A Woman’s Place

It’s convenient to have women at home but it’s not fair.

Domestic work and child rearing is still work and even though it’s unpaid and undervalued society would fall apart without it. We have been taught to believe that this is just the way it is; the way it has to be; women have the equipment for it; men need to provide and women need to care. For years this has been accepted, even though life has changed.

Because I’ve been interested in 1882 I have been looking at the censuses and it is clear that women did work. They worked when their husbands were absent, they worked before they had husbands and surprisingly many worked even when their husbands had jobs. This seems to be particularly true of the seamstresses, dressmakers and milliners.

I have been reading a fascinating book by Emma Griffin called Breadwinner. It looks at the economic history of Victorian Britain in working class households. At the beginning of the period she is studying she notes that few working class women are working outside the home. The man goes out to work, working long hours to ear just enough to keep his family fed and a roof over their heads. He gives all of his wages to his wife, who manages the household budget. However, as the economy strengthens and men are paid better they start to keep some money back for themselves. The men go to the pub and are in the home less, enjoying a leisure time that is not available to their wives. This prompts women to go to work. Obviously, they still have all the unpaid jobs to do but if work is available then they take it, even if they have to chain their child to a chair at home while they are working.

During the wars women realised that working for money was better than being taken for granted but this left gaps. Who was going to do the domestic chores? Surely not men; that would be unthinkable and so a huge campaign was waged to make women believe that their place was in the home. We were overly gendered and in the Fifties women bought into it. 

That was a long time ago, though and we now know that everyone can work and everyone can pull their weight domestically. It takes a village to raise a child, so it would be excellent if that child’s father (and or the man living with their mother) was part of that village.

This current lockdown situation, however, has shown that women still have a long way to go to get equality. When I’m ringing parents to support learning from home I’ve noticed that it’s the Mums I speak to. When those mums have a birthday they tell me, excitedly, that their husband isn’t going to work that day, so he can supervise the schooling while she stays in her bedroom and eats chocolate. 

“I just want to feel as though I could leave the house, or even the room, for ten minutes and someone else will deal with it if World war 3 breaks out.”

I ask, “Do you work?”

“Oh yes but I’ve negotiated with my boss that I will work in the evenings.”

“And your husband?”

“He goes into work/is in the study/out in the shed office.”

I’m sure this isn’t everyone but I was just beginning to get uncomfortable. Women seem to be taking the brunt of this stay at home thing. Then the NHS confirmed my suspicions by making a poster that sent us right back to the 1950s.

Not only are women bearing the brunt but they are being conditioned to do so. Men need to stay home too and not just in the evening to relax and watch TV!

What do normal people do?

 A few days ago I wrote about feeling OLD (Overwhelmed at Leaving Daughter) and with that, the stress of the new ways of working and two Borises in a row I’d developed a stonking headache and was beginning to feel like I wasn’t coping.

I tried all the usual things. I had a bath, watched some TV, read a book, did some yoga breathing, ate chocolate. I went for a walk and listened to birdsong. None of it was working. I still felt stressed and dicombumbulated. I had a ball of anxiety that was moving around like mercury and I wasn’t sure why or what do do with it.

I thought I’d try the cleaning tactic. If I got everything clean and organised I might feel slightly more in control. I started in my study. I went in and shut the door. Now, my parents always joked that when I was growing up if they wanted me to clean my bedroom they would tell me to do flute practice but if it was practising that needed to be done then they would ask me to tidy my room. It turns out that I’m no different as an adult.

I worked my way through all the scales, some daily exercises, Bach and Handel sonatas, the cadenza of Mozart concerto, some flirty French music and finished with some Jazz. A couple of hours later my shoulders were stiff and the dents in the thumb and first finger of my left hand were red raw but I felt better. I could breathe properly again. 

It made me wonder what normal people do. How do you cope with that kind of nebulous anxiety if you don’t have something to blow?

A Surprise Boris

 “There’s a surprise Boris at five,” my daughter announced before I was about the start an evening of teaching the flute via Zoom. 

No one wants a surprise Boris. Can you imagine? The scruffy straw-headed moon face popping up to shout, “surprise!” at you through those rubbery lips. 

I was confused about why the fact that the Prime Minister was going to host the daily five o clock briefing was being described as a ‘surprise Boris,’ in journalistic circles. You might not have noticed (because let’s face it, we’ve all stopped watching) but since we’ve been in Lockdown 3 there’s a briefing every day at 5pm. The cabinet take it in turns. Priti Patel talks absolute gibberish, Matt Hancock proves that he’s been on a steep learning curve but is actually trying, Gavin Williamson upsets teachers, pupils and parents and they are trying to stop Rishi Sunak from announcing free disco passes for anyone who has been vaccinated.  Surely it was just his turn.

It had to be Boris because of the number. Going over the next round number is a moment for an announcement. 

Over 100,000 deaths wasn’t a surprise for any of us who were watching the numbers.  My calculations estimate that even if no more mistakes are made there could still be another 30,000 deaths, as we come down the other side of the curve. However, tipping over this nice round number meant that we needed a serious briefing.

"Woo Hoo! Surprise!" Boris said, "When all this is over we're going to have a party.  A VCV celebration.  We will have defeated the enemy, won the war.  We will honour our brave soldiers of the NHS and commemorate the dead.  Every town will build a huge Johnson in memorial to those that have lost their lives.  We will hang out the rainbow bunting and sing, "We'll meet again," Can't tell you where, can't tell you when."

Then Chris Whitty showed his slides and explained that loads more people were still going to die and the man from the NHS broke down and said how tired they all were (not really, he was very professional) and the journalists asked questions that made the Prime Minister squirm.

"We did everything we could," he protested.

When they asked him how he felt about all those people dead on his watch he said that if he were to tell them then he would, "Exhaust the thesaurus of misery."  I checked Roget's and it's a good job he didn't, there are a lot of words there.

He also said that he had "worked with all the tools he had", which I thought was a rather rude way to refer to Dido Harding and his cabinet.

Weirdly, during the briefing we were treated to occasional glimpses and sounds from the room next door.  A man in a mask (who wasn't the comedian Michael Spicer) was trying to answer the questions for the Prime Minister and we got to see it.

Eventually, the Prime Minister told us why he was really there.

"The deaths we are forced to.....er I am forced to announce today are....."

He didn't want to do it.  He wanted to be Surprise Boris, Party Boris, Boris the bearing of good news but instead he was forced onto TV for everyone to notice that the predicted 20,000 deaths has been multiplied by 5 and there are more to come.  

Many have sadly died during this pandemic.  They use the word sadly to deflect blame but we know and we have sadly lost confidence in what they are doing.

O.L.D.

 It was quite a big day yesterday. 

It was my daughter’s 27th birthday and she got the keys to her first house. It's her first mortgage and the first time she is responsible for all the maintenance and decoration.

Weirdly, although we are excited for her it has also made the Long Suffering Husband and I feel O.L.D. (Overwhelmed at Leaving Daughter). I say weirdly because it's not something you would expect.  I mean, she's 27!  She's left home before and we were not expecting to have her with us for this long this time.  Lockdown meant that we had to adapt to having another adult living in our house and it was actually fine.  She's only moving around the corner and so we are completely confused about why we feel so overwhelmed.

