RetroMen (and the women who don’t love them.)

There are plenty of times in life where you have to keep your eyes out for subtle, subliminal sexism. The pink version of the standard Lego might be depressingly easy to spot, less so the 17% pay gap between men and womens’ hourly pay -which rises to 35% for women who work part-time –  or the fact that women do an average of 15 hours a week more housework than men even when they both work full-time.  These issues tend to get swept under the carpet (classic housework time-saving tip, right there) most of the time; or at least until you look at the figures in black and white and have to remind yourself that we are in 2013, not 1831.

Radical indeed.

It’s always worth remembering that for all of the work of feminists and progressive policies over the last fifty years, that there are still some people out there who haven’t woken up to the fact that women are ACTUAL PEOPLE too, and still think of them as some sort of second-class domestic-droids with no intelligence or power of independent thought.

One of these, er, RetroMen* appears to be alarmingly local to me and has formed a joyous sounding political party, the Justice for Men and Boys and the Women Who Love Them. (Yes, not just campaigning for the rights of men – a terribly under-supported area, but also their Women. The ones who love them, but stay politely out of the way, presumably.)

You can imagine my delight when I read about this charming chap in the local paper. Mike Buchanan believes that the current government has implemented ‘anti-male’ policies, and has cut his ties with the Conservatives to become an Independent candidate. He is planning to stand at the next election, and ‘thinks he can win it’. Mr Buchanan says ‘one of the reasons that I and other people oppose Mr Cameron is that he sometimes says warm words about the family, but the actual policies are designed to drive women out to work. For example, the split on the child allowances encourages women to go to work, rather than stay at home.’

There is certainly work to be done in terms of making it possible for one PARENT to stay at home, or work part time whilst raising children, but encouraging women to go to work if they want to is no crime. In fact, many think of this as progress. And, ideally, it should be a parental choice, not just the woman’s  choice. With many mortgages hinged on two incomes, the idea of there being much choice about surviving on one income is more of a fantasy than anything for a lot of people. But Mr Buchanan does not mention children, or parenting, so I cannot assume that he is referring to this problem. It sounds a teensy bit as is he is suggesting that all women should stay at home. He probably likes his dinner on the table, newspaper ironed and ready on his return from Important Man Work.

He would hate living with me. Often, if I have been working all morning and out with the children in the afternoon, the house looks exactly the same – just with different piles of Stuff in new and interesting places – as it did when Rich left in the morning. I usually do an emergency tidy of the breakfast things and pile of shoes by the door about half past four, just to make a bit of an effort. Sometimes I do spend the whole morning doing housework, but that it because I quite like things to be clean and tidy as much as anything. I don’t think of housework as a career. (Luckily, I would have been sacked long ago.)

If his home is HIS castle, let him clean it !

And then there are Mr Buchanan’s thoughts on why there are more homeless men than women. ‘Because society, as well as government… is sympathetic to women rather than men.’  Really? Really?  So that is why so many magazines and websites such as the MailOnline are dedicated almost entirely to the criticism of women for being, in no particular order; too thin, too fat, too loud, too quiet, too pregnant, not having had children, being unmarried, or married to the wrong person, too sexy, too old, too young for that dress, too rich, too chavvy….

That is why because one of my friends has had to alter her facebook settings to male in order to get rid of all the adverts for weight loss and diet plans. (Never mind the male obesity problem, eh? It’s clearly not as unsightly as overweight women.)

That is why so many women are underpaid, undermined and kept at home doing the cleaning. Because society is more sympathetic to women than men. Got it?

This was not supposed to be a ranty blog, (there have been quite a few of late!) but I did spit my beautifully filtered coffee out as I read this over breakfast yesterday, and it seems wrong that the coffee was spat in vain.

The problem is not that I think that men have no rights. The problem, Mr Buchanan, is that your campaign for the Rights of Men (and boys) sounds an awful lot like it is centered around the right of a man to keep a woman at home.

Good luck with that…

*I am using that for the first time here, mostly because I can’t always say tosser when I mean tosser. It’s not meant to be knocking retro as a look- because I quite like that -I just mean unreconstructed men.

The rule of three.

