembering my days back in school, where twice a year I would get a letter from the bank, telling me my unused bank account had gained money (your £380 is now £383.80!).

Nowadays the letters I get are more gloomy; you've failed a payment so you need to pay the bank back, you've hit your limit and can't spend any more until you put money into the account, also: you need to pay us back for failing to have money. (Anyone else see a paradox here)

The fact is, our world revolves around money and possession, and though it is nice to dream of a utopian, post scarcity future where money is a thing of the past, the stark reality of the matter is that the world we live in is a material world.

Gloomy thoughts at 3am

Call centres and public service

People in call centres get a bad reputation.

Everyone hates getting cold-called, that annoying person trying to sell you something you don't want JUST as you sit down for tea. And yeah, that can be annoying, but you've gotta remember: they're a person too.

That person will get paid pittance for spending a whole day getting yelled at, hung up on and messed around by the people they are made to call, and at the end of a day of abuse, they then have to get on with their own lives, their own troubles, adding to all of that by being rude to them over the phone just seems kind of unnecessary doesn't it? How would you like it if you got yelled at for doing a job you hated, just to earn enough to get by?

And once in a while, every one of us will need to call up a customer service number and ask for help, to these same kinds of people. Will being rude get you what you want? Or will you be nice, but forceful, and have everyone come out of the call happy with a job well done?

What brings me to this is hearing stories from family and friends of cold callers, and "useless" service people when they call helplines. But in my experience, I've never had such a problem, I'm always calm and polite, and so are they (they want to keep that job after all), and as such, every time I call up such a number I seem to come out of it with what I want.

What I think I'm getting at here is: be nice to people, and see what happens, if someone's annoying you or stressing you out, take a moment and imagine the kind of problems they're having too. Everyone has their own lives, their own joys and problems, and it's important that we all remember that.

Hello world

Hi, I decided to start a blog for anyone that's interested.
I'm going to post about any old random topic, but my life leans heavily towards the student gamer lifestyle, so we'll see just how varied my experience is.
To kick off this first post I thought I'd first share a link to a story I wrote on a great subreddit I found. It recently became a default subreddit, so there's plenty more content coming in too, there's usually something appealing to read.

The story:

http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/24us7c/wp_an_ordinary_human_being_gets_abducted_into/chawz4k