Let’s get Deidre Sanders on board in our fight against PA!

As most people know here, I’m a journalist and broadcaster – real McCoy!

I write for national newspapers and magazines regularly and I have a cable TV opinion show on AirTVinternational which is featured on Roku.

But stories about parental alienation have rarely managed to break on to a national platform – except in my own blog, which has 75,000 readers.

I know the national news agendas well, obviously, and, in a way, I understand why my colleagues are reluctant to pick up the baton and run with the heartbreaking stories of suicide, broken families, lost dreams and mentally injury to our children.

The main stumbling block is of course that so many of the tragic things that so many of us are living through involve court action, particularly family courts.

And journalists, like me, are hamstrung by the laws surrounding reporting things which are going through court, held in camera and will identify a child.

And, if you trawl round social media – the first place to check the truth and the tone of something which might get on to the agenda – too often all you see is anger, libel, profanity and tales of masses of litigation.

Then we have to look at the news agenda itself over the last four years – it has been overtaken by the plague of Covid and before that, Brexit. There simply haven’t been that many open news spots.

But today we had a breakthrough … an old ‘mucker’ Deidre Sanders took up the cudgel, at least for a few minutes. She gave some sane and sage advice.

Deidre has been The Sun’s agony aunt for the past 35 years, and she is legendary. She is also a mum and a grandmother.

Our careers in a way mirrored each other’s – I went from the Sun to the Daily star, Deidre went from the Daily Star to the Sun. I moved on from the Star to many other morning papers and the BBC – then into travel and publicity.

Deidre stayed at the Sun and built up a good team which operates from Bedfordshire.

Occasionally our paths would cross and we would follow-up some of the stories she had highlighted.

This is the advice for victims of PA she offered in her column in the Sun.

“Children do not fully understand adult relationships or behaviour.

When parents split up it can feel very scary, as they wonder what will happen to them. And sometimes children blame themselves.

It sounds like your husband is taking advantage of this to make himself seem like the good, blameless parent while you are the wicked one who doesn’t care about them.

His criticism of you will confuse them and affect their self-esteem in the long term because you are half of them.

Tell him he needs to stop criticising and lying about you because it is damaging to them.

Keep trying to talk to the kids. Give them lots of reassurance that you love them.

Please don’t sink to your husband’s level and slag him off to them.

Sometimes children want to talk outside the family.

Could you leave the details somewhere for them without making it obvious?”

Good enough – but keep telling us your stories and I promise when we have the right ones in the numbers we need we will go to Deidre and ask her to jump on board with our fight properly.

Please, though put your comments and stories in the comment box at the end of this article… one simple reason, if they appear in FB comments it becomes very difficult for us at the preservation society to collate them.

#deardeirdre #thesun #parentalalienation

Children’s Mental Health Week, 2021, encouraged children to express themselves and share their feelings … here Andrew John Teague, from NAAP and D.A.D.s, discusses how parental alienation can damage our children.

The worst thing about contact denial is, without a doubt, not being able to see or speak to your children.

But can you even begin to imagine what it must be like for your children? One minute you are there. The next you are gone.

Sadly, sometimes this ends up getting  the parent into trouble. And any police involvement, even without conviction, helps the aligned parent in family courts.

Control and manipulation are the key tools available to the aligned parent. The ultimate control being that of the children.

We are not talking about a microwave, kettle or TV! We are talking  about children’s relationships and how they are ended or disrupted. Desperate parents also look to social media to see if there is anything, any news, any updates about their children there.

So, how can we, as parents, help out children to avoid  mental health problems because of it all?

This is where it gets tricky.

But we as parents can play a huge part.

Attached you will see an illustration how to support your child’s mental health.

Remember though, I said this is where it gets tricky – children’s mental health, cognitive behaviour, emotional, behavioural and physical support. These are the things in life children need from their family.

