Elizabeth Gaskell

 How have I never read Elizabeth Gaskell? 

Is that some part of education that you miss out on if you’re not posh? You know, how Boris is always banging on about Virgil and Gove is obsessed with Henry James. The posh rulers of our country tend to enjoy their literature to be about a dim distant past. None of them get excited about the new James Pattison or Jojo Moyes, although Nicola Sturgeon does read everything.

I’ve stumbled upon Elizabeth Gaskell books as I try to get into the head of the women of 1882. I just discovered that my Emily did work for a little while after William left her, at Courtaulds as a silk winder in the factory that then became the Marconi building in Chelmsford. I wanted to know what that life was like and so found Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell.

 I know. She’s not really my Emily. She’s just a random woman who was briefly in the workhouse and committed a crime that saw her spend a couple of nights at the Moot Hall but she is mine. I’m passionate about understanding her. I’m equally disgusted with her and protective towards her. She could be my own daughter. I’ll forgive her anything because I love her but I can’t understand what she did. Emily’s own mother is equally a puzzle and her Aunts seem like amazing women. 

It is too easy, however, to think you know how they were thinking. You assume that they think like you. Maybe they do but maybe life was so different then that you can’t assume anything. History tends to write women out.

“Oh, of course,” people say to me, “A woman couldn’t live as a single mother without a man, the shame would have been too much.”

But, the censuses show plenty of women living with their children, as the head of the household, or living as unmarried mothers with their parents. I wanted to read women who were writing at the time. The Brontes give you an idea of the very wealthy but was anyone writing about women who made their own way in the world? 

It seems that person was Mrs Gaskell. She wrote Charlotte’s biography and wrote her novel Ruth after contacting Dickens to find out how she could help a woman that she had visited in prison. She wrote Cranford, which I remember being on TV and being a story  about frivolous, gossiping women, who really controlled the town, despite what the men thought. 

Thank goodness that I don’t have eleven Christmas concerts to organise this year. I have a lot of catch up reading to do. 

Mrs Gaskell, at 50, having a kip while reading the latest Henry James?

It’s not personal

 The pudding is made and hiding in the cold cupboard with the sloe gin, the address book is updated, cards have been written and the mincemeat is slowly warming in a very cool oven. The whole house smells of Christmas, which is entirely appropriate for advent Sunday. However, this feeling of being calm, organised is new. Normally, I would be feeling stressed about a Christmas concert that should be happening today. It would be concert 2 of eleven and one that I really care about, so while the mincemeat was warming and I was thinking about making the first mince pies of the season for after church I would also be running round, fixing stands, printing music, checking the sleigh bells all worked and making sure my Christmas jumper still fits. 

It is a very strange feeling but it also means that I have time to do other things, like update the address book or clean out the backs of cupboards. 

I had quite a lot of mincemeat left over from last year. I didn’t use enough, or give enough away. Also,  think I forgot to only make half of the Delia recipe. I checked the jam cupboard and found a rhubarb and a courgette that I’d made that were disgusting, next to the old solid mincemeat. I don’t know what commercial manufacturers do but my preserves don’t seem to last as long as theirs. It has been quite therapeutic scrapping out all the old mincemeat and washing the jars.

Also at the back of the cupboard that were two jars labelled in my Mum’s handwriting. Damson 2015 and Strawberry 2016.

I had a little moment. I knew that I couldn’t face eating them (even if they were ok) but could I throw them away?

It turns out, that if you aren’t too busy then you can trick your brain into letting go of these things by telling yourself, “It’s not personal; it’s mouldy jam!”

I have no idea if it was mouldy as I didn’t open the lids and I feel a little guilty for not emptying, washing and recycling but somehow life just feels a bit better without jam I’m never going to eat in the cupboard.

Wish

 Last night I weighed out the ingredients for the Christmas pudding. Everything goes in a bowl with a good glug of alcohol (I use milk stout and Tiptree Christmas rum). Then you cover it with a tea towel and leave it overnight. 

Traditionally, during this phase each member of the family takes some time with the ingredients. Stir and wish.  Usually, I struggle to think of a wish and so I just think, “Let nice things happen,” as I stir. Whilst I am realistic that my pudding can’t work miracles it doesn’t stop you from asking for them. This year, I keep thinking of things to wish for.

I’m fairly certain that too much stirring at this stage won’t hurt the flavour but will all these wishes make my pudding bitter?

Could this be one of those fairy tales, where adding our dried bitter tears of lockdown frustration will spoil the pudding?

As I’ve walked around town, I’ve heard the phrase, ‘after corona’. People, especially teenagers have lots of plans for nice things to happen after corona. 

Okay. Just one more stir.

All together now.

“We wish for nice things after corona.....oh, and make that soon.”

Seasonal Balance

 My yoga this morning contained balancing postures and I can report that I am very wobbly at the moment. It’s like my body is shouting, “Hah, balance! What’s that?” 

I don’t suppose I’m alone. The government announced that we were all in tier 404 yesterday and now none of us know where we really stand, or even if we’ve got enough balance to actually stand.

Yesterday was the day that the government were supposed to have completed looking at the data to decide which tier each region would be in. Put simply, in all tiers everything except pubs and clubs are open. Clubs aren’t open anywhere and pubs only in tier one and in two, only if you eat. You can’t have any human contact, though in any of their tiers and are not even allowed to see people you like at a distance, if you sing happy birthday while washing your hands, jog around doing the hands, face, space dance, open the windows, dress as Batman or do any of the other three word marketing suggestions that Boris keeps mentioning. He says that he has his foot on the throat of the beast and that we have all been altruistic and just need to carry on until the pricks come marching over the brow of the hill, saving us all by Easter.

Unfortunately, they made the announcement via a website that you had to put your full postcode into to know your tier, causing it to immediately crash. Computer says ,”no,” You are in tier error 404! 

So, we can all be forgiven for feeling a little wobbly.

This is often a tricky season to balance for me. I’m normally, running round, rehearsing, moving furniture and organising 11 Christmas concerts. This year: Nothing. No wonder I feel a bit out of sorts. I have replaced my Christmas busyness with historical research because if you don’t fill the hole then you really will topple over but when you can’t stand on one leg, your body is telling you that your seasonal balance is off. Maybe it’s time to join the rest of the town and put my lights up, deck the halls with boughs of holly , watch Christmas films and eat mince pies.

I’ve just realised that I’m already late. Stir up Sunday was last weekend. I need to make my pudding and get the sprouts onto boil. 

The writing cardigan and cape

 Insomnia rituals will vary from person to person but once you get good at not sleeping you’ll know all the things that help you.

Some people lie still and pretend they are asleep, others get up and make a milky drink and then go back to bed. There are whole armies of middle aged hormonal women reading or listening to the radio at 3am. I’m sure it’s not just women who are bad at sleeping but I’m fairly certain that hormones can make the land of Morpheus difficult to stay in.

Your Fitbit panics so much about your lack of sleep, it decides you must have had a kip when you took it off to have a bath and it just stops registering the three hours you did actually sleep at night because, well, that can’t be right, can it?  If this is you, then like me, you are probably a seasoned pro and you will have rituals that get you through the long, dark, cold hours before the birds start tweeting.

When I have failed at lying still, or reading under the covers and can tell that I’m disturbing the Long Suffering Husband , I get up and go downstairs and write. This is where the writing cardigan comes into its own.

