Do 5 impossible things before you start work

Hi Everyone

Yes, I know it’s been a long time since I blogged, but I’m feeling rather smug today, so I thought I’d tell you about it.  The title of this post is one of the goals I regularly set myself:  Do 5 Impossible Things Before Starting Work.  Since I work from home on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, that’s the day I put this goal into action and try to get 5 different items.

Am I a morning person?  Probably, but more by training than biology.  I’ve had to get up early since I was a teenager, travelling 20 miles to school via train and tram.  Throw in the 7am starts when I was nursing and follow that up with decades of having to leave home at 7am in order to get to work, and suddenly a lie-in becomes any day when I sleep beyond 6am.  Anyway, one of the most important things I’ve learned over the years is that if I don’t do something first thing in the morning, chances are it won’t get done.  

So what were today’s Five Impossible Things:

1. Ran for 25 minutes.  (I’m on week 7 of the Couch-to-5K.)
2. Ran in the rain!  This is the first time I’ve had to run in the rain since before I got sick. I was very pleased that my waterproof jacket kept me dry.
3. Washed up last night’s dirty dishes, including filling and emptying the dishwasher and handwashing the lunchboxes and frying pan.
4. Ate at least 12 different types of fruit, seeds and grains for breakfast.  I’m aiming for 30+ different fruits/veggies/seeds and grains per week.
5. Did two perfect lessons of Duolingo German.  I’m on day 1811.  I did 1750 days of French, before swapping to German.

Not necessarily a profound list, but these are things that would otherwise get procrastinated about/postponed until they built up.  Instead, they were all done before I started work at 8am.

- Pip

Earth Day 22nd April 2024 - What On Earth Can I Do About It?

Global warming is now hitting home.  Dubai Airport closed last week because of flooding.  Dubai, and the rest of the Gulf States, received 18 months-worth of rainfall in less than a day on Tuesday 16 April.  Sea temperatures have risen 1.5C, causing mass bleaching of coral reefs world-wide, with knock on consequences for sea life and the human food-chain.  Spain has been experiencing a drought FOR 6 YEARS!

What the hell can I do about it?  Me?  One person.  Or my household of two????

I first learned about climate change and global warming when my flatmate dragged me along to the public session of a conference, in January 1989.  My takeaways then were: organic gardening; plant trees; recycling; buy unbleached paper products (preferably recycled); go solar powered; support wind farms; use public transport where possible,; drive fuel efficient vehicles but cycle for shorter journeys; and that the mainland Europeans were considerably better than Australians at this stuff.  

When I landed in Copenhagen 4 months later, and saw their rubbish bins with multiple recycling slots for paper, tins and plastics, I was convinced that the latter point was true.  Britain was a disappointment.  No segregated rubbish bins, to split genuine waste from recyclables.  It was 10 years before most local authorities offered households recycling collections for their rubbish.  When ordering office supplies in 1991, it was difficult to buy any recycled paper products - they just didn’t exist - and it took decades for things to improve.

It’s been 35 years since that conference in Australia, and Climate Change is now hitting home.  We can’t just blame governments - the largest contributing factors are the small, incremental decisions that individuals make.  What I’m setting out below are my thoughts, my manifesto, for the changes that we can ALL make to save Planet Earth.

1.  Do Not Waste

In 2020, when asked if he could give one piece of advice to future generations, Sir David Attenborough said “Do Not Waste”.  That is the essence of the Earth Day mantra:

• Reduce your consumption
• Reuse items instead of buying replacements
• Recycle everything possible

Think about it for a minute.  Pretty much everything else I’m about to write boils down into those three words.

2.  Don’t Waste Food

According to the 2024 United Nations Food Index Report quoted in The Guardian, annually about a fifth of all food produced on Earth is wasted, 600 million tonnes of which is wasted by households!  When you think that approximately 730 million people are going hungry every day, that means that the rest of us have to answer for one hell of a lot.

My suggestions to minimise food waste:-

• Meal Plan, so that the fresh food you purchase gets incorporated into the meals you are cooking.
• Turn leftovers into another meal.  Leftover cooked veg can be incorporated into a frittata.  The carcase of a roast chicken can be made into stock.
• Your freezer is your friend.  If you realise that you can’t use it before it shrivels up/turns to mush/grows exotic fungus, freeze it.  Or cook it and freeze it to eat later.  Unless you plan to use it within 2 or 3 days, freeze meat on date of purchase and defrost it in the fridge.
• Buy your fruit and veg loose, not wrapped in plastic.  They’ll last longer.  Produce stored in plastic tends to sweat and the sweat spots are the first places mould will grow, even if you decant them when you get home.
• Store food properly.  Bread lasts longer if stored in a plastic bag in the fridge.  Onions are best left on the counter.  Potatoes need to be stored in a dark cupboard, away from onions (or they’ll sprout). 
• Ignore “Best Before” dates.  They’re more indicative of the predicted lifespan of the packaging, than they are of the product.
• Ignore “Use By” dates.  If it smells OK and taste OK, then it should be fine to eat.
• Eat the whole animal.  If you are a meat eater, then don’t turn your nose up at eating offal. Haggis is delicious, even if it is made from liver, heart and lungs of a sheep.  Seriously, if you eat pâté, then you’re already eating liver.  Respect the animal.  It died to feed you.
• Compost the fruit and veg trimmings that can’t be eaten.  

3. Ask Yourself: Why Am I Buying This?

Do you need another lipstick or are you shopping just because you are bored?  Don’t shop for entertainment.  Whatever you purchase won’t fix the gap that you’re trying to fill.  If you do need to purchase an item, is it the best one for the job?  Does it fulfil all your requirements?  So many times, when we purchase something on the “it will do”; it never does.  Would something you already have do the job instead? 

Instead of trying to fit in with an influencer - who is paid to sell you things - work out what is important to you and to the person you want to be.  Devise your own style and stick to it.  Fast fashion is just flogging you badly made stuff, which won’t last.  Don’t waste precious resources trying to keep up with the Jones’.

4.  Drive The Most Fuel Efficient Vehicle

Do you really need an SUV?  No. Particularly not when, most of the time, there’s only one person in the car.  

Back in 2000, when I bought the Toy, the first priority was to get the most fuel efficient vehicle on the market. That was the diesel VW Lupo, although I bought the cheaper, “SEAT Arosa” version.  Toy averaged 62 miles to the Imperial gallon.  (That’s 4.5 litres, not the American gallon of 3.7 litres.)  Lucky-Car averaged slightly less - at 57mpg - but the replacement to the VW Lupo was horrible to drive, so I went for the Skoda version of the next model up, the Fabia.  

When I think of the number of times Lucky-Car drove through France or up to Scotland, carrying 4 adults plus their luggage, in one small car and still managed over 50mpg… Do you really need an SUV for the school run?  

5.  Do You Really Need to Drive?

The majority of car journeys within the UK cover less than 2 miles. Surely you can walk that distance?  Or cycle it?  Even in my lymphoma-depleted state, I can walk the 1.5 miles to the local Lidl in less than 30 minutes.  (We do that walk regularly.). 

If I lived in the Netherlands, I’d probably cycle everywhere.  When my current employer moved to their new office 7 miles away, the first thing I did was to check out potential cycle routes.  Sadly, there is no safe route.  Only the suicidal would cycle the last mile to the office, down a very busy, narrow country road.

What about public transport?  Surely this should be considered before driving?  I’m lucky to live in London, to have the Tube and reasonably reliable bus services.  Public transport is often not an affordable option in the UK.  You’d need a second mortgage to live in Reading and commute by train into work in London.  In other European countries, travelling by train is quick, cheap and reliable.  Sadly, not here, where 3 decades of privatisation have delivered nothing but higher prices, multiple cancellations and delays.  Most of the time, it’s cheaper to fly to Manchester from London than it is to take the train.

6. Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Spend wisely.  Don’t complain about climate change and then use toilet paper pulped from virgin wood forests!  Buy recycled.  Consider what is in the products you buy and from where they came.  Don’t buy potatoes shipped from Egypt, if you can get ones grown in Essex.

Buy secondhand and don’t be ashamed about it.  Every antique is at least secondhand - if secondhand is good enough for Lord So-And-So, then it’s good enough for you.

7. Vote

2 billion people are going to the polls this year.  Vote for the candidates who will invest in infrastructure, make public transport affordable for all, change building regulations so that all new builds have solar panel roofs, force water companies to control sewage instead of discharging it into the rivers, etc.  Voting is your chance to choose someone who will do something!

