Letters

 Words aren’t as important as you think but letters are everything. Don’t get them wrong or you could be breaking the law.

We are no longer EU. Phew! It’s what we voted for. We no longer have to learn Ode to Joy (unless you are in year 6 and then it’s the compulsory transition piece for going to senior school). All those pesky yellow stars on a blue background are gone. Don’t put E and U on your car.

We’ve got our blue passports back. And here I will have one more rant because I’m old enough to remember. THEY WERE BLACK (a bluish black but still black and not the colour they are now.)

It also means we are now not allowed to but GB on our cars.

‘What?’ you say, ‘But we voted to put the Great back into Britain.’

It seems as though our official letters are UK. 

Risky, I know. Probably not wise to adopt the name United for a country that very much isn’t. I suppose when Scotland leaves we can still be UK and just think ununited kingdom. I know the correct opposite is divided but then we’d have to be DK, which is the abbreviation for Don’t Know.

Maybe we should just use the letters of the countries involved. England Ireland Scotland and Wales. If we put it in the right order we could be WISE and if Scotland left we could be WIE, which counts like why.

What about the Chanel islands? Do they count? SCEWI. 

Maybe we could add Royal Isle of Man as it’s own country and be

Scotland, Chanel Islands, Royal Isle of Man, England, Wales and Ireland Divided.

Whatever, just don’t buy this car sticker from Amazon because even with the patriotic colours it’s still illegal and then you really will be screwed.

Words

 

Words aren’t as important as you’d think.

I recently took a course on historical novel writing and all the other participants were already published writers with an idea that wasn’t their usual genre. One, had been writing very good, lay-person gynaecology books. She had written a birth book and her period book for teenagers was just being published.  However, her life was falling apart. On Twitter, to promote her books, she had taken the most horrific abuse. It started because she had used the word woman. This, apparently, marked her out as a transphobe and the more she tried to defend her use of the word the more transphobic she sounded. It all got quite horrible and I don’t blame her for wanting to run away into the past. That’s exactly what I would do but writing these books is the way she makes her living. It’s how she feeds her children and so she had little choice but to continue to defend herself. The group of women who want transgender women banned from female spaces claimed her as their own and she embraced the support. 

The Lancet published an article about how gynaecological issues had been under researched, with the quote, 

For many women, who were born women and have been identified as women for their whole lives, this felt de-humanising and as though it would actually add to that neglect. If you are talking about women then everyone knows it’s just over half the population. Bodies with vaginas makes it sound like it’s less people and when you start talking about cervixes then a serious number of people with them have no clue that they do. 

Now that the Labour Party Conference is on, it seems to have become their role to define the word woman. It’s a very clever way of making lots of people angry. Emily Thornberry was asked why the party was against saying, “Only women have cervixes,” and she said that it was because it wasn’t true. She explained that trans men also have them. Helen Lewis then pointed out that whilst that is true there also needs to be a distinction between the word woman used socially and the word used as a biological sex marker. Twitter was furious with both women. 

Knowing that the word woman is an abbreviation of the phrase womb owning human  and that ‘trans women are women’ are not mutally exclusive things would be a grow up thing to do. Let’s stop getting hung up on a word as an excuse to have a fight. We don’t all need to be in the same group. It’s our differences that make us human. 

We have lots of words in English that have different meanings depending on the context in which they are used. We don’t have to eradicate the word women to give trans people rights or respect. 

Here is a list of words that can mean different things depending on context, I’m sure there are hundreds of others.

• Fair
• Saw
• Fell
• Novel
• Bow
• Crane 
• Date
• Second
• Type 
• Nail
• Minute
• Bark 
•  Bat
• Mine 
• Water
• Row 
• Season

Please can we stop arguing about this? It’s not healthy.

I refuse

 I’m sorry. I refuse. I won’t do it. 

“Ugh, people!” said my son after a day working in a Supermarket. Normally, I would agree with him. People. Yuk. But yesterday I wasn’t so sure.

