Teenage Kicks
Posted by a Contributor in June's MagazineThe thoughts of a young teenager from Leith who, unusually for one from that loud decade, wishes to remain anonymous. Thus the picture of her, frankly scary, hamster…
Hi this is my first time writing something for the Leither and hopefully I will get the chance to write something again. I’m a teenager so I suppose that this is a young person’s view of things, not important things, but still…
Expenses: In the papers just now, there is a lot of news about MPs expenses and a lot of people seem to be getting quite annoyed about this. I find it quite funny though…maybe because I’m not a taxpayer, so it’s not my money their spending…why would you need to get someone else to pay for a bath plug? I think the funniest one so far has been the ‘floating duck island’, for a start do you really need to be spending immense sums of money (over £1000) on something you can probably make out of a few pieces of wood – depending on how skilled you are – and another thing, why would you want to have a duck pond in your back garden? Would it not be more constructive and rewarding if politicians created duck ponds in places where they could be enjoyed by everybody? It doesn’t really seem logical; MPs have enough money to buy millions of bath plugs! If these people aren’t using their money to purchase everyday household things, you really have to wonder what they spend their salaries on!
Trams: So there you are, trying to cross to the other side of Princes Street and you end up having to walk half the length of Princes Street just to get there! Maybe the Scottish Parliament should have figured out that they didn’t have enough money to build trams and then they could have invested the money in existing transport links and improved the bus service. (At least that way you could have walked through Leith without road works!) Anyway why do we need a tram that is going to take the same route as a bus? My theory is that everywhere has their own transport system which works for them, like London has the Tube, Dublin has trams (not Edinburgh) and…Amsterdam has…Bikes?! Still the silver lining to the cloud is that now nobody can figure out how to get onto Princes Street and if you manage to get onto it it’s not as busy as it used to be: you can walk without bumping into people and you don’t feel like you’re in the middle of a stampede!
Swine flu: At school swine flu has become a bit of a joke, when people are off school, we tell teachers that they have swine flu (possibly in the hope that the school will be closed) and if people sneeze everyone steps away. Even people who have had swine flu don’t appear to be that bothered; one person even said that it was just like having normal flu! Also it’s slightly ironic how the government have sent out swine flu leaflets to everybody when people in the UK have already suffered from swine flu; I wonder if they got a special leaflet?!