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Changes in Society: Divorce


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I had my hair cut at a new barbers yesterday. The barber told me he was a Muslim from Dubai who had been living in the UK for four years. In conversation he added that he had left Dubai to get freedom from his parents. He wanted the right to pick his own bride. He went on to tell me he has had difficulty finding the right woman. A friend had suggested that he try a much older woman (he was 24). He said he thought he could “get into older women”. He asked me what I thought. I replied that I was “also into older women”. However, I added that at “my age you don’t get much choice in the matter”. He did not laugh. The culture gap must have been too large.

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Have been in Melbourne the last few days at a a conference, discussing the plans of the Labor party to cut funding to wealthy private schools and give more to public schools if they win next month's election - beautiful warm spring weather, went to listen to Germaine Greer give a lecture on Shakespeare's women which was fascinating, and to the visiting exhibition of Impressionist paintings from the d'Orsey museum. So, all in all, a very culturally satisfying few days.

Melbourne paper reported more about divorce statistics - there are more divorces among couples with only 1 to 2 year age gap, fewer when age gap is 5/10 years. Not sure what that implies!

I don't suppose we can be too surprised about the abandonment of children by parents - after all, we have manged to somehow bring up what must be one of the most selfish, egotistical, self-absorbed generations in recent history.

I just finished a book written by a 50 something local well-known TV gardening celeb who went to live in France for 6 months. In it she reminisces about her childhood and her parenting. She admits that if given her time over she would have brought up her sons far less indulgently, would have not constantly "rescued" them, would have applied more tough love. I thought it was a brave admission, and probably a fairly common error of the period.

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  • 3 weeks later...

It was recently reported that marital breakdown costs the UK about £15 billion a year (most of this spent on single-parent benefits). Children of divorced parents are much more likely to do worse at school, commit crimes, go to prison and more likely to commit suicide. Divorced men also live shorter lives than married men. For example, they are much more likely to get cancer than married men.

Bob Geldof recently said:

We hop from product to product, channel to channel, station to station and, most damagingly, lover to lover, trading each one in for a new model as soon as passion fades. Perhaps a lot of it is down to an overblown sense of self. We imagine ourselves to be free people, but we should not be free to destroy others, especially children. We have confused freedom with the idea of choice, we have become voracious consumers, not just of stuff, but of the soul.

Has the need to work hard, to produce, to earn, to spend, become more critical to the government – and perhaps our own emptier selves – than the truer world of the home… Have we so devalued domestic life and its culture of companionship and warmth and nurture and safety and calm to the point of being almost irrelevant. We’re all encouraged to put work first and domestic matters such as our families and our relationships second – and those who don’t are regarded with suspicion.

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