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Showing posts from September, 2012

How to be a woman, Caitlin Moran

I set off into this book with a slight prickle about my person. It can get my goat when a book seems to trade in self-deprecating humour, especially when the author is a woman. What is being masked by the humour? So often it is self-loathing, as if the only legitimate entry into public discourse for the (female) speaker is self-negation. Why do women have to twist themselves into such knots in order to speak. Can't they just... Speak?  Perhaps How to be a Woman trades a little too much in this form of self-justification. But its approach to its subject is so unusual and riveting that it can be forgiven.  I have never seen a feminist account of womanhood written in such an irrepressible blend of first person memoir and self-help.  Caitlin Moran has a certain kind of passport past the customs officials guarding feminism precisely because she is not an Oxbridge-educated success story. Hers is a story of success against most people's odds: home-educated -- or rather an autodidac

Universe

This morning was another typical Motherload day: children need feeding, clothing, walking — no, driving to school (driving because another of the electric window motors died last night, and must be repaired, at enormous expense, immediately) — doctor's appointment, forms to fill in, car tax to pay, my own work disappearing further and further down the list of priorities. Suddenly I remembered that my daughter's swim gear was in the boot of the car, now at the garage. She needs it, of course, tomorrow. We have, of course, received dire warnings from teachers, while perched on tiny chairs in the classroom, feeling awash with memories of childhood admonitions, warnings about Not Forgetting The Swim Gear Or Our Children Will Be Humiliated. I rush out of the front door to walk to the garage. On my way I pass a squat object covered in a black bin liner. A notice taped to it reads, "Piano Stool. Please take". I walk on to the garage, retrieve swim bag, and return

A good clearout

I have been hysterical for the past few weeks, roughly coinciding with, oooh, the Summer holidays. There is something terrible about taking a holiday, an enforced holiday, when you have projects on the go, and people you need to keep talking to, for anything to go forward. Every summer, indeed every few weeks, I am told I need to take a holiday. Not for the good of my health, but for the good of my children and teachers... or rather the agrarian needs the academic calendar is calqued on. Summer holidays = harvest time. You couldn't keep the critters in school, or rather in church, so best invent a holiday for them. Parliamentary and university holidays were built around the same idea. Holy-days invented by the church to work around farming. Not so folk could go and do nothing, but so that we would all have food to eat in the winter. Given that we no longer live in an agrarian economy, or rather live in a globalized version which basically does away with seasons, why don'