Maybe it's because the exciting part of her life is just beginning which reminds us that ours is over.  In normal circumstances, people our age, whose children are becoming independent would be thinking about travel, fine dining and spending the kids inheritance but it is difficult to imagine that those things will ever happen again at the moment. When you reach your fifties, you are somehow aware that you haven't got long before your life is about hospital appointments, comparing ailments with your friends and scouring the obituary column of the local newspaper for people you know.  As soon as your children leave home you feel as though you should be making the most of every moment.  

I was pregnant with her when I was 27 and somehow this knowledge also feels overwhelming.  The LSH's dad died when he was 27.  Milestones make you reflect on these things.  We have thought a lot about how our parents would have loved to have seen their grandchildren buy their own homes.

We are also having to remind ourselves that we haven't bought a second house. The LSH was wondering how he was going to fit in all the extra jobs he would now have to do and I felt guilty that I had to work and couldn't help clean her new home.  It would be overwhelming to have to run two houses.

We are both a little tired and over-emotional today and feeling OLD.

It’s a sin

 The most perfect piece of television writing is currently on our screens. Russel T Davis is an actual genius but you don’t need me to tell you that. 

Genius

He has been writing brilliantly for television for years and years (see what I did there?) and at the same time normalising all sexualities. His characters are human and real.

I have only watched the first two episodes of ‘It’s a sin,’because even a dedicated binge watcher with a side helping of emotional masochism, like myself, can’t take the heartbreak, which seems to be heightened by being broadcast during a pandemic that is indiscriminate.

The politicians keep saying that Covid-19 doesn’t discriminate and that’s why we all need to play our part. We know that all viruses do discriminate. There are always some people that are more susceptible and some behaviours that encourage spread, however, the implication is that if the virus discriminated against a group of people or set of behaviours of which we didn’t approve then we wouldn’t all have to play our part.

I was 15 when AIDS first appeared on the scene. My generation were just discovering sex at a time when a sexual plague was sweeping the nation. We still lived in quite a buttoned up conservative society. Our parents sniffed at anyone on the TV who didn’t appear to fit into the normal sexual conventions. I remember Dad getting quite angry about Boy George and Mum deciding that Victoria Wood was probably *mouthed* “a lesbian,” because she wore dungarees. The implication was that ‘nice’ people couldn’t love someone of the same sex or wear clothes that didn’t accurately gender them. My parents grew up in a time when being a gay man was a crime and although they were generally liberal thinkers there was always some residual fear and anger about gay men. Our MP was Harvey Proctor, who lived with a man. For my dad this just doubled down on his crime of being a Tory and when the People newspaper engineered a situation where they could take photos of him with men under the age of 21 and forced his resignation, my dad said, “Well, what do you expect from a shirtlifter?”

It’s crazy to think that in 1981 the age of consent for homosexual men was 21, lowered to 18 in 1998 and it wasn’t given parity with other sexual consent until 2000. What did lawmakers think gay men were going to do, while all their peers were having sex? Sleep with women, just in case? Actually, that’s what many did and it caused so much more pain for everyone.

At 15 I subscribed to The New Scientist magazine because... Because I was a nerd. I had been reading about AIDS but I didn’t for one second think it could relate to me. It probably didn’t because I was a nerd but my friends were sleeping with multiple partners and the girls were all on the pill, so sex was most definitely unprotected. Boys didn’t like to use condoms, was the rumour. The scientific evidence was suggesting that unless you’d rogered a monkey you’d be fine. No one seemed concerned. 

By the time I left University we knew what it was, how it was transmitted and the first antiviral drug to treat it was developed. There were TV adverts warning us all not to die of ignorance and one of my nephew’s first words was condom, which he would say repeatedly, as though it was a little song while he pushed his little Thomas Tank Engine Walker around the living room.

The problem with a drama as good as ‘It’s  a sin’ is that it’s all consuming. Even if it’s too painful to binge watch you think about it all the time. I wish I hadn’t started it because I have things to do today.

Thunder Snow

Red sky in the morning, shepherds warning.  Lock up your sheep the snow is on it's way.

Maybe it will snow.  We usually miss it here.  Forecast snow in Maldon is always a disappointment.  It's the umbrella.  It seems to protect us from the majority of rain, which is good but we like snow.  It's white and clean and fluffy.  

They've had Thunder snow in Reading.  People are out playing and building snowmen.

Am I the only adult that wants to see thunder snow?

There's nothing I'd like more than to spend the day clearing my drive of snow so that we can get the car out to go to work....oh wait, we can't go anywhere can we?  

I could give up the idea and sit watching the politician's contradict each other about when children will be able to go back into school but instead I've got my nose pressed up to the window, waiting .

A watched sky never snows.

Am I mixing my metaphors?

Day of long shadows

 I missed a day. The only thing that caught my attention to write about were the outfits at the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden and the amazing photoshopping efforts of the world, putting Bernie Sanders with his mittens in places where you wouldn’t expect. I didn’t write about them because they seemed frivolous and I was feeling serious.

I’m not often in a serious mood, so today it seems weird that I wouldn’t have written about it.

I was in a good mood but had little time for the trivia of life. The sun was out, I was ahead with my work and so it was a perfect day for a long walk, which helps with perspective. It was a day of long shadows. 

By the evening we had another Boris to look forward to and I had heard some bad news from a couple of friends. The decision to be serious was feeling like less fun. The briefing gave more bad news: an indication that this pandemic is probably going to run the full two year cycle that plague historians warned about. Worryingly, Boris was clear. There were no metaphors, Latin phrases or Greek myths. The virus is more transmissible and causes more people to die, including those who are younger and not necessarily on the vulnerable list. Oh bugger! 

Confucius said, “The end of the day is near when small men make long shadows.”

Somehow, that felt like a metaphor for the day. 

Now I’m making up my own. 

Help.

So, anyway. Tic Toc - Sea Shanties. Bernie Sanders gloves and the many coats of political women of America. Frivolous seems like the perfect retreat. 

1820

 As I was sitting and thinking about the number 1820 (the number of people who died within 28 days of a positive covid test yesterday) a WhatsApp message popped up from the Moot Hall group. 

In our last meeting we had been talking about Transportation.  It turns out that our little town court had the power to send people half way around the world for petty crimes.  My Emily had to go to Chelmsford for her final sentencing after she drowned her child in a pond  but petty sessions were concluded in the Moot Hall. Some of the group had gone off to find out more.

The message included a screenshot of a page from the convict records of Australia.

It said, "Berry Bradbrook.  Date of Birth 21st January 1820"

I thought that was a coincidence.  I was thinking about 1820 and today would have been his birthday. 

The 1820 is actually a typo.  We already know quite a lot about Berry Bradbrook and know that he was born in 1823, which made him just 14 when he was sent to Australia for his terrible crime.

It was September the 20th 1837 and young Berry Bradbrook was at the Maldon Fair.  It was busy with farmers selling their cattle and other goods.  He lived in Layer Breton with his mum, Elizabeth and his dad, also Berry but coming to Maldon Fair was a trip out that all the youngsters made.  It seemed as though it was a cattle market in more than one sense of the word.  In the rush and crush, Berry saw an opportunity.  He might have gone to the fair with the intention of committing his heinous crime or it might just have been a set of circumstances that led to a chance he couldn't pass up.  We will never know but Berry Bradbrook was caught taking a pocket handkercheif out of Mr John Baldwin's pocket, probably by Head Constable John Beale, who would have been patrolling Fair field with his eleven officers on the lookout for the crimes, which he knew would rise that day.

Berry was taken into custody at the Moot Hall, put in the jail and then tried for his crime, where they sentenced him to seven years.  