- Pam

Channelling my inner Greta Thunberg

Beyond the Pandemic, one of the biggest themes of the last two years has been Climate Change.  On the one hand, it’s not surprising.  The rising temperatures are finally impacting weather systems, so that politicians and the general public are beginning to notice.  On the other hand, NONE OF THIS IS NEW!  Before I left Australia in 1989, I attended the public session of a conference about the impacts of global warming and pollution.  Yes, 1989!  

A word about that conference.  I don’t remember who sponsored it - my flat mate got the tickets - but the session I attended was in the Dallas Brooke’s Hall in Melbourne and it was packed.  The speakers were from multiple universities and research organisations across Australia and the whole thing was conducted via video conferencing from conference halls in the various state capitals.  The items I remember:  the hole in the Ozone Layer; global warming and its impacts; plastic pollution; the damage done by the pollution from bleaching paper pulp with (?) dioxins; power generation - the big issue in Australia at the time was the flooding of the Franklin River for a hydroelectric power plant - and whether nuclear power was worth the risks.  The other thing that I remember being mentioned was how rubbish bins in Scandinavian countries were divided into into sections for recycling.  (When I landed in Denmark in May 1989 - my first stop in Europe - I remember being very impressed. It was 20+ years before Britain caught up.)

Fast forward to 2019 and, somehow, the wonderful Greta Thunberg captured the world’s attention with her School Strike For Climate Change.  All I can say is “good on you girl!  You rock!”.  What bothers me is that, in the intervening 30 years, so many things have got worse not better.  Why are more plastic bottles thrown away now than in 1989?  (Why did sales of bottled water skyrocket in those 30 years and why do people throw away the bottles instead of reusing/recycling them?) Why has the wild bee population declined, when we know how important they are?  Why is 25% of all food purchased by British households thrown away?  Why is it more difficult now to buy toilet paper made from recycled paper than it was in 1989?   Why is there so much litter in Britain and why hasn’t this situation improved in the last 2 years, when everybody was in Lockdown?  (Seriously, you can’t walk down a street now without seeing a discarded face mask.)

On the political side, I guess it all boils down to expediency.  Most politicians don’t think beyond their next election and their desire to be re-elected. Changing “business as usual” practices won’t get them headlines, whereas being seen to respond to disasters will. Sadly, changing “Business as Usual” is what needs to be done to save the planet but it needs some political will.  At the moment, the Government is a follower; it needs to lead and to put its money where it’s mouth is.  Here are simple things the Government could do:-

1. Change building regulations so that all new builds have the latest version of  photovoltaic cells on their roof (which are 3x more efficient than the originals).  Every new house should also be built with a small S-shaped wind turbine, while blocks of flats/offices and business parks should have at least one large wind turbine.  All new builds need to have off-street parking - say, one space per bedroom - with vehicle recharging points incorporated therein.
2. All Government paper products should be made from recycled paper, whether it’s toilet paper purchased for use in a hospital or a leaflet to be distributed to the general population.  Lead by example.
3. Government procurement has long been driven by price.  Instead, the first factor to consider should be carbon footprint.  If xx costs a few pence more but is made locally, then that should be purchased instead of shipping it in from China.
4. Ban the use of insecticides on state-owned land.  Organic practices only.  (I will permit weed-killers because some invasive species of weed just won’t die without them.)
5. Invest in hydrogen technology and have all Government vehicles hydrogen powered.  Batteries can’t power everything and their creation/recycling generates a massive amount of pollution.  Battery powered lorries/trucks are impractical (very heavy) and battery powered vehicles can’t tow.
6. Ban the shipping of recycling abroad.  Specifically plastics should be recycled “in country”.  Many British councils ship their plastic recycling abroad, where it is found years later, breaking down on a rubbish dump somewhere and hasn’t been recycled. This is a waste of resources, waste of shipping miles and creates another type of pollution problem..

The above is OK for the Government but what about the rest of us?  What can we do?  In an interview last year, Sir David Attenborough was asked “What is the most important lesson you have learned?”  His answer was “Don’t waste.”  Don’t waste resources.  Reduce.  Reuse.  Recycle.  I’ve been putting my money where my mouth is for years, in an attempt to lower my footprint on the planet:-

1. Where available, I buy recycled paper products (toilet paper, kitchen towel).  Everyone should.  Save virgin paper for books. 
2. I’ll wash and re-use the plastic bags that bread/bagels comes in, before eventually recycling them.  
3. Most of my clothes are bought to last, making me a follower of “slow fashion” and they get worn to death.  I look for classic designs, made from natural fibres.   (Today, I’m wearing hand knitted socks, a pair of jeans bought in 2018, a t-shirt purchased in 2003 and a cashmere cardigan purchased in 2019.  My bra is 5 or 6 years old and my knickers about the same.)
4. When I can buy clothing secondhand, I will.  Three of my work suits come from charity shops, as do several t-shirts and my sheepskin jacket.  (I nearly bought another suit from a charity shop yesterday but the jacket was too tight.)
5. When I do buy new clothes, where possible I buy natural fibres and wear those clothes until they die.  (I’d rather be considered classic than fashionable.)
6. Make the best of what I have for as long as it lasts.  For example, my iPhone is 5 years old.  I won’t consider changing it until Apple stop updating the IOS.  Why should I?  It does everything that I want it to do and, last night, updated to IOS 15, guaranteeing me at least another year of use.
7. Buy smart.  I don’t buy something because it’s the latest widget; I buy it because it fulfils multiple purposes and does exactly what I want.  This saves money as well as resources.  It doesn’t matter if it’s clothes, a kitchen widgets or IT kit.  If it doesn’t do what you want it to do, you’ll never use it and/or you end up replacing it three times.
8. Years before electric vehicles were readily available, I went for a car that was fuel efficient, had good build quality and a low carbon footprint.  (When Lucky dies, he’ll probably be replaced by a hybrid.  Meanwhile, I’ll keep him running for as long as possible.  Pollution isn’t just about carbon; it’s about the other components he’s made from, too.)
9. With the exception of weed killer, I garden organically.  (I’ll only use weed killer if the weed burner fails.)
10. Buy local.  Consider where something is grown and/or where it’s made.  Most of the yarn I’ve purchased over the last 10 years was grown and spun in the UK.  Prior to the Pandemic, my veg came from a local farmer’s farm shop.  He also sold me eggs from his mate’s farm, about 5 miles away.      (Sadly, they closed due to the Pandemic.)
11. Grow/make your own.  Not only will you appreciate it more, it cuts the carbon footprint.  There is nothing nicer than a just-harvested potato.
12. Avoid buying food that is heavily processed.  Not only will your body thank you; all those “e-numbers” are chemical additives that have to be manufactured.
13. If you eat meat, then eat the whole animal, offal included.  Anything less is wasteful.  There is more to a chicken than just chicken breast fillets!  Don’t like liver?  Do you eat pate?  Well, that’s liver.  Get over it.  Personally, I love Haggis but many people shy away from it because it’s made from offal.  They’ll eat that offal when it’s in boring, supermarket sausages, but not in something as nice as Haggis.
14. Do the passive things that will cut your carbon footprint. Compost your vegetable peelings and grass cuttings. Wash your laundry in cold water and air dry it.  (We do.  We don’t own a dryer.). Walk to the shops, instead of driving.  (We walk the 1.5 miles to our local Lidl and lug our shopping home in backpacks.).  Use public transport where practical.  (Nobody in their right mind would drive into central London.)

I guess my message is:  do what you can, when you can, and try to mitigate the consequences.  Don’t waste.  If there is waste, recycle it responsibly.

- Pam

Looking for the silver lining

Something I don’t discuss often here is work.  You know I’ve had jobs that I’ve loved and made some fantastic friends in the process.  Well, I was expecting to be out of work right now.  I’m a contractor - not by choice - and I was told in July that my contract wouldn’t be  renewed when it expired at the end of September.  Looking the inevitable firmly in they eye, I polished up my CV, consulted a friend who wrote CV’s for a living, and started applying for jobs.  I even had an interview.