My writing cardigan is long, brown and comforting. It’s got pockets, which are particularly important because when you write you need to stand up and walk around a bit to loosen the ideas or stop your bottom sticking to the chair and you need a pocket to stash your favourite pen in. There’s nothing worse than completing 10 laps of the living room, coming up with a brilliant idea and not being able to find the right pen because it’s slipped down the crack in the sofa. You can slip a writing cardigan on over any outfit: pyjamas, yoga clothes or even your everyday work clothes and suddenly you are transformed. No longer an insomniac or tired teacher but a woman in a writers cardigan with ideas and words at your fingertips. My writing cardigan is beginning to get a bit old and is starting to bobble and develop holes but I still love it.

It can be quite chilly at this time of the day. The heating hasn’t clicked on and so a little while ago I bought myself a fleecy blanket to stay in the living room. It matches my writer’s cardigan and sometimes I pop it over my knees, like an old granny. If it’s very chilly I might pull the blanket up to my neck or wrap it around my shoulders. This turns me from jaded woman, jabbing at a keyboard to superhero. I’m invincible. Now in my laps of the living room, I have a cape.  I swish up and down, collecting ideas and suddenly 3 am becomes 5am and there are 2000 new words flashing on my screen.

I have put ‘new writing cardigan’ on my Christmas list. I wonder if it will work as well if it isn’t brown and doesn’t match my cape.

Jacob, Jacob and Sons

 This blog has been alive for 9 years.  That's a lot of words and I can't guarantee that I haven't written about the same thing twice.  This morning, I have a weird sense of deja vu, even though, what I'm about to write about must be new because it's never happened before. I feel as though I might have dreamed it when I was 15, after I played the flute underneath the stage for a production of Joseph.

Last night, Rinky-Dink Peter won Bake Off, as predicted.  It was  a lovely programme, just at a time we needed it and so beautifully done at the end, showing us the lengths people had gone to to bring it to us, showing us a lockdown baby, the friends the Bake of Contestants had made in a time when none of the rest of us have been able to make new friends, and a tribute to the lovely Luis (former contestant, who died of bowel cancer a few weeks ago). At the end we were all a little emotional and singing Coat of Many Colours from Joseph.

Much of what I know can be related to a musical and it seemed appropriate that Pru was wearing her coat of many colours last night.

The show aired just after the government had announced the plans for Christmas.  I say announced but what I mean is leaked to the Press.  Nicola Sturgeon gave a press conference but we got a Twitter announcement on Simple Politics, written in comic sans with numbered bullet points.

My daughter and I had been discussing it just before the show started.

"This Christmas thing is making me feel a bit emotional," she said (she has a cold; she's always emotional with a cold)

"I think they are just resigned to the fact that people will see each other and by putting in the three households bubble they will at least get people to think about it."

"Maybe. But how will people choose?"

I didn't really understand what was bothering her because I, like most people, am completely selfish.  Christmas was never going to be a problem for me. It's one advantage of your parents being dead. My children are living at home and my sister lives on her own (there are no rules about how many dogs can come for Christmas dinner). The Long Suffering Husband is also an orphan and rarely sees his sister and never at Christmas.  I also might be a bit of a rebel in my old age because I had already decided that I am perfectly capable of social distancing (in fact I prefer it), so I could see as many people as I liked (which, in reality, is no one)

Of the thorny life questions 2020 was going to sort out, "Who is your favourite child?" wasn't one that I expected.

It was easy for Jacob. Joseph, the youngest, would have been the one he had round for dinner.  The others and their wives just irritated him. (Everything I know comes from a song)

However, if you have three or more grown up children, how do you decide which ones you see? How do you, as a couple decide if your bubble is his parents and sister's family, your parents and brother's family, or if you separate for Christmas, so that you can both see your family?  A parent of two grown up, single children living in a house share each will be able to have both home for Christmas but what about Granny? How do you explain to your small children that they can't see big nanny because little nanny has decided that you are not her favourite child? Many people are already speculating about their status on Twitter, with one person saying they are ordering their microwave meal now because they know they are lower on the list that the dog and the stray cat that brings their parents headless mice.

I don't think these are easy decisions for a government.  They know that we will see our loved ones over Christmas. It's a tradition that most of us would prefer to keep but they want to remind us that big parties are not safe.  No one should be cooking for thirty. This is not the year to watch your Uncle entertain your other cousin's children by taking off his prosthetic leg and making it dance around the room to the tune of Jingle Bells. 

2020: the year when you find out that you are the least favourite child. I think I might make some Christmas cards featuring Pru's coat.  

Jolly Safe Christmas

 The Vaccines should release a Christmas song. I hope they’re working on it already. 

Boris’ head in a tv screen gave another metaphor rich press conference yesterday. I couldn’t stop wondering whether he had trousers on and so I confess that I didn’t listen properly. I somehow imagined boxer shorts with a Hawaiian print. 

“This man has no trousers on!”

Once he’d got over being excited about the Vaccines coming over the brow of the hill, he had to tell everyone it wasn’t over yet. This caused him some trouble, as he wanted to launch into his Winston Churchill impression: Never in the field of human virus fighting has your Prime Minister asked so much of you, etc.

The gist of it seemed to be that a woman on the Oxford team said that they had to develop a vaccine that could be stored in a normal fridge and so we have developed a ‘world beating’ immunisation that is 70% effective. This is less effective than those announced last week but it will be enough to stop the health service becoming overwhelmed. It is also more effective than this year’s flu vaccine (40-60%). 

The he told us that if we want a jolly Christmas then it will end in tiers: it was the only way to have a jolly safe Christmas. He was particularly proud of this bit of language manipulation and had a little chuckle to himself. They are still working out exactly what the tier system will mean, the criteria for tier placement and what relaxations will be made for Christmas but from the leaked information it seems quite well thought out. Reduce as much social mixing as possible but keep things going that encourage good health. Gyms, physios and hairdressers open, places to drink yourself into a stupor closed. It’s not as much fun but I see the logic. 

I was going to write about two tier local authorities (because how can the whole of Essex go into the lower tier of restrictions when you look at Brentwood rates) but there are just too many tiers, all meaning different things and so I’ve confused myself.

I suspect there are also too many tears. 

Last night, as we were taking the dog for an evening walk, there were two police cars outside a house with their flashing lights on, drawing attention to themselves, also blocking a man from getting his car out and telling him he would have to wait. People were hanging out of their windows to look. My daughter flipped into professional journalist mode, took a photo and fired off a request to the Police for information. One of the people hanging out of a window shouted, “Nosey!”  It made us laugh.

We spent the rest of our walk talking about how it was probably just a domestic, chastising ourselves for saying ‘just ‘ a domestic and worrying that the people in that house might not have a jolly safe Christmas, even with a vaccine or tiers. 

Workhouses

 I was introduced to new members , on the local history zoom call, as music teacher by day and investigator of the Victorian poor and downtrodden by night. It is true. I’ve become obsessed with the Maldon Workhouses. Pure History never seems to talk about individuals. It seems to be very bad form to write about the past in any way that brings the poor to life and give them names. Because of this I have become obsessed with making lists of the names of people who were in the workhouses and listed on the censuses. The Marys, Susans, Harriets, Williams, Georges and Isaiahs are all being recorded on my spreadsheet. I’m not sure why but I feel they shouldn’t be forgotten.

In Maldon the new Workhouse (where St Peter’s Hospital is) was, if you read the history books, better than most. The Guardians, a group of rich businessmen, oversaw the running and financing of the workhouse. They were concerned that people should be discouraged from seeking help. The conditions in the workhouse were harsh to keep people out. At the same time the Guardians were working hard to reduce ‘outdoor relief’(giving money to those who didn’t enter the workhouse). These great and good of the Town took their responsibilities of making sure the workhouse stayed profitable very seriously. For their two hot meals and 6oz of bread a day the inmates had to complete a full day’s work. In Maldon that was mainly agricultural labour or domestic work and nursing the older, sicker inmates. There was also a lot of straw plaiting. Children were separated from their mothers, with possibly a half hour visit a day, and given schooling. Maldon was quite proud of its new workhouse and how it treated, particularly, the old men. They had their own room and sitting room and were allowed to apply for day release passes to get out and about. Charles Dickens essay, A Walk in the Workhouse (1850), has particular criticism of the treatment of elderly men and brings the problem to life by quoting a man who was thinking about the previous occupant of his bed, Charley Walters. 