Recoloured photo of a Christmas card painted by Penny Gooden-Marsh

Those seven years were to be served in Australia.  After his conviction was spent he would be free to return home (if he could work out how to get there).  The fourteen year old was taken to Rat Island or maybe a Prison Hulk at Portsmouth before being put on the Minerva, which left for Van Diemens Land on the 25th May 1838.  It was a four month journey and only the fittest survived.  Berry, being just 14 stood a good chance of making it.  

After his seven years were up Berry stayed in Australia and became a Market Gardener with a big plot of land in Athelmstone, Adelaide, which he worked until is death on the 2nd October 1865 at 45 years of age.  His wife (Harriet) and children carried on the business and the future generations were unaware (and completely shocked) to discover their criminal past.  

1820 isn't a great number but I think we can all wish Berry Bradbrook a happy birthday and hope that we never get to thinking about numbers that are close to the current year.  

1610

 In 1610 James the first was on the throne, Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline was first performed, Monteverdi’s vespers were published, Galileo found Jupiter’s 4th moon and witch trials were happening. Sir Robert Rich was our town MP and the Moot Hall was already being used as the centre of government for the town.  There was no plague. Louis XIII was crowned in France and a man called Henry Hudson discovered a river in America (although I suspect the people who lived there knew about it before). It’s also the name of a steak restaurant in Pontefract.

At 16.10 I quite like to have a cup of tea. It’s the time when children, returning from school used to need a snack and a poo.

Supposedly 1610 is an Angel number; a message from your angels reminding you that your thoughts and beliefs create reality, or that you have the power to help others, or that you will be well rewarded if you work hard, depending on which witch you speak to.

1610 is an even number. It is not a palindrome, a triangle, a square or a cube number. It is MDCX in Roman numerals. The square root of 1610 is 40.124805295478. The binary version on 1610 is 11001001010. It is not a prime number or a perfect number. It’s not in the Fibonacci sequence or a partition prime, a Fermat prime or a Pell prime. It’s prime factors are 2 5 7 and 23.

1610 is roughly the seating capacity of the Prince Edward theatre, where I saw Miss Saigon and sobbed.

It’s also the number of people that were recorded as having died from Covid in the UK yesterday (in one day!), as Matt Hancock went on TV and talked about moving out of lockdown soon, as case numbers had started to fall. 

I’m a bit worried about thinking this because of the Angel number stuff but won’t they ever learn? It’s the uncertainty we can’t face; the can-we-can’t-we? confusion; the not being able to plan for anything; the knowledge that if we wait until we know that the vaccine is working then we don’t have to think about thousands of people suffering a new and sometimes unnecessary grief every day in the most terrible circumstances for dealing with grief. 

They paved paradise

 All day yesterday I was humming. Eventually, the words of the song started to appear. Randomly.

I put the phone down from speaking to a pupil and sang, “They put ‘em in a tree museum.”

I finished teaching a flute lesson via Zoom where we worked out how to play the incoming Skype call sound and I sang “I don’t care about spots on my apples.”  A scattered thought, even for me.

Maybe it was because I’d read the article about Brexit and the Bees.

Then I walked into the room where my daughter is storing the purchases she’s made for her house. I saw the beautiful pink kettle and toaster and sang, “With a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot.”

What was going on?

The Long Suffering Husband went to the supermarket for the weekly shop and I sang, “A big yellow taxi took away my old man.” Obviously, he hadn’t gone out in a yellow taxi but the song was in my head and determined to pop out at any given opportunity.

By the evening, the song was playing, in full on repeat, in my head.

“And don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone,”

I saw this meme on Facebook.

Suddenly, I knew why. 

On my morning walk I had unexpectedly seen a friend and we had a good socially distanced chat. This is a friend I would normally see in person once a week. It’s a friend I miss. We would normally spend the Eves (Christmas and New Year) together, celebrating. The LSHs would discuss their purchases from the Screwfix direct catalogue, while we covered the important topics. We hadn’t spent any time as a four since a summer, rain soaked barbecue.  Several times, during Lockdown 3 I had thought about texting and saying I was going for a walk or turning up on the doorstep for a random chat in the cold but then I’d look at the Covid rates and decide it would be better if I did my bit. I pushed our friendship to the back of my mind. 

It’s not just that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. It’s more that you don’t know what you missed until it’s back.

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

Where is that minister for loneliness when you need her?

The Room

 Do you remember, at the beginning of Lockdown 1, when celebrities were interviewed on the TV from home? It was a new experience. Some took great care of the background they presented. For a while they used specially created Zoom backgrounds of bookcases. The world started to get upset (although I still can’t understand why they were surprised) the dictator’s autobiographies featured heavily on the shelves of our ‘great’* leaders.  They were all aware that the background image seemed to matter.

Now that we are in Lockdown 3, we are all TV ‘stars’*. Kids know more about their teacher’s bedroom than they really should. We have grown used to seeing junior reporters interviewing health chiefs from their grotty bedsit £1000 a month room. We are used to children walking in and leaving a note on their Mum’s desk during an important meeting that says, “I’m going for a poo.” Even Peston’s wife doesn’t bother pretending it’s an accident anymore and has no worries about plonking a cup of tea down during the Ten O’clock news. Matt Hancock has stopped pretending that he doesn’t live inside Rishi Sunak’s red Treasury box, with its own mini red case.

My daughter’s house purchase is due to happen next week and she has found the tour of people’s homes to be very inspirational.  Pink kettles, grey kitchen cabinets and different curtain treatments have all absorbed her attention.

Children learning from home are similarly distracted. They don’t hold back in telling you though. With a sharp intake of breath they inform you that one of the teacher’s videos was filmed in the school staffroom.

“I thought we were all supposed to be staying at home?” they ask with a mixture of sadness and hope that they too might be allowed to pop into school.

Another wants to know why they don’t have videos with the teacher who is in school teaching the key workers anymore. When you explain they say, “Oh that’s a shame. I really liked his cat. When I grow up I’m going to have a big clock on my wall too.”

Maybe  they could give the minister for loneliness (oh yes, there is one, even though she has been conspicuously quiet) the responsibility for privacy. I’m sure she could do an ‘excellent’* job of that too.

* sarcastic quotation marks. Please make the gesture as you read.

You won’t like it

 I love a good binge watch. It’s how I like to read books; in one sitting, barely bothering to emerge for cheese or chocolate. 

It was such a miserable day yesterday that was only fit for eating cheese scones and watching something absorbing but not too taxing on the TV. I’d finished Bridgerton over Christmas and was looking for something new. The suggestions of what to watch after Bridgerton weren’t appealing to me. I’d watched most of them anyway.

A colleague had mentioned on Facebook that she was currently addicted to Cobra Kai. I’d never heard of it. 

“You won’t like it. It’s not your thing,” she said.

I could have trusted her judgement. I could have decided that she knows me well enough to know it’s not my sort of programme. After all she’s a huge Game of Thrones fan and I can’t stand it.  However, it felt like a bit of an insult. What kind of person did she think I was? 

So I watched it and now I’m hooked. What’s not to like? Apart from the casual sexism it’s got everything that I love. It’s a ‘what happened next’ story, a story of people not being quite who you expect, a John Hughes-esque teen romance with Karate, bonsai trees and 1980s rock music. What self respecting person doesn’t love REO Speedwagon?

That’s today sorted. See you in 15 hours.

Helpful Mottos?

 We had a bad Friday. 

Any Friday where you can’t get a bunch of friends together to make music is a bad Friday and we have had far too many of those lately but this was more than that.

