Honey Trap

Who knew? Bees smuggling pasta back to the hive for a midnight snack - whatever next.

Went to the High School today with a couple of the Eco Committe kids to see the bee hive they brought in earlier this year. Very interesting talking to the lovely bee-keeping lady about it all. (She certainly set all my Bee Movie myths to rights.) Most fun were the enormous suits, which only seemed to come in XL. I don't think even the 10 year olds would be happy to be put on blip in those.

Aside from that I've been doing a bit of research on a scheme the school gets involved in every year - sending shoeboxes full of Christmas presents to kids in need. Katherine was mad keen to be involved this year, but I've always had a kind of funny feeling about it. So I felt obliged to do hours of research to allow Katherine to make her own decision about it instead of me just saying "we're not doing it". Of course I would have used "no, because I say so" as a back up plan if she'd ignored the evidence!

The problem with it is that it's used as a means of proselytising kids of different faiths, to Christianity - so it's a gift with some pretty serious strings attached. That's all slightly glossed over in the literature. And the head of the organisation in the US has some rather un-Christian things to say about other world faiths. Now, I have to declare an interest in keeping religion out of schools, in fact if I could keep it mostly inside other people's heads I'd be quite happy, but I know that there are some Christian charities that do a lot of good work. This goes beyond that I think. And I'm not comfortable with my money being used to convert folk who are vulnerable and desperate.

(To ensure I don't offend anyone of faith reading this, I should clarify that although I do not belong to a religion myself, I have absolute respect for anyone else's firmly held religious convictions and their right to hold them.)

K decided against it, and I'd only got to point 1 on my list of "things you might want to know about this scheme before you decide".

Now I'm feeling a burning need to stir up trouble at the school by trying to get them to drop the whole scheme and find one that doesn't offend non-Christian parts of our community.

EDIT: Thinking again about that last line: the scheme does offend Christians too - at least some of them, so sorry if I've accidentally offended any Christians by tarring you all with the same brush. I should have just said "that doesn't offend anyone". Am I being hyper-sensitive now?