used to be somebody

sons and daughters

2012-01-29T13:00:00.000-08:00

"I felt they were both drowning, but I could only save one."

That line is from a rather haunting piece last weekend by the Times writer Janice Turner, describing her feelings about coping with both her increasingly frail father and a mother worn out by looking after him.
And it's stayed with me for days, I realise, because it's still so rare to see good writing lavished on a subject most editors instinctively avoid. While working parents' dramas are at least played out noisily in public, an uneasy silence lies over those of working sons and daughters, torn between work and a home they thought they had left long behind.
It isn't hard to see why we prefer not to talk or think about what happens in families towards the end. The story of parenthood is essentially uplifting, a long slow climb towards the light: being the child of fading parents is a darker and more uncertain journey, into things of which we would rather not know. But squeamishness blinds us to the growing challenge eldercare, just like childcare, poses for working life.
I say 'just like' but they're not the same, as I quickly realised when I started writing Half A Wife: while originally I thought I'd be able to deal with both challenges affecting working families in the same book, it quickly became clear that eldercare deserved a book of its own (which I very much hope someone else now writes). The demands of looking after elderly parents are perhaps less intensive day-to-day than those of looking after babies, but also less predictable, since you don't know how long illness may last or what path it will take (and you may be hundreds of miles away in a crisis): they're also arguably less well supported by state and employers. You can get tax breaks to pay for childcare that keeps you working, but not for home helps.
As Turner puts it in that piece 'what helps in old age, even more than money, is a clear-eyed but loving advocate to fight for you' - to fill in paperwork, plead for home helps or respite care (in an era of cutbacks, when help is ever more fiercely rationed), keep a beady eye on hospital or nursing home. When the time comes, most of us will want to be that advocate for the parents we love, but it all takes time and energy away from the day job. I do wonder how many of my generation will cling triumphantly to their careers through the baby years, only to crash and burn unexpectedly when it's the other end of the family that needs them.

should childcare be tax-deductible?

2012-01-22T13:51:00.000-08:00

HIGHLIGHTER pens! Architects' fees! Room service dinners on overnight trips! (Bear with me: this gets more interesting). Bank overdraft charges! Fax running costs! (But not, strictly not, fax machines).
Yup: these are just a few of the thrilling things that as a self-employed person I can, in the unlikely event that I haven't lost the receipts, legally offset against tax. These are the things considered so essential to my work (mailshots and free samples! car breakdown service membership!) that I'm basically allowed to have them for free. The one thing missing from the list, of course, is the one thing without which millions of people can't actually do any work: childcare.
And that's why the holy grail of tax-deductible childcare, which as the Sunday Times reported yesterday a some Conservative backbenchers are pushing David Cameron to introduce, looks initially like a no-brainer.
It would be unbelievably expensive, of course, which is why the Conservative Treasury team backed off hurriedly when they looked at it before the election. But the argument is that it could be limited initially to the self-employed, as a kind of reward for entrepreneurship - or an incentive for parents frustrated at the lack of flexible conventional jobs to create their own.
Were we starting from scratch now, it would of course seem crazy not to include childcare alongside 'renewals of small tools and items of equipment' (to quote that fascinating HMRC publication, 'Self Employment: Full Notes') under the heading of stuff without which the working world would grind to a halt, and which we therefore subsidise. But the snag is we're not starting from scratch.
We're starting from a decision to cut the amount that lower income parents who get Working Tax Credit can claim for childcare, from a maximum 80% of the nursery or childminder bill to 70 %, last spring. And yes, it sounds very boring and technical, but it probably doesn't feel that way to parents who were only just breaking even at work after shelling out for childcare and now find work quite literally doesn't pay. Should nannies for entrepreneurs be the priority, or should it be keeping these parents in work - not just for their own sanity, but for the sake of the taxes they'll pay for the rest of their working lives if they manage to hang on in there now? After all, if you have to wait until the end of the tax year to claim back your childcare costs, it isn't going to be much use to those struggling to make ends meet.
The other hitch with tax-deductible childcare is that money isn't always the problem - and perhaps especially for the self-employed (as well as for people working shifts and antisocial hours). Work is often unpredictable for start-ups: sometimes you're madly busy, sometimes worryingly slow, and projects may come up at short notice. What that requires is flexible childcare where you can chop and change days, rather than committing a term ahead to a nursery place you're not sure you will use. But this kind of free-range childcare spells more hassle and less profit for providers, so it's hard to find even if you can afford it. The idea being kicked around the Tory backbenches is to deregulate childminding, so that less rigorously trained and inspected (and presumably cheaper) minders can set up on a more casual basis, perhaps filling this gap: but not everyone will fancy leaving their precious firstborn in no-frills childcare, which lacks the same emphasis on early education as a fully trained childminder.
That said, these ideas at least show there's fresh thinking in politics about childcare - and they should generate rival ideas from other parties too. Here's hoping...

Image: Arvind Balaraman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

the work-workless balance

2012-01-19T09:34:00.000-08:00

WHAT happens to the idea of work-life balance, when it's too little work and not too much that's the problem? After a week in which unemployment has hit 2.68 million with scary talk of three million by spring, the question is getting pressing. It's all too easy to look at those figures and shiver: to see the desire for more time as suddenly self-indulgent, faintly old hat.
Which is why an interview given by the Virgin tycoon Richard Branson a few days ago is so interesting. He argued that one answer to unemployment was making it 'less expensive to allow job-sharing or flexitime', sharing what work there is around. Or in other words: some parents' desire for more time is part of the solution, not the problem.
It's not a new idea: one of the reasons job-sharing is relatively widespread in the Netherlands is that it was actively promoted in the wake of the 1980s recession, to help keep unemployment down. And going even further back, the Great Depression in the Thirties arguably helped shift us finally from a six day working week (common at the turn of the century) to the five day week we now regard as 'traditional'.
I don't really buy the argument made recently by think-tank the New Economic Foundation for a universal 21-hour working week: not everybody wants to shorten their hours, and thousands of people couldn't afford to even if they did. But promoting job-sharing for those who want it (Branson reckoned about 5,000 of Virgin's 60,000 staff might) does look like a neat way of killing two birds with one stone.
Going part-time after having children works out fine for some, but not every job can physically be done in three days a week -which is how too many parents end up parked in jobs which are too junior for them, but offer the right hours. Job-sharing, on the other hand, can be a way of reducing one's hours while hanging onto seniority (and salary). And in the current crisis, its potential to create new openings (either as the 'other half' of a share, or in full-time roles created when two existing staffers start sharing a job), is suddenly not to be sniffed at.
Branson didn't explain in that interview how job-sharing might be made more appealing, but one obvious answer is some kind of temporary national insurance relief. (The idea of a national insurance 'holiday' for employers willing to hire new people during the slump is already being kicked around Westminster). The more cheapskate option could be an advisory service for small firms struggling to cope with the technicalities of splitting pay, perks and responsibilities between two people. Either way, it's not just work-life balance but the balance between the working and the workless that now matters.

the third shift

2012-01-13T12:38:00.000-08:00

“People always ask me how long it takes to do my hair. I don’t know, I’m never there.”

There are many good reasons to like Dolly Parton, but that quote sums up most of them. There's something wickedly subversive about looking like a Barbie doll, and then deliberately exposing the conjuring trick behind it - wigs, boob job and all - but something oddly generous, too. She never pretends it's effortless, or universally attainable (as she once said, it takes a surprising amount of money to look this cheap) and by making clear just how much time and money the fantasy costs, she lets the rest of us off the hook.
I've been thinking about this ever since I interviewed the Tory MP Claire Perry last month, for an article about feminism. She was rolling her eyes at the madness of feeling that she had to fit in a run round the park that morning, despite having masses of work and all her Christmas shopping still to do, and we ended up discussing why women in public life - even in careers where looks should be irrelevant - feel such pressure to maintain the illusion of youth.
Perry had even tried to persuade colleagues to join her in a public protest against the pressure to dye their hair, letting their grey roots show for a month to expose the ridiculousness of the pretence. Why not, she argued, just be frank about the fact that 'this is what 47 looks like' - and that not looking like it takes money, effort and time that could be spent on something else?
Defying age was always part of the job description in professions that depend on looks, like showbiz, but it seems to be spreading. Perhaps one reason so many female MPs dye their hair is not just that politics is now widely televised but that its leaders are getting younger: suddenly, one hears of older women - and sometimes men too - struggling to land seats. (One candidate I met was advised to knock a few years off her age, since some constituencies didn't really want over-50s). It's not about projecting an image of beauty but of youth, vigour and thrusting ambition - even though none of these qualities is obviously confined to the under-50s.
There is an obvious injustice in women being made to feel, yet again, that there's something wrong with the way they look. But more pragmatically, this kind of maintenance now risks becoming a sort of 'third shift' for women in some professions: just another time-consuming weekly chore on top of the housework and the job. (As the American writer Nora Ephron once put it, 'sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.') That's not to deny the pleasure many women get from playing dress-up, but there is a line beyond which it's no longer a pleasure but an obligation.
Which is what is interesting about Perry's idea. A month 'on strike' wouldn't require women in the public eye to abandon all vanity, but it might make all of us think harder about which aspects of it are fun and life-affirming and which aren't - and if even that's too much, a few Parton-style confessions wouldn't do any harm.
On which note, for anyone who saw me this week in Grazia magazine: that's the result of two hours' work by a professional stylist, makeup artist, flattering lighting and a very patient photographer (and doubtless a careful editing out of squillions of hideous reject shots). "Are those your real clothes?" said my mother suspiciously, when she saw the picture. Hell no: that's barely even my real face....
(Photo: Stuart Miles)

on ambition

2012-01-09T12:22:00.000-08:00

WHAT happens to ambition, when you have children? I've spent the weekend pondering this one, preparing to debate it on the radio with the formidable FT columnist Heather McGregor, author of a new book of advice for ambitious women. And it's forced me to think more deeply about whether I am still ambitious, and if so, for what.
I've always been competitive and driven (among other things women aren't really supposed to be), and definitely career-orientated, which is why the decision to give up my Proper Job after having my son surprised me more than anyone. I still want, very badly, to be good at what I do - but freelancing has been for me a way of focussing on the part I love (finding out stuff and writing about it) and ditching the stuff I don't (office politics, managing people, tiresome greasy pole-climbing).
So it frustrates me when people automatically assume that leaving full-time work signifies the end of ambition, and a slow agreeable decline to mush: because having spent the last year talking to men and women who made the same leap, I'm more convinced than ever that it's nonsense.
Those interviews were done for the book I've been sweating blood over for more than a year, which is finally out (and whose last minute labour pains have been the reason I've been so shamefully lax about blogging lately).
*look away now if you don't want to see the obligatory plug*

