Having just celebrated another wedding anniversary I recognise that numbers can be understood as achievement.
Wedding Anniversaries are usually celebrated in numbers like 25, Silver; 40, Ruby; 50, Gold and 60 Diamond, well we are somewhere between Ruby and Gold and that feels like an achievement.
Certainly when, as a fresh faced and naive young couple, we stood for our photographs outside on a freezing cold November day in Salisbury the thought that over forty years later we would be celebrating our anniversary sitting outside in warm Italian sunshine toasting each other with a G&T, was unimagineable.
Sometimes the achievement is in the number itself, sometimes the number can imply determination, dedication or perseverance but the numbers do matter.
Tragically a number that has appeared in the press over the past few days is neither a cause for celebration or a reason to be cheerful.
The number 1,000,000, indicates the number of young people unemployed in the UK.
C Wright Mills the sociologist has a comment in his book The Sociological Imagination.
Describing the impact of unemployment in a community he says 'the very structure of opportunity has collapsed'.
That is what has happened in the UK for our young people and the fact that in the rest of the Eurozone, Spain, France and Italy things are worse, does not make it OK.
Our politicians should be ashamed. Our business leaders should be ashamed.
We have allowed apprenticeships to disappear. We have allowed the market to replace common sense and wisdom. We have exported jobs and allowed the foreign ownership of our public utilities.
We have put profit before people.
From school to dole queue is not a career move that any young person would choose, especially when as they arrive as the latest sorry statistic, they are criticised and blamed by the millionaire members of parliament, individuals whose personal wealth has meant that they neither wanted or needed a job, simply assuming their inheritance and their role in the family business, or taking up politics as a kind of hobby.
This 1, 000, 000 is a statistic and a number that we should be deeply ashamed of as a nation, it means a gross cost that is significantly higher than the cost of investing wisely in our children's futures.
The cost both to the individual and the nation will be financial, but it is a cost that will also be paid by young people and their families in emotional and physical health.
In Spain the 'indignado's' have camped out in the centre of Madrid and other urban centres to demand changes to the political system.
The LSX campaign at St Paul's Cross is aimed specifically at the financial system and the Stock Exchange alonside such protests, we need in the UK a similar expression of indignation at the colossal and tragic waste of the talent and abilities of our young people.
Whilst personally, we have taken some degree of pride in our achievement, simply staying together like Derby and Joan 'for forty years or more' as the song has it.
However as we look at our grandchildren, their friends and their peers, we fear for their futures.
Their hopes and ambitions need to be nurtured and encouraged, need investment and a humane social policy, need apprenticeships and training opportunities, need a sympathetic and realistic government, if they are to be realised.
Our young people need a 'structure of opportunity' that allows them to look forward to a lifetime of fulfilling and rewarding work, inventing things, designing and building things, making things, building a future for themselves and generations to come.
We can't celebrate this million so let's set to and change it for something we can celebrate, a future for our young people.
Wedding Anniversaries are usually celebrated in numbers like 25, Silver; 40, Ruby; 50, Gold and 60 Diamond, well we are somewhere between Ruby and Gold and that feels like an achievement.
Certainly when, as a fresh faced and naive young couple, we stood for our photographs outside on a freezing cold November day in Salisbury the thought that over forty years later we would be celebrating our anniversary sitting outside in warm Italian sunshine toasting each other with a G&T, was unimagineable.
Sometimes the achievement is in the number itself, sometimes the number can imply determination, dedication or perseverance but the numbers do matter.
Tragically a number that has appeared in the press over the past few days is neither a cause for celebration or a reason to be cheerful.
The number 1,000,000, indicates the number of young people unemployed in the UK.
C Wright Mills the sociologist has a comment in his book The Sociological Imagination.
Describing the impact of unemployment in a community he says 'the very structure of opportunity has collapsed'.
That is what has happened in the UK for our young people and the fact that in the rest of the Eurozone, Spain, France and Italy things are worse, does not make it OK.
Our politicians should be ashamed. Our business leaders should be ashamed.
We have allowed apprenticeships to disappear. We have allowed the market to replace common sense and wisdom. We have exported jobs and allowed the foreign ownership of our public utilities.
We have put profit before people.
From school to dole queue is not a career move that any young person would choose, especially when as they arrive as the latest sorry statistic, they are criticised and blamed by the millionaire members of parliament, individuals whose personal wealth has meant that they neither wanted or needed a job, simply assuming their inheritance and their role in the family business, or taking up politics as a kind of hobby.
This 1, 000, 000 is a statistic and a number that we should be deeply ashamed of as a nation, it means a gross cost that is significantly higher than the cost of investing wisely in our children's futures.
The cost both to the individual and the nation will be financial, but it is a cost that will also be paid by young people and their families in emotional and physical health.
In Spain the 'indignado's' have camped out in the centre of Madrid and other urban centres to demand changes to the political system.
The LSX campaign at St Paul's Cross is aimed specifically at the financial system and the Stock Exchange alonside such protests, we need in the UK a similar expression of indignation at the colossal and tragic waste of the talent and abilities of our young people.
Whilst personally, we have taken some degree of pride in our achievement, simply staying together like Derby and Joan 'for forty years or more' as the song has it.
However as we look at our grandchildren, their friends and their peers, we fear for their futures.
Their hopes and ambitions need to be nurtured and encouraged, need investment and a humane social policy, need apprenticeships and training opportunities, need a sympathetic and realistic government, if they are to be realised.
Our young people need a 'structure of opportunity' that allows them to look forward to a lifetime of fulfilling and rewarding work, inventing things, designing and building things, making things, building a future for themselves and generations to come.
We can't celebrate this million so let's set to and change it for something we can celebrate, a future for our young people.
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