Nigel Gordon

Des, I listened to ABC many years ago whilst island hopping in the Pacific and enjoyed listening to it. I hope you have the Australian equivalent of "Furious of Tunbridge Wells", it would be a shame if anything destroyed ABC.

Chris, I often had to work overseas and before the days of widespread internet spent a lot of my time figuring out how to get BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. I don't think most people in England realize how good our radio is. Fortunately though middle England regards BBC Radio 4 as something akin to a Sacred Cow. Any move by any parties that might end up in endangering their Women's Hour, Gardner's Question Time or, heaven forbid, the Archers, has middle England raising in rebellion. Our government may be prepared to face off most objections to their policies but all the parties know better than try to stand up against 'Furious of Tunbridge Wells'. This morning I have been delighted to listen to Music of the Forest, the story of Colin Turnbell which you can find at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04f9r4m Colin Turnbell was a anthropologist (more by accident than design) who was also gay and eventually died of AIDS. It is an interesting story and well worth listening to..

These may be posted no longer on AD but I am glad they are still available.

I must say that I agree with Lugnutz, I just can't wrap my head around it either, that may though be because I am on the autistic spectrum. It is though a good story and it shows just how difficult autistic people find it to relate to things most people take for granted.

Actually I think the problem is in mentioning dinosaurs, the locals do not want anyone else to know that they still have them.

There is something seriously wrong here but I am not sure if it is with the student, the police or the school, probably it is the whole lot.

This is a story which has captivated me from the start, I have no idea where it is going or how it is going to get there but I intend to read along and find out.

Just read the last chapter, then went back and read the whole thing again from the start. This is a story which promises a lot and it certainly delivers.

I thought this was good from the start but it has just got better, and I expect it will get a lot better yet.

This appears to be a clear and simple instance of personality displacement. You have some aspect of your personality you don't like and you push it off into another personality which you make different from yourself.

It seems that it is almost certain to be. I've just heard a spokesman for the East African Baptist Alliance stating that they intend to get the law reenacted at the first possible opportunity. The strange thing was that for an East African his English had a very pronounced American accent and word usage.

There are some stories that grab you the moment you start to read them and this is one. Having recently read a number of Gee's stories I look forward to seeing where this is going to go, it will without doubt be an interesting read.

Try a helmet mike a some good voice recognition software. I presume you are using a helmet!

Have just read the final chapter and thoroughly enjoyed it. This is a excellent story well told and superbly crafted by a master wordsmith. Thank you Cole for an entertaining and delightful tale well told.

Wish we had, still having to carry the watering can out each night to water the garden. For some reason the storms seem to be avoiding Leicester.

This is an excellent and well told story, it is also an illustration of how much things have changed for the gay community.

Yesterday I listened to a piece about brain development of the adolescent, specifically the adolescent male. What was interesting is that the part of the brain that governs the propensity to take risks and explore takes a leap of development at the start of adolescence and becomes fully developed about half-way through adolescence. The part of the brain that identifies and understands connections and consequences does not start to develop until late adolescence. The simple truth is there are physiological reasons why teenage males spend so much of their time acting in totally stupid ways. It is society's duty to make sure they can't harm themselves or other during their risk taking stage.

Parental attitudes have a lot to do with it, unfortunately we tend to get our hang ups from our parents. Back in the late 1990s I was working in Denmark. The first week I was there I tended to walk everywhere to find my way around and walking up to the shops early one hot Saturday morning I was surprised to see a boy, about seven or eight, lying on the windowsill of a basement apartment, so virtually at pavement level, naked. I could hear his mother shouting at him from inside and thought, with my Anglo/American sensibility, that she was telling him to put some clothes on. It was only when a hand appeared in the window with a large bottle of sunscreen that I realized she was not the least worried about the kid's nudity but the fact that he had not put on sun protection. Incidentally he was still there a good hour later when I walked back with my shopping, by that time a lot of people were around and nobody took the least notice. Over the next few months, which was quite a hot summer, I got quite used to seeing children running around outside in the nude, usually where there were fountains or pools but not always. The point was the parents had no hang up about nudity and neither did the kids, nor will their children.