*Ok, you can look again now*
I don't buy that deciding not to scrabble to the top, if to do so means sacrificing everything else that matters, indicates the end of ambition. If anything, I think it's about the multiplying of ambitions - the old desire to excel professionally, fighting against a new one to be a particular kind of hands-on parent, spouse, friend, or child to your own ageing parents. The headhunter Deborah Loudon, who spent years in HR, once told me that it's never the people you expect who quit after having a baby: it's the ferociously committed ones, the lifelong straight-A students who can't stand the idea of not being 100% on top of their game both at home and at work.
The trouble is, of course, that many employers neither recognise nor reward this more plural, diffuse ambition - or even the conventional kind when it comes surging back late in life, after the children are grown. And that's one of the reasons I wrote the book.
I know I'm lucky to have a profession that's very flexible, and to have earned enough that I could afford to take a salary hit. As the saying goes, it's all right for some. But it's not enough for it to be all right for some. It should be all right for many more men and women to do interesting work and still see the children, and with a little imagination from employers, families and government, it could be. The real failure of ambition would be to think that nothing can change.

the dangers of 'don't ask, don't tell'

2011-11-10T13:05:00.001-08:00

IT's her greatest strength, but perhaps her greatest weakness. What makes the Conservative MP Louise Mensch so unusual is her apparent belief that the rules of politics somehow don't apply to her.
She always seemed fiercely ambitious, yet almost her first act as a new backbencher was to blow promotion by criticising her own side's half-baked proposals for rape law reform. When a tabloid dug up tales of decades-old drugtaking, she didn't claim apologetically never to have inhaled: she merrily confessed to all that she was accused of and probably more.
And yesterday, she sailed out of a critical Commons hearing into tabloid phone hacking early, blithely announcing to the TV cameras that she was off to get the kids from school. Cue outrage, even in some unpredictable quarters. But why?
It's not so much that she scarpered instead of waiting until the bitter end: over years of covering select committees, I saw many MPs trot out their questions, as she diligently did, and then leave (although rarely on such a high profile occasion). It's that she was so brazen about it. She could have slipped out muttering obliquely about a private matter: or hinted at some dire childcare emergency - a nanny off sick, husband away. That's what the rules for working mothers say: never let on how hard it is, and if you must, then stress it's a rare one-off.
But instead Mensch went out of her way to show she actively chose to go, tweeting afterwards that Thursday is one of her days to have her three children (she's divorced, and presumably shares access with her ex-husband) and so she usually works then from her Northamptonshire constituency, where the children are at school. It seems she simply decided that having said she would always be there on Thursdays, she would be there on Thursdays come what may: that the commitment to the children, at least on that day, trumped everything else (presumably on other days, the opposite applies).
Again, plenty of MPs of both sexes seem to be mysteriously unavailable at Westminster any time after Thursday lunchtime: doubtless some are on the school run too. But the unspoken rule is don't ask, don't tell. Keep the fact that that you really want to see your children, after being away for three nights, as your dirty little secret - because if you don't, we would have to face up to the emotional cost of the hours we expect you to keep. (Or indeed, to our anxiety over having made different choices ourselves).
It's the same in countless ordinary offices, where parents are quietly advised never to put anything down on paper about leaving early: just fabricate a client meeting every now and then and slip off early, like everyone else. It works. But it's deeply dishonest, perpetuating the myth that it's fine to work a 70 hour week or choose (as MPs do) between living several hundred miles from their children or dragging them up and down the motorway every weekend. And it's an excuse for nothing to change.
Because if it's not about Mensch blowing the gaff, then what? Let's not pretend another 45 minutes of her silent presence at the hearing would have broken James Murdoch: had she quietly fixed a playdate for the kids and stayed on, it would have been pure presenteeism. Let's not even pretend it's about her being a 'part time MP': it's long been acceptable for backbenchers (often men) to have a second job outside the Commons, which hardly seems any different. Certainly, don't pretend it's about being out of touch with ordinary working parents: where better than the school gates to see what life is like for them?
Some find Mensch herself annoying, of course: I do see that talk of facelifts and dressing nicely for your husband can grate, while others simply don't like Tories, or her apparent hunger for publicity. But you can't believe in parents' (and childrens') right to a family life, and in the benefits to both sides of flexibility, and in judging people by results not by time spent chained to a desk, unless you believe in it even for annoying people.
Mensch will get brickbats for this in the papers and vitriolic emails from constituents: so be it. But perhaps her children will remember that she was always there on a Thursday long after we've all forgotten. She's made the choice, and while it's not everybody's choice, that deserves respect.

what I'm reading (out loud)

2011-10-09T14:04:00.000-07:00

ONE of the reasons I don't read as much as I used to, as I said in yesterday's post, is that having kids doesn't exactly leave you with hours on end to curl up with a book. But actually that wasn't strictly true. I still read a lot: just mostly aloud, and about space and dinosaurs.
Bedtime favourites come and go with my son, but there are a handful of books that have become particularly trusted old friends: some have been loved for years, while others were simply intensely right for their time. And now he's four and learning to read for himself, good stories read aloud seem to have become if anything an important respite from plodding through Biff, Chip and sodding Kipper.
So leaving aside the standard preschool books everyone has (anything by Julia Donaldson, and classic nursery tales) these are the ones we wouldn't have been without.

1. Night Night, by Marie Birkinshaw. The first book I ever read him as a baby, this is unashamed pro-sleep propoganda, with added liftable flaps. Wildly popular until the puppy chewed all the corners off it. So we moved on to...
2. Trucks (author's name lost in mists of time). An old friend of mine visiting from San Francisco gave him this touchy-feely board book of trucks. This is how my son learned words like 'articulated' before 'granny'. It was rehomed (with another truck-loving baby) only after an undignified struggle, when he was three.
3. I Took The Moon For A Walk, by Carolyn Curtis. My sister gave us this: it's a magical, singsong rhyming story about a little boy walking through the night, and we read it so often I knew it by heart. On long car journeys, he would instantly fall asleep if I started reciting it. Just looking at the cover makes me feel nostalgic and we still read it now.
4. The Elephant and the Bad Baby, by Raymond Briggs. I loved this as a child too: a gallumphing elephant, with a baby on board, pinches things from a series of shops - the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer - presumably unfathomable to kids raised on Tesco's. The moral of the story, somewhat subversively, is not 'don't shoplift' but 'always say please'.
5. The Tiger Who Came To Tea, by Judith Kerr. Apparently there's a whole literary subculture devoted to figuring out what the tiger who barges into a little girl's teatime is an allegory for (the Nazis invading Poland? the mother's lover, smuggled in while Daddy's out working?). But my son just liked the way the tiger slurps everything.
6. Volcanoes (Usborne Beginners series), Stephanie Turnbull. I can't remember when or why the obsession with volcanoes started, but it feels like forever. A non-fiction children's book answering all the questions I frankly couldn't about what how and why volcanoes erupt, still much loved. (Honourable mentions too for I Wonder Why the Wind Blows, by Anita Ganeri and How the World Works, by Christiane Dorion which also explain natural phenomena in child-friendly ways).
7. I Am Absolutely Too Small For School, by Lauren Child. Most of the Charlie and Lola books were popular but he read this one over and over again during his first fortnight at school. It deals brilliantly with the little things children actually worry about, like who to sit next to at lunch. I'd buy it for any child in the summer before starting school.
8. My Dad: Anthony Browne. That surprisngly rare thing, a book that's unashamedly upbeat about fathers. Excellent antidote to too much Daddy Pig, and a good one for encouraging fathers to read with kids.
9. Smelly Peter, Green Pea Eater by Steve Smallman. It's about a small boy who only eats peas, turns green, and farts a lot: sophisticated it ain't, but small boy heaven.
10. Monsters: An Owner's Guide, By Jonathan Emmett and Mark Oliver. About a flatpack monster who arrives in the post and trashes everything: I've bought several copies since for friends' children.
Both these last two, incidentally, were random finds in the library which became favourites - as Meg Rosoff's Jumpy Jack and Googily seems to be doing this week. I've not seen them in the major book chains, where the children's selection seems to be as safe and same-y now as the adults': an argument both for keeping libraries open if ever there was one, and of course for independent bookshops. (My favourite of which, incidentally, is the Crow On The Hill near where we used to live in south London: its owner hosts one of the best blogs on books around. And certainly the most sarcastic.)

what I'm reading

2011-10-09T12:35:00.001-07:00

THIS was meant to be a blog about what I currently want to read, for National Book Week - if I'd finished writing it before National Book Week ended. Ah well.
I used to be a voracious reader once, but first work - for which I consumed so many newspapers, magazines, and back copies of Hansard that by the end of the day my eyes hurt - and then the particular kind of exhaustion engendered by small children crushed it out of me. When I changed my job, one thing I hoped to have more time for was reading for pleasure: unfortunately I immediately started writing my own book, which meant months of wading through an awful lot of background for that. Duh.
But I've finished now, so pleasure beckons again. This list probably isn't most people's idea of fun but although I normally read fiction, right now for some reason I want mostly books about ideas. Some aren't out yet, some are years old, but this is what I'm coveting this autumn....