“I am greatly better in my health, Sir; but what I want, to get me quite round,” with his hand on his throat, “is a little fresh air, Sir. It has always done my complaint so much good, Sir. The regular leave for going out, comes round so seldom, that if the gentlemen, next Friday, would give me leave to go out walking, now and then – for only an hour or so, Sir!”

I like to think that the Maldon Guardians had their conscious pricked by Dickens and the fact that he was prepared to use their names.

The old workhouse, on Market Hill, has a blue plaque and was erected by Thomas Plume in 1715. It was one of the first. The idea of looking after the poor in one home, to make your town a nicer place to be appealed to people and at first, with the generosity of Thomas Plume, people were more than happy to contribute through to their taxes.

Everything I thought I knew about workhouses comes from Dickens. The image of Oliver Twist asking for more is all I really had. Was it a lifeline for some people, though? The question of how we help the poor is  not an easy one, although forced labour, less food and harsher treatment than prison offered doesn’t seem a choice many would make.

If you are still reading and haven’t fallen asleep, thinking, “I didn’t click on this blog for a boring history lecture,” then I want to tell you about Martha Newcombe.

Martha was a livewire. She grew up in Tiptree Heath in poor agricultural working family. She hadn’t gained an eduction and by the time she was 18, jobless and unmarried she had no choice but to go to the workhouse. 

In 1868 she attacked the Master of the Workhouse, Mr Charles Timperley and found herself in the dock at the Moot Hall. She had grabbed him by the hair, pulling chunks out, while taking swings at him with her other fist and cursing him in language that was too appalling to write down. The other women held her back, a policeman was called, who took her into custody, claiming never to have heard such a foul mouth on anyone, let alone a woman.

She was fiery and fun but most of all,  angry.

The assault had been brewing for a few days. She was furious that Mr Timperley had put her on bread and water for a previous insubordination. At breakfast she had shaken her piece of bread in his face and told him, in colourful terms,  that it wasn’t enough to live on. At dinner time she was three days into the bread and water fast, having been at work all day and couldn’t take it any more. I imagine having to sit though another meal where everyone else was eating was one torment too many. That’s when she launched her attack. I don’t expect it was pretty. 

In court, Mr Timperley said he hadn’t punished her as much as she deserved. Martha disagreed. All she had done was have a bit of fun with the other girls and blacked up her face as a laugh.

She was sentenced to 21 days for insubordination and 14 days for assault, winking at the judge and saying, “Why, I’m much obliged to thee, Sir!”

Was she cheeky or genuinely grateful to get  35 days with no work and food every day?

I don’t know if my lists make any difference at all but as we head into an era where more people will be struggling I think it’s important to remember that helping people with no money shouldn’t be a worse punishment than what we’d give them for committing a crime.

A week is a long time

Harold Wilson, famously didn’t say “A week is a long time in politics.” He was apparently mis-quoted at the time of the Sterling crisis in 1967 when they devalued the pound. Now that the Bank of England is printing money on loo roll and quantitively easing it into the economy Prime Ministers don’t have to be responsible for that sort of thing and a week is a long time for all of us.

I’ve falling into this weekend feeling more tired than I can ever remember with no where to go or no one to see to take my mind off things I fear that next week will also be exhausting. When your life is the same, day in, day out without a change an hour can feel like a long time in a day.

I followed a retired couple down the road on my lunchtime walk yesterday. I was socially distant but I could hear them as they used their outdoors-with-hearing-aid voices. 

He said, “But I don’t want to go to Perrywoods again!”

She snapped back, “Well, where else is there to go?”

A week feels like a long time but simultaneously drags on a bit. Time is like that.

In politics, this week a lot has happened and simultaneously not happened.

We had a briefing last night. Not Boris, who is self isolating but Hancock, who actually isn’t bad at briefings. He’s happy for questions to be asked, sticks to a simple script and seems quite relaxed. Last night, Johnathan Van Tam and Stephen Powis were via Zoom because they too were self isolating. Someone had challenged JVT (or Penfold) to pretend he was on an airplane. 

“Over,” he said at the end of each reply. It made me want to talk to him on the phone to see if this was his preferred style but I suspect it was all part of the challenge. Last time he talked about vaccines (not the group) the metaphors were train related. This time they were about planes. He said that we were on the glide path but we could still crash and burn. The landing is always the most dangerous part.

In other political news, on anti-bullying day, the government sent a clear message.

While MPs were wearing odd socks the inquiry into complaints from Priti Patel’s staff that she had bullied them came back. An independent body concluded that she had broken the ministerial code by bullying staff. There was some mitigation noted that her staff had not been very co-operative but possibly shouting and swearing at them on a regular basis was not the response required.

The Prime Minister looked at the report and on anti-bullying day he decided that he didn’t think the Ministerial code had been broken. His reason being that she hadn’t realised that she was being a bully. He didn’t even put her on the red traffic light or tell her to stop.

The person who had written the report resigned.

Someone came forward to say that she had been told, on several occasions that swearing at her staff was not allowed but she had continued. 

Bullying might be a tricky thing to define but on anti bullying day most of us would be surprised that a report that has taken 8 months to write could be ignored, when any reasonable person would believe that it’s never ok for your boss to swear at you. The message is clear though. Go ahead, Ms Patel, shout and scream at your employees, make them fearful and feel as though they are small and worthless. That’s fine for you to do because the Prime Minister has your back.

Gosh, no wonder I’m tired. 

Rinky Dink

 I’m really good at connections rounds on quizzes. It’s my brain’s fault. It just doesn’t let me stop. It thinks to itself, “There must be some way I can file everything in the same drawer.” My brain, as a filing clerk, would be the the one that told you that Fred Smith’s notes were the the B drawer for blacksmith, next to Susan Field because she always wears black.

After writing about Peter yesterday I fell down a bit of a rinky dink rabbit hole. This was after I realised that there was no such thing as a goat-monkey, which was quite disappointing, although if you check the internet it seems as though monkeys do quite enjoy riding a goat.

Before I left the house my daughter looked up rinky dink because she also thought the worthless definition was wrong. As she’s young and trendy Urban Dictionary told her that it meant handsome, cute and cool cool from the Romany word rinkano, which means good looking. Why does the Urban dictionary give a different answer depending upon the age of the person googling?

“See, I was right. I knew it couldn’t be what you said because didn’t Velma say it on Scooby Doo?”

I wasn’t sure but tried to Google as I walked out the door. I wouldn’t be able to explain. 

“I’m sorry I’m late but I had to find out whether the phrase rinky dink was used in the Scooby Doo cartoon.” 

I couldn’t find it in the time I had but I did discover that Velma’s surname was Dinkley. I didn’t know they had last names and then the coincidence of the Dinkley name felt serendipitous. Maybe she did say rinky dink.

I told my colleague about the co-incidence. She had been trying to get another (senior management) colleague to slip the word into a collective worship, so is also heavily invested to find the answer.

“What? They have surnames? That’s mad,” she agreed.

When I got home, I checked: Shaggy Rogers, Fred Jones, Daphne Blake and Velma Dinkley but Velma’s catch phrase was “Jinkies!”