The Long Suffering Husband was bored. This isn’t the early retirement he signed up for. Even the golf courses are closed and being a domestic god isn’t quite enough for him. While I rang parents and tried to explain technology I don’t understand myself and talked to children about methods of multiplication that no one talked about when I was at school because you just had to learn your tables (*note* I do think maths teaching is better. I’m not a grumpy old goat who thinks it was better in my day) the LSH busied himself with trying to find every small hole that was causing a draft in our house.

He looked like a neglected puppy dog.

“I’m just bored,” he said.

“It’s the weekend tomorrow,” I said, still in my cheery, everything’s-fine-you-can-do-this-home-educating-your-children-is-a-breeze voice that I had just been using on the telephone.

He pointed out that wasn’t helping. It wasn’t as if we could do anything different then. I thought about it and realised that he was right. We hadn’t even had Bora Bora day, sometime at the beginning of January where social media fills up with pictures of tropical islands for people to tag their mates, looking forward to a summer holiday. The holiday adverts that are on the TV feel like a cruel punishment, as we know that they will have to close the borders for a significant amount of time to come. Even the predicted snow was causing less excitement than it should. What’s the point of snow if there’s no chance of a snow day? Also, predicted snow is always a disappointment here.

We decided to open the last box of Christmas chocolates: a box of fancy truffles. A good solid chocolate hit was required. 

They were the most well wrapped chocolates ever. A triple layer of cardboard and foil and printed on one of the layers of cardboard were the contents and a tear out square containing a motto. I’m certain that it was supposed to be one of those positive thinking things that should help but ...

What?

Nothing?

Oh?

That doesn’t make me relax. In fact.... oh God...... I can’t breathe!

I don’t know if you are an anxious person but the only thing that keeps those of us who have any issues with anxiety sane is the belief that we can at least control the small things. We might not be able to stop an u known virus from killing us but we can have clean hands and a tidy sock drawer. The theory that my socks are always working themselves towards chaos doesn’t help.

Fish and Ravens

 People felt cooped up yesterday. It was raining. The rain was particularly wet; not heavy but fine, constant wet rain. The kind of rain that seeps through your waterproofs and settles in your bones. Most people don’t go out in that kind of rain but it’s my favourite. I am a bit of a fish and I’m missing the swimming pool. There’s a peace to being out in that kind of weather. Maybe because no one else goes out but I think it’s more than that. There’s no sound to that kind of rain. It’s piterrless. It doesn’t even hiss. 

The birds also love this kind of rain. They chirp more and you are much more likely to have a bird fly out right past your nose in that kind of weather. They also seem to play.

I stood for a while watching two big black birds - crows , probably, or maybe ravens, having a game of tag over the school sports field. One would fly from the tree and a few seconds later the other would try to catch its friend. Twisting, turning flight, back and forth until they touched their shiny black beaks and flew back to the tree to start again. This time the other black bird (the one with the tiny white patch under its wing) went first. Someone will probably tell me that this behaviour was nothing to do with the rain and just a harbinger of Spring. They will say that it wasn’t tag but a sexy dance but I’m certain I would never have seen it if I didn’t like walking in the rain. As I watched them, I thought about the ravens at the Tower of London.

You probably know the superstition but it is said that they are a good omen and six have to live there for the Country to be safe. I don’t know where this superstition comes from but the ravens at the Tower are pets. Their wings are clipped and they are given names. The superstition is taken so seriously that they usually have a spare, so that if a ravens does chose to leave then there will still be six. 

I remember in the eighties, when we were all terrified of nuclear attack, and the government pushed leaflets through our doors explaining how to build a bunker with a kitchen table and two rolls of gaffer tape, Raven George had to be retired to Wales for bad behaviour. I think he was attacking the TV aerials.

Now that we are all battling Covid we have another Corvid worry. I have been watching all the Corvidae birds quite closely for a while. As humans we are superstitious about crows and magpies as well as ravens. They seem to be such intelligent birds. But I think it’s the name similarity that has got to me.

Merlina, one of the Tower Ravens, has gone missing. No one knows what has happened to her but she has left of her own free will. They suspect she has probably died. The other ravens just carried on strutting about in the rain and pondering the question of whether they were in actual fact writing desks (Lewis Carrol put the poor ravens into an existential crisis years ago). The Yeomans didn’t panic because they have a spare but we all know that it’s not a good sign.

Meanwhile, in Parliament, an idiot was suggesting that fish were now happy because they are British. Fish don’t care about the rain but I wouldn’t be at surprised if the ravens all leave, no matter what the weather is like.

Make mine a Brazillian

 "Did you hear that there's another new variant?" I asked the Long Suffering Husband.

I asked him if he heard because he gets his news from the TV.  I had read about it. With it's snappy new title 20J/501Y/V3.  It's not a surprise.  Every time a virus goes into a person it has a chance to change.  An effective virus, like this one, will be able to establish itself all over the world by making tiny errors in its genome to make itself more transmissible and also less likely to kill it's host before it has spread. 

He hadn't.

"It's the Brazilian version."

He laughed.

"Oh yes and the absolutely most important thing for us to do is keep allowing flights in from Brazil.  I mean, everyone wants a Brazilian, don't they?

He laughed again.

Later on in the afternoon, the LSH came into where I was working.  He'd watched the news.

"I thought you were joking," he said, "It's not a joke about the Brazilian, is it?"

Brazilian variant - like the British version but sunburnt and less hairy

It turns out that Boris has been told about it and thinks it's very worrying because it might also be vaccine resistant, which would make Priti Patel's words of, "We're going to vaccine everyone," less calming than she intended.  He told Yvette Cooper that he was going to ask the new variant lots of questions and then put it on the naughty step.  She suggested that shutting the borders might be more useful but he just insisted that the government were taking the steps to the airport.

I don't know about you but I'm totally convinced that they've got this and we'll all be back to normal by Easter.  At least they've stopped direct flights from Brazil because no one ever takes interconnecting flights for long trips like that. Come in.  Welcome.  It's good to share.  

Word Salad

 Martin. Locked. Fight. Grappling. Emergence. Work hard. 2 million. Sadly. Thoughts. Prayers. Horrifying. Absolutely. Control. Millions. Collective.. Save lives. Contributing. National Effort. Police Officers. Fines. Selfless. Back. Not immune. Very best of us all. Domestic abuse. Always. Call. 999. Critical stage. Dr Dawker. Lemmy. JCVI. Vaccine everybody. Frontline. You know. Occupational risk. Absolutely. Reflect. Important. Limited. Crystal clear. Outdoor. Recreation. Permitted. Frankly. Remarks. Comments. Impact. Covid. New. Not just. Variant. Measures. Place. Rules. Need. Message. Home. Go out. Sobering. Point. Act. Cough. Urge. Country. Follow. Protect. Save. NHS. Absolutely. Imperative. Tough. Enough. Already. Heard. Fixed. Penalty. Just in Time. Pandemic. First of all. CMO. Day in day out. Simple. Tough. More follow. Sooner. Awful. Atrocious. Drive. Down. Reasons. Meant to. Disease. Tough. Enough. Rules. Sticking. Several times. You know. Again. Again. Think. Actions. Home. Local. Minimise. Social. Contact. On top. Health pandemic. Right now. Egregious. Conscientious. Actions. Restricting. Rules. Not clear. Rules. Are. Clear. Number. Passed away. Died. Fatalities. Reported. Dying. Tragically succumbing. Virus. Exercise. Judgement. Act. Conscience. British. Fact of the matter. Absolutely. Sensible. Understand. Message. Home. Local. Equally. Exercise. Applies. Well-being. Human being. Endless. Discussions. State. Coronavirus. Lockdown. Measures. Rules. Per se. Speculate. Public health colleagues. Breeches. Conversations. Issues. Government. Review. Sadly. Fact. Dreadful. Effectively. Get down. Rolling. Vaccine. Supermarkets. Face coverings. Aspects.  MPCC. Whack virus down. Professional judgement. 

