All Change

I have just watched Sky News tie itself in knots trying to avoid using the word “mother”. They came up with “parent” when showing a clear picture of a woman.

It is very important not to offend the other. I, for example, casually used the term “I” without a thought for “you”. To be inclusive, as we must, perhaps “we” would have been better.

Of course, men are not mothers but that is not to say that they cannot have children. A quick glance at the website Men Having Babies (MHB) will tell you all you need to know.

Even a little word like “it” can add up to big trouble. Back in 1959, a jury awarded damages of £8,000, about £176,000 today, to Wladziu Valentino Liberace, a popular pianist and singer. William Connor, better known as Cassandra, a Daily Mirror columnist, had libelled Liberace by suggesting that he was “Everything that He, She and It can ever want.” The jury agreed that “it” implied that Liberace was homosexual, which of course, he was.

Homosexuality was illegal at the time. Liberace would have to wait until the 1967 Sexual Offences Act that legalized homosexual acts in England and Wales. Scotland would have to wait until 1980 and Northern Ireland until 1982.

But while sex and its many changes is not to be spoken of, Climate Change definitely is. Rarely does a program go out on radio or television without one or more of the world’s ills being attributed to the changing climate or its equally unpleasant brother, Global Warming.
A warm sunny day? Climate Change. A cold, rainy day? Climate Change.

One of the most noticeable aspects of Climate Change is to be found in our supermarkets. Price of potatoes rocketing? Climate Change. A nice sirloin steak way beyond our budget? Climate Change.

As Winston Churchill might have said: A climate change fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

Older readers may remember the call “All Change” that was used to tell passengers on a train or bus that they must get off because it is not going any further. Well, neither is this Blog.