Mostly, I love having three children. There are a few drawbacks; the shoe-shop bill, for instance, can easily reduce me to tears. As can the fact that the law of averages means that at least one of them will object – loudly – to every single suggestion that I make; and then there is the whole ‘outnumbered by your offspring’ issue…

When people see that I have three children, they are quite often given to commenting. In fact, a lot of people seem unable to stop themselves from commenting. Mothers with three kids are obviously fair game for this sort of opinion-giving. When mine were smaller, everyone used to say, ‘wow – you have got your hands full!’ This was true, and very often literally the case; sometimes I would be holding a child by each hand and be wearing Tilly in the sling. But the comments usually had a tone of ‘rather you than me!’ or ‘are you stark raving bonkers?’ or perhaps ‘all THREE are making quite a kerfuffle and you appear to be totally unable to control them.’

These days, I mostly get, ‘how on earth do you manage with three?’ On very rare occasions, the kids are miraculously standing beautifully behind me when people say this, looking relatively clean and sane. At times like this, I must look like some sort of supermum, and like to just shrug and say, ‘oh, you know, I get by…’ Of course, 99.9% of the time when people say this, the children are causing some sort of loud mayhem, and racing about half dressed and feral. And so I mutter something about wine, about embracing chaos, and loving a pack-mentality kind of family life, and generally attempt to leave the vicinity fairly quickly.

But there are many, many wonderful things about having three. They are a gang; a team. They look out for each other. They travel as a pack and are fiercely protective of each other. Having to assert themselves within a tight group of three has made them develop three very different, and strong, personalities. But best of all, they are great friends. The love getting up early at weekends and playing long and involved imaginary games involving Princess Leah, Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter. They like playing in the park together, riding their bikes together, and chasing each other round in circles…(no, really. I know.) Sometimes, they talk to each other using words that only they understand.

But lately, when people ask me how on earth I manage with three, I want to say that I honestly don’t know. I I want to say that sometimes I am so bored with shouting and disciplining them, trying to be fair and consistent and calm with all three but failing miserably, that I fantasise about booking myself a long holiday alone. I want to say that sometimes the effort involved in making sure that everybody eats a reasonable meal, gets some time to read their book, has their teeth cleaned and hair brushed nearly kills me. I want to say that sometimes I come back from the school nursery run feeling as if I have completed a half marathon. I want to say that sometimes I look at the laundry bin and want to weep. But I don’t say any of that. It’s not what people are asking.

I say ‘oh, you know, we manage.’ And sometimes it is more true than other times.

But despite all that, I wouldn’t be without them. Three may be a crowd. But it is a fun crowd.

The fast and the furious: High Street Fashion in 2013.

We all like a bit of a snigger about health and safety right? The fact that you can’t change a lightbulb or go up a ladder without having been on a specific training course, or that you need to fill in a special form if your child has tripped over and grazed their knee at nursery. (At one point, when Will was a bit smaller but no less accident-prone, I once suggested that I just signed a whole pile of them at the beginning of the week, to save time.)

The workers of the factory in Bangladesh that collapsed last week didn’t get a chance to joke about health and safety gone mad though. And anyway, it hadn’t gone mad, because there weren’t any regulations in the first place. The thing that has gone mad is the clothing industry.

Made in Bangladesh

The factory in Bangladesh that collapsed and then caught fire, killing more than 400 people isn’t the first incident to highlight the total lack of concern for garment workers’ safety and wellbeing, it probably won’t be the last. But this feels different. This feels like the one that should make us grow up and realise that something is wrong with being able to buy an entire outfit for £10. The real cost of those £8 jeans, £5 tops, and all the other clothes that are slightly more expensive, but still say ‘Made in Bangladesh’ on the label,  was highlighted in the pictures of families waiting desperately for news of their loved ones beside the rubble of the factory. Fast fashion really does costs lives, and it is time we stopped pretending that it doesn’t.

It’s very hard to equate the clean, expansive rows of clothing in shops on the high street and in supermarkets with the dirty, crowded factories where they are made, by workers too poor to be able to fight for any rights they might be entitled to. It’s time that we fought for them. And although I think there is a gap in the market for more clothing that is made in Britain, it wouldn’t be fair to just bail on these workers in places like Bangladesh. They have given us our fast fashion fix, often at great personal cost . We owe them the right to a well paid, safe job in a factory that doesn’t put their lives in danger. That’s worth another £5 on the price of our clothing, at least.