Just in case you missed Priti Patel’s press conference. It’s simple and clear. 

I don’t need Priti Patel to tell me that we need to stay at home as much as we can, avoid people as much as we can and to know that the police have powers to enforce this but if you did it might not have helped.

Blame and Human Rights and Responsibilities

 A YouGov poll confirmed that the public has no idea.  I'm sorry if you are someone who took part in the poll but really.....what were you thinking?

The poll asked the question, "Who do you hold most responsible for the rise in coronavirus cases over the last month?" 58% blamed the public (other people, of course, not themselves) and 28% the government.  I was surprised.  I'm certain that if I wanted to vote conservative next time then I would be much less happy to blame the government but this isn't a partisan question.  You can recognise that there have been failures of government that have led to this and still think they are better than the other lot.  Certainly, at first, I was very glad that it was Boris and not Corbyn, although I suppose the free broadband would have been useful. 

I have a problem with blaming anyone for a virus.  Why do we have to feel it is someone's fault?  It's a virus, it's unpredictable, scary and because it's new it will overwhelm us with the number of people that get very sick all at the same time. Having said that there are things that we, the public and the government could have done to make the situation better or worse.  

The government have made it worse by:

1. Not closing our borders.

2. Not testing people on arrival

3.  Failing to set up an effective test and trace system.

4.  Giving unclear/confused and constantly changing messages to the public.

5. Encouraging the public to mix more than they would have naturally when there were still a lot of cases. (Eat out to help out)

6.  Sending children back to school for one day when they knew the situation was once again out of control.  

7.  Failing to set incentives for people to stay at home if they are possibly infectious. (Many people won't be paid if they have to self isolate without being sick!)

The public have made it worse by:

1.  Not following the rules

2. Following the rules (see 5 & 6)

3.  Being confused about the rules.

The reason I'm so upset by this poll, though, is that it frightens me.  When humans are in a situation that is scary and out of control, they like to blame other people.  It helps.  It makes us feel more in control.  When really scary things are happening (like war and pandemics) it is too easy to end up demonising a section of society and laying all the blame at their door.  This is why we have human rights.  It's to stop getting into a situation where a portion of society is rounded up and put in a camp.  

The first and most important right is the right to life and sometimes governments will have to limit other rights like the right to marry, or the right to free movement to preserve life.  These are not decisions for individuals to make on behalf of the whole of society.  A government is responsible for assessing the risks and asking the public to take the steps required.  

It can't be just me that thinks the government haven't quite got the balance of this right. 

The perils of a butterfly mind

 "Can I go now? I've got to go to see Hope-Simpson," I asked my PE teacher who was teaching us Physics.

"May I go to see Mr Hope-Simpson," she replied, raising a carefully drawn-on eyebrow at me.

"Well you can if you want but I'm pretty certain he wants to see me for careers advice."

A hush filled the room and I instantly felt stupid.  I hadn't really intended to be sassy.  A normally quiet girl who never wanted to be in trouble for anything, I had just got hung up on the inflection of what she had said.  Obviously, I knew what she was saying but my reply just popped out.  In my head I thought I was in huge trouble but I think she just told me to go, after a sharp intake of breath.

When I got to the deputy headteacher, who was an actual legend, he told me that I could do anything I wanted to do.  I had broad interests and a good spread of probably good O levels to come.  

"Just follow your interests," he said.

Well now that I'm older and I've been following my interests for a while I can see that he might not have given me the best advice.  

My butterfly mind can't sit still.  It flits from one subject to the next.  One moment I'm interested in Victorian bonnets and the next I'm wanting to know more about how the different coronavirus vaccines are made.  I start to make a cake and while it's in the oven knit an ear saver for nurses.  I check Twitter for something to get outraged about, see the cream egg advert and start to look at adverts for chocolate where men break into strange women's bedrooms or women in a bath suck off a flake.  Oh, listen there's a bird in my garden I've never heard before.  I have 3 books on the go and am desperate to walk somewhere new.

I always feel that I should pin it down and stop it wandering.  Could I have achieved more in life if I had been able to stick to one subject at a time?

Today marks the start of the second week of remote learning in Lockdown 3.  Parent's are beginning to feel the pressure of forcing their children to focus on a lesson for that long.  

"Is it reasonable to expect a 7 year old to independently log onto Zoom and have pens and paper ready by 9am each morning?" a parent on Twitter asks hopefully.

Of course it isn't.  But apparently it is reasonable to expect the parent to have set them up by 9am.  

This is the government's fault.  Schools are to be prosecuted if they don't provide the education but there is no way of doing this for a 7 year old that works.  Our school makes videos (don't even talk about how time consuming that is), so that parents can get their children to watch them when it's appropriate.  I saw a different headteacher complain that the parents at his school had decided they didn't like videos and wanted live zoom lessons so that the teachers could be responsible for watching what the children did, rather than the parent.  You can't please everyone.

My job, at the moment, is to make pastoral care phone calls.  I ring and check everyone is getting on ok with the videos.  Before I make the calls I watch the videos that have been set for the day, so that I can give pointers about how to complete the work.  I'll confess that with my butterfly mind, I can't watch a whole lesson in one go.  

That's right.   

I'm a grown up and I can't watch a whole video.  

They're not boring lessons.  They are very well done but I can't seem to get through a whole one without getting side tracked.

The big problem with having this kind of mind is that everything takes so much longer but it’s ok because I don’t sleep very well and so was able to start my day at 4.30am.

You could think of it as a bad thing but aren't butterflies so much more beautiful when they are flying freely then when they are pinned in a display case?

  

It’s fate that my dog is a t***

 Do you believe in fate?

I’m still not sure but when you stop and notice it seems undeniable. I want to tell myself that things are accidental, that nothing happens for a reason. 

To be honest, that aspect of religion totally freaks me out. The idea that a master puppeteer  is pulling our strings is terrifying. And often cruel. 

Yesterday, I decided to throw myself back into 1882. The present wasn’t working too well for me, the immediate past was too real and the future is one big unknowable ball of scariness. 

I started transcribing notes from court cases, but quickly got bored with men fighting, stealing things or exposing their willy to passing strangers and I started to think about Emily again. 

“Oh, hello you,” she said, “You’re back. I thought you’d forgotten about me. Everyone leaves me in the end.”

I’ll admit that her ‘poor me’ attitude is the thing that makes me want to leave her. She’s very needy. 

“You were in the workhouse over Christmas, weren’t you?” I asked her. “Why? Why would you do that? There were other places you could have gone.”

“Christmas wasn’t that bad. We got a day off from work and I saw Gerty all day.”

“I wonder if there are any descriptions of your Christmas in the newspapers.”

“Never mind that!” she snapped, “Find my William.”

I hushed her and typed ‘Maldon Union Christmas’ into the search bar of the newspaper archive.

I clicked on the first result, a Christmas Eve newspaper, and there he was. Her William. A description and a warrant for his arrest for abandoning them. A £1 reward for any information given.

“Don’t get too smug,” I told her, “I’m still going to write about you and it won’t necessarily go all your way.”