Here is the tricky part for any of the absent parents who are not allowed do any of the above. Imagine being a parent being told you can’t let your child know you love them, you can’t let your child know you miss them, there goes emotional attachment and a child potential thoughts of being abandoned.

Joining in with things such as football netball swimming any other forms of sport, impossible, when you can’t see your children. There goes physical.

Set an alarm doing homework, playing games of education, teaching your children, helping them develop through the years.

Not on your Nelly. Not when you can’t see them. There goes cognitive.

Helping to teach them right from wrong, helping to guide them, helping them to know their boundaries, ensuring we have Mum and Dad.

No life nope. There goes behaviour.

Sometimes a child will feel better talking to one parent about some things and another parent about other things. This is another blank when one parent is missing.

A fail. A lapse in support.

Cutting off a mum or dad, grandparents and family can be catastrophically damaging for any child’s mental health. It’s time the likes of Cafcass, guardian lawyers and judges stop shrugging their  shoulders and using the excuse it could be emotionally harming  to reintroduce an absent parent. Especially when the child’s mental health is  at stake.

Cutting one half of a family from a child leaves a huge void and severs half their heritage.

Unless there is risk of significant harm to children they should be in contact with both parents, both grandparents and both families. Family courts should be ashamed of themselves for hiding behind the children.

As Sir James Mundy said at the end of of 2019, the Forgotten Children. Something I’ve been saying for nearly 6 years – the forgotten children.

Used by ex partners, family members and  shielded behind the likes  of social workers, Cafcass, guardian lawyers and judges. In other countries Cafcass and guardian lawyers names may vary at the outlook  and the shame is the same all over the world country after country after country shambolic barbaric draconian systems destined to fail destined film children.

Desperate parents searching for any scraps anything just to know how their children are …

Shocking

#pa #parentalalienation #d.a.d.s #naap #familycourts #children #mentalhealth #parents #families #cafcass #familycourts #shocking

It’s controversial, it’s funny and it’s a RANT! Come and join Leigh and Rodney and tell us what you think about what’s going on in the world.

This is a very short excerpt from my new – but, as yet, unpublished – book Ravine. A lot of it is about Moston and Manchester …

When Ludwig Studios, Moston, shared these pix of Hough Hall with me, it reminded me I’d written a short piece on the history of this little Manchester suburb.

And Hough Hall stood proud and mute as all these centuries of change wafted by.

But now, as we know, this amazing piece of our history is about to vanish. Not even a ghost.

Ludwig Studios’ pictures reveal the cobbled street outside the hall which has already been tarmacked. The cobbles were there until a decade ago. I remember them as a child.

Hough Hall meant something for five centuries – they even named the road after it! Hough Hall Road.

What’s changed? When did it is cease to matter?

If anybody wants to be kept in touch with my book Ravine, go to the end of this piece and leave a message in the comment box – or PM me on fb.

Cheers

Leigh

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MOSTON’S CONDEMNED HALL

“Moston, Manchester, is a museum to bleachers, dyers, poets and brickmakers. My family has lived here, on the outskirts of the Tall Town of Chimneys, for almost two centuries … we blew in along with the Irish tinkers and the French gypsies.

Perhaps we were linen and lace.

Way back then it was a land fertile with dreams, hopes and opportunities. It was beautiful place … salmon in the Irk tributary and the brook, woodlands and wild hyacinth, meadows, daffodils and primrose.

In the first part of the 19th century only 50 people lived on Moston’s square mile-or-so of wetland. But they witnessed the birth of industry.

It began three miles away, you could see its tall chimney stacks belching shapeless tattoos on the horizon. Moston wouldn’t remain as pretty as a picture for much longer. Dye works, tanneries, print works, breweries, brickworks, began blotting out the landscape. By 1860 the population had grown to more than 1200.

King Cotton and coal had turned Moston into a dysfunctional family. Commerce put the town into such a spin it couldn’t remember where it came from or where it was going. The King built more and more terraced houses – hundreds and hundreds of two-ups-two-downs, replicating like warts.