He was complaining about how people are behaving over the fuel issue. The queues were so long for the petrol station at 5.30am, he (who is always early) was late for work. The store managers had to stop people putting food on shelves and getting people’s home deliveries ready to go out and manage the queue. Fights were beginning to break out and the whole town had become gridlocked. 

“It’s a mess,” I agreed, which has been the phrase I’ve said more than any other in the last few years.

He tried to explain the party line that we are gullibly buying. 

“There’s no need for it. If people weren’t panic buying there wouldn’t be a problem.”

It is true that panic buying interferes with the very tight stock control systems and we should have learnt but you can’t just blame all people, except yourself.

Where do you draw the line? The NHS worker who got an email telling them to make sure they have enough petrol in the car to get to work for the next week? The ambulance who drove to four garages before putting £200 worth of fuel in? The HGV lorry that took £600 worth of diesel? The old man filling one can for his lawnmower because the council have threatened to evict him from the allotment if he doesn’t cut his verges? The lady who is off to lunch with friends and notices that the fuel tank is close to the red and knows that although it will probably get her home the fact that she has driven her past 4 empty stations makes her imagine running out on a dark country lane  on the way home and getting raped and murdered by the strange men that are supposed to lurk in those places? The business man who has a meeting the next day in Leeds and thinks he better fill up now while he can? 

No, no, you say, not those people. It’s the others. It’s always the others but the others are us.

Maybe you mean the person that is buying an extra can because they are scared that if the situation gets worse then they won’t get to work and they’ll lose the job that has only just re-started? Or the  lady who is filling up the car she never uses in case her husband, who has terminal cancer needs to go to hospital and they can’t get an ambulance? 

I mean, apart from me, who would rather walk everywhere, who doesn’t need fuel?

They might not need it now but they can see with their own eyes that when they need petrol the pumps could be empty.

OK, you say, then it’s the newspapers’ fault because if they hadn’t  written the stories then people wouldn’t have panicked. That doesn’t work because they wrote about diesel shortages and it’s really bad form to shoot the messenger.

Then it’s teacher’s fault because people can’t read properly. That’s probably true, everything can be blamed on teachers.

The problem with complex issues are that there is no one person, or thing to blame. There are many contributing factors.

You might tell me that it’s the government’s lack of forward planning, Brexit, a backlog in medical for HGV drivers, Covid, antivax lorry drivers, new (since 1970) driving tests, lack of decent pay, relying on a just in time delivery system or the French (it’s usually the French). It’s probably all of-those and more.

I think about my grandmother, her larder full of sugar and insistence that she was ‘never going to be caught out again’. People who panicked and stocked up before World War II were praised for their foresight. They thrived while others died. Can we really blame people who have a strong survival instinct?

So, I refuse. There are enough problems without constantly trying the blame ‘the others’.

Shoot the messenger, blame the victim

 I haven’t blogged much lately. Everything has been a bit much. I’m sure I’m not alone in that. Life paused and now it feels as though everything is trying to catch up on super speed.

In an attempt to keep my sanity, I’ve been trying not to look at my phone as much, stay off social medial and not trawl the news sites but it’s been impossible not to notice just how awful things are looking. 

Covid, Brexit, climate change, sexual violence, acceptance of trans people and poor service have all seen the wrong people get the blame.

According to Boris Kermit the Frog is responsible for climate change and the French are entirely to blame for trade difficulties  because they failed to ‘donnez moi un break’. Laura Keunsberg is responsible for everything to do with Brexit. Phil McCann is responsible for the shortages at petrol stations. The public are to blame for ambulances having to drive round until they find a petrol station with petrol. The press, in general, are the cause of the murder of the young teacher because they wrote a story about Strictly. Women are responsible for being attacked by a man. Staff shortages were the reason I didn’t get a meal in a restaurant last night (not a waiter who got the order wrong). People who find the phrase ‘bodies with vaginas’ , in an article in the Lancet about how women’s health has been under researched, to be dehumanising are  culpable for every attack on a trans person.

What has happened? Have we forgotten that we are not meant to shoot the messenger because then we stop finding out what is happening? Do we really want to blame the victim and allow the perpetrators to continue with their vile behaviour, unchecked?

