Well I never, isn't it amazing what comes out of the woodwork with the input of a search terms like 'research' and 'researcher' (see previous blog entry).

I am giving you the courtesy of a blogger's reply, Lanolin.  Here's a bit of blogging behaviour for you to study and assess.  Please note,  I do not like the style of cold canvassing you have adopted, I have not clicked on your link and I have sent your message to the trash.

Dear Parliamentarians,

It is unbelievable that an amount of £45,000 can be channelled to a university student over four years,listed as a researcher in his father's parliamentary office, with no visible signs of work attached to such a large outlay for that period...

His father, Derek Conway, has blamed poor administration practices for not indicating the amount and type of research his son undertook in all that time. His research efforts, said to be being paid at 17 hours a week, were notable by their singular absence. The Standards and Privileges Committee of The Houses of Parliament, was unable to unearth any records of work, nor any research that had been done by Freddy Conway.

Money from the public purse, paid for administrative work that members of parliament have to cover, has been abused. The parliamentarian's punishment is to be banned from The House of Commons for ten days, he is required to apologize to his fellow parliamentarians and the man is to repay only £13,000. The beleaguered tax payer,you and me,will have to stand the loss of £32,000 without being given any say in the matter.

Then, to crown it all, I heard a reporter say that the money 'diverted' is small fry by comparison to the investigations underway in other parliamentary election matters. That is not the point!

This man has abused his special position of public trust. His actions were planned; in legal parlance, premeditated. What Conway has done appears to me, to amount to fraud. The 'punishment' is not, I feel, proportional to the offence that has been committed. If this was a state benefit claimant channelling funds to their advantage, there would be hell to pay.

Why is he not being asked to repay the full sum, at the very least?

Why should Conway's actions not be referred for police investigation?

There have been some gaping social holes created in the first month of the year which will impact on many people.

Massive losses of personal data, stolen; when announced, other major data losses came to light.

Fuel costs have soared leaving economic holes in our personal pockets. When market prices come down, fuel costs are never adjusted are they.

The international money markets have seriously wobbled, this will further affect all of us in one form or another. However, there is an unexpected element in this that came to light in France just this week.

It appears that one rogue trader in Paris has traded €3.7 billion on behalf of Le Societe Generale. It is further mooted that he may have made other trades to the value of €30 billion. These figures are mind- boggling and are far in excess of the bank's worth. It is said, that these rogue trades may have added to the extreme nervousness of the international money markets and could have influenced the Americans to lower their interest rates at a greater level than they may have, adding to the sense of fragility in the markets.

Nick Leeson, a British ex-rogue trader who brought down a long established banking house in his time, has said that rogue trades go on in banking every day, some unnoticed, some overlooked. Therefore, the smaller the element of the fraud, the less likely it is to be spotted or challenged. That is not the only area where there is management neglect.

There are other gaping holes in our lives. Daily, our personal data, at an individual level, is mishandled and lost. This is not highlighted because the individual numbers remain uncounted and unaccounted for. It is easy for this abuse to remain hidden.

Major institutions in the U.K. and some of the smaller ones too, have a cavalier attitude to the protection of our personal data and privacy. It is a structural and corporate abnegation of responsibility. If the individual incidents were quantified, I would not be surprised to see the measure go off the chart. The breaches would be of dizzying proportions - I do not think it will ever be addressed.

We've had raging gales, fog, rain and snow in twenty four hours. As I write, we're back to the fun of raging gales.

When this house that I live in was built, every roof tile was nailed down. We've seen ferocious storms, a mini cyclone which took off some of our protective pebble-dash at the front and side of the house and incredibly, a length of concrete wall was demolished. We have never, never lost a roof tile.

At its worst, the wind has hoofed its way through the eaves. There have been times when we wondered, when it sounded like the roof structure was being lifted, if we would find our roof demolished, the rafters laid bare. But no, our original roof is still intact. It is amazing.

Irritatingly, another one arrived today. I have just finished glancing through the first one of the year and put it in file thirteen, (the paper bin).

You can be assured, I will not be subscribing anyone else to this excruciating performance with its ghastly twelve monthly reminders. A horrible thought has just occurred to me, maybe, I'll get landed with an extra month, a freebie, in the hope I'll renew the subscription. Not on your life!

I decided to create mail filters in google mail. The amount of junk, spam, you name it, that goes through that mail site is a major nuisance. I have now started the process and the undesirable mails are beginning to reduce in quantity.

However, the clever b****'s programme place an ! where an i should be. The kiddie words that we use are now replacing the unsavoury ones and both these ruses beat the blockade. Another filter is now in place. What will I have to deal with next? 

'Love and eggs are best when they are fresh'

'Eat what is cooked, listen to what is said'

Russian Proverbs

Have you ever completed a major chore,or, if not a chore, a very large piece of work that you were glad had been completed, that it was done and dusted. Then, by chance, a certain incompleteness comes back to haunt you. It has to be attended to and feels as painstakingly long and tiring to do as the original piece of work was.

Enough...

Tomorrow is another day!

Sunday 20th January 2008.

Stopped off at a local hotel for a cuppa and to read their newspapers by a warm fireside. We delayed leaving, there was a prolonged sleet fall.  We decided we were better off where we were.

On the way home bought a different Sunday paper with a Robbie Burns songs CD.  I was determined to read this paper at home today and not in a week's time!