Emily flounced off in a huff. She’s prone to that.

I continued my research on the workhouse. They had beef on Christmas Day. A very useful book about the Guardians of the Board, that I’d borrowed filled in some of the drier technical aspects of how the workhouse operated. I’d kept the book too long and was wondering how I was ever going to be able to return it.

A few hours in and I was needing a change of scene. Stupidly, I left my books out and went to watch some TV with the Long Suffering Husband. The dog, panicked on his next in-breath, realising I was suddenly in the room and struggled onto his feet. He gave the LSH a dirty look and started to leave the room.

“Where are you going?” the LSH asked him.

He snorted and threw a look at me that clearly said, “Anywhere she isn’t,” before he went downstairs.

While we was down there, he decided to eat the borrowed book. 

After a personal meltdown I threatened to post his picture on the My dog is a tw@ Facebook page.

He was unrepentant though. 

“You’ll just have to buy her a new one,” he said, “you can keep this one for yourself!”

So, it’s fate that my dog is a tw@ and I’m now trawling the internet for a a rare antique book, in reasonable condition.

Thanks Facebook - a poem

 Yesterday I was grumpy.

I didn’t know why.

And later I was tearful.

All I could do was sigh.

I had a bad night’s sleep.

Woke feeling anxious and blue.

Today, logged into Facebook,

And there I found a clue.

Not one but two notifications,

Of a birthday we can’t celebrate.

Lots of birthdays missed this year.

It really isn’t great.

There’s always next year we say to cheer.

This isn’t one of those.

But I’m determined to find the positive.

And not fill this page with woes.

A birthday often forgotten in life.

Will always be remembered in death.

Technology moved too fast.

And caused my mother stress.

We set up her first account,

To watch videos of cats and babies.

But then the friend requests came in,

Which began to drive her crazy.

From dad’s account she stalked the lives,

Of all their friends and relatives.

Played candy crush and other games,

Becoming quite competitive.

“Enough’s enough!” 

He said one day

“I don’t waste my time on silly games,

what will my friends all say?”

So, forgetting that she had her own,

A new account was started.

Her birthday year was entered wrong.

A finger slip if I’m being kind hearted.

A loss of nineteen years,

Was all she really needed,

For her birthday, forgotten in life

To, forever be doubly heeded.

I could be sad, I could be blue, 

Instead I’ll smile and say, “Facebook, thank you!”

Kate Winslet standing on the edge of the Titanic

 I woke up grumpy.  I'm just in a bad mood. Like most people I'm tired.  Mentally exhausted.  We are all totally flumpsaustedshagbugknackerfucked.  Lockdown 3 is actually the worst version of Lockdown they've invented so far and really if they wanted a version that might just push the whole country over the edge to the point where they too are donning viking horns and fur gilets to storm parliament then this just might be it.

There is nothing like owning your bad mood, though, for improving it.  I told the people in my house.  The Long Suffering Husband considered trying to fix it, took one look at my face and stepped back, saying, "Well I'm here if you need me."  My daughter raised an eyebrow and said, "OK."  The dog farted. 

"I just need to get up and do my yoga and write my blog.  Then it will be fine," I told them.

The dog farted again.  

I put the yoga on. Today, it was a routine that focused on neck and shoulder tension.  It was almost as if she knew.  

"Imagine you are Kate Winslet standing on the edge of the Titanic," she said as I was standing with my arms out and my heart radiating towards the sky.

"I don't have to imagine," I shouted.

That's what lockdown 3 feels like.  Not the euphoria of young love and freedom.  Not the sensation of flying but the knowledge that we are heading for an iceberg and most of us won't make it.  Knowing that some people are going to push onto the lifeboat first.  Listening to the string quartet play, despite knowing their jobs/lives are over.  

Lockdown 2 was my favourite.  This was the one where we all tried to work as normal but didn't have a social life.  Obviously, if your work was in the entertainment industry then you couldn't work but most of us did.  

Lockdown 1 was a shock but it had the bonus of there being no expectation.  It was a hold your breath, wait and see lockdown.  We thought we could trust our leaders to get us out of this if we all did the right things.  

Lockdown 3, however is of the magnitude of number 1 but with the added complication that expectations have changed.  Government, instead of fixing the problem, just said that they would prosecute anyone who didn't manage to do everything.

Gavin Williamson turned down BT's offer to provide cheap broadband for poorer families and cut the number of devices that could be delivered to schools.  He told schools that they had to be open but not open.  He confirmed that all nurseries had to be open, requiring more school children to need to go to school (because mothers work in nurseries so that they can still care for their children outside the school hours).  Then, yesterday, he stood up in parliament and reminded parents that he had made it a legal requirement for schools to provide 3-5 hours of remote learning a day and that if they weren't getting it then they should report their school to Ofsted.  

I know that all schools aren't the same but no school wants to feel that one disgruntled parent could cause them to be prosecuted.  A call has gone out on social media for parents to tell Ofsted of all the good things schools are doing, so that there is at least an accurate representation of the situation.  

Luckily, I work in an excellent school (and by that I mean actually excellent and not 'excellent' as in an Ofsted rating) and so I know that parents are being supported to the best of the school's ability to deliver those hours of learning a day.  However, this is exhausting for the staff.  Teachers are in school.  They are planning lessons that can be done in school or at home, they are making videos of lessons, they are replying to emails, they are calling parents and they are learning how to work a whole host of new technology.  

The BBC have rolled out their teaching programmes on CBBC, which took them since March last year to make but teachers are expected to make theirs overnight and parents are meant to use whatever app the school uses with no training. ICT training over the phone is very tricky.  Even if schools are doing live, Zoom/teams type lessons it's still exhausting. The effort the brain has to put in to process these interactions where you don't have all the normal cues seems to be so much greater.   

No teacher signed up to be a children's TV presenter and producer.  No parent signed up to be a teacher, whilst still trying to hold down their normal job.  No student nurse signed up to work 24 hours a day without being paid. Absolutely no one wants all of this and I worry what kind of state people will be in when, or indeed, if, we get back to normal.

Oh dear.  I'm sorry.  I clearly am in a bad mood.  But I'm owning it.  It's the weekend tomorrow.  Book reading. Tree pruning. Long walks and no screens.

Selfish Shellfish

 It would be selfish of me to write a daily blog and not comment on the pro-Trump rioters that have stormed congress and been shot.  I'd fallen asleep on the sofa, exhausted from having to think too much and when I woke up the TV was showing Les Mis, or so I thought. I'm not very interested in it though, so that's all you get.  However, if you do fancy it, the costumes are amazing: bare chested men with two dead racoons on their heads.

I do want to talk about types of selfish, though.

There is a lot of chat on social media about selfish people again.  The curtain twitching neighbourhood police are beginning to get fired up.  Twitter is full of vitriol for people who aren't following the rules and they rules are made more stringent than they actually are with each tweet.  

Let's skip over the fact that Trump is actually so selfish that Twitter have suspended his account.  (Oh we really are living in interesting times) and talk about the kind of selfish that people in the UK are talking about.  The selfish that affects how we get out of this pandemic.

I have always had a problem with blaming individual behaviour for the progress of a new virus.  Something like this requires good leadership and clear messaging.  We haven't had those.  We were also given a lesson in selfishness by a government advisor in the first lockdown.

There are two types of selfish.  