I still had the nagging feeling that rinky dink was a good thing, in a cartoon and maybe a song. I found a recent children’s song by Andy and the Odd socks called Rinky Dink Doo (she’s coming for you) about a little superhero, which I have noted for future superhero lessons but that wasn’t what I was thinking of.

As I lay in bed, my mind refusing to switch off until it had replayed the whole day, checking for embarrassments and errors that it could use to keep me awake, it came to me. At lunchtime, after we’ve served the children their dinner in their class bubble we put on a film. Most of the classes love Pink Panther cartoons, which are on YouTube - free and in full and I suddenly remembered the theme tune. 

Think of all the animals you’ve ever heard about, Like rhinoceroses, tigers, cats and mink, There are lots of funny animals in all this world, But have you ever seen a panther that is pink? Think! A panther that is positively pink.,

Well here he is Pink Panther, The pink panther, Everybody loves  panther that is pink, He really is a groovy cat, A gentleman a scholar and an acrobat.

He’s in the pink Pink Panther, The rinky-dink panther, And it’s the plain as your nose, That he’s the one and only, truly original, Panther pink from head to toe!

That’s settled then. Rinky dink means ‘cool’, just like the Pink Panther.

Peter for the Tipperty Topperty Win

 I wrote, yesterday, that Peter would win Bake Off. It’s not a spoiler; I don’t know but if he doesn’t the nation will get cross. Laura has had death threats, just as the vet, the lovey girl with the lipstick and Priya did in pervious years (what is wrong with people? It’s just cake). 

We love Peter, though, not just for his baking. We can’t taste what he makes but it always just looks fine; nothing spectacular but just what he set out to do in the time he was given. He’s clearly a Bake Off super fan and has been watching since he was a baby (and if that doesn’t make you feel old then nothing will.)

What we really love about Peter, though, is his old fashioned sayings. 

“Righty ho. We’re good to go,” he says as he tips out his cake.

“Jeepers Creepers. You can’t trust  cheesecake,” he complains while explaining that he doesn’t really like cheese.

A colleague made me notice it a few weeks ago when she’d pointed out that he’d said, “Rinky Dink.”

We agreed that we loved that phrase. It sounded upbeat and positive.

“Rinky dink, look at my amazing cake?”

Except that when we looked Rinky Dink up in the dictionary it means old fashioned, amateurish and shoddy.

“That can’t be right,” we said. 

I looked for the origin of the phrase. It turns out the first reference to it was in America in the  Fresno Morning Republican in 1899, where a journalist made it up to get a nice rhyme with think.

“But I ain’t got nothing to show him what I think. But you’ll bet I’ll not sit by and get the rinky dink.”

I’m sure we don’t use it that way in the UK.  So I checked the British News paper Archive and I’m sorry to tell you that it’s confirmed. The earliest reference in the British Papers is in the St James Gazette Saturday 24th December 1904. The article is explaining American scare-head ads, where an American journalist attracts his reader. There was some shock that journalists would stoop to such depths to hook a read; that there wasn’t any room for condolence or compsssion. A British Paper would have said, “Alarming Bulletin,” but an American paper would have written, “Will probably die.” They noted that the most alluring (their word) headline of this type was in a small provincial American paper, which said:

Willy gets the Rinky Dink

The story was about the dismissal of a corrupt Police Captain. 

They weren’t confused about the phrase rinky dink but actually quite pleased that it was of better literary quality than the headline that ran, “Goat Monkeys with Explosive. Goes through the Roof.”

I suddenly have more questions.

Wouldn’t it just be rinky dink to find out about those goat monkeys?

Leave the Seventies Where They Belong

 As you get older, nostalgia becomes a favourite pastime; one that I’m guilty of. I confess that when I write my blog and I’m feeling a bit low, overwhelmed or just tired of life, it can very comforting to pop on those rose tinted specs and look back. I tell you about long hot summers and carefree childhood days. I tell you about games, stories and food that I remember fondly, from before my joints ached, got a fish in my eye and a brain that is full of holes. 

This nostalgia is a dangerous beast, though, because it stops us remembering the truth. The people who are outraged at the Sainsbury’s advert are cross because they are rampant racists and can’t ever remember seeing anyone is the UK with skin that doesn’t freckle. I know I wasn’t going to mention it but it’s a hot topic in our house, where, even during the night someone is having to watch comments on stories about Christmas adverts and is becoming very disillusioned with the human race. 

I wasn’t going to write about that.

I wanted to write about Bake Off. 

The semi finals were shown last night and if you were watching and not tasting then the wrong person went (spoilers approaching). It is very difficult to judge Bake Off from your sofa because you only have one of the senses you would normally use to judge cake available.

Personally, I’m here for the ‘looks a mess, tastes delicious’ cake but I think some people will have been unhappy. From the beginning I thought Hermine might have won (who am I kidding, we all know this is Peter’s trophy) because she had classic cooking skills. She could bake like a French person, which should have given her an advantage in Patisserie weeks. Unfortunately, though, Pru and Paul had their time travelling specs on when they set the challenges. Instead of small, perfectly formed fraisiers, entremets and madelines they went straight back to the seventies and set a Rum Baba challenge. There is a reason no one eats Rum Baba any more. Then there was the horn, put in just to give those playing innuendo bingo some fun (it’s never as much fun if you can see it coming) and finally a showstopper cube cakes, made with enough sheets of boiled up cow bone to make a rubber ball to bounce to the moon.

Gelatine and rum babas are definitely things that should be left in the Seventies along with jokes about whether a bloke’s impressive horn fits his briefs. We remember Benny Hill and the Carry on films fondly because we’ve managed to block from our minds the bits that were all about shaming and degrading young women.

Christmas

 Have you noticed that this year no one is getting all ‘grumpy old woman’ about it being too early for Christmas?

We need something to look forward to and hope for more than ever. Christmas is the main festival of light celebrated in this country. It’s the one the government are committed to protecting because it makes the most money. Don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s because we are a Christian country and we value the birth of Christ above the seventh incarnation of Vishnu (Rama-Chandra), some pagan notion of driving spirits out before All Souls’ Day, a celebration of a terrorist, or the second temple in Jerusalem. It’s just the one that we spend the most money for.

I know I’m a cynic but I do think all religion is trying to achieve the same goal. It’s an attempt to explain and celebrate the difficulties in life in a way that is meaningful for the people it represents. In the UK, where it gets dark cold and miserable that celebration is about bringing light and greenery into the house, eating enough so that we survive until we can get back on our vegetable plots and reminding ourselves that happier and sunnier days will come again. 

This year, we have more difficulties than ever to push through. The main purpose of human existence is to connect and at this time we are asking people to not do that. Hands, face, space.

Christmas trees are up, carols are playing in supermarkets and there are queues in garden centres, which remain open as essential businesses so that you can get your decorations. You can’t get a slot to pick up your Marks and Spencer Turkey for love nor money and people are already full of mince pies and Quality Street. However, no one seems to mind. 

“So what if it’s too soon. Its all we’ve got.”

The Christmas adverts have started. Lidl is busy killing Aldi’s carrot. John Lewis is all about the pigeons plotting to make sure we connect and are kind to each other with heart shaped plasters and Sainsbury’s have made the most beautiful adverts with old home movies of Christmases past, so that we can hope to have those this year.

You’ll notice that I’m ignoring the people who’ve caused Sainsbury’s to turn off the comments on their YouTube channel. It’s the best thing to do.

Christmas is wonderful. Twinkly lights, loads of food, Christmas songs and films, and, according to the children who are writing Christmas songs with me, fluffy socks!

Bring it on.

Pomegranates

 If you ate pomegranates as a child does that mean you were posh?

