Post Feminism?

The blog has been neglected for some time. The reason for this is that my husband has been ill.  He was quite clearly feeling awful, and was cold all the time, which is so unlike him. Usually, just as I start to feel warm enough, he announces that he’s too hot, and puts the heating off. Also he has lots of aches and pains. So my imagination was running riot, and the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis  was actually a relief. However, this does not mean he’s actually any better, it’s just that we’re both less worried. Which is something.

Anyway, the carpe diem list has suffered. Not that it was ever meant to be a burden or that I intended to get all competitive over it! But I have done one thing – I’ve started to volunteer, just one afternoon a week, at a charity bookshop. The idea was that I would feel I’m contributing in a small way and it wouldn’t be at all stressful or emotionally demanding. Also I’d be doing something a little different and perhaps meeting different people. The job has met all these criteria, and so far I’ve managed to be firm and not bring any books home, which of course is the worry. The price of staying decluttered is eternal vigilance. There are some very tempting books, too. There are insane numbers of knitting books, by which I’m not in the least tempted. I’m a lousy knitter – I did crack it sufficiently to knit a few plain jumpers for the children, but usually by the time I’d finished it, it fitted the next child down to the one it had been intended for. Also, I couldn’t knit and watch TV and if you can’t do that, knitting is really boring.

So this post is really inspired by the fact that there are builders working down the road. They’ve been there for weeks and I’ve never seen them speak to a girl going past. Now, I expect them to ignore a woman of my age, but when I was young, you could never have walked past a building site without whistles and calls. Lorry drivers sounded their horn and waved as they went past. Strangers stared. Middle class ones didn’t comment, others often did. I remember a trip to pick my mother up when she arrived at King’s Cross; it was summer and I was wearing a sleeveless top, and before long my mother was getting really cross with me about the attention I was attracting! 

Life is really different now. No man would behave like that any more and no woman would accept it, as we did. I think even we saw it as “just a bit of fun”. I always disliked being called “dear” by a strange man. “Love” or “blossom” or “hinny” or “me duck” seemed fine, but there was something deeply patronising about “dear”. It used to make me furious. The only other time I remember being really cross was when a totally strange man patted my bottom at a party. I was talking to someone and he was just walking past. That time I was cross enough to pour a glass of wine over his head.  So things have really changed for the better. This is not to say there isn’t still a long way for women to go.

Actually, the modern phenomenon that makes me foam at the mouth with fury is the way mothers treat their girls. Pink, pink pink. They even go out and buy pink pushchairs. The phrase “little princess” ought to get you sent to a re-education camp for a week, where you can learn that becoming a surgeon or astrophysicist are suitable ambitions for little girls, and that dressing them from head to toe in pink, and telling them they are beautiful little princesses, will not help them succeed. 

“Pampering” – now that’s another word that makes me furious. Pampering is what happens to lap dogs who have short and unhappy lives. Grown women do not need pampering, for God’s sake. In spite of the distance we’ve come, there’s still a lot to do, and I really don’t think we need to hold ourselves back.

Summer is over

Summer is over and I have my usual melancholy - another year over. I used to absolutely hate the kids going back to school. Some mums couldn't wait for term to start, whereas I always felt like weeping. Still, lots to look forward to, mustn't get gloomy. Christmas stuff in the shops already.

I’ve been a bit too busy to blog recently, and as I felt I hadn’t been making too much progress with my carpe diem list, I didn’t really have the inclination. However, when I took stock, I have actually done a couple of the things on the list. So here goes:

I got out my mother’s old oak wooden bowl, sanded and sanded, wire wooled and wire wooled (messy), and finally varnished it. It looks great. I don’t know quite why I bothered, because there’s nothing special about it, and my mother was never fond of it (“Well, it was war time, there wasn’t much you could get for wedding presents.”) But I’ve always felt it was a pleasing shape, and it is a good big chunk of English oak. So mending or restoring something was on the list, and it was right that it was, because the end result was very satisfying.

One thing was to attend a sporting event. I’ve half done that – we went to see the Tour of Britain start from the Castle this morning. We saw Wiggins and Cavendish, which was exciting, but I’m not going to tick it off, because really the Castle is so close it would have been pathetic not to go, and also the crowds were such that I really didn’t see very much. 