It’s a complex and difficult issue to talk about because it’s not just one chain of shops, or even type of shop that supports the practice of unregulated, underpaid work. Some retailers are better at distancing themselves from it than others. Some are probably worse than others, but it is very hard to find the information to prove it. Complicated and intricate supply chains are everywhere. Primark and other large budget retailers are the obvious target, but the fact that much more upmarket chains such as Mango and Bennetton were also using suppliers in the same factory indicates that the practice is far more widespread than that.

The reason that Primark gets it in the neck the most is that it is the most obvious embodiment of the high-volume, low-cost, fast turnaround element of the fashion industry that should now have started to disgust us all. And clearly, Primark is not just a shop for people who can’t afford to shop elsewhere, so the argument that those shops exist to keep the poor in clothing is irrelevant. The fact that there is a Primark Flagship Store on Oxford Street says it all. And anyway, shopping at Primark is something of a false economy, because it is mostly badly-made, from low quality fabric. It doesn’t last.You end up having to buy more, three weeks later. But hey, that’s instant fashion gratification for you. (By the way, I am not saying this as someone who is immune to this urge to buy-something-cheap-now. I know that my current love affair with Zara is almost bound to end in tears, and that if I looked closely into their supply chain, I would probably end up finding similarly awful practice.)

So, what to do? My plan is this: firstly, to find ethical alternatives where possible. Ethical Superstore is a good place to start. But it is not always possible: ethical fashion is still not mainstream, and is by definition, more expensive. I do not live in fairyland. (Sadly.)

Secondly, sign this petition to put pressure on retailers to take responsibility for their workers’ rights and welfare.

Thirdly, remember that if that if a top only costs me a fiver, someone elsewhere is likely to have paid a much higher price for it.

Fourthly, I am going to write to my MP (Richard Fuller.) I’ve had enough (well, almost) of writing angry blog posts about the unfairness of it all; it won’t change the world. But I feel passionate enough to demand that my representative in Parliament asks some questions of the fashion industry, on my behalf. I’ll write him a nice little essay on my feelings on the matter. Anyone who wants to sign it, leave a comment below, or on my facebook page.

 

 

Weekend Perspective.

Small children are renowned for many things, but a sense of perspective is not amongst them. I say this as the mother of two girls who spent this morning wailing over various troubles. One had the heart-wrenching choice between a summer dress that is slightly too long, or a summer dress that is knicker-skimmingly short. Or, one which is approximately the right size but ‘is a bit itchy and gets its sleeves all scrunched up when I put a cardigan on.’ You could ask my neighbours to confirm that was EXACTLY what she said, as she bellowed it right next to the (very thin) wall. The joys of semi-detached living.

The other girl wanted to wear a skirt which is somewhere in the loft. I refused to get up in the loft at 8am to rummage about for it, which was clearly very unreasonable of me. The boy was slightly nonplussed by all of this. “Mummy,” he said, sadly, “Tilly won’t stop crying. She won’t put her shoes on. We might all have to stay at home today.” Well, if there is one thing not to do with a house full of wailing children, it is stay in all day.

Luckily for all involved, we made it out of the house and into school. The moment they get on their scooters and are on their way, all of the worries about dress length and skirt selection just evaporate. But like I said, perspective is not really a concept they are interested in yet.

And neither is it a concept that the author of the piece I read in the Family section of the Guardian can have been very aware of as she was writing.  I should say that usually, this is one of my favourite sections of the newspaper. I read it second, after the Weekend magazine. (Shiny bits first, is my rule with newspapers.) The article was about how much ‘screen time’ you should allow children to have. Because, like the author of this piece, we all have 3 or four iPads lying about, plus laptops and PCs. And the damn kids just keep, well, using the things. Don’t we all live like that?