When I was in primary school I was teased for being posh. I remember a blond-haired boy called Michael being obsessed with how posh I was. Michael lived in a huge house on Stock Road; his dad drove a fancy sports car; they had more than one holiday a year to places like the South of France in Summer and skiiing in Switzerland in the Winter. He had never had mixed tin goulash, cooked over a calor gas two ring burner in a leaky tent in the middle of a freak summer storm. If you looked at our wealth then you would have concluded that Michael was more posh than me. However, because I pronounced the ends of my words, had read lots of books and knew how different fruit and vegetables tasted then he concluded that I was posh and posh was an insult to tease me with.

I couldn’t deny it, really. I didn’t want to be posh, just as I didn’t want to be a ‘virgin’ because even if you don’t know what the word really means or if it applies you you, you can definitely recognise it as a playground insult. Your mum laughing and saying, “But you are a virgin, darling, it’s a good thing,” didn’t really help. You still knew you were being laughed at. 

The dictionary defines posh as elegant or stylishly luxurious so you would think it would be a compliment but we all know that to have been called posh in a state primary school in Essex in the Seventies meant that you were unrelatable and very definitely not cool.

It is true that I spoke well. I read loads and I knew that certain words had consonants in. I saw the words spelled out in my head as I said them so it would have been really weird to start saying, “I ate your wawah bo-allI fink you goaw i’ from Saafend,” when I saw the words I hate your water bottle. I think you got it from Southend.

The worst teasing, however, came at the end of October. We weren’t a really wealthy family but we were aspirational middle class. My dad had a good job and we lived in a nice semi detached house with a mortgage. We took camping holidays rather than going to a holiday camp and we had spare money for a Thursday present.

I don’t know why my Mum did this but it was something we all looked forward to. A Thursday present was a little gift that would come back from the shops with her. It was a small thing that showed that she was thinking about you. It might be a cream cake, a colouring book, a pair of scissors, new socks or something from the greengrocers. She would write and draw on the bag or box the gift came in, making Thursday the day we couldn’t wait to get home from school.

I particularly loved it when the gift was in a brown paper bag from the greengrocers in town. It would always be something seasonal or unusual. It might be a russet apple, an avocado pear, a clementine (heralding the start of Christmas), big fat dark cherries or, if we were really lucky in October, a pomegranate. When pomegranates became fashionable later in the eighties and people discussed eating them with a pin I was totally surprised that people wanted to miss out on the joy of ripping open the tough skin, pulling back the fine membranes to expose the juicy jewel-like seeds. They would miss out on licking the juice from their wrists.

Anyway, it was a Friday in October and I had half a pomegranate in my lunchbox. Michael peered in.

“What’s that?”

“A pomegranate. Have you you had a pomegranate before?”

“Nah, don’t be silly. I ain’t posh.” 

Then to his mates. “Ere look, Posh ‘as a pomegranaaa.”

“Pomegrante” I corrected.

Everyone laughed and shouted, “P.O.S.H. Posh!”

My daughter brought three pomegranates home the other day. She had met her friend for a walk and they had decided on a fruity picnic. 

“He says that we were posh if we had pomegranates growing up,” she tells me.

“Yes. Yes we were. He’s right. I’ve always been posh.”

Missing Terry Wogan Day

 Today is Children in Need day. This year the focus is on helping children with mental health problems, whic I am sure is going to be needed as the fallout from this pandemic leaves a legacy of health anxious, alcohol dependent children (They are addicted to licking the hand gel from their hands: trust me - it’s a time bomb). The five to thrive campaign is hoping it can not only use this opportunity to raise funds for those already in crisis but also prevent more children slipping into need. Connect, be curious, get active, take notice and give are the five things we should do to thrive.   

This means that frazzled teachers, already struggling to keep five year olds in seats now have a non uniform day to contend with and as they aren’t really allowed to connect with the other staff (stick to your bubble!) they’ll just have to work harder on the others, already giving as much as they are able and  pushing through the morning Joe Wicks, despite the obligatory 3am panic waking. It is probably the taking notice and being curious parts that will get them through. 

Children in Need day is always one where I miss Terry Wogan. I grew up with him on the radio. My parents tried to fight the flab while we pranced around the living room to the floral dance. He wasn’t only the presenter on Children in Need and Radio 2’s breakfast presenter but also the host of Eurovision, where he made a name for the best sarcastic commentary, even though he clearly loved it as much as we do. In the Eighties he had been host of the brilliant game show Blankety Blank and became a chat show host. At the time he was everywhere. I worked with someone whose husband was a cameraman at ITV. They also lived in the same town as Terry and had thought that he was becoming arrogant. One day, she came to work and told me a brilliant story of his wife telling him off and explaining that he was just a lucky man and really shouldn’t get too big for his boots. I was very relieved to hear this because no body wants to hear that their heroes are less than perfect.

Terry Wogan was my hero. I listened to him every morning and I wrote to him every Friday. I considered myself to be a WOG (Wogan’s Old Geezers) despite being a 14 year old girl. I wrote about finding a traffic cone in a strange place; an escapee from the EU Cone Mountain. I wrote about magpies and gremlins and how I’d love to visit the lady who shut the gates on the Cockbridge to Tomintoul Pass at the first flake of snow. 

For me, Terry Wogan, inspired many of the five to thrive elements, particularly the take notice and be curious. I could notice things and write to Terry to ask him why? He also inspired laughter, which I think is the most important thing for mental health. 

Laughter is one of the main reasons I’m so grateful to be working in the school I work in. We laugh. A lot. There was a story I’m meant to tell you about plums and flumps but I can only remember the laughter and the, “Here’s one for your blog,” instruction.

So today, I will be missing Terry and humming the floral dance as I laugh my way through the day.

If you listen to this song on YouTube you can hear him laughing.

The Fall from Grace

Tennyson said, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.” This is an argument we comfort ourselves with when everything goes wrong but I’m wondering how true it is. If we are talking people who have died then absolutely I would agree. To have someone in your life who you loved is a blessing that you never regret, even after their death but what about money, power and status? And what about if it’s the loss of a person through the end of a relationship?

I’ve been thinking about Donald Trump and I can’t help feel a bit sorry for him. Is it harder to lose that status if you are always used to winning? He comes from a background where he can’t lose. His wealth and the people around him have always bought him success. I’m sure you are not going to agree with me but I think it is going to be harder for him to have lost the election than it would be for most people and I worry that his sanity might not survive it. If it doesn’t, though, where will our sympathies lie? If he goes doolally (not a technical term) and runs round the White House naked, wearing spotty pants on his head and shouting,”You can’t catch me, I’m Mr Fwibble-elect!”, will we feel more sorry for him than we do someone who has mental health issues that has never had a pot to piss in? I suspect some might but others won’t because Trump’s wealth and power isn’t something we can imagine in the first place.

The reason I’m thinking about all of this is because I’m firmly wedged in 1882. I’ve got that ‘history feeling’ again. I’ve stumbled upon a small case of a child killer. Something about it doesn’t add up for me and I can’t put my finger on it but I think it’s to do with the sympathy we feel for people who have lost everything, especially if we can imagine or empathise with what they’ve lost. 

If you saw someone you knew in the street, looking a little confused and you knew that her husband had left her for another woman then you would probably ask her if she was alright. Imagine that she’s a nice girl, with a nice family. She grew up on a farm close by and has lots of friends too. After her husband went off with another woman she took her small child and went to live with a friend. Her friend had her own small business and she worked with her. After a while, for reasons you don’t know, she took herself and her daughter  off to live in a homeless hostel, claiming benefits and eating from the food bank. Her grandfather and aunts on the farm had begged her to go and live with them and her mother, who had remarried and had 4 more children, offered her the couch despite not having room. So, there she is outside your house. 