Now the King needed pubs to keep all these people under control. Beer and gin, cheaper and more effective than food.

Pubs reeked on every corner.

The dye workers and the bleachers drank beer until their lights went out every night – and twice on Sundays. It was their only escape, you see. They toiled under a poisonous multi-coloured sky. The dye and the bleach works had turned the sky into a toxic rainbow – red from the ribbon factory, blue from cobalt, yellows and greens. Sometimes the wind blew it away and sometimes it didn’t. Those smoky pigments were lethal – they got in to your food, your beer. And your blood.

Drinking was a matter of survival, sixteen families to a windowless cellar, no heat, no light, no running water. But still drovers became tanners and farm labourers became brick setters and the gypsies plied their linen and lace door to door … the Irish, the refugees and the farm labourers and the plebs, they all saw this stinking, polluted grimy place as a swing into the jungles of the new world. The choice was simple, the poor house – or a job in a factory and a dirty dank corner of a cellar to call you own.

The bosses lived in imposing slate-and-tile mansions overlooking the deer leaps and the ancient ravine in Boggart Hole Clough. And they drank too, brandy and champagne washed down with liberal glugs of Laudanum.

Next the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway steamed through Newton Heath and put up giant viaducts across Blackley, another replicating township, this one owned by the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ drug-addicted Lord Byron. King Cotton, Lord Byron, the autocratic morons of Mammon were the people all the plebs looked up to from their dirty holes beneath the pavements.

And still shopkeepers rode in on the backs of the trains. Moston became a frontier town, and the poor the rich and the downright dishonest made their way here too. Tinkers and tailors and candlestick makers joined the gypsies, tramps and thieves. Drapers, butchers, gamblers, skallywags and drunks, they all came along. Somebody even opened a tea room. This strange little place kept on growing, distorting and mutating.

By the time the 20th century clocked in, it was bustling. They built new pubs, a fire station and three cinemas, the Moston Imperial Palace, The Adelphi and The Fourways.

In the 1940s, it joined in the war, became home to Big Bertha, an anti-aircraft cannon that thumped away on Broadhurst Fields.

Moston wasn’t any different really from any other working-class suburb with middle-class pretensions, it worked, it drank, it failed and it succeeded.

And Hough Hall was a mute witness to all this.”

Surely, one of the best things in life is to be able to tell your child that you love them … to let them know that you care and that you will always be there to protect them.

Then something awful happens and you split from your wife or husband and one way or the other you move into another life … a life that is alien to you. You become the absent parent.

And at first you have heartbreak … heartbreak for the whole family. But your own heartbreak is all the greater because you are the parent who can no longer kiss your son or your daughter good night every night as they go to bed and to their own land of young dreams.

But you also know that your child is suffering because they miss you – a massive part of their life is basically standing at the window looking in, waving and then walking away. Secretly all your child sees is you walking away.

So, you know it is your job to re-assure them, make them feel safe, cared for, wanted, loved even though now you live across town or in a different part of the world.

But you can re-assure them and tell them how much they are loved by telephone, by letter, on your access days or simply by a gesture or a look.

Then something happens … something beyond comprehension.

You are advised by the people who are supposedly there to help heal rifts between families, to protect the sanctity of parental love, that you must no longer tell your child you love them …

Yes, here at the preservationsociety we are hearing real-life horror stories of estranged parents who are being told that displays of affection are putting your child in danger of emotional damage.

Tell us at the preservationsociety if this has happened to you – when we have enough we will approach Cafcass and other organisations and face them with the facts.

We will publish their response.

#cafcass #children #family #loveban #wordstoneverspeak

What is wrong with Britain? Even the Covid vaccine is anything but a shot in the arm to some people who’ve had it!

As if it was some major talking point, Piers Morgan revealed his mum has flu-like symptoms after her first coronavirus vaccinations and that began a debate yet again how safe it all is!

