Children online

Parents are rethinking the desire to share images of their children online, given that those images could be misused in quite disturbing ways.

A few years back nobody thought twice about posting images of little Jason or little Julie. The mages were basically for the benefit of family and friends, and few people thought about the possible consequences of those images being freely available to complete strangers online.

Now there's a growing realisation that those images could be stolen and abused in all sorts of repugnant ways, and it may be difficult to get the unwanted images removed.

We're now aware of images that have been "nudified" i.e. children stripped of their clothes. We're aware of children and parents being unwillingly recognised in the street. We're aware of fake identities cloned from the original.

And then there's the children themselves, who may object to having their image posted online, who might feel their privacy has been violated. Or they might just object to how they have been portrayed.

So a lot of parents are rethinking their impulse to put their children online. They might do it more sparingly, or they might keep their children offline altogether.

A shame that once again there's reason to be suspicious and cautious and mistrustful.

PS: Luckily I've never had to wrestle with this problem as Jenny and I don't have any children.

The death of chivalry

Interesting how the idea of male chivalry has died a death. It used to be very common when I was young but now it's just laughable.

As a young lad, I was introduced to numerous ways in which men should be chivalrous to women i.e. assuming women weren't as capable or resilient as men and needed a helping hand in all sorts of situations. We were supposed to:

• Hold doors open for her
• Walk on the curbside in case of runaway cars
• Offer her a coat in cold weather
• Carry heavy bags for her
• Pay for meals
• Offer her a seat on public transport
• Pull out a chair for her to sit
• Have her go first
• Guide her along
• Stand up when she arrives

Nowadays all these things seem ridiculous and patronising and all that's required of a man in this more liberated era is to be considerate and thoughtful.

The only thing that still applies in this age of sexual harassment is to walk a woman safely home, though even that she might object to.

The idea of chivalry seems as old-fashioned as the idea of a gentleman.

Getting justice

Justice. Isn't that a vague word? It's flung around as if it means something quite specific, but far from it. Is it even attainable?

People talk about a demand for justice, but what exactly are they demanding? What do they mean by the word?

If my child was knocked down and killed by a drunk driver, what sort of justice could I ever achieve? Whatever the consequences - the driver jailed, or banned from driving, or more roadside alcohol tests for drivers - it wouldn't bring my child back to life, it wouldn't lessen the grief, it wouldn't stop the feelings of rage and helplessness and despair. So where is the justice?

Or what about the pregnant woman whose baby dies because of some fatal mistake by a nurse? The hospital can issue a profuse apology, training can be tightened, the nurse can be reprimanded, but that doesn't lessen the sense of misery and loss the woman is going through. What form of justice could possibly make up for this tragedy? Her baby is gone and nothing can change that.

Justice is more an anguished hope than a reality.

Tried that

I was never seriously attracted to leisure drugs (dope, cocaine etc). I always wanted to be my natural self without my mind being subject to artificial alterations.

When I was young, when other people were praising the joys of whatever drug they had just discovered, I would wonder why they were so desperate to escape their everyday reality for hours on end.

Yes, reality can be pretty grim, but I never had the wish to escape from it. I wanted to experience it and deal with it, however difficult it might be. Drugs seemed not so much an escape as running away.

I did try dope twice, and LSD twice, but they didn't do anything for me. As a result, I was put off drugs for good.

Apart from anything else, you don't know exactly what's being handed to you. The content of the drugs isn't verified and depending what's in them, they could be lethal. There are plenty of grieving parents out there wishing their dead daughter or dead son had never been tempted by someone's chance offering.

The only drugs I favour come over the pharmacy counter.

Identity crisis

Despite the unanimous decision of the English Supreme Court in April 2025 that a female means a biological female, hundreds of people are still defying the law and insisting that if a man declares himself to be a woman then that's what he is.

Those who maintain that declaring yourself a female is nonsense and there's no such thing as a sex change are roundly attacked as "transphobic" and subjected to vicious abuse and hatred.

Male prisoners are declaring themselves female and being transferred to female prisons where quite often they sexually abuse female prisoners.

It's extraordinary that in 2026 women have to protect themselves against men who declare they're female and insist on invading female spaces like women's refuges and women's sports events.

When I was young, transsexuals, as they were called then, never believed they were real women, and knew they were merely passing as women. And other people were willing to treat them as women as long as they kept a low profile. They didn't make the sort of bizarre demands they're making now and didn't encroach on women's facilities and activities.

I wonder how long this insistence on sex changes will go on before people finally come to their senses and revert to reality.