Then we went to London, to the National Theatre to see Timon of Athens. This is part of our ambition to see every Shakespeare play on stage.  So although Phil has torn the meniscus in his knee, and can’t walk very far, we had a lovely day. The River Festival was on so there was lots of added value in the form of acrobats and barge racing. London looked marvellous, as always, but the tube seemed much cleaner than it used to be. The streets have been clean for ages, but there was a definite difference with the tube. Also there are people walking along the foreshore of the Thames at low tide – we remember it being thickly covered with black smelly sludge. So all that was great.

One can see why Timon is a lesser performed play. The language isn’t generally as gripping, although Timon has a couple of enormously powerful  speeches.   The production made use of imagery of the City and the Occupy movement, and that worked well. I did admire Simon Russell Beale’s movement and body language when he was reduced to a down and out. It was creepy, and somewhat guilt inducing, to recognise the shaky run, the lack of social inhibition, and the shuffling, poorly coordinated movement that you see in street people.  I don’t know how he managed it, but somehow Russell Beale made you see that Timon’s insane generosity when he is rich is because he believes that he is unlovable. So his rejection of everything afterwards makes  sense. So more moving than I expected, and we’re glad we went.

A week in Whitby

I’ve been staying in Whitby, with my husband, the two grandsons and, for part of the week, our middle son, who is amazingly patient with the little boys and very good at distracting them and calming situations. He’ll make a terrific dad, I hope.

Whitby is an excellent holiday spot, but there are considerable contrasts to Swanage. Swanage is definitely more sophisticated, and groomed, whereas even quite smart places here are somehow brasher and in your face. Of course, there are lots of pretty rough establishments too, with bouncers in the evening. 

Beach huts in Whitby

The little boys loved the beach. It is actually a beautiful beach, smooth, firm sand with sweeping tides, so very clean, and just a few good big rock pools at one end. They played defending a castle from the tide – they’d never done it before and had the most tremendous fun. One thing we did notice is the size of the earthworks (“sand castle” just doesn’t do them justice.) People arrive on the beach equipped with garden spades; I was quite envious, especially since Phil kept pointing out how much bigger other people’s castles were. I only managed a bit of a swim because we had to keep an eye on the boys jumping the waves. On the phone to his mum, the older grandson was squeaking "I went in the sea and it was really rough and I was all on my own and the waves were going right over my head and I was all on my own and it was really rough" etc. etc. I had to take the phone and say that it wasn't quite like that, or she'd have been leaping in the car to come and rescue him. 

The other thing the boys really enjoyed was the port and the boats, and the 199 steps. We avoided mention of Dracula as much as possible. We didn’t want nightmares! There are loads of alternative shops – folk instruments and music, straightforward Goth, ironic Goth (sundresses printed with pink and blue skulls) proper antique, vintage, fossils and shells, gifts of all kinds, as well as the jet and jewellery shops.

So now we’re home and our son in law has the week off to look after the boys, so we are having a rest! But we’d definitely do it again.

The Olympics

I’ve been watching the Olympics on television rather obsessively. I did try for tickets but didn’t get any in the first round and then was so fed up with the system I didn’t try again. In any case, Phil was very negative about the idea of the London Olympics, and he is not keen on sport in the first place, so I couldn’t help losing heart. I’m sorry now, because the whole thing looked great – London and the Olympic Park looked marvellous, it all seemed to be very well done, and I won’t get another chance, after all.  Everyone I know who went has said how well organised it was, with lots of added value things like dance performances and explanations of how minority sports work.

Rhythmic gymnastics is a “sport” I thought was pointless, but I began to respect it – I still think the whole thing is a ludicrous endeavour, unless you want to be a circus performer, but the things they can do with their bodies! Similarly with synchronised swimming – it’s the most ridiculous thing, but you know how hard it would be to do anything similar, so you have to respect the swimmers even when wearing full eye make in the pool.

Sports I didn’t come round to are water polo – what’s the point of that? – and Taekwondo. They keep trying to kick their opponent, missing, and falling over. How would that work in a real fight, without a referee to stop your opponent? It’s just stupid. I’ve never been keen on basketball – there’s too many goals and hence, no tension. Handball seemed rather similar. I should think that they are both far more fun to play than watch. 