It’s quite depressing. 

I love you but

 In the words of Meatloaf, “I’d do anything for love but I won’t do that.”

The Long Suffering Husband came home from golf looking very pleased with himself. 

Some people might think he took early retirement but in actual fact he became a golf pro. A golf pro in the same way that I’m a professional musician: there’s no money in it but he works hard. Not to make life too difficult for himself and being a bit of a bandit (shush, don’t tell him I said that) he joined the OAP section of the club and he has been having very good games. It’s my birthday soon so I’m sure there will be a piece of equipment I will need to make his game even better. I’ve never minded that, it’s what true love is, isn’t it? That and showing/telling each other health concerns that you’d never mention to anyone else.

However, I draw the line at yesterday’s suggestion.

“I’ve been formally asked now.”

“What?” 

I was confused because I hadn’t listened properly before. That’s also what love is. Pretending to listen to things that bore you but looking as though you are really interested.

“You know, they keep saying I’d be a really good captain.”

I could feel the panic rising in my chest. I suppose it was inevitable; a man in his middle fifties looks positively dynamic amongst a bunch of octogenarians. It shouldn’t worry me. Golf is his hobby, right? It’s not how hobbies work though. Just as I might ask him to come to occasional concert or make him eat cake he might ask me to something golf based. When that was going to golf shops or walking round a big field that was fine but becoming the captain’s wife was not high on my list of things to do before I die.

“I’ve been formally asked to be Vice Captain now. It’s very flattering,” he said.

“Yes , but you’d hate it.” I tried to persuade, “The politics of it all would spoil your hobby.”

He looked dejected. 

“I quite like the idea.”

My breathing was coming in short, ragged gasps and the world was fading at the edges and turning black. I had to say something but he continued.

“But I said no,”

I breathed again, maybe I wasn’t going to faint.

“I told them that I don’t like public speaking and so I couldn’t do it.”

That was a relief. I had imagined writing speeches appropriate for a golf club, littered with Daily Mail opinions and jokes that wouldn’t look out of place in the 1970s and sitting with him for hours until he felt comfortable enough to perform in public. I would have done that because of love.

“I just don’t think you’ve got quite the right sort of wife, either,” I told him. “It takes someone that likes organising events.”

“You are very good at that.”

“But I hate going to them.”

“There would be the Captain’s Ball. We could go anyway. It might be fun.”

That is what I won’t do for love. I am not going to the Captain’s Ball. Not as the Mrs Captain or any other kind of glamorous arm appendage. I am not buying a dress without pockets. I am not wearing heels and making small talk with people who enjoy hitting a small ball around a field. 

I am a grumpy old woman who would rather stay at home and research murder. Please don’t look at my browser history. I’m a writer not a serial killer, although the idea of a story about the wife of a golfer is coming to me. When he becomes captain she throws herself into the events, enthusatically pretending to enjoy herself, while hating every moment. She spends most evenings thinking, “I’m missing Eastenders for this!” As part of their new found lifestyle she practises her cocktail making skills, requiring him to try a new one every night. It’s very hard to taste anti-freeze in a well mixed cocktail. Is it a good use of my time to start researching golf based cocktails now?

The Hole in One - found on Pinterest  

The most perfect joke

 I missed the fact that the Mash Report has been moved to Dave. In my naivety, I thought Dave only showed repeats but that is where you will find the new series. The joke writers on this program are the best. They manage to effortlessly squeeze in some of the most perfectly created jokes on the planet between all the angry ranty stuff.

I’m going to dedicate this blog to one of those perfect jokes. I didn’t write it but as it’s wasted on Dave I thought I’d share it.

The reasons the government have failed to do any planning for the future is that they thought ‘generation Z’ sounded like it would be the last one.

See, perfect joke, although a little kind on the government, as it assumes they know their alphabet. 

Cabinet Reshuffle

 “What do you fancy for tea?”

“Oh, I don’t know, let’s see what’s in the cupboard.”

We both peer in and take stock. A tin of sardines, some dried tagliatelle, a pack of custard and a can of chick peas stare back at us, uninspiring.