Then the unthinkable happened.  Over the August Bank Holiday Weekend, one of my Finance colleagues had a serious accident and spent three weeks on a ventilator in Intensive Care.  (She’s conscious now, thank God, and breathing on her own, but weak as a kitten with a long recovery ahead.).   When the news broke, I messaged our Financial Controller, “If you need another pair of hands, count me in”.  The rest is history.  I’m now responsible for the cashbook, credit control, cash flow reporting, work-in-progress reporting and trade debtor reporting, together with half-a-dozen balance sheet reconciliations.   With the help of some lovely colleagues, I’ve just survived my first month end. They’re talking about extending my contract to March.

I’m lucky.  I know that.  It doesn’t mean I haven’t faced tough times.  I’ve had to work hard to build a career and a good life.  “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst” has long been my philosophy.  It’s how you face the bad times that define you. You make your own luck.  When I was made redundant in 2016, I gave myself a week to wallow in self-pity - oh how it hurt - and then I deliberately chose to act positively. “Pick yourself up.  Dust yourself off, and start all over again.”    I choose to keep trying and keep seeking ways to do better.  

Everything life throws at you, gives you choices. You can’t control what happens to you but you can control how you react to it. You may be the victim of something horrible, an assault or long term bullying, but you can choose whether you define yourself as a victim or as a survivor.  You control the messages you feed to yourself; that’s what defines your self-worth, not something external.  Sure, people want to be liked and valued by their peers, but if they don’t like themselves then they’ll never be happy.  How many people do you know who are still beating themselves up over something that happened 10, 15, even 25 years ago?  I can name a few.  They haven’t forgiven themselves for an event that everyone else has forgotten.  It’s just another reason to hate themselves.

There are so many people who measure their self worth by Facebook or Instagram, needing the constant affirmation of “likes” to feel whole. The most self-obsessed people are usually the most insecure, too wrapped up in what is happening inside their own head to notice what is happening to the people around them.  A year ago, someone complained to me that their boss never spoke to them and how hurtful it was.  Knowing this person, I wondered how many times they’d actually initiated a conversation with their boss and asked the boss about themself.  (I occasionally give this person a lift to events.  They never ask me about myself or events in my life, and I’ve known them to sulk if they don’t get complimented on their outfit.)

You always have a choice.  You choose how you face the day.  Another thing I choose to do is to treat other people with kindness.  They may be really grumpy, but I’d rather think that they were having a bad day and treat them with civility and kindness.  No, I am not a doormat.   Anger and aggression are defence mechanisms born out of pain.  Sometimes just asking “are you ok?” can diffuse a situation and, if you are prepared to watch and listen, you’d be amazed what you can learn about someone.

- Pam

Housing, slums and other problems

I mentioned in my last post that the kitchen is the workroom of the home.  The thought occurs to me that, maybe, I should explain how I came to that conclusion.  It seems obvious once mentioned, but I only realised when I was watching the BBCs documentary series, The Victorian Slum.

Let me explain... Using a group of volunteers, the BBC recreated life in an East End slum covering the period from 1860 to 1914.  The building they used is derelict, originally part of a fire station. It was the closest they could get to a Victorian "court house", the original type of slum dwelling.  Court houses wrap around a courtyard, hugging the perimeter of the land, with shops and workshops on the ground floor and living spaces on the upper floors.  (There is a surviving example in Liverpool which has been preserved as part of the Museum of Liverpool.)

In Victorian times, families were lucky if they could afford one room to call home.  Housing costs consumed two-thirds of the average weekly wage, with food taking up the other third.  Everyone worked:  the man tramping down to the docks or to the factories, hoping he'd get picked for a day's hard labour; the wife and children doing piecework at home, often making matchboxes or artificial flowers.  Piecework brought with it a double burden since not only did you have to make enough units of sufficient quality to get paid, but you frequently had to purchase the raw materials first. Heaven help you if you were a widow or a single mum, since there were few jobs for women and having children automatically disqualified you from those.  Life was hard.  People frequently went hungry because the first priority was paying the rent.  You were only ever a few days hard work from being out on the street.

The series caught my imagination for a few reasons.  This was the life lived by my great-grandparents and where my grandmother spent part of her childhood.  (My great-aunt was born in the East End.)

The second reason is more telling.  In today's "zero hour contract" world, many people are back to that same hand-to-mouth existence.   The Guardian recently highlighted that there are thousands living in the UK who are technically "in work" so cannot claim benefit but without a guaranteed income who cannot afford to pay for housing.  Worse, they are not alone.  I turned on BBC2 a month ago, catching the tail end of a documentary about the current generation of hidden homeless - the small part of the documentary I watched showed a young mum "sofa surfing" with the father of her child.  She is a student teacher, desperately trying to finish her degree and get a proper job.  He works in maintenance on the London Underground but his monthly take home pay isn't enough to pay for even a modest home and they do not qualify for any state assistance, so rely on the goodwill of family and friends to home them for a few days at a time.

How can this be happening now, fifty years after Cathy Come Home and fifty years after the founding of the housing charity, Shelter?  This should not be happening now! These stories are not unique.  In London, the demand for housing has passed breaking point and property prices are obscene - the average price of a flat is10 times the average salary, while rents have doubled in the 27 years I've been in London.  (Rents were always obscenely high but haven't risen as fast, with a studio flat in Ealing going for £650 per month in 1999.  Now, it'd be around £900 to £1000.).  I cannot find the article to link to, but I remember reading that five out of six recipients of housing benefit is employed.

Salaries have not kept pace with inflation, especially house-price inflation so people cannot afford to buy nor can they now afford to rent.  As far as I can tell, the causes are three fold:-

1. House building failing to keep up with demand.  This is partially due to difficulties with planning laws/green belt legislation and partially due to nimbyism.
2. The Right-to-Buy legislation which penalised councils replacing the housing stock they sold with new properties.   The penalties were horrendous.  They were also "encouraged" to pass their remaining council properties to Housing Associations.
3. When new properties are built, they are often sold off-plan to foreign buyers who are not purchasing them to live in or rent out, but as "investments" to sell later.

I am writing this as a marker in the sand, on the last day of 2016.  I don't have a solution.  Beyond massive wage rises and a huge, state sponsored building program, I can't foresee a way out.

- Pam

Stop Catastrophising

I was watching Sylvester have a meltdown in an episode of  Scorpion today, when the thought occurred to me that one of most important life skills to learn is to stop the thought process of catastrophising.  Www.psychcentral.com defines catastrophising as

Catastrophizing is an irrational thought a lot of us have in believing that something is far worse than it actually is. Catastrophizing can generally can take two forms.  The first of these is making a catastrophe out of a situation...  This kind of catastrophizing takes a current situation and gives it a truly negative “spin.”

The second kind of...Catastrophizing occurs when we look to the future and anticipate all the things that are going to go wrong. We then create a reality around those thoughts...Because we believe something will go wrong, we make it go wrong.

In other words, it's the thought process that blows something out of all proportion in your mind until you're thought processes are so consumed by the "disaster" that you cannot think your way through any alternative paths to get to your real desired outcome.   I'll give you an example:  imagine you're in high school and you want to be a doctor.  You get to your final exams, open the chemistry paper and the first question you see is about something you don't know.  What do you do?  You need to average over 80% in each subject in order to get into med school.

Once the initial panic subsides, you may decide to attempt all the questions you can answer.  "Take the easy cans off the shelf, ladies and gents," as one of my lecturers used to say.  (Best piece of exam advice I was every given.  Thank you, David.).  Who knows?  You may salvage enough marks by taking this approach.  Or you can figure out a different way to get into med school, perhaps by starting a science degree first and transferring...

Or you can burst into tears, run screaming out of the exam and throw everything away.  "My life is ruined!  I'm useless!  I'll never be a doctor!  My father will kill me!".   Catastrophising? Absolutely.  And self destructive, since you've guaranteed that you will definitely fail.  And then where will you be?  Labelling yourself as a failure forever?  (Seriously?  This happened.  One of my school teachers tried desperately to calm the girl down and quarantine her so that she could sit the exam paper once she was calm.  Worse - one friend witnessed a classmate commit suicide in similar circumstances.  He stuck pencils up his nose and slammed them down on the desk...).
 
How do you break the cycle?  Psychcentral give some guidance in the link above, but the best advice I've come across was on a blog, here.    It boils down to breaking the cycle.

- Pam

Don't Brood

If I have rules that I live by, then one of them is "Don't brood on the might-have-beens".  I have never seen the point of constantly re-hashing events in your mind, wishing the outcome was different to reality, while just reopening old wounds in the process.  After the first or second time - when you might possibly identify any mistakes made and figure out how to correct them in future - it seems to me that brooding becomes more about reinflicting pain upon oneself than a learning process.  Ultimately, it gets to the point where you think so little of yourself that you consider yourself such a loser, such a failure, that reinflicting old pain is deemed appropriate. (Or so it seems to me.)