The issue of how much time we allow children to use technology is a pertinent one, and one that will become increasingly important as technology integrates itself further and further into daily life. But. But. The iPad rule is surely the same as the biscuit rule: if it is there, it will be consumed. Instead of moaning about how much time the kids  spend on the technology, how about not having so many options available? iPads were made to be lusted after; and children and touchscreen technology is a love affair waiting to happen. The article is interesting, and balanced, and the author discusses what is a moderate path through the kids vs technology battleground, acknowledging that using them sparingly and constructively is in the best interests of everyone involved.  She doesn’t ignore the link between parents’ technology habits and those of our children; adding a reminder that children look to adults for their behaviour cues, and if the grown – ups are glued to their phones and laptops, it makes sense that the children will follow suit.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about how it was basically an article that could have been subtitled ‘Help! I have too many iPads lying around!’ As twitter would say: #firstworldproblems, or perhaps #middleclassangst. At no point does Emma Cook acknowledge the fact that she must be incredibly fortunate  to have enough technology to share between her three children, not to mention a ‘new smartphone and laptop’ for herself.  I couldn’t shake off the association with the criticism so often leveled at less well-off families who ‘haven’t got any money, but they’ll always have Sky TV.’  Well, maybe that is a bit silly, but no more silly than Emma Cook’s house, where ‘it’s as if Apple has been breeding in my living room; its slim screens and sleek lines clogging up our shelves and kitchen surfaces, beyond reproach because they look so good.’ A sleek, innovative iPad is so much more aesthetically pleasing than a rusty old Sky dish screwed to the wall of a crumbling mid-terrace, though, right? The trouble with poor people is that they just have no taste.

Later on, I was Googling some recipe ideas (this came after a disastrous incident which I will refer to for now as ‘the spaghetti bolognaise argument’) for families on a budget and I came across a blog so good it quite literally stopped me in my tracks. A Girl Called Jack is a story of a young single mum trying to quite literally survive by the skin of her teeth. Having been made redundant from her £27,000 a year job in the fire service, unable to find even the most basic job, despite endless applications, she was thrown into a a world of benefit-balancing, pawn shops and bailiffs.  A world where it’s a good idea to unscrew the lightbulbs to stop you from using unnecessary electricity, and put furniture in front of heaters to keep you from the temptation of turning them on. A world where you have to sell your iPhone and furniture  just to keep a roof over your head. She started blogging about her mission to make the best meals she could for her and her son, whilst living below the breadline. Her recipes are great; the blog is eye-opening. Jack writes in a post titled  Hunger hurts:

“Poverty is the sinking feeling when your small boy finishes his one Weetabix and says ‘more mummy, bread and jam please mummy’ as you’re wondering whether to take the TV or the guitar to the pawn shop first, and how to tell him that there is no bread or jam.”

I don’t think I really need to go on about how this gave me a bit of a kick up the backside and totally put the over ipad-ding issue into perspective. Two mums, probably geographically not far apart but at opposite ends of the wealth spectrum, both writing about (amongst other things) trying to do the best for their kids. The technology argument has its place, and whilst I would love to be in a position to worry about how much time Tilly had spent on the third laptop, I am mostly just glad that we will at least be able to feed her and her siblings tonight, and that the television doesn’t have to go to the pawn shop any time soon.

Yesterday: April the 23rd

It’s kind of cool that St George’s Day and William Shakespeare’s birthday are celebrated on the same day.  Two legends of English history. A pick n’ mix of cultural icons. I have to confess that I don’t actually know much about the story of St George, except for the essentials, like, er,  he slays a dragon. The myth that we based our portrait of St George on, the noble Christian who kills the dragon to protect the beautiful maiden, is inextricably mixed in with earlier Eastern religious folklore. We celebrate him as the patron saint without really needing much more; his legendary status has been assured since 1222, when the Council of Oxford appointed 23 April as his Feast Day. If anything, the story of St George reflects the messy, complicated,  cross-cultural heritage of most of the mythology that underpins our ideas of what ‘England’ itself represents.

St George (Maiden in background.)

Shakespeare, with the benefit of being born slightly later than the tricky ‘days of yore’ era, we are more sure about. A bit more sure, anyway. I know, (mostly from watching Shakespeare in Love and a QI episode about him) that there is still some debate around whether all of the work accredited to him actually belongs to him or not, but this mostly seems to be rooted in the snobbish idea that a man of relatively humble origins could not possibly have produced so much Good Stuff. In the celebration of anything English, clearly there must be at least a smidgen of cynicism, not to mention a touch of class-based snobbery thrown in, just for good measure.

At school I used to grumble about the amount of Shakespeare that was shoved into the GCSE syllabus and shoe-horned into every term. I liked a lot of the plays; but always thought they are written as plays to be performed and watched, rather than half-read and picked over by bored year nines trying to impose every meaning possible on each line of deconstructed dialogue.

Will Shakespeare. Kind of like a groovy 6th form English teacher here, no?

Then we studied Room with a View and I never looked back on the bard. I had fallen in love with 20th Century fiction. I picked a University literature course that  didn’t include compulsory Shakespeare.

