Friday, July 15, 2011

Sometimes Annabel Crabb just nails it straight through the heart

As here:
Margaret Thatcher earned her 'Ditch The Bitch' placards in 1971, when as education minister she abolished free school milk for the over-sevens in British school. That's pretty hardcore. When you consider that Julia Gillard gets caned for handing out free libraries, you get an idea of the general trend described by the entitlement culture over the intervening four decades.

9 comments:

paul walter said...

I suppose at least the pom kids milk wasn't sour by recess time, unlike ours most of the time..
Maggie Thatcher would have been welcomed with open arms by Aussie schoolkids of a previous era.

JahTeh said...

Amen to that Paul Walter. I remember the whole class buying the straws that had a flavour stick through the middle to make the horror more palatable. They were banned eventually because the colour wouldn't wash out of the bottles so lord knows what it was doing to our insides.

paul walter said...

It is not a nice thing to recollect, even after all the passing years. Tres Formidable.
At my school, they always took particular care to make sure to deliver the milk crates on the sunny side of the building when it woud have meant dragging them a shorter distance to put them in the shade, but some kids didn't keep the stuff down long enough for it to remotely harm their insides.
Can you conjure with a strawberry stick in fatty milk on a hot day, btw?

Frances said...

You, Paul Walter, and even the lovely Jah Teh, are showing the pickiness of those younger than me. For those brought up on a regular dose of epsom salts, warm sour milk was a very minor discomfort.
What I CAN'T STAND is the homogeneity of language used by commentators. At present on the ABC every criticism of anyone is introduced by saying that they were caned.
Stop it, stop it, stop it...and yes, I know that that is not original. James Thurber?

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

I can live with 'caned', just, but the next time I hear someone say 'bundled out' to mean 'defeated and put out of a contest' (almost always of a tennis tournament, but never about football finals: go figure) I'm going to break something.

Barbara Temperton said...

I grew up in the North-West of WA. Our school milk arrived frozen solid on the weekly freezer truck to be thawed out on the day of consumption. I loved it, and as I recall, so did most other students. It was usually still pretty frozen by the time we got it.
Apart from being a milky icy-pole, the other reason I loved school milk was that it was real milk, by that I mean fresh. At home we only had powdered [brand deleted] milk, which made me feel ill every time I drank it, because I once pinched a tin and crawled under the house to eat as much as I could in one sitting. Oh, the memories, still love fresh milk, can't go anywhere near the [brand deleted] variety.

David Irving (no relation) said...

I still can't drink milk, paul and JahTeh. Even with a flavoured straw. (I still can't drink vodka, either, for a similar reason ... )

Welcome back, btw, Kerryn.

paul walter said...

DI(nr) I find it disturbing to discover your vodka consumption at school was interrupted by the substitution of sour milk.
Now you loath both milk and vodka!
Barbara is right tho, I can remember the sheer enjoyment of an icy cold bottle of milk in winter.
I agree with Frances' comment also, what devastation has been wrought with broadsheet msm over the last decade or so.

Anthony said...

I recall when Thatcher visited Melbourne in the late 1980s. I went to a campus meeting called to organise protests against her. The seasoned activists led off with a denunciation of her myriad crimes: the continued war on the Irish people in the Six Occupied Counties; the brutal crushing of the miners' strike; the slaughter of innocents on board the General Belgrano, etc. But to top off the indictment, a softly spoken, elderly woman with a lilting Irish accent piped up with "And you know she even took the milk away from the kiddies!"