I don't know about 'blessed', Eliza, but thank you for the kind thoughts. It can get you down at times. It's tough here, harsh and brutal in many places. I'm lucky, I was raised in an entirely different place, spiritually..in a different time too. So many of these children have known nothing else though, than the unforgiving streets of this place. Social Services are kept so busy here in Torquay. Many, many young Mums, children begetting other children.
You can see the loss of hope in their young faces already.

Torquay took on many 'problem' families back in the 70s, so I've been told by many folks here..The council got money to take them in from up country, Newcastle and Liverpool in particular...so they jumped on the bandwagon, taking as many as they could, not to care for them, but for the money involved.

Add to that a Mayor whose made this a place for Stag Parties and Hen Nights, so the clubs and pubs have taken over the town and you get some idea of what it's become. So many people I talk to loathe Nick Bye for what he's done. He wanted to move the War Memorial a while back, further into town. Seems a good idea, right? But he merely wanted the land the War Memorial stood on, so a Mega Casino could be put there instead.   Most of the good shops have pulled out now, many are empty or filled with crappy rubbish that you'd not want, ever.

There are so many drug addicts and alcoholics here, their faces deathly pale and gaunt. It's like a different planet from more affluent places....and all this is now happening in The English Riviera, a place of great beauty, an English Monaco, almost...but look a little deeper and you see a town dying on its' feet, whilst the million pound yachts bob up and down in the pretty harbour.

There are no jobs of any worth. Hardly any jobs at all. This year in particular, there aren't even any signs in the window for Easter jobs...and the people grow more desperate, more hopeless.

So the anger runs deep in this town as does the bad behaviour at times. I don't excuse it, but I'm just saying I understand it. It's exactly the same thing I used to see in Horrabridge, on Dartmoor, where I used to live years back. Again, there, lay deep poverty..and a vast factory farm of a school, Tavistock College, where over 2,000 pupils spent the vast majority of their young life shut inside. Terrible things happened in that place, I know because my daughter went there...and just last year the headmaster was dismissed after it failed almost every OFSTED tick box they could think of.   The misery in that school spreads out into all the local villages, as schools down there are few and far between...

Exmouth College is another. It used to be in the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest school in Europe..(!?!) and the town centre again has many drink related problems, cameras everywhere..

I've tried to tell folks for years now that so many social problems are also there because of these vast schools, where children lose their identities, where bullying runs rife. I'd wait for my little boy, as he was then, when he went to Tavistock Primary for a very short while, which lay behind the College..and I'd be aghast at how some parents spoke to their children..They seemed to hate them...

Now I realise that those parents themselves had probably known a similar upbringing.

If society can change that, then we can change many other things too.
Harshness now dominates so many things in young people's lives, music, video games, films, the entire culture...far more than when we were young...all these horrifically violent images that so many of them watch from early childhood, yet they were never there in our minds in the first place. You never had to worry that your children might be watching some horrific video when they went round to tea with a friend back when I was little...Yet now, goodness knows what is going on half the time.

The desensitisation of our children is an horrific thing, which is not being addressed at all. That desensitivity spills out into the streets, into how they treat each other, other people, animals...it spreads far and wide.

Big problem to cure. It can be cured, but only if enough people first face up to it being here in the first place, and then decide to do something about it...and we need to decide that AS A NATION, being led from the top downwards. If we don't tackle this, then each generation will get successively more desensitised..ad infinitum...imo.