The first is where you are on the Titanic, the boat is sinking and you push all the women and children out of the way to get on the lifeboat first.  This is probably like organising a rave,  going on an anti-covid demonstration, posting false information about chips in vaccines online,  never washing your hands and licking them before you touch door handles, spitting in the face of the woman in Marks and Spencers because she won't let you in to buy lobster without a mask, keep going to work when you've got a cough and are feeling a bit off or appointing your useless best friend's  incompetent wife to run a country's test and trace system.

The second type of selfish is where you are in a plane crash and you put your oxygen mask on before helping anyone else.  This is where you take the dog out twice a day because no one can work in a dog fart filled room.  It's where you don't use hand sanitiser because it makes your eczema flare up.  It's where you see someone because you think you can't go on.  It's where you go to your mum's house because your boyfriend has threatened you with a frying pan.  It's where you go out for a walk of longer than an hour because your brain is so fried you have started to try to call people with the calculator app on your phone (this was me yesterday).

Sometimes you have to be a little selfish so that you are still able to help others.  We all have to be in a place, when we come out of this, where we can still function and self care is never selfish.

So many people on social media mis-spell selfish as shellfish, which always makes me laugh.  It reminds me of one of my favourite jokes.

Epiphany

It's Twelfth night. Out with the old, in with the new. Decorations back in the loft.  Christmas tree pruned down to get into the green bin.  Throw out any expectations of your children being in school and find a way to educate them yourselves.

I spent yesterday taking down my tree and phoning people.  I spoke to parents and children and so this morning I have some thoughts about this thing we are calling home school. 

1.  It's hard.  

2. Something is better than nothing.

3.  Don't compare your child to other children.  Even teachers, who are forced to do this by the government prefer to focus on whether the child is living up to what they are capable of.  

4.  If you are tempted to compare then look for good ideas and remember that you are not seeing the meltdown that child had because they didn't want to write anything.

5.  Use what your school provides, if you can.

6.  A good school will have thought about how to make it easy for you.  

7.  The internet is panicking too.  Be patient with it.  It suddenly has another 8.89 million devices (that's just the children not including teachers and all the parents who are now having to work from home) attached to it between the hours of 9am and 3pm.

8.  Have a timetable but be flexible.  This is something teachers are experts at.  In school, the internet can drop out, kids can hit a brick wall and you have to change your plans.  This isn't a failure.

9.  Do a little and often.  Don't try to catch up on every maths lesson the day before the children are going back to school.  That will be too painful for everyone.

10.  Remember that they are your children and most of their learning has been down to you anyway. 

11.  Let them follow their interests.  Everything can be a learning opportunity.  

12. Let them have some brain breaks.

13.  Expect a lot but be chilled if you don't get it.  This is one of the hardest things for teachers.  We always plan more than the children get through because it would be terrible to have under prepared but it takes years for teachers to learn not to be stressed out by not getting through everything.

14. If the work the school hasn't provided for you isn't working, do something else.  There's the BBC and YouTube and worksheets on the internet.  You can get maths and english workbooks from essential shops.

15.  Helping around the house or just being quiet can be valuable learning experiences.  

16.  If you are overwhelmed by all the things you could do, you are not alone.  There is too much content out there.  Slow down, breath and pick something.  Anything.  See point number 2.

17.  Reward and explanation works better than threats.

18.  Rewards can be  very simple things like, "if you do this work, we can go for a walk after."

19.  Getting outside when you get stuck is the best thing.

20.  Children don't work well when they are hungry.

21.  Children are hungry when they don't want to work well.

22. A tummy ache can be a tummy ache or an excuse for not wanting to work.  A tummy ache can mean they are hungry or need to go to the toilet.

23.  Children love spending time with you.  

24.  Children hate spending time with you.

25.  Children are contrary.

26.  Yesterday was just day one.  If you failed at day one then there are many more days to come.  

27.  In the last lockdown it took about three weeks for people to find a routine that worked. We only started Zoom quizzes and clapping for carers on the Thursday after three weeks.  Keep trying, keep adapting.

30.  Nothing works better than saying, "I'm going to count to ten. 1,2,3"  No one ever gets to ten, thankfully.

31.  Books. Books and more books. Reading is the best.

3/. It’s hard.

That's my epiphany.  Home schooling is hard.  Be kind to yourself.  

How did you sleep?

 Boris appeared on the TV, looking sad and ill (don't feel sorry for him) and told us what we already knew. Hospitals are overwhelmed, we are at crisis point, schools are safe but also vectors for disease (so not really safe)

Another national lockdown, like the one we had in March.

It was on time, succinct and clear. Almost as though he had no choice but to do this properly.

For us, in Essex, this will probably make little difference.  We have been living under the toughest tier 4 restrictions for a while and schools knew they weren't going to reopen in the normal way.  We had got to the point where we knew people with Covid and knew that some of them had been very sick.  We might even know of a death.  We had seen pictures of ambulances stacked outside the hospitals and had talked to friends in the NHS, who are exhausted and scared - again. We knew that this was the right thing.  We knew that it was important.

However, there is no explaining how something like this throws a curved ball at your brain.  

Just seeing Boris on the TV looking serious feels terrifying.  The man is never serious.  The lack of metaphors, or Latin phrases, reasonably combed hair, and no hint of a smile playing anywhere near the corners of his mouth are completely out of character.  It's like when a loud teacher suddenly whispers.

The country, again, collectively held it's breath and had flashbacks to the trauma of the first lockdown.

Can we home school without killing our children? Can we make banana bread? Is Joe Wicks back? Cancel dry January? Are we giving carers the clap again every Thursday? Online Zoom quiz anyone?

Last time, we started in an optimistic way.  We told ourselves that it wouldn't be for long.  This time the Prime Minister has told us not to even think about it until February half term.  Everyone googled when that was, as if that was the date to aim for but we all know that his predictions of dates are......I was struggling for the right word here but I think the best word is......WRONG.

In theory, we should have adapted.  We should be used to the restrictions.  We know how to use Zoom/Skype/Teams/GoogleMeet/Discord/Facebook video - other platforms are probably available. However, the longer it  goes on, the deeper the despair.

Be kind to yourself today.  If you didn't sleep well, dreamt about rollercoasters, floods or dead ends and can't properly function today then cut yourself some slack, get outside, listen to the birds, go for a walk, breathe and remember you got through it before.  You've just got to give your brain time to file all this extra information and realise that it isn't new and can probably just shred it, rather than trying to ram it into the already overflowing filing cabinet.

Those parents

Boris is one of ‘those’ parents, isn’t he?

Teachers nod and nudge each other, knowingly. We can be just as bad for stereotyping parents as it seems to appear the world is about teachers. Or are they? On Twitter someone had posed the question, “Why do people hate teachers so much?” If you read all the comments then you would have concluded that they don’t. There were one or two replies that talked about laziness, long holidays, or a Machiavellian desire to mould children into enemies of the state but 90% of the replies made it clear that teacher hating isn’t a normal experience. It is, however, human nature to make more of the negative comments than the positive. Why do we do this to ourselves?

Anyway, that wasn’t what I was going to write about. 

Has anyone else got a flitty brain at the moment?

Again, sidetracked.

Boris. Parents. Right.

There are some parents that make a teacher's work harder, and the Boris type is one of those. Prime Minister is a parental role for the whole country.  Boris is one of those parents that wants to be their child's friend.  The most important thing for a Boris is that their children like them.  This can be a disaster because sometimes, as a parent, you have to ask your children to do things they don't want to.