1. 'Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour', by Michael Lewis. Of all the endless 'why the global econmy is screwed' books now coming out, this looks to be the most readable and possibly the only one with a sense of humour. Important when you're reading about the end of the world, I think.
2 'Masters of Nothing', Matthew Hancock and Nadhim Zahawi. Another book about the crash but concentrating on the human behaviour that led to it: Hancock used to work for the current Chancellor.
3. 'You Talkin To Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama', by Sam Leith - because he is an effortlessly clever writer (see here) and I love the subject: why the spoken word holds such power to move us.
4. 'The Canon', by Natalie Angier - This is an a beautifully written book designed to convince scientific illiterates like me of the magic of science (here's the piece that made me want to read it.) I bought it on maternity leave, worried that I'd be bored with nothing to do but look after a small baby all day: I mean, presumably it would just sleep and I'd be sat twiddling my thumbs....Let's just say it was not the book's fault that I only got to chapter three. Four years later, he sleeps for long enough that I could probably finish this.
5. 'The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future', by David Willetts - I got this because I have never been bored talking to David, and am fascinated by the unravelling consequences of an ageing society. I started it but lost the book when we moved house. Being too mean to buy another one, I kept hoping it would turn up but it hasn't. Presumably the removal men now know much more demographic change than they did. Time to buy another copy.
6. 'Franklin & Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage', by Hazel Rowley. OK, it's the story of President Roosevelt and his wife but it's not a political work at all in the conventional sense: it's about the intricate compromises and ebb and flow within a marriage.
7. 'New Selected Stories,' by Alice Munro. Most of the fiction I read this autumn will probably end up being picked by the book group I belong to, but this one's all mine: short stories are perfect for interrupted readers, and she's the master.
8. Matthew D'Ancona's book for Penguin on the coalition, still being written. No idea what it's called or when it'll be out but it's the only book on the Cameron-Clegg years I want to read, because he's one of remarkably few journalists who genuinely understands Cameron yet won't churn out a hagiography. I think he'll be the Andrew Rawnsley of the coalition years.
Tomorrow: the ten children's books we really loved in this house. Also, um, for National Book Week. Give or take....

something for the ladies

2011-10-04T13:32:00.000-07:00

IT'S that special time again, the one women look forward to with such enthusiasm: the few days a year when politics suddenly falls over itself to notice we exist. Panicky memos on what female voters might want fly across Whitehall, journalists are exhaustively briefed on how the prime minister wants to woo wonen (why is our vote always wooed, Mills and Boon style, when men's is targeted?), and even Jeremy Paxman is made to host an all-female panel of political pundits in front of an all-female audience. And then, of course, everyone goes gratefully back to business as usual. Yawn.
But something thrillingly unexpected happened during last night's special 'Ladies Day' edition of Newsnight: a mini-insurrection erupted, led by the Tory MP Claire Perry (on the panel) and activist Charlotte Vere (in the audience), attacking the very idea that there is a 'woman's vote' or that women are defined by issues like childcare. (Fathers are interested in children too, someone shouted from the back). And I increasingly think they're right.
It sometimes feels as though I spent half my career in political journalism writing about the 'women's vote': pollsters and pressure groups never tire of analysing it, and some female ministers used it very effectively as a way of leveraging what they wanted out of Downing Street. But lately I've been increasingly uncomfortable about the term. How can you lump together grannies and students, hotshot female bankers and their minimum wage cleaners, in one supposedly cohesive group - as if the mythical Power of Ladyness somehow unites them all, despite obviously different priorities? Why is anyone shocked at YouGov's finding earlier this summer that nearly half of us can't identify which party is closest to women, rather than seeing it as healthy that women no longer vote - like a huddled, threatened minority - en bloc? Talking about the 'women's vote' too often carries the inference that women are a strange minority requiring their own special politics - preferably pink, and handbag-sized - while men remain the mainstream majority. Nobody talks about politicians losing the 'man's vote', although thousands of men have changed their minds about the coalition too.
Drill down into the data, as this recent blog by Resolution Foundation's Gavin Kelly points out, and the idea of one homogenous 'women's vote' makes even less sense.The Tories have lost support among women since the election, but it's among 'squeezed middle' women from the C2 socioeconomic group that they're really struggling: support among professional women has actually risen. So much for the sisterhood. As the pollster Anthony Wells points out, it isn't true either that women care mostly about 'soft' issues like health and education while men care about money and wars: both sexes are worried now about the economy, jobs, and living standards.
That said, there is one striking difference in the YouGov polling Wells was analysing: lack of confidence. Women are more likely than men to say they're 'very worried' about losing their jobs, losing their homes, or getting ill, suggesting they may react with greater alarm to the same levels of threat (women are indeed particularly vulnerable to job losses now these have reached the public sector, but they're presumably not more likely to get ill). Women are also much readier than men to tick 'don't know' - to admit that they're not sure whether spending cuts are good or bad, fair or unfair, too deep or not deep enough - while men tend to take a definitive view (although when even Nobel prizewinning economists disagree on tackling the crisis, most of us in all honesty probably don't know whether the government's economic gamble is the right one). Perhaps men are less willing to lose face by telling a pollster they don't know the answer, but it might also mean women feel greater uncertainty, fuelling their already greater anxiety. I wouldn't be surprised if the overriding mood Cameron wants to create today is one of reassurance.
And if that's so, he should forget about the mythical 'women's vote' and concentrate on some specific female voters with cause to feel threatened or let down by the coalition. Here are three ideas to get him started:
1. Wake up to older women. In 1997 it was all about the swing voting suburban mum, but Worcester Woman is 14 years older now and her children are nearly grown up: an ageing population means the biggest single electoral grouping is women aged 40 to 59. Harriet Harman dropped a big fat hint last week that Labour is going after them, talking about tackling the double whammy of ageism and sexism faced by older women. By contrast the coalition offers an unappealing cocktail of hiking retirement age to 66, deep uncertainty about the future of longterm care (women have a 50:50 chance of ending up caring for elderly parents or other relatives by the age of 59), and higher tuition fees (this group may have children approaching university age). And while stock market crashes particularly hurt the over-55s, whose pension funds don't really have time to recover before they retire, older women may feel more vulnerable because their savings tend to be smaller and probably need to last them longer. Cameron consciously surrounds himself with women who can offer him insights into what their peers want, but most are in their 30s and 40s: where are the older women, either in government or behind the scenes?
2. It's hard to be both the party of big business, and the party of female employees. The impression lingers that if asked to choose between a bright, ambitious young woman and an old dinosaur of a boss who won't promote her in case she has a baby one day, Tory sympathies would instinctively lie with the boss. This isn't exactly helped by threatening to price people out of taking discrimination cases to tribunal (which is effectively what the Chancellor was announcing earlier this week), or wild talk about abolishing maternity leave. Downing Street needs to pick a high-profile issue fast where it can be seen to be on the side of ordinary working women.
3. Watch for hidden gender traps. We're told, for example, that the prime minister will exhort the nation this afternoon to pay off our credit card and storecard debts: but since there are estimated to be three times as many single women struggling with store card debt as single men, and newspapers invariably run stories like this alongside images of women swinging shopping bags, if he's not careful young women are going to feel criticised and patronised. It wouldn't hurt to balance this with a promise to look again, say, at the relentless pushing of storecards (often with killer rates of interest) at point of sale in women's clothes shops.

the truth about tortoises and hares

2011-09-23T01:23:00.000-07:00

THOSE, like me, of a nerdy disposition may just remember a storm in a teacup earlier this year when the higher education minister David Willetts triggered outrage by suggesting feminism was to blame for helping keep working class men down.
He was arguing that when universities expanded in the 1960s-1980s, the extra places went not to bright kids from poorer backgrounds but mostly to middle class girls: the kind whose brothers might once have gone to college, while they were steered off into nursing or secretarial work. The heavens duly opened, as Willetts was accused of suggesting that bumptious women were trampling poor hard-done-by men beneath their stiletto heels in the race to the top.
At the time, I felt sympathy for Willetts, firstly because he is one of the least chauvinistic male politicians I've met (and boy, I've met a few) and secondly because his facts (if not necessarily the headlines) were broadly correct. There are many reasons poorer boys don't get on in life, mostly nothing to do with women, but one is that middle class kids of both sexes hoover up all the prizes from kindergarten onwards. But there's a fascinating piece of research out today from the thinktank Resolution Foundation* which puts the other side of this story.
It looks at earnings mobility, or how able people are to 'earn' their way up the social ladder - how easy it is, say, to start out on the shop floor and end up as the boss - among two groups: one born in the late 1950s who would now be in their 50s, and the generation born in 1970 who would have just turned 40 now. The good news is that the Seventies kids were more likely to work their way up: the bad news is that men were 40 per cent more likely than women to do so ( the gap was even bigger for the Fifties-born), and those on middling to high salaries to start with were a lot more likely to rise than those starting at the bottom. In other words, you can rise from humble beginnings to the top: but it helps to be both a bloke, and not that humble to start with. So much for the all-conquering rise of wimmin.
It's not completely clear why women couldn't climb as fast as men, but here's a big fat clue: if you switched to part-time work from a full-time job during the last decade, you were 30 per cent more likely to slide back down the ladder. And it's working mothers who are by far the most likely to go part-time. (Although the study didn't find a major link between having children and falling behind, its authors say that's because it began tracking people after they were 30, and many women would by then already have children and so would have already taken the hit).
So we're left with a picture of young women as hares - racing ahead initially, snaffling up the best university places (unsurprisingly, since they do better at Alevel than boys), setting out full of promise - only to be overtaken further down the line by tortoise men, creeping ahead of them during the babymaking years. It's a pattern many women will recognise in their own lives: and while children don't explain everything, they are clearly a big part of the jigsaw which wasn't acknowledged back in spring.
There is one note of cheer for beleaguered hares, however: while women clearly do still pay a heavy price for working part-time, Seventies children who reduced their hours suffered less for it than the Fifties generation, which the report suggests might be due to better quality part time work becoming available. In other words if more parents could hang on to decent well-paid jobs despite doing a three-day week, hares as well as tortoises might yet make it to the finishing line.