“They don’t really work well do they?

“Let’s try moving them round.”

The pantry dwellers blink back and shrug their tinny shoulders.

“Are those chickpeas out of date?”

We look at its bottom and discover that we should have thrown it out ages ago. The signs were there. Beginnings of rust at the edges, indicating that it wasn’t really fit for purpose. 

“We should replace it.”

“Good idea. There’s a tin of silver polish here. That will do.”

“I’m not sure. What experience does silver polish have as a dinner ingredient?”

“None but I’m sure it could learn.”

We look again. 

“Shall we just go out?”

There are times when no matter how much you move round the things you have in the cupboard you realise that it might be time for a change.

We had a fantastic meal of tapas at the Brazilian restaurant I can highly recommend it.

When I was 18

 The hashtag #WhenIWas18 is trending on Twitter because Emma Radacanu listened to Piers Morgan. (Obviously she didn’t but he is claiming the victory as his because he was so rude to her after she pulled out of her Wimbledon match because she was having trouble breathing)

Not only did she win the US open, she did it as a qualifier without dropping a set and then stood up and gave the most perfect interview with pauses in the right places and nods to the right people. It was a masterclass that had us mere mortals in awe. These things have never been done before all at the same time. It was so amazing that all Tim Henman could say was, “Its insane,” and look like the proudest parent in the world and he’s not even her dad. I can only imagine how her actual parents were feeling.

When I was 18 I liked to wear socks the same colour as my jumper. 

Watching tennis always takes me back to when I was 18. The year I was doing my A levels was the year I was interested in tennis. (I have always been a serial hobbyist) I watched every Wimbledon match, walked the dog around the tennis courts to accidentally see the Long Suffering Husband playing tennis with his friend and I even had a go myself, which was an uncoordinated disaster. My form class were a motley bunch and I remember us talking about heavy metal bands and how difficult our A levels were.

We were all in awe of Lisa though because she not only had to do A levels but she also had to constantly argue with the school to let her have time off to play tennis. They were never very happy about it, even when, that year, she got to the middle Saturday of Wimbledon. 

Every time I watch tennis I hear an REO Speedwagon song, smell the unique smell of our form room (pencil sharpening sand rubber plimsoles) and wonder what she is doing now. I’m guessing she married a tennis player and they have sporty children but I don’t know. However at 18, while I was worrying about whether my socks matched my jumper she was about as cool as Emma Radacanu and had impossibly long , perfectly tanned legs.

No idea what I’m doing

 The rumour is that today there will be a cabinet reshuffle. The reason people think this is that Boris is scheduled to be at Downing Street all day. Who knew that just being at your place of work could cause such speculation?  The rumour is that Gavin Williamson (Education Secretary) will go, especially after yesterday’s stupid blunder.

We’ve all done it right? Three hundred kids names to learn, you’re bound to get a few mixed up. You do tend to take extra care not to call all the black children by the name of the most charismatic, though. Everyone knows that would be bad. Muddling up brothers names or just completely forgetting is one thing but the idea that anyone could accuse you of thinking, ‘they all look the same to me,’ is quite another.

I used to be really good with names but less so recently. They just slip through the holes in my brain. I sit and study the class photos of an evening and then find that the real live children are indistinguishable from flat inanimate photos. 

This week has been a challenge. My anxious monkey brain presents me with the question, ‘you really have no idea what you are doing, do you?’ on a regular basis throughout the day. I expect Gavin has had the same thoughts because in truth, do any of us really know what we are here for? I guess it would be political suicide for him to confess that.

I do feel quite sorry for him. I know exactly what it feels like to feel as though you have no idea what you are doing and still hope you hold onto your job.

The blue car

 “We are in the Truman show,” the Long Suffering Husband pointed out about a year ago.

I don’t know if you remember the film but it was about someone who was in a reality TV show. They had followed him since birth and he had no idea, except when he started to notice that the same things happened over and over again. I always wondered how he managed to get to his 30s without noticing before but here we are in our 50s only just noticing it ourselves.