So what has triggered my rant?  One of my team is starting maternity leave shortly and two weeks ago, I conducted interviews for her maternity cover.  Three interviews in, I found the perfect project accountant - absolutely wonderful, would hire her in a heartbeat.  Then my line-management pulls the plug.  Can't be done - we have spare capacity in Glasgow that has to be utilised first, etc, etc... 

I argue.  I lose.  I speak to the boss's boss.  I still lose.  I wander around furious for a few hours.  The implications to me are clear:  ever since we moved regions there has been a looming power struggle over my project accounting team, because we aren't based in Glasgow and not part of their project accounting hierarchy.  I know this.  I have always known this.  (I also know that regardless of what happens to my project accounting team, my job is safe because my business will still need a Finance Manager and that role is outside the power struggle.)

Reluctantly, I break the news to my team and deal with the fallout.  Suddenly, I have three people worried about their jobs and a battle of attrition as work drifts north.  If I have any say in the matter, that won't happen, but I know it is a battle I won't be able to win if the bosses decide it is to happen.

Firmly, I remind myself that there is no point brooding.  Brooding over whether I will eventually lose the team is just counterproductive - it won't help me stop it.  I can't control what will happen; I can only ensure that I do my best to demonstrate why it is important to keep my team together, by providing the best support for our business.  With that in mind, I consciously turned my thoughts firmly to how to best maintain business as usual.  The job goes on...

You can't always control what happens to you, but you can control how you think about it and how you deal with it.

- Pam

Angel of Death

One of the constant descriptions you hear about nurses is “they’re angels”, which would be rapidly followed by a comment about how “nursing is a noble profession”. When I was nursing, there were times when both statements would annoy me. I remember snapping at my dad once, saying “there’s nothing noble about watching a dying man trying to tell his wife he loves her when she won’t damn well listen!”.

Because I spent much of my nursing career working on cancer wards, together with a year working in Radiotherapy And Oncology Outpatients, I rapidly came to the conclusion that, if I was an angel then I was an angel of death, since I spent most of my time trying to make the dying comfortable.

I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. It can’t be helped - several of my friends have either lost a parent this year or are experiencing the pain of watching a parent undergo life-prolonging treatment for terminal cancer. Perhaps it’s our age. It’s the alternative mid-life crisis; not so much “life is passing me by -what do I do with myself?” but instead “I’m not old enough to lose my mum/dad! How can this happen to me?”.

As a friend, I have learned that the best thing to do is listen, hug your friend and ply them with tea/suitable beverage. Offers of help need to be specific: “do you need me to collect your brother from the airport?” is easier for a grieving mind to process than being asked “is there anything I can do to help?”.

On Saturday, I will be singing in a service to celebrate the life of a dear friend’s dad; a lovely man who recently lost an 18 month battle with pancreatic cancer. I consider it an honour and a privilege to have been asked. It is my gift to my friend and her family. I hope they gain a level of comfort from it.

- Pam











PS: The other life lesson I’ve learned is that marriage makes things far easier if your life-partner dies – from organising the funeral to dealing with the deceased’s estate, being married to your partner will make things much, much easier. There is no such thing as de facto marriage in this country, so if there isn’t a will the surviving partner will lose everything. Even if there is a will, they won’t be sheltered from inheritance tax on the estate. (And don’t get me started on hospitals/doctors who refuse to give spouse status to the non-married life-partner of a patient….Red rag to a bull, that….)

Marry the man = Marry the job

Once upon a time, I had a friend who was dating a sports journalist. After a few months, she started getting very sulky about him spending most weekends of "the season" working. Her complaint was that you didn't date someone in order to spend most weekends alone; you dated them to have someone to spend weekends with! At the time, I was a bit mystified - surely she knew what his job entailed before they became a serious item? Hadn't she considered how it might impact on their time together? To not do so seemed to me to be as silly as those Army or Navy wives who complain when their husbands are sent abroad on a tour of duty. You knew that their job was their life when you got involved with them, so why exactly are you complaining?

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague asked me whether DH minded the long hours I put in and the travel that I do. The question surprised me*. It could be interpreted on several levels, although I am sure the original intention was just curiosity and a chance to compare someone-else's circumstances to his own. Of course, in a male dominated industry, there is always the sexist angle that we expect wives to put up with travelling husbands but vice-versa is rare enough to be an object of curiosity. However, I don't think that was his intention. Still, he got me thinking - what are the assumptions we make about our relationships? And that reminded me of my friend, above.

Maybe I am different from other people, but I have always assumed that you have to accept your partner as they are - and that includes accepting the impositions of their job. Marry the man; marry the job, as it were. Then again, I started my working life doing shift-work, in a job that required a degree of obsession to enable you to do it (nursing). Perhaps it has given me a different perspective. I don't understand when women (and it is usually women) complain about the hours their husbands put in, but they're happy to enjoy the benefits of the income his hard work pulls in. You can't have it both ways.

In engineering, there often isn't much of a choice - you want the job, then you have to work at site, miles from home. It isn't a lifestyle choice; it's a choice between earning an income or being unemployed; paying the mortgage or worrying about where the next meal comes from. Even if you are a permanent employee, there are only so many times you can turn down working away before it damages your billability and your career. Oh, and marks you down as dead-wood for the next round of redundancies.

However, a marriage is a partnership. If a job offer or promotion comes through that involves longer hours/weekend working/working away/a long commute then you have to discuss it. When the job is a lifestyle, both partners have to have buy-in, even though reality is there may be little or no choice. It is what it is. But both parties need to accept that. And accept that, if you love your partner, then you need to love their job too.

- Pam




* The answer, when I asked DH, was "No" but he's a bit fed up with dropping me off for early flights.

Musical memories

One of the things that set humans apart from the other animals is that we make music.  There is evidence that we made music long before the Neanderthals died out - I think Howard Goodall's History of Music series on the BBC cites a 28,000 year old bone flute!  Possibly, it's something we discovered early on, not long after the first ape decided it was better to live on the plains and sprint across them on two legs with your arms pumping hard.

However it came about, music can be evocative, triggering memories of people, events and emotions almost - but not quite - forgotten.  How many of us tuck away the memory of a boyfriend together with the music you heard on the radio all that summer, so that when you hear a certain song again years later, all the memories of him come flooding back?  How many couples have "their song"?

On the flip side to that, how many times do you find yourself remembering a particular song, after certain events have occured?  I grew up by the beach, so a hot summer's day accompanied by the smell of the sea will always make me think of "Beach Baby" by First Class, and going down the beach with my mates during the long summer days of high school.

When the gloom and cold get to me and work seems to be one long day after another, there  is a particular song that plays in my head.  It's the words of Banjo Paterson's Clancy of the Overflow set to music by some Australian country singer.  While I have vague memories of a single being released around 1980 (possibly this one), the version in my head is one which was played live to me and some classmates on our year 12 camp.  We were high up in the snowy mountains near Gelantipy and the guy who performed it belonged to the campsite.  I don't know how many times during a long and frustrating day at work, I've heard him singing in my head:-

I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
    Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
   Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all.

......

And I somehow fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
   Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cashbook and the journal -
   But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of "The Overflow".*

It's my escapist fantasy poem.  The music is little more than the hook upon which the poetry was reeled into my mind. I've lost count of how many offices I've sat in and recalled those words, wishing like the Banjo that I could replace the endless grind of "the cashbook and the journal" with wide open fields and the bush.

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
   In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
  And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.*

I don't get homesick often.  But I was chatting with a colleague about Australia, trying to put into words how I feel about my homeland, and ended up quoting poetry to him, starting with Dorothea Mackellar's My Country  (still under copyright so read it via the link) followed by Clancy of the Overflow.  (Yes, I did find myself wondering whether I must be crazy to quote poetry to one of the guys at work, but it didn't seem to go down too badly.) 

Anyway, the above is all a longwinded way to explain why I've just wasted an hour trying to find a recording that matches - even vaguely - the recording of Clancy of the Overflow that plays in my head. There are dozens of recordings on Amazon: some performances that just made me cringe; others that reminded me of the Australian country dances craze that surfaced in the 1980's on the eve of the Bicentenary.  I want the one that will evoke the smell of eucalyptus trees on a summer's evening mingling with the smell of wood-smoke from a fire that's just been lit because the temperature is dropping rapidly after sunset.  I ended up with this version by "The Colonial Boys".  It's not bad, but I can't smell the wood-smoke.  I think I am going to have to keep looking.