*Quick declaration of interest: I have no financial links with Resolution, but I am currently sitting on a policy commission for them, unpaid.

not staying mum

2011-09-20T12:12:00.001-07:00

WHAT feels now like light years ago, when my son was around two months old, I met an old friend for coffee in the little cafe down the road. Baby perched on my knee, I told her airily that having kids wasn't going to change me: it was all a matter of choice, how much you allowed yourself to be sucked into all that mum stuff. The look in her eye, as she politely nodded along with me, suggested she didn't believe a word. Correctly, as it turns out.
But it's only now, emerging from the tunnel, that I can see which of the changes parenthood brought (and which I tried so hard initially to deny) were permanent and which surprisingly temporary. In the thick of it, you are Alice down the rabbithole, Dorothy whisked away in a whirlwind, scrabbling for toeholds in a strange world and unsure if you will ever find your way home. And I was reminded sharply of that feeling this week by the food writer Esther Walker's post on that bewildering feeling of having turned into 'this mum person', some strange alter ego exiled from what used to be your life. Why, for all the billions of tiresome words written about women 'getting your figure back' after having a baby, is so little intelligently said about recovering your identity?
Hell, the body thing is easy by comparison: eat less, run more, and if you haven't got the energy yet, stop worrying and wear maternity clothes for a bit longer. What would be more useful to new mothers than guilt-tripping them back into their old jeans is knowing that there is a point, however unlikely it sounds, at which one's mojo (or the bedraggled remains of it) returns. That your identity is not lost, but still out there somewhere, waiting patiently to be found. And while everyone's road back to sanity is different, these are some things I found useful.
1. Sleep. Hard to imagine amid the broken nights, but it will return one day: and lo, you will marvel at how fast your brain works when you are not mad-eyed and murderous with exhaustion.
2. Work, or its equivalent, even for a couple of hours a week, when you're ready for it. It doesn't actually have to be a job. Just something not baby-related, that you do for and by yourself (and if possible also for people who are grateful for your efforts, instead of spitting them up down the back of your jumper). Reading a newspaper in a cafe would do, frankly.
3. Distance. Small babies are such vast caverns of neediness that you do simply have to sink into it for a while: the boundaries between child and parent have to blur. But when the baby grows up a bit, and stops being quite so needy, and especially when it has kindly grandparents, there is much to be said for a childfree weekend away. You can't see your non-maternal self clearly when with your child.
4. Old friends, especially those without children, who can remember what you were like before you had children. Preferably with photographic evidence.
5. Realising that you're chasing a moving target. The good news is that everyone is getting older, slower, more out of the loop: even those who haven't spent three years changing nappies now can't drink like they used to, and secretly think the music they grew up with is better than whatever they're pretending to like now. You don't have to spring back to being the person you were pre-children, because even if you hadn't had kids, three years on you still wouldn't be that person now. At least as a parent, you've got an excuse.

Lessons in guiltfree living

2011-09-12T03:18:00.000-07:00

ALL week long, I've been trying to work out why I didn't cry. After all, the first day of primary school is supposed to bring a tear to the flintiest eye: all those anxious little faces, swamped by brand new uniforms, tightly clutching parents' hands. The end of an era, the beginning of the long slow terrible process of letting go. Waterproof mascara all round.
It's not that I didn't feel some sadness, as he trotted off into the classroom, at that particular chapter of our lives coming to an end. Or even a tiny pang of envy for the mothers still squeezing pushchairs through the school gates, for whom the story isn't over. But still, I walked back across the playground with unmistakably dry eyes.
For what I felt most strikingly was a tiny whoosh of liberation - not from him, but from the weight of guilt you hardly realise is there until it's gone.
This isn't the first time we've spent days apart, since I've worked (first full-time and then part-time) since he was eight months old. But it is the first time the choice - that terrible, double-edged choice - about whether to be home or not has been completely taken away from me. The little nagging voice in my head when I work, the one that used to say you could be with him, instead, has fallen silent: because now I couldn't, even if I wanted to. Even the most zealous champion of full-time motherhood is now suddenly behind me having 30 hours a week to myself (or rather, to work: for me, it's virtually the same thing) where a few months ago I would have been damned for it.
And when I opened my laptop that morning to finish off some edits for my book, it hit me: this is what work would feel like all the time, if you could only be relieved of the guilt, spared the guillotine of public disapproval, real or imagined. (Only that morning the Today programme devoted several minutes to a debate on whether daycare damages small children: God knows how many mothers listened to that one in the car on the way to nursery, a neat little dagger in the heart).
Well, school is the point where for some parents the cloud of self-doubt lifts completely - if you can find work that fits around school hours - and for others it surely lifts a little. The switch flips, the pendulum swings, and the only tiny hitch is wondering how long before that other guilty little voice starts up in one's head: the one that says now they're in school, shouldn't you be working harder than this?

what's the point of hiring women?

2011-07-27T23:48:00.001-07:00

THIS morning's fuss over news that the prime minister's chief strategist suggested scrapping maternity leave isn't, luckily, quite what it seems. Steve Hilton is famous for having nine faintly mad ideas for every good one, and most of the time his madder ones don't see the light of day: it's just that this time someone has apparently decided to embarrass him.
But it's his underlying argument - that parental rights hurt women, by discouraging employers from hiring them - that is more widely shared on the right and ultimately more dangerous. What really needs tackling is the mistaken idea that it's perfectly rational for employers to refuse to hire anyone biologically capable of having a baby (and that therefore women need to be stripped of all those pesky off-putting rights), since it is in fact completely self-defeating to blacklist half the talent pool under 45.
So here, just for anyone who hasn't quite grasped that argument, is a random selection of female talent that would have been lost to the world had the fact that they were of childbearing age put their early employers off.

1. Margaret Thatcher: she was 24 and didn't yet have children when she fought her first general election (for a safe Labour seat). She went on to have twins three years later: Thatcher was a few days short of her 34th birthday, and the twins were six, when she finally got elected in Finchley.
2. Marie Curie, the double Nobel Prize winning scientist, who was 26 when she first started work in an industrial laboratory. Four years later, she had the first of her two daughters (who incidentally grew up to become a Nobel Prize-winning scientist too).
3. Sally Gunnell, who was 26 when she was sent out to Barcelona as part of the Olympic squad. She won her first Olympic gold and went on to become world number one, before retiring from competitive sport and going on to have three children.
4. Samantha Cameron, who was 25 when hired as creative director by Smythson and went on to have four children while with the firm. Doesn't seem to have worked out that badly for Smythson, which was sold for £18 million in 2009.
5. Rachel Whetstone, 38 when hired by Google as head of communications and public policy: two years later it emerged she was expecting her first child with her partner, ahem, Steve Hilton. Google seems to have got by somehow. And she's now a vice president.

Why some men hate women

2011-07-26T14:44:00.001-07:00

WHEN I started this post, I thought I wanted to write about why neofascists so often hate women. It's impossible, after all, to read the deranged manifesto left by the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik without being chilled by its vitriol not just against Muslims but against women - or at least, the sort of women he considers to have fatally weakened men with their addiction to political correctness, Sex and the City, and turning men into 'a never-criticising soulmate to the new age feminist woman goddess.'
And so it's difficult not to nod along with those commentators arguing that his rage against women must have had something to do with the otherwise senseless massacre on Utoya, that his fear of being 'femninised' perhaps led him to express a warped idea of uber-masculinity through violence. And it's easy to draw an older parallel between the far right and misogyny, from Hitler claiming that the emancipation of women was dreamt up by the Jews to modern BNP candidates' distasteful views on rape, domestic violence and 'feminazis'. The far right prospers in times of high unemployment, so the idea of forcing women back to the kitchen sink - and therefore reducing competition for jobs - is undoubtedly comforting to some men anxious about their economic futures. Hitler, after all, campaigned for election on a promise to get nearly a million working women back into the home.
But then I began to wonder if I'm simply seeing what I choose to see here. Human brains like to pluck order from chaos, to see a tidy pattern where there isn't really one, which is perhaps why so much of what I've read so far on Norway's tragedy seems to involve the author conveniently seeing their own pet ideas reflected in this massacre.
So for the former teacher Katherine Barbalsingh, it's somehow about the killer's parents divorcing 31 years ago (nevermind the countless Norwegian children who experienced their parents' separation without becoming mass murderers). For the over-40s, it's about that newfangled internet, enabling one crazed loner to find others who share his warped ideas. For the left, it's about inflammatory language by rightwingers legitimising hatred of immigrants: for the right, it's about liberals failing to crack down on terrorism. But it would be more honest, if duller, to admit that nothing yet explains precisely what brought death to Utoya: and that the answer - if there is one - will more likely come through long, painstaking psychiatric interviews of the killer than from wild journalistic speculation.
The main reason, however, I'm uncomfortable with misogyny as a catch-all explanation for Breivik's actions is that there is nothing particularly extraordinary in his views on women. He says nothing I didn't see regularly in my postbag as a journalist, nothing you won't see in the comments on pretty much any high-traffic blogpost by pretty much any woman mentioning the word 'feminist', and no doubt most are written by men who will never resort to mass violence.
It's a shock for women to realise that even a small minority of men do genuinely hate women, fear women, blame women for the economic and social blows they've suffered. It's not pleasant either to think that the current combination of a recession, plus a longer-term shift away from men as main breadwinners (and therefore domestic powerbrokers), may only deepen that hatred. That may turn out to have nothing to do with what happened on Utoya. But I doubt it's without long-term consequences, all the same.

cometh the hour, cometh the woman

2011-07-18T00:28:00.000-07:00

LAST week, I chaired a meeting at the House of Commons on the perennial topic of why there aren't enough women in politics. We were running through all the usual stuff - lousy working hours, sexist colleagues - when a woman in the audience asked a genuinely interesting question. Why, she said, were there women leaders in developing countries like Liberia, but vanishingly few in supposedly mature liberal democracies like ours?
I've been thinking about the answer the Labour MP Gisela Stuart gave her - basically that women often get their chance only when men have made a spectacular mess of it, as in wartorn Liberia - for days, because I think it goes much wider than politics.
Think of the two senior policewomen, Sue Akers and Cressida Dick, who have respectively taken over the phone hacking inquiry and the job of Met deputy commissioner following the weekend's mad flurry of resignations (it's rumoured the departing head of the Met, Sir Paul Stephenson, may also now be replaced by a woman). Think of Christine Lagarde, becoming head of the International Monetary Fund after her predecessor was accused (he says falsely) of raping a hotel maid. Like Liberia's president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, elected after years of civil war and violent repression, these women are powerful symbols of a break with an old, tarnished male order. But why do they get called on only when it's time to clean up?
Perhaps it's partly explained by the so-called 'glass cliff' theory, which suggest women often get to run big companies only when the share price is crashing, male rivals steer clear, and boards become desperate enough to take the 'risk' of hiring a woman (imagine! ladies in charge!)
Or perhaps it's a variation on the classic Westminster reshuffle trick: stick a woman in a government job no woman has previously held, and hopefully the headlines will be more about shattering glass ceilings than why someone else got quietly fired. No doubt it also sends a useful signal, in industries that have clearly sailed too close to the wind, to hire a woman since women are seen as more cautious and conscientious than men (although as the arrest of News International executive Rebekah Brooks may or may not go on to prove, women have no monopoly on sainthood).
But I suspect the real reason women sometimes profit from a crisis is that they however high they climb, women often don't quite break into the inner circle: the lone senior woman in a clubbable, all-boys-together office is often not quite 'one of us'. That holds her back in good times. But when being 'one of us' suddenly means being tainted by association, nothing looks more desirable than an outsider: however briefly, everyone sees the point of having someone who thinks differently from the rest, who questions the way things have always been done, who isn't so much 'one of the lads' that they overlook the casual bending of the rules.
We saw it after the City crash of 2008, when there was much discussion of whether macho bank traders had developed 'groupthink' which blinded them to the risks involved in subprime mortgages, and we're seeing it now in the unravelling of the Met. But when the immediate crisis blows over, will anyone remember that it doesn't always pay to be one of the guys?