Unfortunately Cole it is only the Western Continental Europeans who tend to have an open attitude to sex. The offshore Europeans (Scots, English, Welsh, Irish ) and the Eastern Europeans tend to have a rather closed attitude. Historically that is where most of the 19th and 20th century immigration to the United States originated from, so you ended up getting their sexual baggage with them. One thing you have to remember is a large proportion of that immigrant population were from religious groups who found the attitude in their home country far too liberal.

And it shows Cole, we may only be at Chapter 2 but there is something about this story which says it is going to be a good one.

I must admit that I have no idea how to bring about the required change but I do know that we must keep on trying. What each of us can do might be very very small but remember a million small chips can wear down a mountain. Personally I think the first step would be to dump the commitment to the culture of the Abrahamic faiths that pervades much of society, though I am aware some followers of those faiths would argue that opposite.

As one of those 'sitting in their ivory towers' I also experienced bullying which resulted in me attempting suicide at the age of 14, which resulted in eights weeks hospitalization, as a result of bullying and that was back in the early 1960s when you were told to toughen up and take it like a man. You don't stop bullying by applying tough hard sentences on them, all you do is show them that might is right, which just reinforces the underlying tendency to exercise their might over other. You only need to walk into any prison to see the pecking order of bullies and when they come out of prison the prison bully become even bigger bullies. The only way you can stop bullying in all its forms is to change the way how people think. To do that you need to challenge their thinking patterns and that you cannot do by using force, you have to use one to one engagement. Anyone who has been through a process of behavioral realignment using techniques such as CBT will know that it is not an easy option. You will get emotionally and psychologically torn apart and then you will have to rebuild yourself. The leader of the gang that bullied me ended up being sent to Borstal, for a particularly nasty beating up of a fifteen year old. That was the start of a number of stays at Her Majesty's Pleasure, which eventually resulted in a life sentence for manslaughter. I hear from a friend, who spends a lot of time in prison (I based the character on A Strange Warmth on him), that he is now one of the biggest bullies in prison, making the life of vulnerable or weaker prisoners hell. Vengeance in the form of tough prison sentences does not tackle the problem. What is needed is the means to change the way people think. Prison does not and never will do that, it just reinforces anti-social behavior. You don't do that by just tackling the bullies, you have to tackle the whole of society. One of the first things you need to do is change the 'guilt' Anglo-American society has over issues of sex and sexuality.

None of the above, it is just an example of the third law of computing - the more important the event taking place or the person observing the more extensive is the crash that will take place.

Addym, the one thing you do not say is 'you poor misguided thing'. The important thing is the element of guidance, which is sadly lacking in a lot of Anglo/American social service scenarios that I have seen. You have to show them that their actions were wrong and that they have caused harm, you have to get them to accept that they have caused harm and take responsibility for that harm. At the same time you have to give the the means and support necessary for them to cope with the consequences of their actions. You need to challenge them and make them deal with their actions. What you do not do is dump them in a prison with a lot of similar minded people who will support and reinforce their perception of their actions. I have seen both approaches in action and can say that those who have gone through a programme of strict supervision with its support and guidance certainly had a tougher time than those in prison and they had a far lower re-offending work. It is also cost effective. The cost of keeping a young offender is prison is about £50K per year, it is actually cheaper to send a kid to Eton than to some young offender establishments. The cost of a strict supervision and support programme is about £15K a year. Over 80% of those who go to a young offender facility end up re-offending within three years of release, the figure for those who go through a strict supervision and support programme is under 30%.

Chris, I have to disagree with you, the boy behind the camera, or more likely the smartphone, does not deserve years in prison, what he does deserve is some support and counseling and guidance to see where his actions have led. Like most young people he probably had no idea what his actions would result in and in probably somewhat in shock now. We need to be able to get young people to understand that posting anything and everything to the net is not a good idea, in fact in most cases it is a bad idea.