- Pam





* Extracts from Clancy of the Overflow by Andrew Barton ("Banjo") Paterson, first published in "The Bulletin, 21 December 1889.

Belated post for St Valentine's Day

(I meant to write this for St Valentine's Day but lack of time got in the way.  This is a post where I pull myself up to my full 5 feet 4 inches and dispense the wisdom I've accumulated over the years and ramble on about love....)

In the recent past, three incidents have occured which got me thinking about the subject of "Love" and what it means.  The first was a meal with a friend where she described her last-but-one and last-but-two relationships as "love-less". (Never met the most recent guy.) Both relationships lasted 3 or 4 years and, well, at the time she definitely fooled me. I tried to get to the bottom of what she meant, without asking intrusive questions that might shut her up, and was left with more unasked questions than answers.

The second was this very thoughtful post about love and relationships by my friend, Diana. (Please, go away and read her post and then come back.  OK?)

The third was a conversation with another friend, one of my fellow sopranos from choir.  She told me about bumping into an old friend recently, a man to whom she was very much attracted.  The problem was that he has a very different belief system to her own - something she found abhorrent - and she was having a difficult time getting her head around her abhorrence and why not compromising her own beliefs is important.

Anyway, it all got me thinking...

My philosophy regarding love has always been that it doesn't matter if I end up hurt so long as a) I don't hurt anyone I care about in the process, and b) I can get to 95 and say proudly to myself "Wow! I lived. I had a great time!".  If you don't risk love and the pain that comes from broken relationships then you aren't living; you are just existing.

As far as I can tell, real "love" is based on four things:-

1. Sexual attraction. Often this is the hardest part. For the last 20 years, I've worked in male dominated environments with some really nice guys. At times I was single but I've spent most of that time with DH.  From all that time, I can count on my fingers the colleagues whose mere presence makes/made my pulse race. Pheromones play a large part in that, the rest is indefinable. And, surprisingly, you can feel the pull even if you're happily/deeply/enthrallingly in love with someone else.
   
2. Genuine liking. You can like someone, even fancy them, but if there's something you don't like about their attitudes or opinions it will niggle and eat away at you. I don't mean they have to like everything you do, just have considered opinions you can respect. It's how you instinctively respond to the throw away remarks - don't belittle that. For instance, on one date, the guy made a throw away remark that made me realise that I couldn't trust him. It's the throw away remarks that give real clues to someone's character. And if you don't like someone's character, that's a real turn-off sexually.
   
3. Genuine caring for the other party. It's about putting the other person's feelings before your own, say when you don't go to that party because it'd be awkward with his kids and ex-wife. We've all watched-from-the-sidelines relationships where one party is really demanding and the other is always in a spin trying to please them. And that's not a loving relationship; it's abuse. There's a song Leanne Rimes recorded with the lyrics "When it's all over, it's not over for you...When you love enough for both of you, no one else has to do...". It is a song about a one-sided relationship and when I think about my relationship with Dumbo, that song always plays in my head. I loved and cared about him, he only cared about himself/what he could get out of the relationship.
   
   
4. Trust/honesty. In order to have trust, both parties have to be honest with themselves and each other. We all know someone who was so desperate to be in a relationship that they "settled" for someone who'd "do" and, years later, when the relationship split up a) they tell you that it was a loveless relationship and b) nobody-else is surprised.
   
   Also, with the trust thing: I've spent quite a lot of time working away from home, staying in hotels with my male colleagues. (Engineering is like that.) I'll spend those evenings in the bar/restaurant/on a pub crawl/watching sport with the guys, being "one of the lads". If DH didn't trust me, those evenings would leave him sitting at home in an agony of jealousy, which would eat away at our relationship like a cancer. (Incidentally, you know when you're one of the lads when, at the Christmas Party, they do a double take when they see you all glamm'ed up because they've stopped thinking of you in that way.)
   
   And,  finally, on the subject of trust. You have to trust yourself that nothing will happen if, when thrown together on an away trip, you or the guy-who-gets-your-pulse-racing are already in relationships with people you love and care about. It's being honest about what is more important to you - a quick fling or your existing relationship. (Also, affairs never work out well.  Might as well just enjoy spending the next few years with an added zing in your work relationship.)

Gross generalisation time:-

• From personal observation, women often confuse lust and sex with "love", while men appear to have the capacity to compartmentalise them into different emotional boxes. 
• Women get so hung up on finding Mr Right that they scare guys off and ruin potentially great relationships. Mr Right-for-now is enough. If he's going to turn into Mr Right-forever then it will happen without worrying about it/brooding over it/choosing your engagement ring on some arbitrary timetable.
• On the flip side to that, you get women who spend years with a bloke they like but with whom the lust has worn off very quickly because they perceive it to be better to have someone than no-one. Once upon a time, I worked with an office junior who confided that her new boyfriend had just been arrested for beating up his previous girlfriend.  She was so happy to finally have someone in her life that she couldn't understand why we were all so horrified.  In order to make her understand, I actually asked her, "do you think so little of yourself that you're happy to settle for someone who beats up his girlfriends?"
• You cannot predict the future. Nobody can. Whatever armchair psychologists say, people do not conform to sets of rules - everyone is different and every relationship must be approached on its own terms. You cannot predict one person's behaviour from how another behaves in similar circumstances. However, if you watch someone's behaviour over a period of time, you may discern a pattern that is applicable to them. (Anyone know a serial committment-phobe?)
• If you actually like someone and fancy them, tell them!  Women drop lots of hints but they never actually say what they want or mean.  How can the poor bloke decipher whether you like him or not, if you don't actually say it?
• Nothing is scarier to a man than a woman out on the pull, or vice-versa.  Seriously, nothing will put a man off faster than being dressed up like a WAG, combing the bar looking for a date, while giving off the aura of "desperate".  Want to know how that appears to a man?  Think of all the sleazy blokes who try to chat you up doing their best Howard Walowitz.  Got it?

The critical thing is, make friends with members of the opposite sex and love will follow when you least expect it.  Trust me on this.  I'm married to a wonderful guy and I have a lot of male friends.  And it was through one of those friends that I met DH.  I do not have men falling over me every time I walk in a room, a la Marilyn Monroe.  I am not a stunning beauty. (I think I look "OK", but that's all.)  But I spend a lot of time with men - frequently, I'm the only woman in the group - and I know men like me.  (To quote one colleague:  "You're pretty. You like beer and football.  And you cook. You are an engineer's wet dream!".)


Whilst I know anecdotally that some people have had success with internet dating, virtually everyone I know who is in a stable relationship met their partner through work or friends or shared interests.  It sounds trite, but if you're looking for a man go where the men are:  learn about football and rugby and cricket; play role-playing-games; take up martial arts; join the gym and lift weights.  These are places where single men are found.  Make friends with men and, sooner or later, you'll meet one who has that certain something and thinks you do too.

(If you're a bloke and you are looking for love and you can read music and pitch a note, for God's sake join a choir.  Not only is every amateur choir in the country desperate for male singers, choirs and drama groups are where you'll find the single women. Also dance classes and salsa nights. Trust me on this.)

If you are looking for love, good luck.  I hope the above is helpful to you.

- Pam

Interior Lives, Exterior People

*** Spoiler Alert ***

If you are a fan of NCIS and haven't seen episode 2, season 9 (a.k.a. "Restless"), read on at your peril.  This blog post contains spoilers and a link to a full plot synopsis.

***End of Spoiler Alert ***

Last night, after DH and I watched episode 2, season 9 of NCIS, I fell asleep thinking about how everyone has interior and exterior lives.  The episode includes a storyline about a delusional 27 year old woman, who has been living as a teenage girl, running away from her foster families just before her "18th" birthday and then establishing herself as a 16-year-old in a new foster family somewhere else.  She truly believed she was that teenager; it wasn't an impersonation or an act.