Sorry mummy is a bit crocked Piers but surely it’s better than mummy becoming an ex-mummy because of covid isn’t it!

Surely, if it saves your life it’s worth a few aches and pains…

Piers said: “They said it was very efficient, very quick, very painless, all very happy. My mum then got quite a bad reaction to her jab. I say bad, like a fluey reaction, and she’s in bed. A lot of people are getting a little bit, or a little bit more reaction.”

Dr Hilary Jones then reassured him that what she was experiencing is perfectly normal.

He said: “Most people might get a slight reaction at the injection site so some redness, some heat, some warmth a bit of tenderness probably last a few hours. Certainly gone overnight. That’s not uncommon at all, and that’s common with any vaccination.

“The second thing people are reporting is a bit of fatigue, headache, muscle pains, that might last a bit longer. Some people getting chills and a very slight temperature.

“Up to 50 per cent people are getting fatigue for a few hours, maybe 24 hours.”

But surely these negatives are actually positives – it the jab is working.

Our own writer Dorrie Bridge had this to say: Am I justified in saying we don’t want to talk about Corvid – it’s there every time we look round.  Also anything on the subject written by me is written from my point of view but not based on ‘fake news’  (we do so miss you, Donald).

However, today I am moved to write as the inimitable Piers Morgan has said that his mother had bad side effects after her jab.  Bad enough, I believe, to make her take to her bed.  Although Piers is often deemed to exaggerate I trust he would not do so about this aspect.

Secondly, I, personally, suffered strong flu symptoms after my jab.   A friend told me on the phone that she had also felt the same symptoms for at least two weeks.   Millions do not – but how many people do and yet, when feeling better, say they were ‘Fine’.  In other words don’t bother  to go into the details.

We are constantly reminded that the scientists and medical gurus are playing it by ear.  The virus,the vaccines, the variants.  When we get the vaccination, each vaccine is prepared by differing methodology.  We get the one that happens to be around our area that week.  We may each have decided which we’d prefer, done our own ‘research’ but when push comes to shove we accept what we’re given.  For the safety of the many, not the few. Where have I heard that?

When the entire populace, in the main, have had the two doses of the vaccine, it is then, we are told, that we may be able to mix more freely, albeit masked and distanced according to the safety measures still needed.

As the experts have to learn as they go, having no reliable precedent, we assume they are collecting data, compiling the rules as they gather evidence.

The vast majority would not get significant side effects.  According, however, to human nature, if asked how they had felt many would simply say, Fine, not going into details as they are now back to normal.  In most cases even the GPs would not know. Yet it might be important for those in the field to know the reactions of different age groups to the various vaccines.

Data can be sought and recorded in many ways but one way is for each patient at the time of the vaccination be given a simple set of questions in a form to be filled out after a week.   The questions are obvious and would lead to much clearer knowledge rather than a random, hearsay approach.  It would require admin input but is probably very necessary data for the future.

Piers Morgan’s remark and my own gathering of the experiences of people I know led to this thought.   

I promise my next project will give us all a rest from Covid.

Dorrie Jane Bridge

Mosa Kiswane has gone straight to the top in his battle to mend his broken family…

Straight to the top of one of the world’s highest mountains, Kilimanjaro.

Mosa, aged 49, said: “I’d reached rock bottom five years ago but now I’ve climbed back and got to the summit of Kilimanjaro. It means such a lot to me.

“In 2016 I was feeling so low and suffering from depression. I’d been hit by many personal tragedies, it had been a hell of journey. But then I started to believe in myself and I got up again, faced my demons and took control of my life.”

At 5,895 meters (19,341 feet) Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa and the tallest in the world inside the Kilimanjaro National Park of Tanzania.

Mosa’s extraordinary determination to fight back is something we see all the time – the courage of people battered emotionally by ex-partners and be madness of family courts, the courage of people who climb massive obstacles to get their children back in their lives.