in defence of the yummy mummy

2011-07-08T23:23:00.001-07:00

LIKE most people who occasionally sneer at them, I'm still not really sure what a 'yummy mummy' is, apart from universally scorned. I vaguely think of them as women with blonde highlights (tick); sunglasses on top of their heads (um, tick); who don't work full time (oh dear, tick); are glamorously high maintenance (phew: this I'm not) and wear lots of Boden (never). And according to my former boss and now Times deputy editor Roger Alton, they also sit around drinking Fair Trade tea (um, tick) and eating organic shortbread and boycotting the News of the World, thus costing other people jobs.
What many women seem to have heard in Roger Alton's words was the old ugly inference that women in general and mothers in particular shouldn't have opinions or influence beyond the home - although having never been exactly short of opinions myself, and having worked happily for Roger for many years at the Observer, I don't buy that.
But leaving aside the tabloid ethics, since I've already said what I think about that, the bile heaped on yummy mummies intrigues me. It's partly about money, of course: yummy mummies usually accessorise with enviably rich husbands. But when the term is applied so sweepingly - here as shorthand for Mumsnet users, many of whom are far less privileged than the stereotype suggests - then I think the real envy (because nothing generates hatred like envy) is of what they have that so many of us don't: time.
Time to make their own organic shortbread, time to glam up for the school run, but also time to read the papers and get worked up about things: time to go online and wind their friends up about those things and - well, what might happen then? Because the thing about mothers and indeed fathers, yummy or otherwise, is that they do sometimes ask awkward questions.
You don't have to have kids to care about a fair deal for tea growers, or global warming, or about dubious commercial values. Parents have no monopoly on caring about other people: indeed, are sometimes too obsessed with their own little darlings to put other people's concerns in perspective.
But having children can also turn you from someone who merrily shoves all their recycling in the dustbin into someone at least vaguely concerned about the world in which they may grow up. You start signing petitions, worrying about stuff out of your control: threats to other people's children - from drought and famine to abusive parents - can't be so easily dismissed. You complain more, meddle more, are doubtless far more irritating, since the flipside of parental concern is nimbyism and hysteria.
But you also, occasionally and in small ways, do some good. You volunteer for stuff, even if only the school fete: because you now use public services more, you get involved when the library's threatened with closure or the hospital's going downhill. On maternity leave was the first time I became in any sense connected to the community I was ostensibly part of, but had previously left at 8am and returned to only after dark. Parenthood, and the sense of solidarity it brings with everyone else in the same knackered and sick-stained boat, is the first time many of us really understand the power and responsibility we might have as part of something bigger than ourselves. Easy to satirise: harder, I think, to dismiss.

the true cost of news

2011-07-06T02:08:00.000-07:00

UNTIL now, I can't remember a time I haven't felt proud of being a journalist. We can't all be heroes, of course, so for every Watergate, there's a million parish council reports: for every atrocity revealed to the world, a heck of a lot of diet book serialisations. But still, you could usually kid yourself you were part of something that mattered. Less easy now.
And that's about more than one's obvious revulsion over journalists hacking the phones of missing children, or eavesdropping on the grief of terrorist victims. It's about thinking that this kind of thing only happens in a dying industry.
I've worked in national newspapers for 15 years, 13 of them on staff first for the Daily Mail and then the Observer and now freelance for whoever. I've never hacked a phone - I can barely access my own voicemails, frankly - nor been asked or pressured to do something illegal for a story. So I'm one of the lucky ones. I got yelled at sometimes, sniped at sometimes, for missing stories, but I was never told - as some journalists (and doubtless their managers) across Fleet Street regularly are - that I'd be fired if I didn't beat X to a story, or shouldn't bother coming back to the office tomorrow if I didn't land Y scoop. I've never been bullied into choosing between mortgage and conscience. Hopefully I'd have chosen well, but luckily I never had to find out: thanks partly to the people I worked for and partly to writing about politics, where you can still get stories simply by talking to enough people and reading enough boring Hansard. And it's partly thanks to working in parts of journalism whose economic model wasn't totally bust.
Tabloids basically sell via scoops - those jaw-hits-floor, have-to-buy-the-paper-so-I-know-what-everyone's-talking-about stories nobody else has got - and juicy gossip. But scoops are labour-intensive, expensive: they mean letting a reporter spend months digging around before they can produce a single word, always with the risk that they'll find nothing much worth printing. The News of the World has done its share of these stories, in fairness - remember the 'fake sheikh' sting that caught out Sophie, Countess of Wessex? - but filling a paper every week like this takes very deep pockets in an industry suffering steadily falling sales and advertising (thanks to the growth of free news online).
And that's why almost nobody now does really serious long-term investigative journalism, except sometimes the Sunday Times (most recently on alleged corruption in football) and the Guardian (which broke the phone hacking story). The posh papers rely on features'n'fluff instead to drive sales - star columnists, lush magazine supplements, acre upon acre about what celebrities are wearing - which costs far less than months of undercover investigation and sells more reliably. And we now know that the less posh papers (for I would be amazed if it was only the News of the World: everyone's under the same commercial pressures) kept chasing jaw-dropping scoops but used cheap and dirty shortcuts to get them: hacking phones, paying police officers, rifling bins, who knows what else.
The features'n'fluff tactic is, of course, nothing like the moral equivalent of hacking: it's dumb but it's legal, and relatively harmless (although the relentless emphasis on celebrities' weight and looks has arguably had consequences for teenage girls especially). But they're both sides of the same financial coin.
So now what? If the outcome of this week's horrors is that newspapers are regulated out of using dirty tricks, then newspaper proprietors either have to pump money into proper scoop gathering again, or invent completely new ways of driving sales. And that's really why News International is fighting this so hard: it's not just protecting individuals like Rebekah Brooks, but a whole business model.
My guess is the longterm legacy could now be a quicker death for print newspapers (or at least tabloid ones): most News of the World readers won't stop buying it because of what it's done, but may well stop buying it if the juicy stories dry up, because the paper's no longer allowed to do what it used to do to get them.
What we're really seeing here is just how much it costs to produce ethical, but still interesting, newspapers. Just as we've had to learn that a £3 Tshirt may well be made by a seven-year-old in a sweatshop, or a dirt-cheap chicken probably had an utterly miserable life, we now know whose grief is exploited and whose privacy trampled to bring us cheap news. What's not clear is whether we're still willing to pay for old-fashioned, slow, labour-intensive journalism without the collateral damage.

on househusbands

2011-07-03T16:54:00.000-07:00

IF you want to get ahead, maybe get a househusband. Or so, apparently, says the woman behind a new initiative to get more women into the boardroom.
The City fund manager Helena Morrissey, whose own husband Richard decided to stay home after their fourth child was born, reportedly told the Sunday Times yesterday that 'the idea that a woman can have a family and friends and hold down a difficult, high octane job when both partners work full-time — that is a very tall order. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s a bit unrealistic.' Something has to give and, it seems, that something is increasingly husbands: men staying at home was, Morrissey added, 'one of the things that definitely helps unlock that pipeline of women' into the top ranks of business (she founded the 30 Per Cent Club, dedicated to getting more women on boards, which holds its first meeting today).
Admittedly the Morrisseys aren't quite your average family: they have nine children and she manages funds worth almost £50 billion, putting her pretty much at the extreme edge of working motherhood. But still, it's hard to argue with her logic: there are some jobs that can't be done unless you have someone at home doing all the domestic backup. You can't work an 80 hour week and be willing to jump on a flight to New York at an hour's notice unless you have either a fleet of nannies working around the clock, or a spouse at home taking care of absolutely everything. Once upon a time that would have been a wife, but as more and more women start doing these kinds of punishing long hours jobs in the senior reaches of business, law and politics, you can see why househusbands are proliferating: as far back as 2001, the American magazine Fortune found 30 per cent of the women at its Most Powerful Women in Business summit had househusbands. And for some couples it undoubtedly works, so long as they're both doing what plays to their natural strengths.
But there's something about this argument that troubles me nonetheless. To say that men will only get to the top if their wives stay at home sounds snortingly reactionary: we assume nowadays that women are perfectly entitled to careers of their own, thanks very much. So why is it fine to suggest that women can only get to the top by pushing their husbands back into the kitchen?
The real question is surely whether it's fair for a job to consume quite so much of anyone's time that they need a second adult devoting their lives to making that job possible - perhaps at the expense of their own ambitions. Should families have to reorganise themselves around the kind of schedule Morrissey describes, rising at 5am and putting in 60 hours a week? Or would it be healthier to reorganise the crazy hours instead? I can't help wondering whether the rise of the executive househusband is actually letting some employers off the hook.

school's out (for, um, not sure how long)