But these days, I am glad in a way that we had iambic pentameter force-fed to us for a while. Lines drift back to me now and then; offering a view into the mysterious world of 16th century language and poetry that I never would have been aware of left to my own narrow minded devices. Our world now is one where culture is constantly photographed, documented, discussed and regurgitated online. The sheer volume of plays and poetry that Shakespeare wrote gives us an opportunity to peek into the otherwise impenetrable world of  500 (ish) years ago. It’s all there; but instead of documentary footage, twitter trends and instagrams, it is witty, sharp, revolutionary writing. A bit hard to read at times, but mostly worth the effort.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Also, the film 10 Things I hate about You would simply not have existed without The Taming of the Shrew. And for that, I am eternally grateful.

You can’t just buy me a guitar every time you screw up, you know?

Meeting your Heroines.

People often say that you shouldn’t meet your heroes. They might disappoint you, or, in the case of fictional heroes, be notoriously difficult to track down. I think it depends on who you choose as your heroes. Or heroines. A lot of mine are in fact fictional, so there is no danger of me ever being disappointed by them. Pippi Longstocking, for instance, can remain safely as cool as she is in my mind for ever, I am unlikely to ever run into her.

Pippi Longstocking

Some of my heroines are real. Some are on twitter. Many, I have tweeted; like a demented, love-sick, idiot. And then, the other day I got the chance to go and listen to a couple of them speak, as columnists at The Guardian, at a writing Masterclass. It was only when I got there that the fact that I had semi-idolised these people, in the way that normal people might have idolised rock stars or actresses, was a bit weird. (It is not entirely coincidence that Polly is a Polly, and one of my all-time favourite columnists for the Observer magazine, and yes, Grazia – is Polly Vernon. Luckily Polly is also partly named after PJ Harvey, which makes the whole thing a bit less of a geek-freak thing.)

The beautiful Polly Harvey

The two speakers I was excited about were Hadley Freeman and Marina Hyde. Hadley I liked initially because she was a fashion journalist who doesn’t take fashion too seriously, and writes a hilarious fashion-advice column called Ask Hadley. But also because I can identify with the slightly shy, little-bit-geeky character she comes over as in her writing. She has written a book, The Meaning of Sunglasses, which I own and is brilliant. She has another one out tomorrow called How to be Awesome. You see why I like her. Marina Hyde writes a sports column  a politics column and a very funny feature on a Friday called Lost in Showbiz; searingly sarcastic and properly laugh-out-loud funny. One of the first thing Marina talked about was not writing in list form, unless absolutely necessary. “If my column appears as a list, ” she said “it means it’s totally sh*t, but I couldn’t think of anything else to write.” (Or something to that effect. I didn’t tape the whole thing, or anything. I’m not an actual stalker.) But she did swear. Marina is one of those gloriously posh people who swears like a sailor, all the time. I do love a bit of posh-person-cursing. So, um, in honour of, but at the same time directly contravening  Marina’s advice, I am going to list some of the things I learned on Monday. Because it was f*cking brilliant. (Nope. Just not posh enough.)

Converse: uniform of wannabe writers

*The collective noun for a group of aspiring writers should be, if it isn’t already, a converse of writers. (Navy being the colour of choice.)

*The question ‘so, are you actually a writer?’ almost never has a one word answer.

*Tone is everything.

*Write widely, and often, about stuff you are passionate about, but also about anything else.

*Try not to be angry too often. Or smug.

*Keep it brief. No one wants to read a 15,000 word essay on a blog.

*That I would remove at least two of my limbs for the chance to be a columnist at The Guardian.

*If you don’t want anyone to sit next to you on the train home, you could try eating a tuna sandwich.

There was probably more to be learned, but I was distracted at the beginning of the session by the attire of a gentleman three seats along, who was bravely attempting a red-shirt bow-tie/tight tweed trousers combo (with converse, obvs,) and also the fact that I was IN THE SAME ROOM AS HADLEY FREEMAN.

Guest Blog: Kelly the Naturopath

Reblogged from Park Life:

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We're very excited about this guest blog from one of out lovely local customers, Kelly. Kelly is a naturopath practicing in Bedford. Here's her story of how she has worked hard to pursue her dream job; with a few handy tips for healthy living too!

I grew up in Bedford but moved to London when I was 19 to pursue a career in media.

Read more… 971 more words