She says, “There’s a policeman that lives in your street isn’t there?”

You tell her what number and ask her if she’s alright.

“No, I don’t think I am,” she replies, “I’ve just drowned my little girl.”

What do you say?

Maybe you say, “Oh don’t say that,” and let her go.

After she’s gone you might think about it and worry that she might be telling the truth but will you ever believe that she did it on purpose?

Now imagine the same scenario but the woman is poor. She grew up on a council estate with a single mum, eleven siblings and a succession of drug dealing boyfriends. She’d got pregnant by accident and probably couldn’t even tell you who the father was. She was often seen sitting on a bench by the church swigging from a bottle. She’d been cautioned by the police several times and had ended up being arrested for a fight, where she used language, the like of which shocked the magistrate (who thought he’d heard it all before). On her release she was seen wandering the streets with her child in tow before you met her outside your house where she was alone. When she asks to be directed to the policeman’s house and tells you that she’s drowned her child do you believe her? Do you escort her to the cells yourself? 

It is fascinating that we would probably treat these two stories differently. Even as we discuss these historical cases in our zoom meeting there is more sympathy for the nice girls and those who have had things and lost them than those who never had a chance.

Frankenstein’s Grandmother

 “Oh, for goodness sake,” I shouted at the radio, “When will we learn?”

I then spent the rest of the day ranting at anyone who would listen. 

The cause of my rant? An interview with Maggi Hamblin about her latest sculpture. You might not know Maggi Hamblin but you will know the seashell sculpture on Aldeburgh beach and you might have sat to have a conversation with Oscar Wilde near Charing Cross. On the radio, Maggi sounds like a man. Her latest work was commissioned as a statue of Mary Wollstencraft. 

Again, you might not know Mary Woolstencraft but if you are a woman then you have benefitted from something she wrote. I stumbled upon her on a visit to, I think, the Tate with my mum.  I was taken with a portrait of a plain woman with a book. She could have been me. I was plain and frequently had my nose in a book. She was different from other women; there was no glamour; she wasn’t in her finery; or naked; she just sat there, reading her book, as though we’d just caught her doing what she does every day.

I remember being particularly taken with it because she had an unusual name. I liked unusual names and this happened at the beginning of my love for telephone directories, where I had noticed that everyone listed with my surname was actually related to me. I imagined that Mary was also checking out the lack of other Wollstonecrafts in the book.

I showed my mum. She thought she looked interesting too and wrote her name in her sketch book for the next time we went to the library.

What treats awaited us when we found out about her! Not only was she brilliant, advocating for all women to be educated to the same level as men because it would be better for society but also because her daughter went on to write Frankenstein, which I had just read.

I’ve written before about the lack of statues of women. I think it’s a real problem. We assume that it is because women haven’t done anything. Women get wiped from history because we don’t tell their stories, not because they weren’t there. We have this bizarre idea that women had no agency in the past but I’ve been studying the censuses from the 1800s and women are there, as the head of the household, running bakeries, selling beer, keeping lodging houses. They chose to leave their wealth to other women, rather than their male children or married daughters, however, we persist with the thought that everything women did was for or because of a man and that all women were there for is to produce the next men.

I’m not the only person that has noticed the lack of female statues and campaigners (or bloody feminists) have hoped for more. When they commissioned a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft they must have been thrilled. This was the perfect woman to exemplify. Getting Maggi Hamblin on board must have felt like quite a coup too.

However.

This is the statue.

Can you see a problem? 

Maggi was asked, on the radio, if the statue was meant to be Mary. She laughed.

“Oh no, she’s meant to represent all women. It is the perfect woman rising out of the forms of all women.”

This is what my mum used to refer to as ‘art bollocks’.: The justification of the art you’ve made to please the thinking art world. If Ms Hamblin wanted to make a sculpture like this then that’s fine but it’s really not the statue that should have been commissioned. 

Twitter got as upset as I had and Maggi was interviewed. She laughed at the prudishness of society and suggested that we’d all missed the point. “You can’t be naked enough, can you? The point is that clothes define people. We all know clothes define people and she has to represent everywoman.”

And that’s where the people commissioning the artist missed the point. I realise that there are too few statues of women but we don’t fix that by making the few we have represent every woman. Worse, to make the perfect female form to appeal to  sexual desire. We can honour individual women, as we do men, with clothes on. Maybe even put her in a skirt with pockets!

This phenomenon of ‘all women’ makes me furious. The Diana memorial is a water feature, the women of world war 2 are empty coats and now Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of feminism is a naked nymph.

Maybe for balance, when they make a statue of Boris Johnson they could just have a huge todger and hang some male clothes on it: a Johnson to represent all men.

She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain

 I’ve woken up feeling unaccountably anxious this morning. It doesn’t make any sense: Lockdown 2 is fine; not being able to do the extra curricular teaching has given me a bit more time. There’s a vaccine on its way. Biden is making calm sensible announcements and his wife and daughter have set up a DOTUS account on Twitter for their dogs. Work is fine: we are heading towards Christmas is a pared down way. There is absolutely no reason to feel anxious. 

Even yesterday’s Boris wasn’t too bad. He was positive and sounded a little bit like he knew what he was doing. He had an army man and Johnathan Van Tam with him and they sprinkled the world with metaphors. 

The army man showed us the swabs they were using to test the whole of Liverpool and explained that sticking cotton buds up people’s noses is exactly what his men are trained for and no, they wouldn’t be shooting anyone. 

Boris was trying to keep a lid on the excitement over the vaccine, explaining that the ‘distant cavalry was coming over the brow of the hill with their epidemiological arrows in their quiver and the toot was getting louder.’

Jonathan Van Tam tried to reign the excitement in with a train metaphor. It was a good plan. No one can get excited about trains. He told us that we could see the lights of the train coming round the bend a couple of miles down the track. He said we would just have to wait for it. It could still break down before it got to us, get held up at traffic lights, the doors could fail to open and it could already be full without even any standing room. There could also be such a rush to get on that panic and crush injuries could follow. 

Someone asked them if they had plans to help people whose mental health has suffered during these lockdown phases. Van Tam burst into tears and said that he understands; he’s missing his Saturday football watching so much. People sat home on the sofa with crippling depression and no social support will have appreciated his honesty, I’m sure. Boris got excited at the sporting reference and threw in a, “home run, slam dunk, ball to the back of the net,” omne  trium  perfectum, for good measure. 

I went to bed humming, “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.”

Maybe I’m anxious, remembering all those school trips, where the cool kids at the back of the bus, unsupervised, would steal something out of your bag and laugh at you. We would smile through it and sing, “Singing aye aye yippy, we come from Billericay....” and hope they would move onto their next victim quickly or become distracted by a good looking person in a passing car.

I started to wonder if Boris was the cool kid at the back of the bus or the nerd having his copy of the Iliad passed round but then I remembered that he went to Eton and they probably didn’t have to get on a bus because they had all the facilities. 

Failure

 Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.

I could hear my Dad’s voice in my head, during a long Sunday afternoon walk. I didn’t really mind where I went but had searched a possible route and had my phone in case I got very lost. I was thinking about how I had nothing with me; no backpack; no bottle of water; no portable battery for my phone; no paper map. I did have my emergency fiver and my Oyster card in my coat’s secret top pocket but I didn’t think either of those would be much help in a field in Essex on a Sunday after 4pm. It was beginning to get dark,  I had probably mis-timed such a long walk and it was getting harder to read my book as I walked.

