Arrival

The Benjamin of my tribe finally walked into arrivals at YVR yesterday at something like 16.00, sans baggage. Hmmm. He had waited until his flight's carousel had been picked clean and then was told by some helpful person to find his airline's desk. This turned out to be like one of those chocolate orange TV ads. An almost impossible task since Zoom do not actually have their own desk at YVR, however we did succeed in tracking down one very nice gentleman who had the task of dealing with ten different charter companies. So he was our chocolate orange and when we had done all the Indiana Jones stuff to find him, he in his turn found Ben's luggage. Sorted.

Meanwhile, over in Britain, well, that's not entirely accurate because it doesn't include Scotland, but in general, the school year is about to grind to an unnecessarily tardy close.
Throughout the temperatures of 30 plus, teachers have been giving way, oh so way more than their pound of flesh before finally collapsing in a heap for five to six weeks. Oh yes, it's the five to six weeks 'holiday' that the general public focus on. Has seemed odd to me that teacher recruitment has been low for a number of years now, you'd think teacher training would be the number one pick for lazy graduates.

Often, at this time of year, you can hear some wheezing whinge from the right wing press and their lackeys about how it's time to reform the school year, after all, wasn't it created like this so that children were out in the fields to help bring in the harvest? Now, the argument goes, that child labour laws and mechanisation in the agricultural industry have removed that need, we should be making the school year longer, or smarter or something. The five term year is the most fashionable paradigm.

Well...teachers aren't the only stakeholders in education. As the school year stands at the moment, many parents seem incapable of taking their holidays during the six week summer period, so I cannot imagine how they would cope with little slots every ten weeks.
Education is steadily disrupted by a stream of kids being taken out of class from late September through to the end of November, and then it starts up again around Easter. And maybe a little ski-ing flurry in February.
Er... I should point out that Ben is here because he has finished school, not because I am one of those parents springing him early.

I was in the middle of slagging the right wing press as usual, when I received this link from Simmi, it's a corker:)

In my LGBT slot, Simmi had also sent me this interesting article from Planetout, comparing North American airlines for LGBT friendliness. Our own Air Canuck comes third, although as I said to Simmi, the fact that they are even included is something that gives kudos to Planetout itself. I would expect commercial airlines to be quite LGBT aware. It may seem a bit of a stereotype that all male air crew are gay, not only because of Alan Cummin's half of the comic air crew in 'The High Life', but speaking as someone who spends her fair share of time on aircraft, many of them are quite camp and again, speaking as a frequent air traveller, frankly - I like that. Simmi tells me that they're doing European carriers soon.

On the F-word blog yesterday, Jess McCabe pointed out that Manchester, yes, the city not the football teams, are charging a fee of £50 to everyone participating in this year's Pride march. It seems quite outrageous to me - no pun intended, seriously - when I think of the cost to the public of policing football matches and also of the money made by the city and its commerce and merchants because of Pride, well, apologies, but they're taking the piss.