2011-06-28T07:35:00.000-07:00

LATELY I have been having a recurrent nightmare, which always wakes me in a cold sweat. It is that I've muddled up the dates for the forthcoming home visit from my son's prospective new teacher, and she's caught us not in the middle of some unconvincingly staged wholesome family activity but slumped in our pyjamas in front of Scooby Doo. I think it's still a few days away. But I've got the alphabet jigsaw out just in case.
Everyone I know with children starting state primary schools this September is currently facing the same ritual, although nobody seems really to know what it's for, except that it clearly involves frantic prior hoovering. 'I think it's basically a test of how middle class you are,' says a friend who's already had hers, rather vaguely.
But along with the myriad other invitations to come into lessons or spend a morning in school, it's presumably part of a laudable effort to familiarise small children with school. I love that they take so much care over the transition: I'm intensely relieved that they ease the children in gently, so that it's nearly the end of September before they actually stay a whole day.
But then it's easy for me to be relieved when I work flexibly from home. If I was still working full-time in an office, I'd be panicking about how to fit even this preparatory stuff in - never mind the endless guilt-inducing demands once school starts for parents to chaperone trips, read to the children, come in for sharing assemblies. Children love it when their parents come into school, and it's right that schools should encourage parental involvement when research suggests it's critical to children's success. But where, exactly, do we draw the line? What is it fair to expect of parents who need to work, and how much responsibility is it fair to dump onto teachers? Do teachers have a responsibility to help adult lives run smoothly, or to insist on what may work inconveniently best for children?
The recent row over homework, started by the TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp complaining that working mothers shouldn't have to spend scarce time with their children nagging them about spellings, went right to the heart of this same argument. She clearly struck a chord with many parents: but should teachers have to worry about the quality of children's family lives, or is that a problem for parents to sort out? The lines between parent and teacher are becoming uncomfortably blurred, and I suspect they're only going to get more so after tomorrow's teachers' strike.
The education secretary, Michael Gove, is painting it as a battle between supposedly selfish teachers and harassed working mothers forced to scratch around for childcare. But polling suggests it's not that simple, with around four in ten Britons (even among 30 to 50-year-olds, the age group most likely to be parents) supporting the action: they can't all be freelancers who can get away with having Thursday off.
Attitudes will probably harden if industrial action continues, of course. But whether or not this strike is resolved quickly, I think we're left with some big questions about where the balance of responsibility lies between teachers and parents.

big fat belated weddings

2011-03-30T05:37:00.001-07:00

I do love a wedding: pretty much anyone's wedding, really. I like the hat wearing aspect, and obviously the champagne: I like the suspension of cynicism for a few magical hours, all that hope and optimism and the sense of life unfolding gloriously before you.
So it's a shame Ed Miliband and Justine Thornton's now confirmed nuptials in May have prompted so much snarking. The traditionalists think they should have done it earlier, before they had two children (and preferably should do it 'properly' now, with a best man and all the trimmings, instead of in some newfangled way). The resolutely non-married think they shouldn't have caved in to political pressure. Almost nobody seems to buy the idea that they might have genuinely wanted to get married, but not quite (what with one baby and another) got around to it: and yet that's the increasingly common story most of us see among our friends.
The moral panic about the rise of unmarried parents (based on the fact that they are statistically more likely than smug marrieds to separate, although like all statistics that's a sweeping generalisation which tells you little about any individual couple) often ignores one interesting fact: just because you're not married when you have children doesn't mean you never will be.
Nearly a quarter of cohabiting couples who become parents get married between the birth and the child's fifth birthday: that means cohabiting couples are twice as likely to formalise their commitment as to split. For some the birth of a baby is clearly still a prompt to settling down: but for others, marriage was probably always on the cards, and just seemed less urgent than getting pregnant. So why do so many couples, as my granny would have said, put the cart before the horse?
One possible reason is that horses are stupidly expensive. The average big fat British wedding now allegedly costs an eye-watering £20,000, which takes a lot of saving up for: while children aren't exactly cheap to run, the costs aren't so blatantly upfront.
Secondly, saving up for a horse may well be stymied by crazy property prices. The average couple who do not have help from the Bank of Mum and Dad don't buy their first home until they're 37: during the boom years, many couples will have felt it was more important to get a mortgage before prices soared completely out of their reach than to blow the deposit money on a frock and a honeymoon.
And thirdly, women don't run out of time for horses. Couples who only settle down together in their early or mid 30s (as the Miliband-Thorntons did) may feel that trying to get pregnant is biologically urgent, while they can do the wedding thing any old time. Add in the fact that the children of divorced parents may well grow up extremely cautious about marriage, and the fading of the stigma that once surrounded unmarried parents, and what is left may well be a logical decision for a lot of couples to put having children first.
I've blogged before about why I don't believe there's anything wrong with being an unmarried parent, and don't think a decline in marriage in itself necessarily spells doom: it's a stable and committed relationship between both parents and their children which matters. But for those who are worried about the future of marriage, it might help to distinguish better between a decline in marriage and a delay in marriage - and focus on the underlying social reasons for that delay.

Friends (The one about why you haven't seen them for ages)

2011-03-19T05:29:00.000-07:00

Never has this family approached a weekend so organised. The fridge is stuffed with three days' worth of meals cooked in advance, birthday presents and cards for the next three weeks are wrapped and written: I even finally remembered to order the nametapes ready for my son starting preschool. Why such uncharacteristic smugness? Because I was going in for some very minor routine surgery. It wasn't until I fell into bed late the night before going into hospital that I realised what it was really all about. There's something about the anticipated whiff of anaesthetic that does trigger an awareness of one's mortality. Perish the thought that I might die without having bought my nephew's birthday robot.
It's ridiculous, I know: embarrassingly melodramatic. But it made me realise that if it had all gone horribly wrong, my regrets - apart from the big unthinkable one I can't even talk about, the one about leaving a motherless child - wouldn't have been about the book I've only half finished writing, or any of the other big stuff. They'd be for little things. The friend I travelled with in my gap year whose message I've been meaning to return for weeks but haven't. A conversation I've been meaning to have with another close college friend. Not having seen my oldest friend's new baby yet, although she nearly died having it. This despite telling myself that one of the benefits of working part-time would be to have more time for the people I loved outside this family as well as in it.
Do friendships just inevitably slip through the cracks when you have children? There was some research recently suggesting you lose roughly one friend per two kids (although since parenthood tends to bring a new circle of friends, perhaps that figure hides a greater loss of old friends replaced by newer 'mummy' ones).
But while tiredness and lack of time are bound to take their toll, I suspect this narrowing of the social circle is also about how easy it is unwittingly to prioritise the urgent but dull - work emails that have to be answered, lunchboxes that have to be packed - over the important. You could always phone a friend tomorrow instead of today, and so the call keeps getting crowded out by something more pressing but often less rewarding: friendships are accidentally squeezed out by things that actually matter less. Bugger sewing in nametapes. I think I have something less urgent to do.

no children were harmed in the making of this blog

2011-02-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

So my son has been fast asleep for a good hour, and the packed lunches were done before I started typing. Bear with me while I feel the need to tell you this, for tweeting/blogging/Mumsnetting mothers have just come in for a right pasting.
The excellent Liz Fraser has written an article arguing that too many of us are Facebooking with one hand while swatting away our wailing offspring with the other. Apparently ignoring your child for a computer screen can seriously damage their self-esteem.
Personally, I wish she hadn't made it all about mothers: fathers checking rugby scores on their smartphones at the swings are just as common.
And for many of us, tackling the odd email surreptitiously is the price paid for being there, not stuck in an office. Wireless internet lets me both work from home and on my 'mummy days', feign professionalism (for those clients who don't really 'get' part time) while in the playground.
But she has a point. The uncomfortable truth is that I do sometimes check 'just one' email while my son is playing and end up engrossed 20 minutes later. Social media is addictive and absorbing in a way that pottering around the kitchen or chatting to a friend while your kids rampage around breaking things isn't. I can't remember who described parenthood as the art of being interruptible when necessary, but it's a good rule of thumb.
Like many seemingly 'new' issues, this is however really an age-old one: the eternal dilemma over how much time is enough to give your children.
You're not supposed to give into their every whinge, or they'll grow up crazed with instant gratification. But they thrive on being talked to and played with, so they can't get too bored. How bored is bored enough? And how bored is bored enough for a parent to refuse to play hide and seek any more, and have a cup of tea instead?
When I'm kicking myself about this broader issue, as everyone does occasionally, I find this piece by Elizabeth Hartley Brewer terribly reassuring - it's now regrettably behind the Times paywall, but the gist is that you should be fully present in the moment for the important stuff, and not sweat the rest.
So for under-fours, the critical things are joining in their bonkers imaginary games (presumably unless you are asked, as I was by my volcano-obssessed son, to 'be a man choking on ash at Pompeii, mummy' at a supermarket checkout) and not multi-tasking by, say, tidying the bathroom while they're in the bath. From four to six, play board games and eat with them once a day. It's basic stuff: but then, surprisingly often so is parenting.

on reproductive panic

2011-01-29T13:51:00.000-08:00

I'M not saying it's impossible for a thirtysomething woman to be completely unaware that fertility declines with age. I mean, in theory, you could have missed the whole 'forgot to have a baby? tsk tsk!' debate: you might never have read a newspaper, or a women's magazine, or seen any films starring Jennifer Aniston. You might not have any thirtysomething female friends at all, or a mother who wants grandchildren, or any nosey elderly relatives ("will we be hearing the patter of tiny feet soon?"). You might never have dated someone who ran scared of the possibility of your ticking biological clock; or never have had a boss who mysteriously started passing you over for promotion when you turned 30 (lest you go on maternity leave). You might even have survived the whole of your wedding without someone 'jovially' mentioning the need to get on with it. I mean, it's possible. Just unlikely.
Which is why there is something impossibly quaint about the advice from two eminent obstetricians (at least one of whom has form on this subject) in the latest issue of the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology house journal, that young couples be told to have kids by 35 if they want to be sure of having them. It's not exactly letting them in on a huge secret.
There is one group that probably could do with reminding: existing mothers who, having beaten the odds and got pregnant easily in their mid-thirties, can easily get complacent about how long they can wait to have a second. This stuff is too often pitched at single women and too rarely at a group vulnerable to secondary infertility (where you've had one baby but can't conceive again).
But it would be nice if we could now move on now from trumpeting the benefits of early motherhood to tackling the reasons why women hesitate and delay - a rather messier story about how much happiness parenting brings, compared to other things one might do; how much having a baby changes women's lives, and careers, and marriages, and friendships.
Meanwhile, for worried thirtysomethings tempted to marry the first loser who asks, here are three statistics worth knowing.
1. While it's true as reported here that miscarriage is more likely than a healthy pregnancy in 40 to 44 year olds, the balance is tipped by one percentage point: ie, you have a 51 per cent risk (it's 24 per cent for 35 to 39-year-olds).
2. Yes, you are six times as likely to have trouble conceiving at 35 as at 25: but that still means a cheering 70 per cent of 35-year-olds don't have trouble (ie, they get pregnant in the old fashioned way in under a year). And some of the rest may well go on to conceive but just take longer.
3. Of course it's tougher at 40. But the paper notes that 'only two in five' - ie 40 per cent - of women at this age can have a baby. They're not exactly terrible odds - and rather better than the odds on divorce, should you be propelled into marriage by reproductive panic alone.

