Motherload

The other night, my husband and I had an argument. Not very uplifting, and I won't bore you with the details. Suffice to say it was about one of the two main subjects married people tend to fight over, and it wasn't about sex. The argument came pretty much out of nowhere, and our son was in the bath in the next room. He was playing away, chatting to himself, even as I stormed, and husband snapped. Later on our son came downstairs to kiss me goodnight, and made no mention of the parental explosion. I put it to the back of my mind, still angry. The next morning, he came downstairs with his bear, and told me, "My bear's said I have to pack my clothes and leave". A knot formed deep in my stomach. Some of these words he'd overheard from me the night before. What had gone on in his mind? What had he understood? How had he come to the decision to use his bear to represent his anxiety? Which elements were conscious, and which unconscious? What had I meant by...

This morning, on In Our Time , Melvyn Bragg was being peremptory and testy with one of my former professors and mentors, Terence Cave. The subject was Montaigne, death, friendship, the essai , stoicism and living in the moment. I do need to digress to poke a stick at some Braggadocio. Thank goodness the man exists so that this programme itself can — but, oh, the misogyny, the pomposity and the insecurity! He speaks over any woman he has on the show and is rude to anyone more intellectually prestigious than himself. Quite often he behaves like a second-year student, who got drunk the night before and only has half an essay, and so is compensating by being bloody-minded. Hearing him order Professor Cave to "go on, tell us what Montaigne was on about, then," was excruciating. Professor Cave and his excellent Renaissance companions teased out how Montaigne harnessed and channelled his classical education and his experience of public life into his writing. Unlike anyone writi...

My beautiful, fantastically intelligent friend, Gill Howie, died on 26 March 2013. She died of cancer, after a long illness, and she has left two young boys. We had drifted apart over the last decade or so, for no reason other than that both of us were working hard, she had had children, and then I did. She was in Liverpool, I was in Cambridge, then Australia, then London, then moving, then management consulting, then researching, then governing bodying, then... then... you get the picture. Busying myself. Gill was a feminist philosopher, and asked difficult questions all the time about Marxism, and critical thinkers. Gill was an activist intellectual. She thought it was vital to live out her moral investigations in her own actions. So she was a union activist, and later, once she was a professor at Liverpool, and a head of department, I imagine she looked after the interests of her staff to the very best of her abilities. Because Gill was one of the most compassionate people I h...

The Real Women's Issue: Time , a piece in The Wall Street Journal by Jody Greenstone Miller, is a breath of fresh air in the stifling and ideas-free Women 'n' Work debate.  It takes headon the idea that all ambitious women can do in the workplace is 'lean in', a term coined by Sheryl Sandberg, to mean 'assert themselves more'.  Miller argues that, in fact, organizations and institutions could change the notion of work,  rather than thinking that the only model of success is working a 60+ hour week. Let's not forget that many women (ambitious or otherwise) work that many hours a week already. It's just that, once they have a family, they ain't gonna be doing it in their place of employment.  So — change what 'work' is. Remember that it's carried out by human beings, who still operate in lunar cycles with circadian rhythms, aging year by year, reproducing awkwardly at around the time they reach full working capacity (go figure). ...

This weekend I was put on trial. My daughter, aghast that the biscuits had been finished, demanded to know who had scoffed the lot. It was me. I had made a lovely cup of coffee and had leant against the sink, gloriously inhaling Hob Nobs one after the other, until they were all gone. I'd consumed about six, without really thinking about it, and enjoying every single one. I'd had a momentary pang of guilt, remembering that my daughter and I had purchased said biscuits together the previous day. But it hadn't been enough to prevent me polishing them all off. My daughter thought for a moment, whisked upstairs, and came back down with a white woollen shawl draped across the top of her head, long woolly flaps hanging down each side, and wielding a hair brush gavel. She was my judge. She asked for witnesses. There were none. She demanded evidence. No biscuits in cupboard, empty wrapping in bin. She extorted a confession. I shamefacedly gave her one. She sentenced me to tw...

Yesterday I took the children to Tate Britain for a Family Day. They had given over some five of the rooms to art activities for children: a cardboard city, costumes imprinted with famous artworks which children could use to act out playlets, a musical section with amplified instruments, and a room filled with building blocks. The place was mayhem. The cafe was manned by just one server, and the queue was round the block. In a side room, parties of buggies, babies and toddlers were camped out. The scene resembled a refugee camp. On the opposite wall was a series of Gilbert and George tapestries. They looked like vast pencil sketches, and featured the two men sauntering through Constable country. Printed in capitals along the bottom was a message which, paraphrased, reads: 'Art is a way of contemplating life, love and nature, and makes things better for Gilbert and George'. It was a lovely tease: is Art only for the initiated? Is there always a risk of solipsism in the art...

What the hell just happened? Oh I know, it was Half Term. Somehow I quite often seem to blog about holidays when they are about to be over, when I am at an ebb so low you can see the the mid-Atlantic ridge of my soul. What is it about these energy-sapping, will-defying, hope-unplugging weeks? On paper I was good to go. My military precision planning had ensured: food supplies in the house a diary neatly stocked with things to do a weekend at my mother's (always a good way to use up several days, while knowing that there will be a soothing caress and a gin at the end of each one — did my mother bargain on having to mother me until her mid-seventies?) playdates library cinema cultural exploration shopping a sleepover special time with each child menus planned for the week a night out pour la mère packed lunch goodies and I was even able to do a bit of teaching and dance.  What a domestic goddess, I hear you cry, cheering me on in my maternal triumph. Hmmm...