Anyway, it got me thinking. We all have a fantasy life and a reality life, but most of us can distinguish between the two. Out fantasy life includes our internal dialogue - the things we can't say or act out.  Here's a typical example from my life:  Tuesday 6-ish pm, my New Boss phones me.  Outwardly, I'm my usual cheerful, chatty, polite self. We talk for 10 minutes. Inside my head, I'm thinking "Will you please just get to the point man and go away!  I'm busy. Got at least an hour's more work to do before I can go home.  I'm already well into overtime and you're wasting my time."  Of course, I say none of those things.  But that's what I'm trying to describe when I talk about internal and external lives:  internally the quiet guy in Corporate may daydream about how he'd seduce the new secretary in Legal; externally, he's still trying to find out her name and if she's single. 

Young children act out their fantasy lives all the time.  As they play a box becomes a castle, a house, a king's throne and then a boat.  They live the experience, peopling the world around them with characters from whichever plot they're imagining.  How many young boys have jumped off the shed roof, believing they're Superman and can fly?

I think a sign of growing up is the disassociation between fantasy and reality; it's knowing the difference between what's in my head and what's actually happening.  It's also knowing that actions have consequences.  For many, knowing the difference between reality and fantasy is the definition of sanity.  

We all - all of us - have a real life and a fantasy life that just exists in our heads.  For most people, the borders between the two are distinct and the fantasy life is kept well hidden, confined to daydreams or the inner dialogue where you're reliving that conversation with your boss/husband/colleague and wishing you'd said x, y or z.  It's what we feed when we read novels or watch films.  I don't know about you, but if I can't identify with the main character(s) and lose myself in their story, I lose interest and stop reading/watching.


Humans have been telling each other stories for thousands of years. Novelists are people who can take their interior, fantasy world, put it down on paper and tell convincing stories with it.  It's a gift.   A good story passes the reality test, i.e. it gives a "yes" answer to the following question: if confronted with those circumstances would I or someone I know act in that way?  Doesn't matter if it's a modern murder mystery or set in a feudalistic fantasy world where an elite troop ride dragons out to fight the enemy.  The characters have to act credibly.  (As an aside, years ago, I tried to read The Da Vinci Code.  Whilst I could get beyond the annoying chapter structure - seriously, one paragraph = one chapter?? - I couldn't get beyond the point where the hero walks into a bank in the middle of France within a day or so of the story beginning and the conspirators know who he is and are expecting him.  Just not credible.)

Where am I going with all this?  Last week, I attended the role-playing games convention, Conception.  Four days of battling demons and enemy legions, from the safety of a comfy chair around a table in the New Forest, using multi-sided dice as your weapons of fate.  Trying to explain RPGs to a muggle is difficult, although the Wikipedia definition is a good starting point:

A role-playing game (RPG and sometimes roleplaying game^[1][2]) is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development.^[3] Actions taken within many games succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines.

At Conception, as at most games conventions, we were using pregenerated characters.   The interesting thing happens in a campaign game when people generate their own.   Often you get clues as to the person they are in their own inner fantasies.  I know one man who always plays a female character and she always the same: a cross between Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Wonder Woman.  It didn't take long to realise that she is his fantasy woman, the one he'd like to seduce.  Another man I know always plays the military hero type: his characters will always do something rash like a HALO jump at night when they have a 5% skill in parachute.  (On that particular campaign, we invented the phrase "going out for an alibi".  While he was off doing something risky, our characters would go out for a meal in a public place, thus establishing their alibis and proving they couldn't possibly be involved in his stupid plan.)

Me?  Often the clue is in the name of my characters:  Dana Scully, Ziva.  I like to play strong, smart females.  Frequently science types.   What does that say about me?

- Pam

Get a Life

Some people (usually women) would consider it a sad fact of my life, that gossip magazines bore me to tears. I've just flipped through someone's copy of OK magazine and neither know nor care about 99% of the people covered. The remaining 1% tempts me to protest: "Leave them alone!", as blatant speculation about members of the Royal Family's private lives kick off another round of unfounded rumours.

Why do gossip magazines sell? What drives our celeb-mad culture? It can't all be down to teenage girls searching for their identity, finding someone to idolise and emulate. My theory is that it is similar to the appeal of soap operas: women living life vicariously instead of going out and seizing it in both hands. To me, an obsession with the soaps/gossip mags speaks volumes about living in a fantasy world, waiting for Prince Charming to sweep them away from their dull, boring existence. When will they grow up?

I reckon I'd grown out of all that before my 21st birthday. I was a nurse and a singer in a semi-professional choir. Life was full and busy. There were days when it felt as if we were living in a soap opera; so much drama was occurring. Dealing with the ill and their families during the day, then living the university chorister life by night. Going to parties after finishing a late shift, getting 3 hours sleep and working the early shift the next day (even then, I wasn't much of a drinker so I was inevitably sober). Singing with major orchestras, well known conductors and soloists.

It was intense. It was fun. It was living life to the full. And it taught me that living life second hand, through a tv soap or reality tv program is not living life at all. Live life first hand, in the now, experiencing every minute. Seize it with both hands and chase your dreams. Live your adventures don't just watch them.

Writing as therapy

A girl sat opposite me on the Tube. She's unremarkable - thin, long dark hair, pale skin. Cold. From her bag, she produced an A5 notebook and started to write. Glancing furtively at the lefthand page, I see she's writing a list. I can read the first item: "my apparently awful ability to remember experiences".  From my distance of 4 feet away, I can tell that the rest of her list is consists of additional "faults" and/or a written rebutal to them.  Someone has been snarkily chipping away at her and now she was quietly fighting back.

Writing as therapy. 

Memories flowed:  I remember doing it too, back in the dim-and-distant past, when Dumbo was playing his mind-games:  start a list, leave some space,  change pens and write a rebuttal in the space you left.  Counter the negative with something positive. List the nastiness, the petty cruelties, the times (s)he hurt you and didn't notice or care. On a different page, or at the other end of the notebook, write a list of positive things about yourself.  Doesn't matter if it is something simple like "I've got good teeth" - anything to strengthen your sense of self and ensure that someone-else's perverted view of you doesn't engulf your entire life. Make a list of goals and plans: how you'll escape; who you want to be in 6 months, a year, two years time.  Hide the notebook where it can't be found and your rebellion exposed - in your bag, probably.

I watched the girl furtively over my knitting.  I wanted to tell her that she isn't alone; that others have been there too and survived.  And that she is far more worthy than the person who hurt her.  To do that, though, would have been to admit to invading her privacy and to possibly hurt/embarrass her further.  It would also have meant popping the bubble that is travelling on the London Underground, where everyone is in a privacy bubble, travelling in a world of their own.  I could not do that to her.  All I could do was sit and silently wish her well, when she got off the train.

I hope she is OK and that her writing gives her the strength she needs to stand her ground and protect herself.

- Pam

Ramblings

Lurgy

 I'm so tired.  I'm carrying some sort of cold bug that just won't go beyond the first few, throaty symptoms.  I'll feel rough for a few hours and then it eases back for a while.   This has been going on for over a week.

Last Monday, my throat was so swollen, I skipped rehearsal and went to bed early.  Gradually felt better on Tuesday, rough on Wednesday and OK by Friday.  This Monday, I spent most of the day with a splitting headache, partially masked by painkillers.  Couldn't miss another rehearsal, but felt more and more knackered as the evening wore on.  I yawned my way home, went to bed fairly quickly and promptly woke up at 4am.  Couldn't get back to sleep.   Felt like a zombie for a large part of yesterday then, at 3pm, my Commercial Director bought me a cappacino.  The caffeine kicked in around 5 and didn't wear off until  midnight.  Today, I was woken by the rain but felt human until just before I left work.

Right now, I'm peering at the computer, feeling slightly feverish with a sore throat.  I haven't had an on-off, dragged-out illness-in-stages like this since the winter before I got diagnosed with hypothyroidism.  I just wish the damn thing would either develop or go.  I'm sick of it.

==========================
Channel 4

Last night, I watched 27 Dresses on E4 (one of the TV stations controlled by Channel 4).  Good film.  Very funny. Cute leading man, James Marsden.  Almost totally ruined by Channel 4's insistence that they insert 5 advertisements every 10 minutes, cutting scenes in the middle, without sensitivity to the story line.  They do it by the clock.  You can set your watch by it.

I hate Channel 4 for this!  I remember the night they totally ruined The Elephant Man.   They don't care about the film or their audience, just about their advertising revenue.  I rarely watch programs on Channel 4 - wonder why?

==========================
Eye Candy

 Talking about James Marsden, I spent a considerable part of the film thinking he looks a lot like the poster-boy of English cricket, Alistair Cook.

