Scythes and strimmers - a tale of Petrol Poverty....

Managing management is a sometimes difficult task, guiding her gently towards and idea.

Then when she gets there (particularly if you can convince her it was her idea in the first place) she is away.

For some time now I have advocated getting a scythe. A proper old fashioned blade like my grandad used to use. He never hed things like strimmer and hedge trimmers, he just had a scythe so old the blade was partly worn down.

So anyway yesterday there was an auction locally, this is often bad news neither of us is very good at driving past "to the auction" signs.

But we came home with a useful range of new toys, I picked up a big socket set and axle stands ideal for the discerning fire engine owner.

4 picnic tables for less than the price of the wood meant going to fetch the trailer to drag them home.

But the bargain of the day was a full size scythe. Management has been seen haunting you tube looking for footage of people using such weapons and has concluded that they are probably better than a strimmer and definitely use less petrol.

Once you make her think it's her idea.......

R

Direct work

I suppose it had to happen.

The young committed highly motivated Social Worker from East Europe had subtly changed when she arrived yesterday.

Her eyes were open, she was fed up, she cannot make decisions, her managers will not make decisions, there is no money for anything, her life is about boxes and putting ticks in them. She is a great person, all those things she joined up to do, direct work with children, life story work, she cannot do, she is reduced to a clerk moveing bits of paper from one end of her desk to the other, be effective she cannot.

Of course as a foster carer all I ever do is direct work with children.

She was jealous, she wanted to be me.

I was damn sure I did not want to be her...

R

My muscles hurt....

Sometimes you have to admit to nasty facts.

I might be getting older.

It is a real delight to work on a Green Goddess, a truck where someone worked out I might one day need to change things. Getting the radiator off could have been a real ordeal, but no someone thought it through and it falls off. Well Ok except it weighs rather a lot.

Same with the cylinder head, I could feel my back objecting. Might design a little rig to handle it for the putting it back on bit.

And in total contrast I got to pretend to be clever and important yesterday.

Interviewing people who should in theory be my superiors is always an ego massaging experience. Getting to fight to get the job offered to someone who is front line and practice based over a management speak clone is about doing the job right.

Still today is back to important things, need to get that fire engine running.



Back to reality today.

Advertising

It's funny, I fill my blog with tales of woe about fostering and my ad box fills with adverts encouraging you lot to sign up to be foster carers.

With such clever ad placement it's not hard to understand how my ad revenue stands at a heady ten dollars. Hell the way the dollar is going I could end up being a net loser on my ad account.

Whats actually a personal problem for me is that one of the agencies involved is one I would not use to look after my cats. A money grabbing group where profit comes first second third and fourth, care for kids gets as far as their slick promos and no further.

Now I dare say me contric with ad sense would not allow me to.

But I digress today I got to do proper fire engine things. It's nice to get away from serious stuff and roll round under a 50 year old lorry for a while, oh and I went out to lunch too.

Tomorrow we are going green, putting a new cylinder head to allow the green goddess to run on unleaded. Yes hardly planet changing when the thing gobbles it up at a ferocious rate. In some garages you have to switch off the engine as the pump can't keep up....

Ha ha

Rhys

Writing things down.

Funny how things trigger other things.

I was hauled up over the coals once. Water and the backs of ducks of course.

But anyway, I was pulled up for having offended a social workers delicate sensibilities by shouting at the little angel then slamming down the phone.

So of course that was all recorded and very serious.

Being a helpful sort of chap I said that maybe the records needed to be more comprehensive:

What I actually said admittedly quite loudly was:

"I have now been awake for 18 hours straight through with a child in the grip of psychosis, placing himself, myself and my family at risk. You promised to have someone here at 9 am this morning then at 4 PM this afternoon to take him to somewhere appropriate. Now you are asking me to drive 120 miles on my own in a car with this child. Do you think this is safe?"

The phone went down when you flat refused to choose between yes and no.

Funny you know there was a marked reluctance to record the whole conversation.

When I pointed out that when they went home and I organised transport for this lad, both the address for the place they had identified for him and the phone number were in fact wrong. Well I think they would have loved to write it down but you see their Biro had run out of ink...

R

More fermenting festering.

One thing I left out in the previous, was what happened between V's 12th and her 16th.

At 12 as I said she was about to end up seeing to the needs of old men who do not wash a lot.

She was not an easy girl to like. Her early life had left her finding it very hard to be loved. If the people who love you hurt you, you have to defend yourself. Especially if you are a child. If the people you love and who love you are not predictable then you have to defend yourself. If the person you love choses someone who is hateful and hurtful to you, you do the same.

You build a great big wall around yourself, a big high one, with wire on the top. You defend yourself by creating hate, you know others dislike for you keeps them out, keeps you safe. To let them see the lovely person you are is to let them in and once in they can hurt you.

I'm not putting any of that up as an explanation, she is the expert on her, but I reckon this tree I am barking up is not far from the right one...

Over the years, we did not a lot, people who parent are in the position of handing the child the lego, thats all you can do. Hand them the lego and they either build a castle or throw the set out of the window. Foster carers go out into the garden, pick up the bits and take them back into the house to try again. It's what we do.

She went through crashing cycles where she would build and build and build then break it all down.

Thing was though she had her social worker.

A rock, a firm foundation, quite something else.

When she "decided" she was not "doing school" any more. SW could have talked about rights, she could have said we cannot make her. Nope, she said: "get on the bus and get into school".

Without lots of rights explainers to tell her she didn't have to, she did what was right for her.

Sometimes we adults forget that we are, the adults that is.

Every right carries a responsibility in it's back pack.

If I exercise a right I have responsibility for what happens if it all goes wrong. And if I am not mature enough to take the responsibility, giving me the right is a form of abuse. It is setting me up to fail.

Yes of course give kids rights when they have no understanding of responsibility, why not give babies guns while we are at it.

This was one of the best bits about her Social Worker, she was person centered.

Just as it says in the job specification.

When mum threw out the abusive boyfriend, Social worker didn't just do her job, fill in a referral form for the domestic violence team and forget about it; she went round the house and helped mum do what was needed, herself.

That's proper outside the tick box person centered social work.

V matured in ways that frequently delighted management and me.

When her school were off doing their outward bound and they got completly blisteringly lost. She was the calm voice that took charge and got them out of there. A born leader opened her wings and flew.

When she was 15 she said she wanted to be a foster carer, the calm maturity, the diligence, the caring person she had allowed herself to become was someone I thought I would be really happy to leave my own kids with.

This was the complete opposite of the child who arrived three years before and who is today, three years after.

Which makes it the more distressing for us, we didn't raise her to do what she has done now.

We handed her into the care of leaving care only to discover they didn't and between them and the toilet checkers they would try and stop us from caring too.

Being actively prevented from caring is abusive I reckon.

But as the toilet checker said "she only wanted to do her job and do what she was told".

I have a few things I would like to tell her, I am not sure she would not perceive them as abuse....

R

Who's a clever little reader then....

Having safely deposited no one son in town it's back home and check the email and blunder round the blogs.

I found a programme that apparently analyses your blog then tells you how clever you need to be to read it.

Well here's the news, the fact that you are reading this makes you a genius or so this website would have me believe.

Does that make me super brain for writing it?

Why does it not feel like that?

Aha I can put a link from their site to mine, do I detect the faintest whiff of rodent?

Is this but advertising dressed up as something else?



Ah well away to go, here in west Wales we are bracing for the storm that is forecast. The wind is getting up already.


R