It was an unusual voice to have in my head. I wouldn’t have taken my Dad as someone who was overly prepared. He liked to ‘wing it’ as much as I do. If it had been the Long Suffering Husband’s voice that would have made more sense. The LSH never leaves the house without a spare pair of pants, a screwdriver set and a torch. Even my daughter, the list queen’s voice would have made sense but no, it was my Dad, there in the middle of a field, somewhere near Danbury accusing me of being a failure.

I’m not sure why it mattered, either. I had only gone for a walk. My reason for a long walk was three-fold. Firstly, I needed the headspace and there’s nothing like standing in a huge field with all that big sky to help with that and secondly, our school PTA (without the usual fetes and quiz nights to rely on) have come up with a whole school fundraising project where everyone does sponsored walking to rack up the miles to get to Lapland. I believe that when we get there we are going to kidnap Santa and keep him in our school bubble, which could be a problem because he’s quite old and I’m sure he’s best off where he is, protected from the coronavirus by the guard penguins. 

The third and final reason for my walk was that I had already been a failure. I woke up on Saturday morning, exhausted from constantly looking at my phone. I had become obsessed with the American election and was scrolling through Twitter, Facebook, the CNN website and even Instagram for clues. 

“I’m going to have a phone free day,” I declared to the LSH.

“That’s nice, dear,” he replied absentmindedly.

“Oh, look at all these lovely photos and all these nice walks everyone is going on,” I said, as I distractedly flipped through Facebook.

“I thought you were off social media today,” he said, surprising me because he had actually listened.

It’s much harder than you think to stay off these things and I was beginning to wonder if I had a problem. By Sunday morning I watch twitching to look again, absolutely convinced I’d missed out on something. 

“I think I’ve got a problem,” I confessed, “I’ve failed at staying off social media for longer than half an hour at a time. I need to go into rehab.”

A walk, would at least keep me occupied for a couple of hours. 

I did have a great time, added about 10 miles to the total and have contributed to the fundraising, so maybe I’m not such a failure even though I definitely failed to prepare.

That Friday Feeling

 Did you have that Friday feeling? 

It was the end of the day and everyone was cheerful, happy and excited for their weekends. It had felt like a long first week back at school but also a long week for everyone else. 

There had been so much information for our brains to process. It was only last Saturday that Boris, Whitty and Valance gave their, ‘look at these scary slides that you can’t read’ conference and told us all we had to stay in again. We spent the week trying to process what this meant. For me, it looked like I wouldn’t be able to teach my flute pupils but their exams would still take place (which I had a hard time understanding). So much changed within the week. The guidance and advice about who could work and who couldn’t flipped and flopped more than a recently caught fish on the riverbank.

I spent a lot of time worrying about people who would be affected by this more than I am and eventually had to get a bit selfish and remember that I’m in a very privileged position to get some peace. I’m so lucky to live in a town with only 40 cases, where the rates don’t appear to be rising exponentially. I’m lucky that 3/4 of my income comes from a school based job and that I’m perfectly able to survive without the rest. I’m lucky that I don’t live alone and lucky that my house is a nice place to be, if I have to stay at home. I’m lucky that I live in a beautiful place with plenty of walking opportunities and excellent take-aways. There is still a little part of me that is sad and confused for the people who aren’t as lucky as me but I just had to stop worrying about it. 

Then there was the American election: Just more confusion. Our brains were reeling; the filing clerk was getting overwhelmed with all the paperwork; “Where do I file electoral college?” it asked. We were confused about how close it all seemed, about why they announce the numbers as they are counting and why it’s up to CNN to declare the winner. It looks like it’s going to be Biden but it is still too close to call and I don’t really blame Trump for holding on for long enough to see if it swaps round again. I have the image of the flip-flopping fish on the riverbank again. 

Our national lockdown part 2 started on Thursday and for those of us at work it hasn’t felt any different.

I was surprised about that Friday feeling that everyone seemed to have. 

“Have a nice weekend. Are you doing anything nice?” people chirruped as they left.

It seemed like such a weird question. Enjoy doing nothing. No going to the pub or out to dinner or having your mates round to sample the gin advent calendar you bought to mark the 4 weeks of lockdown. No playing football, golf or completing the virtual swim around the Cook Islands.  

All we can do is stay in, get a takeaway, read books, go for walks, play board games, sweep the leaves up in the garden, feed the birds, eat chocolate, drink all the gin from our lockdown calendar ourselves and watch Netflix in our pyjamas.

No wonder everyone is so cheerful. It sounds like just what we need, after all the thinking we’ve had to do. It’s time to stop flip-flopping about on the edge of the pond. Someone has kicked us back in the water and we can stay there all weekend.

Simon Says

 In yesterday’s blog I wrote that people all over England were deciding whether or not to break the law. It was a question of deciding who or what we loved the most. I do mean England; the same thing isn’t happening in Scotland and Wales and the difference is communication and a phenomenon that my lecturer used to call sticks and carrots. 

Psychologists love to study the things that motivate behaviour. Naturally, we believe that the sticks approach is the best. Tell people they can’t do something and explain they will be punished if they do. We think this will work because they are still in the mindset of toddlers. “Be good, or you’ll go on the naughty step,” or if you were born in the sixties, “Do you want a smack?” It’s logical to think that you can motivate people through fear. After many years of study, though, psychologists have discovered that fear isn’t a very good motivator; it tends to paralyse. 

As children grow up, the star chart becomes more popular. As society grows up, rewards are more popular. Let’s face it, none of us really want to hurt our children. We say, “If you get 5 stars then you can have a treat.” This is popular in schools. No longer can a child be beaten - the most draconian punishments removed by law - so educators had to find better ways to motivate children.  

However, as all parents know one of the best ways to get your children to do what you want it to explain it to them. If it makes sense then they’ll not do it. I clearly remember, when I was young, my dad explaining why we had to be careful with knives with the use of a carrot that we were told to imagine as a finger. We got it. The lesson he gave wasn’t just fear based. He showed us how to avoid our fingers when we chopped, which is quite lucky because otherwise I’d never have used a sharp knife again. He was probably motivated to give this lesson because he chopped the end of his finger off when he was three. It was soon after the end of the war and bananas had just come back into the shops. His mum bought him one on the way back from the doctor and he ate it with the skin on, which, whenever he told the story was always the worst part. The countries that have good compliance from their citizens have explained the situation. People in Scotland, Wales and Germany have been happy to accept the restrictions because they understand why and it makes sense.

Someone has told our government that the general public are unlikely to strictly stick to this lockdown; that they’ve chosen who they love most and it’s not Boris. Psychologists will have advised them that the disastrous ‘next slide’ conference, where we couldn’t read any of the slides hasn’t helped at all. It doesn’t help that the laws are confusing and there are no rewards for some who do the right thing. (Pay people who have tested positive if they stay at home and they probably will)

Someone had explained all this to the government and so we had another Boris conference to explain the lockdown. This time, instead of the unholy trinity, he had found some bloke called Simon. Simon said that the NHS was about to stop coping. He showed one slide and an animation and told us that the number of people in hospital with coronavirus was equivalent to 22 full hospitals in the country. That was a clear, terrifying message. It may have frightened us into action, although I feel it was more likely to paralyse us. 

Boris could have followed this scary message with an oppressive instruction. 

“Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives, or you will be fined £10,000 and the police will chop your feet off.” 

However, he tried a new tactic.

Those of use with children, or who work with them know that it is easier to get kids to do what you want if it’s fun. They learn well through play.

 Boris thought, “I know, I’ll make it a game.”

“Simon says, stay at home.”

“As Simon says, the NHS is overwhelmed, take the virus seriously.”

Oh no. Simon says. We’ve got to do it now, right?

I worry, though, because Boris clearly hasn’t played Simon Says with anyone in a long time. There are always one or two who get it wrong on purpose because it’s funny and the whole game descends  into giggling anarchy.