And help others along the way.

Andrew John Teague, founder of D.A.D.s and NAAP, said: “This sends a message to all parents and children who experienced parental alienation, don’t ever give up on yourself or your children

“I have experienced the horrors of family courts and having strangers telling you if you can see your children or not based on a system that is not fit for purpose.”

Mosa said: “My story is not dissimilar to many other parents who experience parental alienation, it nearly broke me at the beginning and I didn’t know how to handle it, but I refused to bow down and fought the battle with all I got, I learned many lessons along the way and this has shaped the person I am today. This climb was for you all.”

Kilimanjaro attracts 50,000 climbers a year, about 50 times more than attempt either Everest or Denali (formerly Mount McKinley) in Alaska.

Mosa live in London where he has built a new life as a personal trainer, nutritionist VIP concierge at London Heathrow ensuring people have a smooth ‘journey’ through the airport.

He said: “I used to work for British Airways as a cabin service manager and did that for 16 years. I went round the world.

“Then in late 2015 I separated from my wife. This was a when my problems began … we were together for 15 years and had two boys who were 10 and seven year old. We decided that the marriage wasn’t working and we had to separate.

“Later, I lost contact with my children, not by choice. I wasn’t prepared for it. I started drinking  a lot and the stress caused me to have a mini-stroke.

“I was hospitalised and was unable to work for three months, I managed to find a shabby studio to rent but was unable to see my children which impacted me and nearly drove me to suicide on many occasions.

“I wasn’t able to function properly but I somehow managed to get back to work and had to take voluntary redundancy from BA as I needed the money so I could rent a proper place where I can have my children come and stay over.

“I did that and at the same time started my legal battle to be able to see my children, I self represented and it was tough, Cafcass offered me supervised visit by my ex at the beginning which I took but it nearly broke me again.

“I was overweight, drinking too much and suicidal.

“But I woke up one day and decided that I need to stop drinking and get healthy. It was tough but I did it and I enrolled into college and gained a personal training diploma. At the same time I got a part time job at the airport and since then I led a healthy life style and managed to get more contact with my boys.”

#parentalalienation #alcohol #drinking #familycourt #children #family #cafcass #suicide

Catch Leigh ranting at his best over Brits who say they can’t go on holiday. And Rodney is right behind him with his bish, bosh, bash-ing of cant and catastrophic thinking!

About 35 years ago, I’d just finished an interview for a morning newspaper with pop crock PJ Proby.

Jim was making yet another comeback, this time by claiming that Madonna was singing on the notorious Savoy Sessions, his latest recording.

Of course she wasn’t and she was apparently threatening to sue him. What did she expect to get? Some ring-pulls and a few bottle tops?

So I’d called him.

I’d met Jim many times and this was just another stop along the way to the bottom of a Jack Daniels bottle.

But what surprised me more was his claim that the enigmatic Scott Walker was having an affair with Jacques Brel, the French doyen of songs of poetry and pomp.

Scott had sung many of them including Mathilde, Amsterdam and the heartbreaking If You Go Away.

Yes, over the years there had been hints of Brel being gay or bisexual in the French media. But that simply made him seem more exotic and charming.

But Scott?

There had never been any suggestion that he was gay.

I remember feeling a bit angry at Proby, who had rapidly become an inglorious singer most famous for repeatedly losing his career and falling off the stage drunk.

Anyway, I had met Scott years ago and despite his waif-like wasted elegance and the androgynous of the 60s and 70s there was nothing to suggest Proby wasn’t making this up as well.

Besides, Scott was married.

Yep, I was angry with Proby…

Anyway, round about then – it would have been 3pm – the office tea trolley squeaked and creaked across the editorial floor followed by another trolley which brought the latest review copies of CDs and tapes of the likes of Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men, TLC and Hootie & the Blowfish.

And there it was, Tilt… the new Scott Walker album – 11 years late as far as his die-hard fans were concerned.