a bigot writes

2011-01-24T12:54:00.000-08:00

MAYBE it wasn't the ideal day, in retrospect, for a male MP to come out all guns blazing against feminists. Maybe the declaration that sex discrimination is dead could have waited until we'd all finished reading about the two football commentators caught making sexist remarks about a female linesman. But anyway. Deep breath. If you strip away the offensive and the just plain confused bits of what the Conservative MP Dominic Raab said in his article for politicshome, there is something here that needed saying.
Not the bit about how the pay gap is now the result of choice (how much of a free choice is it to leave a job where your boss makes your life impossible?), or the bit about how twentysomething women earn more than men: it's not so surprising, what with their better GCSEs and Alevels and degree results, and anyway when they hit their thirties (and have children) doubtless the pay gap will be back with a vengeance. Not the bit about how pesky career women are to blame for stalling social mobility: if, when university education expanded beyond the preserve of middle class boys, those who got in were middle class girls not working class boys then that is surely a class rather than gender issue.
And certainly not the bit about how 'feminists are now amongst the most obnoxious bigots' - well, no doubt some feminists are bigoted, just as some sports commentators and, from memory, some Conservative MPs are. But why tar all with the same brush?
But Raab is right to argue that more flexible parental leave, which fathers as well as mothers could take, could help families share the domestic stuff out more equally. He's right that some public debate about men, from suggestions that masculinity 'caused' the banking crisis to men being judged by the size of their paypacket, is crude and simplistic and confusing to young men bombarded by mixed messages about what they're for in a rapidly changing world. Many of the mothers of boys I know feel a sort of nagging anxiety for their futures that I don't think I would feel for a girl.
And while unlike Raab I don't think overt discrimination is dead, I think he is absolutely right that many couples now want to forge a common project out of sorting out how to work and still have time for each other and their children, rather than regarding work and home as 'his' and 'hers' terrain. He's also absolutely right that politicians should be helping them do it.
It's just a pity he wrapped up his call to halt the sex wars in language that automatically puts female hackles up. It's hard to have a truce when you can still hear gunfire.

a word of advice

2011-01-14T14:40:00.000-08:00

I STILL feel a bit resentful about the peanut butter thing, to be honest.
When I was newly pregnant, I craved the stuff but was sternly warned against eating it for nine months lest it give my baby a deadly nut allergy. Within the year, the health visitor was merrily recommending peanut butter on toast as a weaning food. 'Oh, that's all changed now,' she said airily, when I looked confused.
The thing about parental guilt is that if you only wait long enough, half the cast iron official advice you have been worried sick about disobeying turns out to be wrong anyway. Last week it was the turn of weaning, when a team of paediatricians said the commandment to wait six months before giving anything but breast milk might be wrong, leaving yet more anxious new mothers confused.
Trust your instincts, everyone says, which is all very well but meaningless: I don't have any deep, primal instincts about peanut butter. The truth is that a lot of parenthood is just about winging it, doing roughly what your parents did (if you feel that turned out all right) and crossing your fingers - and remembering that if it doesn't work, you usually have time to change tack.
So here, for what it's worth, are the three best pieces of parenting advice I was ever given, all of which have withstood if not the test of time, at least four years.

1.'The key is to get used to never exactly finishing anything.'
Sentences, say. Cups of tea before they get cold. Work, before having to leave the office on time. The house you have only half done up. If you like leaving things neat and tidy with no loose ends, it's important to realise that life isn't really like that any more.
2. In response to me asking what would be the most useful thing to do in the last few weeks between stopping work and having the baby: 'Absolutely bloody nothing. Maybe watch a boxset.'
Or put more traditionally, in the first few weeks of having a baby, never stand up when you could conceivably sit; never sit when you could conceivably lie down; and never just lie down when you could conceivably be asleep. Less is more. This quite possibly works for parenting teenagers as well, I imagine.
3. On looking after a tiny baby: 'Start the day with just one thing in mind that you'd like to have achieved by the end, to make yourself feel in control.' Me (hopefully): "What, like go to an art gallery?' Her (pitying expression): 'No, like get dressed.'

What was the best baby advice you ever got?

how much parenting is enough?

2011-01-09T12:37:00.001-08:00

I"D never heard of so-called Tiger Mothers before yesterday, but I suspect we'll be hearing the phrase again when Amy Chua's book comes out next month. (For those unwilling to pay for a subscription to read her essay in the Sunday Times, there's a non-paywalled summary here).
A Chinese-born mother of two daughters, both of whom were musical prodigies, Chua's basic argument is that there is no great mystery about why research constantly shows Chinese kids outperforming not only than other ethnic minorities but often white children at school. Producing a genius, she suggests, is easy: it just means no playdates, no sleepovers, no games, no acceptance of anything other than A grades (when she came second in a history contest as a child her father told her to 'never never disgrace me like that again') and intensive coaching at piano and violin that borders on the terrifying. (She readily admits telling her own daughter that if she didn't master a piano piece all her stuffed animals would be burned, and offering her recalcitrant three year old a choice between standing shivering outside in an icy Connecticut winter or learning the piano).
Your first thought on reading it is for the children: when do they play, relax or have fun in this regime? But my second was for the mother. When on earth does she do the same?
I initially assumed, reading about how she supervised piano practice for 90 minutes minimum a day and attended every one of the music lessons personally, that she must be a stay at home mother devoting her life to the zealous pursuit of perfection. Then I realised that she's a Yale law professor, which means she was presumably finding the time for all this frenetic uber-parenting on top of working.
Not many parents do it quite like Chua (although she says this is normal in Chinese immigrant families). But on a far lesser scale, many of us parent now more intensely and competitively than we were parented ourselves: more one-on-one time, more extra-curricular activities, more coaching and tuition on top of school (because everyone else seems to be doing it), more frantic competition although it's debatable how much good it ultimately does. And I also wonder how much that contributes to the pressure working parents feel themselves to be under.
It's arguable that a heavily diluted version of Chua's regime - limiting television, say, and encouraging kids to aim high - might be beneficial. But are tiger mothers the timely rebuke to lazy Western parents one suspects she feels herself to be? Or would some of us be better lowering, rather than raising, the parenting bar?

the politics of privacy

2011-01-07T12:36:00.000-08:00

IT's hard to decide what's most painful about this blogpost from the MP Nadine Dorries. Is it the public labelling of her new boyfriend's ex-wife as an alcoholic, and (alleged) bad mother to boot?
Or the decision to let his daughter post something about her mother that, one day, she might live to regret? Or just the fact that it will surely be open season on all of them in tomorrow's papers, with editors doubtless arguing that the children of both parties are now fair game?
But I have a nagging feeling that it's too simple just to blame Dorries for this mess. She crossed the line: but she's part of a political and media culture in which that's now too easy, and as a journalist it makes me uncomfortable.
It's not that she posted this in response to a newspaper story brewing about her relationship. You may or may not feel there is public interest in her love life, but many MPs endure such interest without going this nuclear.
It's more that she is in politics at a time when there is no such thing as too much information, from the mysterious 'contraceptive equipment' Cherie Blair didn't want to take to Balmoral to Nick Clegg's 30 previous lovers (or not quite, as the case may be).
We demand to know exactly why Ed Miliband hasn't married his partner, or precisely how Gordon Brown felt about the death of his firstborn child (as if you couldn't imagine). We think there's something wrong with politicians who won't play the game (see how po-faced Yvette Cooper is made to sound in this interview for not wanting to discuss her kids). We rely too much on intimate personal information to judge our leaders' characters - and not enough on ideas, which might tell us about their values.
And I'm as guilty as anyone. I have sat glazed-eyed through interviews with Cabinet Ministers chuntering on about white papers and almost wept with relief when they finally offer some kind of personal anecdote to illustrate it: ha, something I know the news desk will like! (And I worked for a broadsheet).
Human interest stories are naturally easier to digest than dry policy, and private life is sometimes highly relevant to public confidence: think of the minister who sacks his diary secretary to install his mistress in the job, say. But we are reaching the stage where ideas alone aren't enough for politicians to offer. And suddenly the kind of casual invasiveness Dorries demonstrates here can start to seem weirdly normal.
It's partly about the celebritisation of politics, partly about the way blogging and Facebooking gradually chips away at MPs' inhibitions, and partly a legacy of the expenses leaks.
We now know exactly where they bought their loobrushes at our expense: not much mystique there. And many MPs are so desperate to show they have nothing to hide that they're confused about where exactly to stop (think David Laws having to out himself as gay following stories about his expense claims on a house shared with his lover). It's perhaps relevant that details of Dorries's private life have been used by opponents to challenge her expenses claims in the past.
The caravan will move on from Dorries. But the uncomfortable question remains: where to draw the line on what we really want, or need, to know?

reclaim the night (from work)