 Alistair, when you cricket career finishes, I hope Hollywood comes calling.

========================

Toying with an idea - PipneyJane's Wartime Experiment


World War 2 is back on our screens in the form of the Wartime Farm on the BBC.  The thread discussing it on MSE got me thinking.  Five years ago, Thriftlady did a ration book challenge - feeding her family for (I think) 2 weeks on the same quantity of rations they'd have got in 1942.  Could we do something similar?  Who would be willing to pretend it's September 1939 again? War has just been declared and rationing is imminent.

These are the ration quantities per person, per week:-
Meat –this was rationed in money not by weight but it was roughly equivalent to 12 oz mince/stewing steak. Chicken was scarce. Offal and sausages were not rationed but hard to get. Wild game such as rabbit was not rationed.
Milk - 3 pints
Sugar ½ lb
Butter – 2 oz
Margarine – 4 oz (for this challenge can up the butter ration to 6 oz instead of using margarine)
Cooking fat (dripping/lard) – 3 oz (for this challenge can substitute up to 3 fl oz oil)
Cheese (English hard cheese) – 3 oz
Bacon and ham - 4 oz (or have an extra 4oz of meat instead)
Eggs - 1 Dried egg -¼ packet (equivalent to 3 eggs so use 3 eggs)
Sweets and chocolate - 2 oz
Jam- 3 oz Tea - 2 oz (18 teabags) (need an equivalent for coffee)
There was a points system - 16 per person per month – which allowed you to buy tinned goods, orange juice, cereals, rice and pulses. Off ration were: bread (finally rationed in 1947), potatoes, oats, fresh fish, and homegrown fruit and veg.

As to the rules for the game, so far, I've come up with these:-

• All mod-cons are allowed if you already own them (freezers, food processors, microwaves, etc). 
• You don't have to buy a whole week's ration every week.  If you routinely only shop once a month, then buy a month's worth then.
• You can eat out of the freezer or the pantry but limit your weekly quantities to those of the ration.
• You can stockpile a week's ration, but you can't spend one in advance, i.e. you can save up your chocolate ration for several weeks in order to purchase the chocolate needed to make coconut rough for Easter.
• You don't have to eat wartime recipes, just adapt what you normally eat to fit the restrictions of the rations.  (However, the various recipe collections such as Marguerite Patten's Victory Cookbook are a very good resource if you need ideas.)
• Petrol/gasoline rations.  Since I'm dependent on a car for work, I was thinking 1 tank of fuel per car per week.
• Clothing rations.  How about throwing in a Fashion on the Ration challenge as well?  The 1941 clothing ration was 66 coupons. (Yarn and fabric already owned doesn't count towards your ration.) This is what your coupons could buy according to Fashion Era:-

Item Of Clothing	Women	Girls
Lined mackintosh or coat over 28"	14	11
Under 28" short coat or jacket	11	8
Frock, gown or dress of wool	11	8
Frock, gown or dress of other fabric	7	5
Bodice with girls skirt or gym tunic	8	6
Pyjamas	8	6
Divided skirt or skirt	7	5
Nightdress	6	5
Dungarees or overalls	6	4
Blouse, shirt, sports top, cardigan or jumper	5	3
Pair of slippers, boots or shoes	5	3
Other garments including corsets	5	2
Petticoat or slip, cami knickers or combinations	4	3
Apron or pinafore	3	2
Scarf, gloves, mittens or muff	2	2
Stockings per pair	2	1
Ankle socks per pair	1	1
1 yard wool cloth 36"wide	3	3
2 ounces of wool knitting yarn	1	1

I'm still not sure I'll go through with this.

- Pam

Mean Girls

(I have been stewing over this for the best part of 10 months.  I think sufficient time has elapsed, now, to tell you all about it.)

Just before Christmas, I met up with a group of girlfriends for our annual Christmas Night Out. We are a group of five successful women in our forties. I was late and flustered (got held up in traffic) but within five minutes of my arriving, it turned into the female equivalent of a pissing contest. One woman (I'll call her TopDog) had to be better/a bigger martyre/a saint/more successful/bigger-spender than the rest of us. Whatever it was about TopDog had to win the comparison contest. My favourite episode from that evening was not long after I arrived, when the others were commisserating with me about my journey: TopDog announced that she'd had the furthest to travel to get to the restaurant, which was blatently untrue. "No you haven't", I responded, "I've just driven in from Reading, which is 40 miles away. You've only come 20 miles". If looks could kill, I'd be pushing up daisies.


The evening deteriorated from that point onwards, with TopDog demanding admiration and to be the centre of attention at every turn, making more and more outlandish comments just to get a rise out of people. (Seriously? Why else declare that your latest, uncircumcised partner was so much more sexually stimulating than your previous circumcised one simply because he has a foreskin? Who cares?) At one point, late in the evening, she even started a sentence irrelevantly with "Well, speaking as the only mother here....", which was designed to be a dig at me (several rounds of infertility treatment) and at another friend (I'll call her Placator) who is also not childless by choice. I demanded to know "And that means what exactly? What are you really saying?" and got no answer.

The worst part of the evening, though, was the half an hour TopDog laid into Placator bullying her, criticising her for her lack of love-life and for not wanting to date anything in sight. The rest of us sat there speachless. It was a horrible, nasty thing to do. We tried to change the subject and it kept coming back, time and again. I couldn't think of a thing to say to stop her. Eventually, one of the others said, "Friends don't try to "fix" friends," to which we all agreed and that finally changed the subject. (Honestly, I nearly accosted a total stranger in the Ladies Toilet to ask her what to do. I was at my wits end.)

I drove home that night fuming with anger. Still feel it now. In the morning, I sent Placator a text message apologising that I hadn't stood up to TopDog on her behalf. When TopDog sent out an email saying "That was fun! Must do it again!", I replied that I hadn't enjoyed the evening and that I though she owed Placator an apology for laying into her for half an hour. My exact words were:

Personally, I didn't have a good night. I didn't enjoy what I witnessed. You obviously have no idea how hurtful you were being last night. You laid into xxxx for nearly half an hour. In that entire time, I'm surprised she only came back at you with one snarky remark. And she immediately apologised for it. Sorry, but I think you owe her an apology. You need to learn when to stop.

The response can be summarised as: "F.... Off. And don't bother to contact me again.". At which point I congratulated myself for saving myself a Christmas card. When I talked to the others, the response I got was largely positive. It needed to be said. And I'm glad I won't have her in my life any longer. You know when someone is a good person and a good friend when go to their wedding/birthday/family celebrations and see how many of the people there have known them for years - looking back at the time I've known TopDog, she has virtually no long term friends other than the girls who were at that meal. Says a lot really.
 
My only regret is that I didn't tell TopDog to stop. I was brought up to believe that I should stand up for the defenceless and shouldn't stand by when someone-else is in trouble. And that includes standing up to bullies like TopDog.


Life is too short to worry about the TopDogs unless one is unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of their attentions. I hope you have managed to escape such nastiness.

- Pam

A sobering thought for the day

A couple of hours ago, I was ravenously hungry and waiting for the clock to tick around to lunchtime.  Something reminded me of a post on one of the forums I frequent.  The writer had recently married and moved in with her husband. They had virtually no food in their home and, with the exception of £10 she'd managed to raise via eBay sales, no money to take them through the week until payday.   In addition, her employer had recently folded and she had learned that she was not entitled to contribution-based benefits such as Job Seeker's Allowance or statutory redundancy money because the company had not paid over tax or National Insurance Contributions that they'd deducted from their employees. She'd been crying because her husband had gone to work without breakfast and had had nothing to take for lunch.  The forum gave her some good advice about spending her precious £10 on potatoes, oats, eggs, milk, discounted bread, etc, as well as on how to stretch the few items she had in stock. 

 While waiting for lunch, I started to ponder what I'd do in the writer's shoes.  The biggest difference between her and me is that I have a store cupboard.  When I fed two adults in February 1991 on £25, I had some food already in stock:  flour, some tinned goods, spices, sugar, pasta, rice, as well as a few things in the freezer.  And I worked for a company that fed me lunch.  If I'd been truly desperate, I could have made myself toast for breakfast at work, too.   There were days later on, say in 1995, when I ran out of cash and only had 10p to buy some apples for lunch, but I always had food at home and I could have brought my lunch into work if I'd been more organised.  (Different employer by then.)  My store cupboard is a lot bigger now and I have a freezer that is so full of food, I have to play Freezer Tetris whenever I try to take something out.  Truth be told, as long as I was allowed £20 to buy some milk, eggs and veggies (mainly potatoes, onions, mushrooms and carrots), I could get by without spending anything else on food until May.  Or, possibly, June.  But then I'm not particularly narrow minded about food; although we are meat eaters, we eat a lot of pulses-based dishes as well as a reasonable amount of fish and cheese.  