I had very mixed feelings about the dressage – I admire the horses and the training that has gone into it, but do they have to demean the horse by doing it to terrible arrangements of cheesy music?

I liked all the brilliant colour schemes. It didn’t look nationalistic, more welcoming. I liked the opening ceremony. If you knew absolutely nothing about British history, maybe it would have been confusing, but I think if you were reasonably quick on the uptake, you would have learned quite a lot about Britain. The forging of the Olympic rings and the whole lighting of the cauldron bit, with the young athletes and the”petal”  for every nation,  were exceptionally good. Just put McCartney out to grass please.

The closing ceremony, not so good. Some of the songs were a bt obscure and there weren’t enough sing along ones. You could see how much the athletes enjoyed it when they could. The LED lights round the stadium made a wonderful show. The highlight was Annie Lennox. We were simply staring at the screen in bemusement and we’re British. I thought it had to be a celebration of Whitby Goth weeks, someone else suggested that it was a memorial to the slave trade – it was weird, we all were giggling helplessly, and the commentators clearly had no idea either. Eventually (far too late) they identified the song as being from a Dracula film, which meant that my “celebration of Whitby Goth week” was not so far out. So why on earth did she choose that one? Was it something about celebrating Britain’s literary heritage – something the organisers of both ceremonies seem keen on? It was plain daft, and it will certainly be difficult for Rio de Janeiro to top that.

Through both ceremonies, I did like the determined Britishness, and to hell with anyone else’s over sensibilities. So sod the Pakistani and Saudi ideas about modest dress, sod American ideas about racial mixing and religion, sod the Russians and the Chinese and the Saudis and many others – let’s have paeons to personal freedom. Good stuff!

There are pervading stereotypes of the British as being buttoned up and inhibited. Having travelled around a bit, it seems to me that the British place a high value on privacy, but are much better at letting their hair down and enjoying themselves than, say, the Americans, and much less inhibited by worries about “face” than, say, the French. I hope the Olympics have shown this side of us to the world. And we are dreadful grumblers and very keen to put ourselves down, so maybe they have shown an efficiency and competence, that we didn’t know we had, to ourselves.

Alien America

Mitt Romney has been visiting and managed to offend by criticising the U.K.’s readiness to stage the Olympics. It’s quite funny, because he hasn’t said anything that one of the British newspapers hasn’t said, but we’re all still quite cross.

Well, of course, one can criticise members of one’s own family, and still be deeply offended if an outsider criticises them, and Romney should have had more sense and tact.  But the fuss started me thinking about the differences between the U.S.A. and the U.K.

 The first time I went to the U.S.A., I’d never been anywhere so completely foreign. I think that because Americans speak English, we expect them to think like us, and then are shocked to find this enormous gulf between our values and beliefs and theirs; and on top of this, Americans themselves seem largely unaware of the gulf. Beliefs which appear to them not as a belief, but as an unchallengeable fact, leave us utterly amazed. The two most obvious examples are gun control or the lack of it, and healthcare or the lack of it. There’s just been another mass shooting in Colorado, which sums up, to my European mind, the madness of American attitudes. First, the killer had assault weapons and 60,000 rounds of ammunition. 60, 000!!! What on earth is a civilian doing with this sort of arsenal? It can only be intended for mass murder – that’s the only purpose it can have. I remember the boys finding the signs on public buildings in Kentucky “No Concealed Weapons”,  hysterically funny, and all of us being open mouthed at the sign in Wal-mart, “We are sorry, we may not sell automatic weapons after 11 p.m.” I’m sure any European who reads this will be as staggered by these signs as we were. But Americans just don’t get it – they just don’t appreciate how it stuns non Americans. Apparently, after the latest shooting, the sales of guns in Colorado have greatly increased!  This is when you feel like giving up – they’re aliens, and it’s no good even trying to understand them.

On the health care topic, the newspaper was saying that some of the Colorado wounded  have no health insurance. Apparently American hospitals have to give life saving treatment, but should any of them need further treatment, they won’t get it. Good God, how can you call this a civilised society?  I simply can’t get my head round the fact that the richest nation in the world won’t take basic care of its citizens. It seems that even those who are insured are likely to be refused further tests if their condition is hard to diagnose.