Every time we leave the house an old man in a blue car drives slowly past. We only noticed it at first because the dog has become old stubborn and possibly a little senile. 

During lockdown the dog enjoyed walking down the centre of roads. It was his place, where he was meant to be, the king of his own little street. If we saw people (which was rare because everyone was hiding)they would watch him and make comments on his cuteness. He was having his own parade. Now that cars are back on the road  he doesn’t  seem to want to give up the habit. Luckily, we live on a quiet street and so outside the house he can usually still trot down the centre, as though he owns it. We leave the house and he positions himself in the centre of the road, trip-trotting along until the blue car arrives. 

And it arrives every single time.

You could argue that as most people are creatures of habit we walk the dog at the same time and we are just going at the time he leaves for work but we aren’t those people. With age, the dog has his own timetable for walking and being a dog, he can’t tell the time. Also, as he’s got less mobile we have been walking on our own more often and the blue car still appears.

We have been laughing about it for a while.

Last Wednesday, the LSH was playing golf and I walked into town. There was no sign of the blue car and I rejoiced.

“It’s not my show, then,” I said to myself. 

However, when I got near town and it was time to cross the zebra crossing, a car stopped just before I got there This is a rare occurrence and so I looked up. It was the blue car, with the same man driving. I tried to smile and wave but he looked right through me.

Then Saturday evening, there was no blue car as we left. 

“They know we’re onto them,” I told the LSH and we laughed.

However, on the way home a smaller grey car drove past.

“It’s him!” the LSH said. “They must be trying to throw us off the scent.”

I wonder if he will be there today. I’d quite like him to have a rest because it must be exhausting having to be there every time I leave the house. It’s a shame he couldn’t have been given someone who isn’t a little claustrophobic.

Done

 When my children completed their first couple of days at school, before a weekend, they had slightly different reactions but they both had the same sensation that they were ‘done’.

My daughter had been so looking forward to school. She was desperate to learn and had some weird notion that she would go to school and come home knowing everything.

“I don’t think I’ll go back on Monday,” she said, “I didn’t learn anything. We just played.”

Being the super supportive parent I am, I just laughed at her. I might have even rolled my eyes and sarcastically said something about making the most of it because it only gets worse.

My son was less keen to start school. Not against it but also not bothered much by it. He came home from his first few days, saying nothing - a position he has maintained into adulthood (if anyone is looking to recruit a spy, he could be your man). It was only on the following Monday morning that we found out that he was also ‘done’.

“But I did school,” he said.

Even teachers feel this. Including those who love their jobs and were excited to get back. Most of us had forgotten just how tiring it is, just to go to work, never mind deal with bouncy, enthusiastic humans who are expecting you to open the tops of their heads, fill it with knowledge without them actually having to do anything. The exhaustion is compounded by the amount of furniture you, weirdly, have to move, the dust that seems to be everywhere, despite the school having really good cleaners and the technology. A teacher’s computer may suddenly not recognise them, question whether they are over 18, get double vision or only work intermittently. The interactive white board could have stopped being interactive and gained a pink stripe down the middle. Over the holidays a group of rowdy trolls have had a party in the stock cupboard and there is now no space even for a quick cry, never mind a chance of finding a glue stick or 30 whiteboard pens. The staff room is a seething mass of complex grief and other emotions because teachers have human lives and we’ve just lived through a pandemic that is now over (but it’s not over).

If your children are ‘done’ and wake up on Monday morning with a groan and a lack of will to keep doing it then at least they are in good company. The good news is that it gets better. In a  week or so there’s a routine that feels almost normal, which will last for about 5 weeks until the exhaustion catches up and everyone looks like a frazzled pigeon. 

At weekends, during school time my children often adopted the pyjama defence, where they refused to get dressed so that they couldn’t be made to go anywhere, or do anything. Today, that feels like a very good plan, as I appear to have caught a cold (honestly, Mr Williamson, no germs spread in schools) and my brain resembles a good Emmental even more than normal. It might be time to invest in a pair of pyjamas.

Nice pair of Olivia Von Halle PJs - a snip at £520

Maybe not. I promised to help build the shed. Can you build a shed in pyjamas?

