"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail".This is confidently attributed to Mark Twain in many places around the Internet, but most smart things are. Whoever was responsible for it, it's a profound truth that when all you have is X, then X will be your primary way of getting things done.
Think of Popeye, whose solution to everything is to eat spinach and hit people hard in the head. It seemed to work for him, but his problems did tend to be rather same-y. Or as Kurt Vonnegut would have it :-
"The military men want us to find the bad guys and put bullets through their brains. These are not always the best solutions--particularly in the fields of sewage disposal and birth control."Stanetta has had some abdominal problems - she's been back and forward to hospital. She saw a surgeon - who decided the solution was cutting her appendix out. She saw an Accident & Emergency consultant and got a fistful of drugs. Then she saw her GP, who actually gave the matter some thought and suggested she give up dairy products. Which seems to be working.
It's a phenomenon I've seen in my Magistrating also. There was one man who had several mental health issues and an industrial-strength case of alcoholism. He had been arrested in the picturesque town square, out of his head on supermarket cider, shouting at the pigeons. This was pretty usual behaviour with him, and the police would usually just have moved him on. But on this occasion, he then decided to urinate against a car, neglected to do his trousers back up and started shouting at the people who were trying very, very hard to pretend he didn't exist.
Magistrates have hammers. Quite a few varieties of them, but all we have is hammers.
This guy hadn't committed any offence serious enough to deserve jail, and in fact our guidelines specifically rule out that option. So we left that hammer alone.
He had no money, so fining him was an exercise in futility.
We could impose all kinds of community penalties - but he was incapable of doing work or abiding by any kind of discipline due to his many mental issues and crushing alcoholism.
We could give him something called a Conditional Discharge which says that if he keeps his nose clean (and his trousers zipped up correctly) then there will be no penalty. But, if he commits this crime again, he'll get sentenced for that matter plus a bit extra. He had committed score of similar offences, and I could see this was a popular choice for the benches who had seen him previously. Didn't seem to be working.
There's also something called an Absolute Discharge, where no penalty is imposed. What you are saying here is that the public interest is not served by imposing any penalties. The offence will be on their record and after you've had a good talking-to by the Chair, you can go home.
We chose this final option. It's not a solution, but one thing you learn quickly as a Magistrate is that we can't solve problems. Because all we have is a bunch of hammers, and sometime hammers just don't get the job done.
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On a lighter note, here is Stanetta's guide to what's worth having in her new world of dairy-free food :-
Company | Where found | Product | Rating /5 | Comments |
Provanel organic | Holland and Barret | Soya chocolate flavoured milk | 0/5 | Truly disgusting, tasted like sick |
Sainsbury's free from | Sainsbury’s | Chocolate bar and rice crispies | 5/5 | Yummy! Just like real chocolate |
Sainsbury’s free from | Sainsbury’s | Chocolate bar | 5/5 | Yummy! Just like real chocolate |
Sainsbury’s free from | Sainsbury's | Chocolate brownies | 3/5 | Ok, wouldn’t call them Brownies, more chocolate flavoured stuff... |
Provanel organic | Holland and Barret | Chocolate soya dessert | 1/5 | Went from ok to overly sweet to cardboard to yuck... |
Pure | Holland and Barret | Dairy free butter | 4/5 | It was good- nice and creamy! However, not like the real thing. |
Toffuti | Holland and Barret | Dairy free cheese | 1/5 | Regurgitated cheese anyone? |
Toffuti | Holland and Barret | Dairy free rock and roll ice cream cones | 4/5 | Nice ice cream, the nuts and the soggy cone were a bit of a letdown though |
Alpro soya | Sainsbury's | Unsweetened soya milk | 3/5 | Ok, not like real milk, like cold custard. NB not good with scrambled egg |
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