I’m sure I’m not alone but I do think it’s time the government stopped treating us like children and stopped acting like the worst parents on the planet. Give us clear instructions and reward the people who are being disproportionately affected. Explain the situation and give us agency. 

How much do you love me?

 The American election still isn’t decided. It’s looking like Biden might be the next President but it’s really close and Trump isn’t going without a fight. 

A fascinating phenomenon has started to play out on the news networks. People have started to appear to defend Trump. They will say anything, no matter how bizarre, to defend their preferred leader. Trump seems to have a lot of people willing to defend him, even as the leadership slips though his fingers. I’ve always understood that people will support a person who has power - it’s a form of self preservation - but as that power slips you would expect that the support would fall. Donald Trump is used to undying loyalty. He has always had money which always equates to power. It doesn’t seem strange to him at all. The rest of us, however, are confused. To us, it sounds like a toddler shouting, “Prove it. Show me how much you love me!” 

I keep humming the dadadadas from the King’s song, in Hamilton, every time Farrage, Guliani or one of his children appears. “You say that the price of my love’s not a price you are willing to pay. You’ll be back!”

I can’t help feeling that if I had been ridiculously stupid, the people around me wouldn’t defend me, whatever the cost. I think they would just go quiet; play possum; wait until the fuss was over and say, “We still love you but you were an idiot.”

In real life (not politics) people are having to prove how much they love each other. Human connection is a basic human need and people in England are now having to decide if they love each other enough to break the law. 

Meanwhile, the virus sings, “Ill be back....da da da daa.”

Some Old White Guy

 You might be the kind of person to have stayed up all night, with your map and spreadsheets or have woken up anxiously waiting to find out who the next President of the United States will be. However, if you live in the UK, then you are probably, like me a little confused.

Blue is Red. Remember that, I say to myself. We are used to red representing the left but it’s the other way in America. Trump likes red, which must be very confusing, even to him, when the rest of the world associated red with Communism.

Then there’s the whole donkey and elephant thing. I’m still not sure which is which but neither make me think of good things. They are both stubborn and surely animals of mockery, rather than valour. 

Then you have the whole voting system, which seems even more unfair than ours. People vote for weeks before and sometimes can’t get to vote because they e been in a queue for a fortnight. Even then, their vote doesn’t seem to count for much.

“It’s like Strictly,” the Long Suffering Husband explains, patiently. “The public vote for who they want and the judges get to decide.”

When I started writing this blog Biden was in the lead by a long way. He’s the blue donkey (I think) but who know how it will turn out. Now, I think it’s too close to call. Even if Trump loses he could still throw some lawyers at the problem and win, I believe. Trump was so tired and confused by the time I went to bed last night he was promising he would create lots of dogs if he were re-elected. That would have swayed me.

All I do know is that the winner will be some old white guy. I guess I should be more interested than that but I just can’t muster up the energy. Also, if Trump doesn’t win, who will there be for us to hate?

Are We Clapping Yet?

 Lockdown two, what can we do, the rain is getting harder.

I’ve got the tune to Electric Avenue stuck in my head and I keep re-writing song lyrics. It’s perfectly appropriate as this evening is Eighties night on Bake Off, so, on with the leg warmers before I make some simple butterfly cakes singing my new song.

During the last lockdown, I found myself getting increasingly irritable with the posters that said that rainbows came after storms. Rainbows come during storms. They appear during the unexpected downpours of rain. You know, the ones where you’re walking along in the sunshine, feeling all happy, imagining that life is good and wham! Suddenly you’re soaked but no one told the sun either and so there it is, shining through the rain, pretending. “This is fine,” the sun says, “We’ve got this. Just keep shining. It doesn’t matter that the rain is splitting my light into its constituent parts. Just look at how pretty I really am.”

Is it just me that thinks it’s odd that we are heading into lockdown again, just as the weather decides that rainbows hugely important? It’s almost as though the rainbow posters in the first lockdown were prophetic.

I know. It’s just me. I need to sleep more and think less but are we clapping yet?

Furious Swimming

 The pool was packed. It was full of people swimming furiously. Swim to wash the rubbish out of your head; swim all the lengths for the next month; swim fast; swim hard. It wasn’t a particularly pleasurable experience but it was therapeutic. There was a county swimmer in my Lane who kept grabbing my ankle every time she wanted to get past. I started to imagine her as a shark and fantasised about being brave enough to punch her on the nose. I didn’t though, I just kept swimming. 

In our house, we all deal with anxiety differently and in ways that make each other worse and so the last few days have been challenging. 

No teacher sleeps well the night before going back to school. I don’t know why, although I expect it’s a version of performance anxiety. In the current world teachers are the only people allowed (and expected) to put on a show.. We went into this half term holiday in desperate need of a rest. The emotional challenge of teaching in the current climate was huge and no teacher could quite believe they hadn’t done a whole term. Now we are going back to teach children in a lockdown world and none of us know how this will be. We are all still holding our breath. It’s like underwater swimming.

I wish I had answers. It’s just going to be hard but we just have to keep swimming (even if that’s only metaphorically) and breathing.

Humble in the Face of Nature

 Here we go again. It looks like lockdown 2.0 is with us, from Thursday. 

Yesterday was interesting. The strategy of briefing out to the press backfired. The whole country sighed and thought, “We’ve had enough of being governed by children.” This caused the government to have to pretend to be cross. Someone leaked. This will also be a good excuse to get rid of a minister that they can blame it on. Then they announced a press conference at 4. 

At 4pm the BBC news team were poised. They’d found experts to talk to who could explain the government’s strategy. Those of us watching were beginning to understand. It was too late, again, but it had to be done. If schools were to stay open then it might take six weeks to get the virus to a manageable level. The flu model wasn’t working because of how many people need hospitalisation at the same time when the growth of infection increases at the rate it does. The only solution is the SARS model, which aims to eradicate the disease. The manageable level is one where every person who has the illness can be persuaded to stay at home and not spread it and as we can’t trace everyone that has it because Test and Trace is a failure and too many people are infected we all need to be persuaded to stay at home. It was beginning to sound quite depressing. Almost as if our government were totally incompetent on the issue.

4pm came and went. The rumours came; it has been delayed; it will be 5pm now. The news anchors continued filling, doing a splendid job. At 5pm there was another rumour of delay; maybe to 6pm; maybe 6.30, who knows?

By 6pm the reporters were having to apologise for not being Little Mix. 

Finally, at about 6.45, they appeared. The unholy trinity. Boris in the middle, looking scruffy and bewildered. Muttering about being “humble in the face of nature.”

They then showed a whole load of slides that couldn’t be read, or where the edges were cut off that no one could concentrate on anyway because we were only watching to find out how our lives were going to change. 

I’m not an expert but I do think if you are holding a press conference to prove that you are a competent government who doesn’t leak things to the press to gain public opinion before you implement them then you should probably be on time, get your presentation clear and speak in a way that’s understandable. 

BBC One decided that enough was enough. The nation didn’t need to hear any more. We needed Strictly and so cut the end and the journalists questions off. I switched to BBC news, which had a fabulous sign language interpreter who seemed to be signing what we were all thinking. I’m fairly certain I saw the sign for, ‘Donkeys’ several times.

I can’t stop thinking about the phrase, ‘humble in the face of nature.’ What does that mean? Do we have to go back to watching birds and  watching things (not) grow in the garden (it’s winter)? Are young couples going to have to start meeting up in the woods for illicit sex again? 

I could be wrong but I think compliance will be a lot less this time. When you aim for simple messaging in a complex situation it just ends up sounding like a song.

Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives, hands, face, space, test and trace, humble in the face of nature.