My teenage kid, a bright, generous, and thoughtful lad, asked me yesterday what I and my school mates called thick kids at school. I offered words like 'twat', 'idiot', 'clot', 'prat' etc. But what he said next froze me to the core. "We call them Downs". I could not stay calm. "Do you know what a Downs person is? How dare you show disrespect to people, especially children with disabilities. Can't you see how hurtful this would be to parents and siblings of Downs sufferers? How would you feel if you heard it being used as an insult if your own brother was a Downs child?"... and so on. But instead of my normally respectful intelligent son apologising and mumbling that he wasn't thinking and would never do it again, he angrily defended his attitude and those of 'his generation'. "You live in the past. Things are different today" - probably much like I would have argued with my own parents. Is he right? Or have w...
My kids call me Grom (Grumpy Old Man). OK, pedants will know that ought to be GOM, but a Grom sounds grumpy. I started building internet businesses in the 1980s and these days invest in other peoples' start-ups. Now that less of my life is about to happen than has happened, I've got a lot to get off my chest. This blog is a series of posts about things that annoy me, things that excite me or things that just need to be said. Grumbles of a Grom... Grombles