Suspicious minds

By Paul Flower on May 31, 11 01:15 PM

A consequence of getting older is that you no longer accept things at face value. Where once you may have blindly believed everything you read, experience of life now leads you to question everything instead.

An example of this was the recent headline I read (over someone's shoulder) in a reactionary newspaper. It claimed that there would now be on-the-spot £100 fines for idiot drivers, that people would now be penalised for bad driving. This is all well and good, were it not clearly a headline-grabbing-stunt with no real merit.

The police clearly find it hard enough to enforce the powers they already have with regard to driving offences without the option of being able to punish, surely speculative, bad driving.

We all know that it's currently illegal to drive whilst using a hand-held telephone but we all do it or at least know people that do. I suspect we know very few who've actually been punished for doing so yet we could all randomly walk the street and spot many offenders every single day. It's a worthwhile law but it's almost impossible to enforce, particularly with the Government cutting police budgets and workforce accordingly.

Questioning everything is something of a curse, there's definitely a reason for the maxim that 'ignorance is bliss'. I happen also to be reading a book at present and one of the chapters, set in 1960, mentioned rocket-flights from Cape Canaveral. I stopped at that point to question whether this could be accurate; it troubled me for the rest of the day - or at least as long as it took me to look it up on Wikipedia.

I should've accepted that the author would've done the necessary research and if not then it would've been picked up by her editor. This didn't stop me questioning a later paragraph that mentioned the book, Stuart Little. Yes, it was written a lot earlier than 1960 but who'd have known (other than the author and aforementioned editors of course).

There are other times where you think that your life-experience is sufficient for you to make snap-judgements on stories. I was drawn to this one because I went to the school concerned. In my time there corporal punishment was on the wane but still an option and certain teachers had a manner that today would be frowned upon - even if it was only the habit of poking you in the chest whilst they spoke down to you.

Even given this I was sceptical that any teacher (particularly the head, no pun intended) would be likely to head-butt a pupil. Naturally I posted the link on my Facebook page and commented that I couldn't imagine our former-heads dishing out this kind of treatment. I meant it in a jocular manner of course, as they're probably still alive and potentially litigious. I also wanted to draw attention to the school being judged as 'outstanding' by Ofsted, something else that wouldn't have occurred in my day - not only because Ofsted didn't exist back then.

I have a few Facebook friends from my former school, most of which were recently added due to a proposed reunion. One who clearly still lives in the area voiced the opinion that the teacher concerned was a 'bully'. On reflection this was an entirely unexpected response and undermined my belief (based on nothing but assumption) that the story would prove groundless.

It shows that some things you know and some you only think you know. There's often more beneath the surface than you'd think and equally there's sometimes a lot less. Whether you can always be bothered to question everything is another matter entirely. Just remember that you'll never know it all.