On my very first day of school I observed one of these parents in action.  Its a very clear memory.  I had already waved goodbye to my mum and was putting my PE bag on the peg labelled with my name when a beautiful little girl, with dark wavy hair and enormous eyes appeared.  I had spent a little time before, reading all the names next to the pegs and had been fascinated with her ..  It was different, unusual and rolled around the tongue in a uniquely satisfying way.  I will use her name, one day, in a fiction but not here. She was making the most awful racket.  Her Mum was still with her.  She sobbed and wailed and said that she didn't want to stay at school.  Her mum cajoled and placated and told her how lovely she was.  Her mum wasn't wrong.  She was lovely.  Even when she was sobbing, I looked up to her, both literally and figuratively.  

"It's alright, Sweetie, you don't have to stay if you don't want to."

The wailing was instantly broken and the sobs became more spaced out.  A smile spread over her face and she slipped her hand into her mum's.

Unfortunately for her, Miss Jones had heard all of this and swept into the cloakroom.  She saw me, standing open mouthed and said, "Go and sit down Julia, stop dithering, and close your mouth.  You'll catch flies standing there like that."

Miss Jones peeled the crying child away from her mother and gave her a warning about not making promises she couldn't keep.

I have no other memories of this girl until I was in senior school.  I was in the humanities department, doing some handwriting practise, as the joke about me becoming a doctor was beginning to wear a bit thin.  I was mortified at having to be there with a lot of the children who were in detention.  This girl was one of them. She was still beautiful and tall and I still loved her name.

"Oh yes," she said, "I can have any boyfriend I want to stay.  My mum is like my best friend."

We were 12 and I remember being shocked as shocked as she went on to explain, in graphic detail, to the open mouthed boys, exactly what her and the sleepover boys did.

About a year later there were whispered rumours that she had left the school because she was pregnant and her mum had decided that they would move because of the shame.  She was supposed to have told Louise William's mum that her daughter now hated her and had asked her why she had never set any rules.  Louise Williams always knew everything and her mum worked at the doctor's surgery so no one questioned the truth of the rumour.

I suspect though, we have now got to the stage where the country are asking Boris why he didn't set tougher boundaries before and so it's only a matter of time before he gives in and gives us what we want again. The Daily Star has decided that he's a clown and most of the other papers have stopped saying nice or sycophantic things.  

*I forgot to publish this blog this morning and as it has just been announced that Boris will give a television address at 8pm and Scotland have announced a full national lockdown, like March I feel as though I predicted something, entirely predictable. 

The nuance of cheese

 I didn't write yesterday and have completely lost track of which day of cheesemas we are now on.  

I had a headache (maybe too much cheese) and thoughts were swirling around, refusing to be caught.  This happens sometimes, so I decided to have a cheese free day and not subject you to my randomness.

The trouble was that I was thinking about the word nuance.  

If you think about one word too much it can be difficult to take it seriously.  The word goaded me. 

"Ha, yes, you are right I'm a weird word.  Nu.  New. No I don't know if I'm an English word.  Maybe I'm French.  Yes, blame the French.  It's always the fault of the French."

"That's not a very nuanced approach," I told the word.

I had listened to a programme on BBC Radio 4 called, 'The death of nuance.'  I couldn't stop thinking about it.  I wasn't even sure I knew what nuance meant, except that my observation of the subtle differences in life and a steadfast refusal to believe in a binary world possibly means that I love nuance.  In the programme they suggested that you keep a day book, to note the subtle differences you notice.

"Who doesn't do that?" I shouted at the radio.

The word was right.  It is French, from the word nuer, which means to shade.

Adrienne has a new 30 day Yoga programme, which started yesterday.  I have now been using her videos every day for too long to count and you could be fooled into thinking that they are all the same but they're not.  The subtle differences are in how you breath, how fast or slow you move, how you think.  Yesterday, on day one, when I was contemplating the word nuance she said, "I want you to think about the nuance, whatever that word means to you," and my head exploded.

The news had upset a lot of teachers.  Particularly a headline in the Telegraph which said, "Teachers demand all schools stay closed."

I was confused.  It didn't seem like a particularly inflammatory headline.  If it had said, "Lazy teachers call for longer Christmas break," then I wouldn't have read the article.  However, I also thought the article was balanced.  It said that Gavin Williamson was under pressure to keep all schools from returning fully next week.  The unions, who represent teachers, had been trying to get him to listen to their member's concerns that with this new variant of the virus the measures that are possible to be put into schools are just not going to be enough.  No where else are people being told that they can have over thirty people from different households in a room and that remain safe.  The article used the word 'shambles' about the government's response in how they have handled these latest school decisions.  This, from a pro-government paper seemed quite strong.  It said that he had already added schools that he had forgotten and now had included the whole of London.  Teaching unions feel that he hasn't listened to them and have advised schools to make their own decisions, if they feel that they can't keep their staff, children and the community that they represent safe.

That's how I read the article but it's all about nuance isn't it?  Other's could have put their own interpretation on the words.  I appreciate that schools are never closed (except in the holidays and at weekends) but they are for the majority of children.  It might be lazy of editors to use the word 'closed' in the headline but I'm not sure how else they can say it in five or six words. 

The government may be hoping for a fight with the teaching unions to deflect away from their incompetence but my feeling is that teachers should resist getting drawn into this.  As soon as you start to defend your position you lose all sight of the nuance.  You get drawn into the I'm right and they are wrong argument, when we all know that it's so much more complicated that that. If we talk about the subtle differences, rather than the headline statements then I'm sure we will find that we have more in common than that which divides us. (I'm sure someone famous said that)

I, personally, would love schools to be open.  I have the best job and I want nothing more than to be able to do it, normally.  However, these aren't normal times.  The virus spreads in schools because it spreads with human contact.  It is impossible to teach without human contact.  The makeshift arrangements we have for home learning (no matter how good they are) will never work properly and the gap between those who know how to learn and those who don't will widen further.  This might have been enough to suggest that being in school was a risk worth taking, especially as children don't seem to get very sick, or die but not now.  Not this close to the vaccine solution.  I'm going to use Jonathan Van Tam's train metaphor to tell you why I think this.  

JVT said that the vaccine is like a train.  We were all on the platform with a lion, eating a few people at a time and were waiting for the train to come and save us all.  When he made the analogy the train was at the lights waiting for approval that the vaccine was safe.  Now, the train is in the station and we are trying to get everyone on it.  Sensibly, we are putting those that lions find the tastiest on the train first but there are lots of people and a short platform.  It's going to take some time.  We are so close.  If we hold our nerve we could save lots of people from the lion.  Yes, a few will still be eaten but it's the best we can do. However, we've just found out that the lion has a couple of mates who have joined him and they are super hungry.  These lions breed in schools.  Luckily, it's been the Christmas holidays and so schools have been shut for a couple of weeks.  Reopening schools normally (or possibly, even at all) at this time is like chucking extra lions on the platform, which, frankly, seems not only irresponsible but also negligent. 

That was a bit depressing.  Sorry.  Back to nuance.  The nuance of my cheese situation is not just that I've still got cheese left in the fridge, it's that I have some St Auger, Cornish Cruncher and a little of the white stilton and ginger.  The chili flavoured cheese and charcoal wrapped goats cheese are finished, along with the Bavarian smoked cheese.  We were coming to the end of cheese every day.  The epiphany could have happened by the 6th but the Long Suffering Husband decided to by more of the Bavarian smoked and a new wheel of Camembert, because, "a Sunday afternoon, watching films and dipping French stick into baked Camembert is what you need right now."  I can't disagree.  I might even finish the After Eights.