Today I've mostly bin...

[clvrlad]

well i hope your enjoying the bottle of wine

[Bunnylump]

Aw, that was a nice thing to do, Tricia!

[giraffe]

Well done Tricia, that's lovely.

[LAT]

Well done Tricia! And good on you for bringing your colleague such pleasure. Enjoy your wine!

My daughter won a prize last week at work in a similar raffle but wasn't there when the tickets were drawn so they asked a colleague what he thought she would like. Apparently he unhesitatingly said "the vodka"! How well he already knows her even if she has only been in the job just under two months!

[clvrlad]

lol dont know whether thats good or bad

[Bunnylump]

Oh, that was a wise man!!
Better than my useless husband. We won a quiz night raffle, and I made him go to collect a prize. There were chocolates there,(which we could have shared with our table) and what did he pick? A revolting black "hand" (the kind of thing you hand jewellery on). Then he insisted on having it in our hallway to hang his car keys on. Very tasteful. NOT.

[giraffe]

What a kind man to leave all the good prizes for the others. Very selfless!

[clvrlad]

well i suppose its practical.....
ive never been that practical

[pebbles]

Just thought I'd let you know - I won first prize at the raffle for our Mcmillan coffee morning at work.! What was that first prize?.............................. A tour for 6 people round Ibrox football ground! I was the envy of every rangers supporter and had the sympathy of every celtic supporter. Me - I prefer Rugby! What did I do - I gave the prize to the first Ranger's supporter I met at work that day - my reward - the pleasure in that guys face - as a consolation I was also given a bottle of wine - But it was reward enough to see the pleasure in Alecs face when I handed it to him - fortunately I had to answer the phone or he might have seen a little tear!
Tricia

Now if it was Murrayfield and rugby - that would be an entirely different story

That reminds me of a charity raffle my husband won. The prize was your child being a mascot at a Wasps rugby game. My son was 26 at the time and 6 feet tall! So my husband let the guy who sold him the ticket have the prize for his 7 year old son. He had Matt Dawson look after him, with lots of jokes played on the players, and he was shown on the telly leading out the team.

[Bunnylump]

I'd have LOVED to have seen your son dressed up as the mascot though!! That would have been HYSTERICAL. Bet the little lad loved it though!

[pebbles]

I'd have LOVED to have seen your son dressed up as the mascot though!! That would have been HYSTERICAL. Bet the little lad loved it though!

We laughed at the thought of that too! The little guy had the best time ever!

[katsmom]

I just have to post this:
I've been doing a voice over for anal cleaning products and enemas trying not to laugh The Chinese have no shame!

Then we spent a glorious afternoon watching the Chinese National Day Parade! No flag waving in this house though. I'm trying to explain the primitiveness of the display of military might vs. human rights or lack there of while my husband is oohing and aahing the really cool rockets. You can tell where our priorities lie.

Poor kid didn't know who to listen to. Mom and her history/humanitarian lecture or dad and his "look at the cool gun"

[eirian]

... sneaking on here from work!
Yes, I'm missing Thomas (well, most of him, although I don't miss what I did miss (if you follow) as he did a really dirty, leaky nappy that apparently took Sigur 30 mins to sort out. Nasty!)

[giraffe]

Well done Thomas for making Mum feel better about leaving you!

[gill216]

Why does that also sound like he's going to take revenge on Mummy tonight Really nasty nappies, really nasty teeth

Hope the first day back went well Eirian.

[gill216]

Today I've been sitting with my jaw close to the ground.

A friend of my daughter & co (I call them the Spanish lot now murdered his parents. Its all over the papers and the news. He isn't just a casual acquaintance met in the pub they had either. He holidayed in Spain with them earlier this year.

A P.E. teacher! Whats worse is he told them weeks ago his mum had died and he'd just been to her funeral. Obviously as he's just murdered her that was rubbish. Pre - meditated must be the call although he's obviously unhinged anyway.

I'm wondering just what this world is coming too. This is the second murderer my daughter has had the misfortune to know. The first was actually a pair- who are still serving a life sentence. All the same age, all lived in the same flats in their early 20's and the victim was a girl of a similar age who had learning disabilities and had been put out to care in the community.

Given that she has also had a gun held to her head in an armed robbery this is starting to sound like she associates with the lowest of the low. That is just not the case.

Her best friend has been date raped . Her drink was spiked with a drug that can be found in hair up to 3 months later, she received criminal injuries compen to a fair sum, a sum which will never compensate her, and the perpetrators- yes plural- weren't prosecuted despite previous similar complaints made against them. Each incident has taken place in a different part of the UK.

I fear for our youngsters.

[Scurra]

This is that statistics problem again. Someone wins the National Lottery every week as well (OK, so not every week, but near enough) - is there something weird going on if you happen to know two of them?

I'm not trying to trivialise this, but the problem with anecdotal evidence is that it looks more significant than it is. If you experience it personally, then you (a) tend to notice it more elsewhere and (b) tend to lump it all in together as being evidence of everything "going to hell in a handcart" because the innate paranoia that helps us survive as a species also tends us towards a pessimistic interpretation of events.

(I think this is in danger of turning into a very political side-alley... I'd better stop here before I start frothing at the mouth myself - but for opposite reasons )

edit: and, as katsmom reminds me below, I'm also completely sympathetic towards your daughter, who sounds as though she's had a dreadful time. I'm honestly not trivialising her experiences.

[katsmom]

Oh Gill, I hope your daughter is ok. That must be very hard for her.

My biggest fear is something happening to my daughter. Myself, I could live with but if something were to happen to her it would devastate me. We never hear of these things happening in HK. The English news protects us from all the negativity of man. I'm not so sure that is good. How do you explain there are bad people in the world when it only shows up on CNN or on BBC?

Along with you, that fear is always there. Where did we as a race go wrong? Was the world this terrible when we were young?

[gill216]

David- I don't want to lump this into a general political discussion, and had no intentions of making it sound so.

Its not just my daughter who has been affected on more than one occasion. We have too - entirely different event- which I cant go into. My son has also been burgled 3 times- once by a masked man.

We may be unfortunate but we are a normal hardworking family - law abiding too. If it can happen to us it CAN happen to you.

[Scurra]

That's my point about the National Lottery though. It COULD be you.
What happens is that you remember the bad stuff - because it's generally so traumatic - or the wonderful stuff (for opposite reasons!) but the vast majority of the "nothing much happened" stuff gets folded away because, well, "nothing much happened." (Once again, I want to say that I'm not attempting to trivialise your experiences.)

But life really has always been like this. It's true that we now live in an age of mass media, meaning that coverage of things is perhaps more instantaneous and widespread, but we managed to have two world wars last century without the benefit of television. Street gangs in our cities today aren't a patch on the ones in the 18th or 19th centuries, and in those days we had capital punishment and deportation too!

And in the end, the personal IS political. (The Electoral Commission had a great advert about that, reminding people to register to vote. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zruGBWLk9s8)