Other issues that one simply can’t broach with most Americans are crime and punishment, the Middle East, and the fact that America’s ban on drugs isn’t working, creates crime, and is wrecking Mexico and much of central America. It’s the complete closed mindedness that’s so frustrating. Well, that and the attitudes that were outdated in Victorian times here.

We’ve just had the Olympic opening ceremony, and I particularly liked the tribute to the N.H.S., the gallop through our cultural history, and idea that it was for everyone. I’m feeling pretty patriotic at present.

The torch

On the day we left Swanage, the Olympic torch came through it.  When we went down to the beach for our swim, the owners of beach huts were all getting ready with bunting, balloons, and red, white and blue clothing for all. The council workers were primping the place – not that it needs it – and all over you could hear people discussing where to go to see it. “ Come over to mine, and I’ll make some scones.”  It was all really touching.

Then when we went down for our valedictory fish and chips, there outside the pub on the corner was one of the torch bearers. I think he must have been there with his mates and his wife for at least four hours and he was three sheets to the wind, but nicely. He was obviously bursting with pride, and rightly so, because he was an ex soldier who had settled in Swanage, and was the president of the local British Legion, and had done loads for the steam railway and lots of other charity work.

I took my older grandson to see the torch come through Nottingham and I’m afraid what he liked best was the Coca Cola bus, and the police motorcycle outriders. But the streets were packed and there were 16, 000 people in Market Square. So I know it’s all a bit rubbish, with the commercialisation and bloody Coca Cola, and the fact that the torch is mostly in a bus, but what I conclude is that it gives people chance to demonstrate a bit of pride in themselves and their country, and that is something good.

I feel exactly the same about the Diamond Jubilee – it is about the Queen, but only in so far as she’s ours, and we’re proud of her and glad to celebrate us – our country. So it’s an excuse for an outburst of patriotism, which is nice because we’re bad at noticing the good things about  Britain.

And a very very good thing about Britain is Dorset in general and Swanage in particular! (I should keep quiet about this – don’t want it turning into Cornwall.) 

Durdle Door

We’re on holiday in Dorset and I have achieved another ambition – today I swam through Durdle Door!  I thought it might not happen because the weather was so bad, but since we got here we’ve had very decent weather and number two son, Will, and I have swum every day. He has a triathlon wet suit, but I don’t think you really need one, if you were brought up in the North East and spent every half way summer Sunday at Saltburn. Although of course he swims faster and much further than me, and stays in the water longer. Yesterday I acted as (air) sea rescue, or maybe Baywatch. I was swimming and saw Phil waving at me, which slightly surprised me, but I waved back, and wondered why the people near him on the beach seemed to be staring so. I carried on swimming for quite a while, then eventually turned to come back into shore and saw something floating. Of course I swam over to investigate, and found a toy panda attached to a parachute. So then it all fell into place, and I towed it back in, much to the satisfaction of the little boy to whom it belonged, and much to the relief of the grandfather who had let go!

Going through - the first head is me, with Will catching up fast.

So today we went to Durdle Door, aiming for slack water at high tide, but it’s really quite windy, so the sea was really choppy. Going out was quite easy, but turning to go round the stack was quite hard; I think I made it harder for myself by giving the rocks an unnecessarily wide berth. Going through the arch itself was really hard work, with the waves apparently coming from all directions. Although I was swimming  hard, it was slow progress, almost all the way back to the beach. The really painful bit was getting out of the water onto the beach, as it’s shingle. I ended up flopping my way out on my tummy like an elephant seal.  But I did it, and I’m really pleased with myself.

The swimming team - Phil is excellent at handing a towel when I emerge from the water. 

Had a second swim in the next bay which was a little sheltered from the wind and had leisure to look down and see the kelp and red seaweed, extremely tall, 30 feet at least, and shaped like a juniper tree. I saw some small fish, too.

Also, as an extra source of happiness, I’ve been able to fly my new birthday present kite, and had all the fun of the company of the kids, their partners and the grandsons. What a wonderful time I’m having.