How to feel old

 You know the age you feel in your head? I’m quite young - about 9. Most people, if you ask them feel somewhere between 18 and 30 but no one ‘feels’ over fifty. It’s just not an age our mind can comprehend. So, most of the time, we don’t live our day to day lives feeling old. However, just occasionally there are little reminders. 

1. The early morning stiffness - if you are a man, reading this, then stop sniggering. I was talking about knees and hips!

2. Being able to remember the current fashion the first time round.

3. Working in a school where children, when trying to guess your age, suddenly start saying, “Well, my grandma is 55, so you must be about that old.”

4. Watching all the first day of school pictures on social media. This will be the loveliest thing and also a stark reminder of just how old you are. The children you taught are all grown up and going into year 7 or 13, or even worse, are posting pictures of their own children on the doorstep in a pristine uniform.

5. Teachers you work with are younger than your own children. 

It’s a real shock, though, to square the reality with the age in my head. I may be older than you, have put the phone in the fridge because I forgot that I’d let the double glazing salesman talk uninterrupted but in my head I’m probably younger than all of you. Nine is such a fun age. Hopscotch anyone?

Texas or Afghanistan

 What are women for? 

Obviously, it’s the womb. Without the baby carrying sack wo-men would just be men, right? The current arguments between the trans community and a certain group of feminists have arisen (I believe) because owning a baby making bag makes a person valuable, dangerous and in need of control. Generations and generations of control. Because if you don’t control them then they might decide they don’t want to host a man’s seed.

Once, in the long dim distant past, this might have been a problem but not now. Now, we know, or should know that not all women have the equipment to make a baby (even if they do  own the expandable bag) and that allowing them free will and choice doesn’t automatically mean that they won’t want to have children. Dividing the world into male and female and treating all the females poorly because you a frightened of  the end of the human project, turns out to be wonky thinking. Yet it still persists.

In Afghanistan they have decided that no women (including girls) are allowed to think, hold a high position in society, be seen in public and many other things, just in case the approximately 14% of them who could have a child decided they don’t want to host any man’s offspring. It’s overkill, right? We can all see that but somehow we believe it. Women fight amongst themselves about the best way to control all women, like we are all exactly the same. Just to keep the 14% of us who are actually fertile from deciding not to have a child. 

The so-called TERFS (hate the word) (trans exclusionary radical feminists) are frightened that if they let people who have never had a womb into the women group it will be more difficult to argue that all women are picked on because of the small number who are fertile. That might sound laughable but we know that the reason women (as a group) can be controlled so easily is because the people who own a penis (I know I’ve made it sound like a pet but I’m not sure that’s wrong) have a strength advantage. (Read Naomi Alderman’s The Power if you’ve ever wondered what would happen if the power was reversed)

“But that’s just Afghanistan,” you say. We don’t need to worry about that. The World Bank did a study in 2019 looking into equal rights for men and women at work and found that only six countries did, in actual fact, have equal rights (Spoiler; Uk isn’t one of them) https://wbl.worldbank.org/en/wbl# Also, what about countries likeSaudi Arabia where women aren’t allowed to drive?or Yemen, where a woman’s life is literally valued at half the price of a man’s?

“But those are just backward countries!” you say.

Shall we talk Texas then? Texas yesterday passed a law to make abortion illegal after 6 weeks. For anyone. Regardless of circumstance. Raped? Unless you have it aborted before 6 weeks you have to keep it. Genetic deformity that means child can’t live outside the womb? No have to keep that unless it’s spotted before your first scan, even if that puts the mother’s life at risk.

Now, six weeks isn’t six weeks pregnant. Unless all women are always pregnant because pregnancy is measured from the first day of your last period. You are actually deemed to have been pregnant at the point where you were the least pregnant it was possible to be.. So, depending on the length of your cycle to be 6 weeks pregnant intercourse could have taken place somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks before.  I’ve said pregnant too many times.

How do these laws get passed? I’m despairing. So much progress and yet none at all. First day of school and I have too much to worry about.