Burnt the vegetable soup, rescued it (just) and offered it as roast vegetable soup    

Sat in comfortable chair at home, read my newspaper and listened to the Burns songs CD, which was pleasant easy listening.  Diction very good, no mean feat for Ayrshire dialect.

It's time now to prepare our meal of the day, so, I have promised myself I will not be distracted from the task. We might get some real roast vegetables with it. 

Language has evolved in specific ways with the information technology revolution. For example;

This morning Mr Chris Lamb executive of the pig breeders association spoke on their behalf regarding the future pricing of pork.

It's been a trying afternoon. I do not feel kindly disposed to anyone precisely at this moment, it takes too much bl**dy effort. Just thought I would say that before I put on the easiest nosh to cook that I can think of, that takes the least effort and can be called a meal (of sorts). Huh.

I Cannot believe it; aunty BBC not only has a financial reporter on both visual and sound waves, with the most strange phrasing and cadences, but he also has an odd way with vocabulary.

This morning this reporter described the Chancellor of The Exchequer as PRELONGING his anouncements. Jeez, what are we coming to!

Please, aunty BBC, bring back Evan Davis and please,don't prolong the agony for us listeners with more of this grating verbiage.

Residential care for the elderly is being featured for a month on BBC Radio 4. There are so many aspects to it that I wonder what the overall focus will be. One major concern is the cost of care and how it should be met.

Like many, I have been directly involved in arranging care for an elderly relative and being supportive to a family member who had to deal with similar issues. One is in Scotland and one is in England. Finance is a major concern.

I live in Scotland. It is being touted that personal care for the elderly is free. It is not. There is some assistance with it, but it is not free. Like everywhere else, care is means tested. Let's consider some of the arrangements that pertain in Scotland, England and Wales.

Scotland; if personal care is claimed, there are two levels. To get the second and higher amount of £175 per week, the condition of the person needing care, has to be what should be a total hospital care responsibility and you have to prove your claim. The lower level, more commonly paid is, £145 per week.

In England, the point above compares with trying to obtain nursing fees; it is a battle to get anyone to agree the condition of an individual requiring that level of care as the local NHS Trusts do not want to pay the costs.

Again, in England, if the resident is self-funding, the Attendance allowance is kept. If not, the Attendance Allowance is paid to the residential or nursing home.

I have not yet researched the above point with the Welsh experience.

However, when a claim in made in Scotland for the personal care allowances, at whichever level, the first thing that disappears is the attendance allowance, assuming that the benefit has been received. The higher level attendance allowance is about £62. That is a financial off-set for the government against a personal care allowance for someone in residential care. Therefore, £145 less £62 = approx £83 per week. It is just £20 or so, higher than the attendance allowance.

I have no objection to sacrificing the attendance allowance, but it should be remembered it is an offset against the allowance, rather like a tax deduction and leaves a cash benefit of approximately £20 per week extra. The savings allowance threshold will further off-set that sum for the government, (see below).

The financial off-sets do not stop there. The maximum savings threshold a Scot may hold from which no further deductions are accounted against, is £20,000. In England the savings threshold is £22,000 (when I last looked at the figures); in Wales, the savings threshold is £23,000.

Savings Allowed

England £22,000 Wales £23,000 Scotland £20,000

There are no plans to increase the savings threshold for the Scots, even though the question has been raised in the Scottish Parliament.

I leave you to figure out what 'free personal care means'.

I was struck by the quiet love and passion that the organiser, the 'mover and shaker', of the V-Bomber Preservation Society, demonstrated for the plane. When he was interviewed this morning on BBC Radio 4 we discovered that this man had given up his day job to take on board so-to-speak, the campaign to preserve at least one of these planes. The technology is sixty years old.

The V bomber was last used in The Falklands war and the plane had to be refuelled many times on the journey.

The man who lovingly helped to preserve the plane, has never flown in it. Passengers were never allowed! That is amazing dedication to a technological cause.

My desk got cleared and tidied, (apart from one corner) because I was given a present of an all-singing-all-dancing printer. I'm still trying to get to grips with it.

As one does, where I live in Scotland, last night we went with bag in hand, containing whisky, brandy and a sherry, to toast our best wishes for the new year with friends and family in their homes. We were a little later than most people because we'd been away. It was fifth night which gave our need to visit a bit of urgency. The reason being that by the sixth night, everyone has taken down decorations and they are disposing of Christmas trees, tidying up and preparing for 'getting back to normal'.

Admittedly, the cushion felt a little chunkier but it was just as squashy. However, there was an almighty yowl and I jerked up. Oh dear, I had sat on the cat, which, during my brief walkabout, had decided to join the company; it liked the chair I was using as much as I did. The cat literally scarpered, not be to seen again anywhere near where we were socialising.

Poor cat, I did feel bad about sitting on it. It would probably have been very happy seated at my back and I wouldn't have minded it either. I had to find the cat before I left. It had eventually come out of hiding and was sitting, safely, on a windowsill in another room gazing into the street.  We rubbed noses and parted friends.  

Yet again, this week, we have heard and seen gory pictures of man's inhumanity to man in the name of politics, this time in Kenya.

This time last year I was replacing an electric kettle that lasted about 4 years. Previous ones have worked a lot longer, about eight years. I replaced the defunct kettle with a well known make and at what I thought was a reasonable price for something with a trademark that meant quality. Huh, how wrong could I be.