Nick Gisburne's Comments

Difficult to convert since a cup measures volume while grams are units of mass. Would a cup of feathers really weigh the same as a cup of lead? And if you're using either to bake gingerbread you're probably not going to get great results :o)
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I wonder if you read through ALL the linked articles, because one of them includes interviews with some of the children. I'm going to take one example, the man's daughter, Emily, who has three children and moved to France because her husband is a surgeon there. She is currently working as a translator. Right there, does that sound like a failure? She has a family and a successful husband and a job of her own. What has angered her father is that she phones home regularly to ask her parents for some words of support because she's newly moved to a different country, and as you might expect that's a huge culture shock for her, as it would be for most people. I cannot imagine that anyone wouldn't want to talk to their parents, to get a little bit of reassurance, a bit of a morale boost. In time she will almost certainly have settled in, but right now it's a difficult time for her. So she offloads her troubles to her parents. Why? Because they are her PARENTS. They are supposed to listen and to CARE about her welfare.

She's not enabled or entitled, or whatever you want to call it. She is a stranger in a strange land struggling to adapt. Yes, she made that choice, and probably didn't do it lightly. She left her own career behind to be with the man she has married. Who wouldn't be conflicted, who wouldn't look to someone else for help now and again? And now her father thinks she is too needy and is a failure, and won't talk to any of the children until they come back with success stories? Sorry, you cannot convince me that that is how a parent should react.

The man's entire attitude seems to be this: we've given you an expensive education in a private school and we want to see a return on our investment. Other people's children have better jobs than you so you're a failure. As I said before, his daughter is married to a surgeon so she's unlikely to be living in poverty. She just hasn't adapted to the change yet.

And if the grandparents are so fearful of being cut off from their grandchildren, how is 'I don't want to see you until you're successful' going to work out for them?

If I had a parent who sent me a letter like that, nothing on earth would stop me leaking it. 'This is how my father wants to treat his children when they ask for help' would be the message I'd want to get out.

Rotten parents raise rotten kids? No, not in this case. Rotten parents seem to have raised good kids, kids who seem to be making the best life for themselves that they can. Notice that none of them are living on handouts, they either have jobs or in Emily's case are raising a family with the support of a husband, while she is also working as a translator. But that just isn't good enough for their father. It's not that he wants better for them, he wants them to be better so that HE looks good when his friends come to dinner. He wants children 'as good as' those of his friends. He says as much in his letter.

Retired nuclear submarine captain Nick Crews. Maybe he's just not used to anyone questioning his authority or coming to him with problems? I wonder how regularly he saw the children while he was growing up, or is that not a relevant question? I suspect that he was hardly a hands-on father - regarding the calls to from the children to the mother he says 'I avoided them thinking it was "women's stuff"'. In other words, his only input to this particular situation has been to excommunicate his children and call them disappointments. What a paragon of fatherhood, I do not think.
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The undo thing - literally true - usually when I'm writing on paper with a pen and make a mistake. I've also been frustrated by paper books because I can't Ctrl-F to find something. I'm sure there are more, but in my shame I've put them in a corner of my brain marked 'Trash' and emptied it.
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Profile for Nick Gisburne

  • Member Since 2012/08/04


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