I studied the paper artwork inside the slightly scratched plastic box it had arrived in. The original ‘rare’ jewel case had been ‘nicked’ of course.

But the cover imagery itself was darker than even Climate of the Hunter, a decade earlier, had managed to be… a mangle of eyes and fingers and the sensuality of high heels and stockings… the eyes were dark and brooding, yet lights pocked them like tears and pearls. There was also what could have easily been a distorted cartoon of Marilyn Monroe, dress drawn out into a flying saucer as it billowed around her waist …

But the gnarled-looking hand had me from the start. It turned out it was Scott’s. Hard, gnarled and dead. Scott was in his early 40s but that hand held its own story.

I left the office early claiming that I was going to drive to Prestwich where Proby was holed up in a grubby house rolling in discarded cans of super lager. It stood next to the Halfway House pub where by now he would be holding his addled court and telling tales and half-truths about Elvis.

I poured out of the big glass Art Deco office on Gt Ancoats Street, found my car and thought ‘stuff Proby’. I would be far more interesting to know what Walker had been doing.

So I turned left towards the dark Stockport garret I called home.

I was recently divorced and lived in two rooms on the top floor of on old dolorous Victorian house, heavy in dampness and ghosts. As I closed the big oak door I flicked the switch on my electric fire, pulled the curtains shut and switched on my midi-cd player. It hummed as it waited for my new cd.

And so it began. Something abandoned … other worldly, disembodied. Scott had created a burnt-out landscape, not smouldering, not smokey but stark, a place where only the dead could walk.

“… who’ll give me 21, 21…”

Scott Walker, that handsomeness of a smile had created the loneliest place in the universe.

https://leighgbankspreservationsociety.blog/remembering-mr-invisible/

And he was comfortable there. His voice was a clear sonorous bell – just like the opening of Farmer in the City… but it was now a clarion cry of surrealism over elements of industrial rock, Zappa. opera and aria.

And of course there is his dark Gothic poetry.

 Tilt threw out everything that we recognised of the Walker Brothers and even Brel. Now we had a new classical music. Tilt is a masterpiece. It isn’t easy listening like My Ship is Coming In or Like Walking in the Rain but it is astonishing when put up against them.

Which is better? The pop or the Art?

I think we just thank our gods for allowing this man to walk and create among us for more than half a century.

##SCOTTWALKER #walkerbrothers #engel #pjproby #jacquesbrel #brel #tilt #myshipiscomingin #walkingintherain #climateofthehunter #manchester #stockport #gtancoatsstreet

Do i hear
21
21
21

i’ll give you
21
21
21

Do i hear
21
21
21

i’ll give you
21
21
21

This night you
are mistaken

i’m a farmer
in the city

Dark farm
houses
against the
sky

Every night
i must wonder why

Harness on the
left nail keeps
wrinkling wrinkling

Then higher above
me – e e so o
e e e so o o

Can’t go by
a man from
Rio

Can’t go by
a man from
Vigo

Can’t go by
a man from
Ostia

Hey Ninetto

Remember that
dream

we talked about
it
so many times

Do i hear
21
21
21

i’ll give you
21
21
21

Do i hear
21
21
21

i’ll give you
21
21
21

And if i’m not
mistaken
We can search
from farm to
farm

Dark farm houses
against our eyes

Every night i
must realize

Harness on the
left nail

keeps withering withering

Then higher above
me e e so o
e e e so o o

Can’t go by
a man in
this shirt

Can’t go by
a man in
that shirt

Can’t go by
a man with brain
grass

go by his long
long eye
gas

And i used
to be a
citizen

i never felt
the pressure

i knew nothing
of the horses

Nothing of the
thresher

Paulo
take me with
you

it was the
journey of
life

Do i hear
21
21
21

i’ll give you
21
21
21

Do i hear
21
21
21

i’ll give you
21
21
21

Probably one of the most important discussions of the day – what are we actually free to say.