 What would really panic me, would be not having cooking facilities. I could probably get by without an oven and without a microwave, although I use my microwave-convection oven every week, but not having a hob to cook on would almost kill me.  Yes, I could light the barbecue and cook on that but I'd need something for fuel.  (And it might not be strong enough to hold my saucepans.)  If the loss of power was due to some regional disaster or war, would I have to quickly scavenge all my wood supplies and barricade them inside my house?  Isn't that what happened in war-torn Europe during/after the Second World War? And in Kosovo? Another thought:  when the television cameras focus on the faces of the starving and hungry in famine-torn parts of the world,  do we consider that having walked hundreds/thousands of miles to get to the refuge camp, they might not have a pot to cook in? Or any fuel? How many women were raped, maimed or murdered in Darfur because they dared venture out of the refugee camps to find fuel so that they could cook their UN rations?  

It's a sobering thought, risking it all just so you can feed your family and yourself. It certainly puts any recent episode of "I wants it!!" into perspective.  If the dice were rolled differently, that could be me or you or family or friends.  As my mother used to say, "There but for the grace of God, go I". 

- Pam

How I'd Do The Budget

Wednesday is Budget Day in the UK. Since I have absolutely no influence whatsoever, I thought I'd blog about what I'd do, if I was Chancellor.  Most of it is to do with tidying up the tax system:-

• Make everyone file a tax return annually and link the receipt of as many benefits as possible to that.  At the moment, less than a quarter of the UK population files a tax return.  HM Revenue and Customs spends a lot of its time chasing it's tail, collecting tax information from multiple sources and trying to cross reference it without a main data key (i.e. a unique tax number for each person).  In addition, we have multiple different regimes dishing out benefits such as tax credits for low income earners (HMRC), housing benefit (local councils), pension credit (Department of Work and Pensions), etc, etc. Each regime requires yet another set of forms, often duplicating each other. Many people don't claim benefits to which they are entitled. Others get take advantage of the lack of joined up dots and claim things to which they are not entitled or dodge taxes altogether. This will be eliminated if you use an annual tax return as the basis for all benefit allocations without the need for further applications, i.e. if you are a pensioner on a very low income, you would automatically receive pension credit without needing to apply for it separately. It will also eliminate a raft of bureaucracy since a lot of the benefit assessments can be handled automatically by the tax return software. (HMRC provides free electronic tax return filing, which automatically calculates your tax liability/refund.)
• All couples, both married and cohabiting, to quote each other's unique tax reference numbers on their tax returns. This would allow benefits to be assessed that require information on both incomes without compromising privacy or the principles of independent taxation (eg working families tax credit).
• Automatic transfer of unused personal tax allowances between couples.
• Increase the personal allowance to £10,000. That was an election promise. It will increase people's disposable incomes by £100 a month and, therefore, stimulate the economy. In addition it'd take the poorest section of the population out of the tax net.
• Increase the threshold for the 40% tax band to £50,000 to help the "squeezed middle".  Again, this would put hard-earned Pounds into people's pockets, stimulating the economy.
• Decrease fuel duty by 8p per litre.  Once you factor in VAT, the total decrease would be 10p.  This would lower inflation, since over 90% of everything is transported by road.  (Note, today I paid 147.9p/litre for diesel.  A year ago, it was 131p.  That is money that is being sucked out of everyone's pockets but it is particularly felt by the poorer sections of society since food prices are being inflated to cover transportation costs.)
• Impose stamp duty on the sellers of homes as well as on the buyers.
• Remove the exemption from stamp duty on property that companies currently enjoy.
• Change the basis for funding the NHS. (This is a whole rant on its own.). I'd scrap the current unpopular proposals and, instead, just change the basis on which the NHS is funded. The change is simple: hospitals, doctors and other NHS services only get paid when they treat patients. The current model pays out whether patients are treated or not so patient care isn't the primary focus - maintaining their budgets is. In addition, companies and units are awarded expensive contracts to provide services exclusively in an area.  Under my model, any licensed medical organisation could do NHS work, so long as it was prepared to accept NHS pay rates and deliver the accepted levels of care. Nobody gets awarded expensive contracts. Bureaucracy is automatically discouraged because it doesn't treat patients and, therefore, doesn't bring in money. Expensive PCTCTs can be disbanded because they will have no further purpose.  (You could keep one to work out what rates to pay for treatments and to administer the payment of bills, but you don't need the other 50+ "commissioning bodies".)
• Increase tax relief for research and development.
• Give tax breaks to companies which develop and manufacture goods in this country.
• Change the basis of local government funding from the current Council Tax, which is levied at a series of banded rates depending on property values, to an income tax levy which is collected centrally and then distributed based on a formula determined by population and land area.  This would be fairer.
• Decrease employer's National Insurance, which is nothing more than a tax on payrolls, by 1% to encourage hiring more staff.

That's what I'd put in my "Budget for growth".

- Pam

Food security

Last week, one of my lunches was a Thai Chicken 'lunch pot' from the condemned food counter at Tesco (less than half price of course). While it was heating, I read the ingredients list and was horrified to discover that the country of origin for the chicken was Thailand!

I have nothing against the Thais exporting meat, but surely it does not make economic or environmental sense to import chicken for use in a ready meal from 9,000 miles away? Not when there are probably a million chicken farms located in between.

Anyway, it got me thinking of the issue of food security. The next World War will probably be fought over access to food and water, when Global Warming and an ever increasing population exacerbate current food shortages.  Low lying areas will flood as the polar ice-caps melt, while drought zones will get even less rainfall. To avoid catastrophe, surely it is up to every country to encourage their population to grow as much food as possible in the most environmentally friendly way possible?  Shouldn't they encourage supermarkets and food businesses to buy locally?

This argument isn't as straight-forward as it may initially seem.  With all the best intentions in the world, can Britain feed itself?  Even in the 1930's, Britain did not produce enough food to feed it's population.  For more than 50 years prior to World War 2, Britain's agricultural sector was trapped in an economic depression while cheap imports kept prices low and farmers went bankrupt.  Food production fell during that time. After the War, the huge push into factory farming was driven by the need for food security but, as a result, we now have green deserts of monoculture, where the soil has been depleted of nutrients because crops are no longer rotated, leaving the farms dependent on fertilisers. 

Animals were confined to "factory farms", where their welfare was severely compromised in order to squeeze more chickens/pigs/cattle into smaller and smaller spaces.  This is changing, but if we provide farm animals with sufficient space, fresh air, daylight and fresh food to enable a decent standard of welfare, will we produce enough food?  Is the even sufficient land available?

In addition, there are things we just can't grow:  rice, hard wheat suitable for bread, many fruits.

On the flip side, enterprising farmers in Africa and Asia have created businesses growing food for Britain.  A large proportion of fresh produce in our supermarkets is imported from places like Kenya.  Traditional British varieties of potatoes are imported from Egypt.  These farmers are creating wealth for themselves and paying a living to their workers, reducing their need for international aid to survive.  By buying British, will we deprive these people of the chance to better themselves and their nations?  Or are the contracts placed with these farms actually driving up local food prices beyond the budgets of the locals and diverting food to Europe which would otherwise feed them?  Are we exporting the worst of our current food production practices to them, in order to keep down costs?  Will we damage their farming environment, like we've damaged our own?

I wonder whether the French tolerate food imports in the same way as we do, since a walk through Carrefour leaves the impression that they're rather pay more for good food that is locally produced rather than buy cheap imports.  In their street markets, usually the person selling fresh produce is the farmer who grew it. They are proud of their local food producers and I understand that attitude.  I know the people who grow my vegetables and where they source their eggs.  I hope my butcher purchases his meat from ethical sources.  Personally, I do not want my food to travel thousands of miles around the world unless it is moving under it's own power (flying, walking or swimming).  I'd like to grow more of my own food, particularly the things our farmer doesn't grow (aubergine, peppers).

See what I mean?  This isn't a simple argument.  Where do we go from here?

- Pam