2011-01-03T12:39:00.000-08:00

FOR most of the last five years, New Year's resolutions have been a breeze. Every January, 'get a better work life balance' or (after repeatedly failing that one) 'change job' went on the list. Every December, I gloomily realised it'd be on the next list too.
Then I actually did change my job. So what now?
The trouble is that a big one-off change of job is a bit like a crash diet: dramatic in the short term, less effective in the longterm. It's easy to stop bingeing (on either cake, or work) for a bit, but hard not to backslide, unless you tackle the ingrained habits and assumptions that made you overdo it in the first place.
Which is why a few days after Christmas I found myself at the computer well after midnight, finishing a commission I really shouldn't have accepted because I really didn't have time to do it. And then it hit me: I hated working into the small hours in my old job. Why am I still doing it?
Working at night is a classic trap into which many self-employed or freelance parents fall. You free up time for family things during the day, but end up working when the kids are in bed to catch up. It feels better than working nights for a traditional employer, because in theory you could choose not to: but for whatever reason - money worries, anxiety about doing a good enough job, inability to say no, bad time management - you don't.
Yet habitually working in the evenings squeezes out stuff that matters: sleep, conversation, a social life, time with your partner, getting organised for the next day. So this year I'm resolving to reclaim the nights.
Firstly, we've started eating together as a family rather than cooking once for the small boy, then again for two adults after he's in bed. Mealtimes are somewhat less civilised, but it claws back a good hour in the evening - and cuts down on wine consumption. Which is a good thing. I suppose.
Secondly, I resolve to go to bed earlier. This classic post on why sleep is a feminist issue puts it neatly: suffice to say: since having my son, 7am counts as an unprecedented lie-in.
And thirdly, the tricky one: from now on, if it can't get done in the three days I work it doesn't (except in an emergency) get done. I may earn less initially, but over time I suspect I'll become more productive for not being constantly knackered.
And yes, I am writing this in the evening.....Damn it.

why reading matters

2010-12-22T13:29:00.001-08:00

EVERY time I shut the fridge door and one of the magnetic letters falls off, I'm tempted to sweep the whole lot clear. It's not as if they are really serving their intended purpose: my son is always game to help spell out the word 'bum' and then fall over in hysterics, but that's about as far as literacy goes.
Then I read this, possibly one of the saddest things I've read this side of Christmas. It was forwarded by a teacher who set her class the task of 'reviewing' a book at home. The child who wrote this didn't have any books at home, so did their level best with the only available thing: a Yellow Pages.
It's been circulated in defence of Bookstart, which most parents of under-fives will recognise as the programme that gives out fantastically well-chosen packs of free books on certain birthdays to encourage the habit of reading. Its government funding was cut by 100 per cent last week, and its future is now uncertain. For children growing up in homes where nobody ever reads them a goodnight story, one more little chink of light is extinguished.
There's a respectable argument that it doesn't really matter. At our local library, it was always the middle class parents (yes, me included) bossily demanding their Bookstart bags: how many of those free books ended up on already well-stuffed shelves, subsidising parents who frankly didn't need them and completely bypassing the parents who did? Maybe we're kidding ourselves to think it made any difference.
But if you look at the wider context, not all of it political, the loss of Bookstart is worrying. Take the round-the-clock temptation of television for preschoolers, which may be a godsend to frazzled parents (again, me included) but arguably doesn't teach language as well as interacting with real people. Add in cuts to local libraries, the one place hard-up parents can get books for free. Then scrap children's right to 'one to one' catch up tuition in school if they fall behind with literacy. Are too many steps on the road to reading now at risk?

on living with ghosts

2010-12-17T13:14:00.000-08:00

We have ghosts in our attic. And actually in our cupboards, on top of wardrobes, under the beds, anywhere you could squeeze a cardboard box: swathed in bubble wrap and masking tape, they are the ghosts of lives past, present and perhaps yet to come.
We've just moved house, one reason blogging has been shamefully light for the last few weeks: I've done nothing for weeks but frantically shovel things into boxes, and then frantically shovel them out again at the other end. But it has been an unexpectedly revealing process.
We had the usual pre-move debate about what could legitimately be thrown out. My pack rat husband clung indignantly on to vast piles of junk: broken stereos, miles of unidentified cabling, mystery bits of plastic, old band tour Tshirts with holes in.
Whereas I clung indignantly on to vast piles of different junk: teenage diaries, pages of toddler scribbles, photographs of people I haven't spoken to in 20 years. And of course, almost everything we'd jointly refused to get rid of went straight from the loft at the old house to the loft in the new one, doubtless to stay there undisturbed until we move again.
Really, we should throw out anything that hasn't been opened in six months. But the trouble is those ghosts. Because this isn't just useless clutter: this is useless clutter with meaning. It represents the lives we haven't lived, and would either (in a parallel universe) quite like to live or are quietly grateful we didn't.
That's why I need three skirts that I could only wear if I lost half a stone, and a pile of love letters from someone I didn't marry, and a boxful of baby things just in case: it's why my husband needs his mouldering cricket pads, despite not having played cricket for at least 15 years, because apparently this summer he might.
Ours are for the most part friendly ghosts: they don't haunt us from behind closed doors. They're just other lives we might have led, which for the most part remind us that we quite like the life we chose. I think they're going to be happy in this house. I think we are too.

When part time becomes 'workshy'

2010-11-13T09:09:00.000-08:00

THERE can't be a part timer alive who hasn't come across someone convinced they are taking the easy way out: that doing 'only' two days a week means you're slacking, not serious, or spending the rest of your time watching Trisha.
But whatever people's private prejudices, until now the state has not ruled on whether and when we 'should' be working more hours. Is that about to change?
There's a strange little clause buried in last week's welfare reform plans which suggests it might be. The headlines were all about taking benefits away from dole claimants who won't take a job, but the small print of the white paper's chapter on conditionality suggests in future, ministers might also target people working limited hours.
It's technical and complicated but would basically involve raising the threshold for intervention to include people who are working but not earning much, and so still get some benefits intended for the lowpaid - like, for example, housing benefit. These people could then presumably be told to increase their hours or risk losing some of that state help. As the paper explains, the government could then 'encourage people to increase their earnings and hours in a way that we have never been able to do before', until they're weaned off benefits all together.
In other words, if you're a part-timer not earning much (and many jobs that fit around school hours are badly paid), you could be forced to try and work more.
There's very little detail about this will work, so perhaps it wouldn't apply to parents of young children. Perhaps it's just about ensuring people don't keep a black market job on the side, while doing the minimum in 'official' work to keep the JobCentre happy. But it sets a dramatic precedent.
Mothers who work part time often face the rather bitter comment that it 'must be nice to have the choice', as if we were all the pampered wives of rich spouses. But part time work exists in all income brackets and sometimes it's not a banker husband but the state that makes it feasible to spend time with your children.
Perhaps ministers think it's no longer fair for taxpayers who may themselves be doing long hours to subsidise other people's family lives. But if so, they should start a public debate about whether that's what we really want - preferably without reinforcing the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong, or lazy, about working less than five days a week.

a year on

2010-10-31T13:48:00.000-07:00

HOW did that go so fast? It's only because today is Halloween that I realised this is actually the anniversary of this blog project. It was a year ago today that I walked out of my much-loved job and gave myself a year to get a life. So having turned my career and our family life upside down by quitting and moving to the country, where are we a year on?

Things my son has learned in the last year.
1. Those are not generally known as 'little pig houses', and they will not be blown down by a big bad wolf. They are called thatched cottages and weekending bankers pay fortunes for them.
2. That is not 'a milk float'. That is what buses look like in the country.
3. Where to find blackberries, how to catch crayfish, how to tell if a horse is about to bite, what a day-old calf looks like, and why it's not advisable to wade into a river deeper than your wellies.

The things I've learned are a little more complicated, however.
1. That desperately wanting to spend more time with my son doesn't mean it will always be blissful. It took a while to accept that there were good days and bad days at home, just as there are at work - and that's okay.
2. That my dreams of a smooth and harmonious domestic life in which nobody ever loses their keys and I have time to hand-stitch quilts were precisely that: dreams. We still have no bathroom curtains. I still kill houseplants. Perhaps if I was at home full time instead of working three days a week, that would be different, but I doubt it: wherever there are small children, there will be chaos, at least if I'm in charge. It's just that I'm no longer too exhausted to cope with it.
3. That the earth isn't flat. I was privately afraid that by going freelance I might never work again: I'd just fall off the edge of the world. Yet having sailed blithely over, it turns out there are whole new worlds out there. Going home doesn't mean being defined by home.
4. That what I thought I wanted isn't really what I wanted. I thought I needed a complete change of career: now I see I still love writing, and the old career just needed tweaking to fit.
5. That I don't much care what other people think. There are many ways to be involved in a public conversation: what I now lack in depth of involvement in politics, I gain in breadth of ways to cover what interests me. A few months ago I wrote about domestic violence for Red magazine, and a reader wrote in to say it had given her the courage to stay away from her violent partner. I can't remember much I wrote as a political editor that had a direct and practical impact on people's lives.
6. That I wouldn't go back: not for double or triple the salary, and regardless of what happens next. And that for once, I'm genuinely looking forward to the year to come.

under pressure

2010-10-28T08:50:00.001-07:00

Oh, curses. My days as a totalitarian mother are numbered: it has finally dawned on my little boy that other children get stuff he doesn't.
It started last week when (cue tragic face) he complained that 'everyone else has squeezy yoghurt in tubes.' Under questioning, 'everyone else' turned out to mean one little girl at his childminder's, but nonetheless it's clear: peer pressure has landed. He's since forgotten it, but I suspect the days of fobbing him off with natural yogurt plus fresh fruit and no E-numbers - or brown bread instead of white, or water instead of juice, or raisins instead of sweets, or anything instead of the stuff that kids with less drearily self-righteous parents allow them - are drawing to a close.
And as he gets older, I now see there will be trickier issues than lunchboxes. He can't read yet, but has recognised brands for at least a year: he doesn't watch TV adverts, but pounces on the endless toy catalogues coming through the door (despite me religiously ticking the 'no don't bombard me with your literature option' when ordering online) or anything featuring a picture of Fireman Sam. Advertising has its hooks in him already, like it or not: now comes the tricky job of explaining why you can't always have what you want - and why not everything that glitters (or squeezes) is necessarily gold.
I don't want to give in: I recognise that part of good parenting is teaching children to accept the limits of desire. But adults are subject to peer pressure ourselves: it only takes a few parents to buy their five-year-old an iphone for Christmas (and yes, unbelievably, some will) before everyone starts worrying their child's the odd one out.
For parents who are broke, it's torture: and even the comfortably-off could do without being dragged into the arms race.
So given this will be an anxious Christmas for many parents whose jobs are uncertain, it seems a good time to try and relieve the commercial pressure. Any ideas?

the rise of the commuter granny

2010-10-22T11:59:00.000-07:00

IT's a well-known fact that many of us live so far from our parents that the extended family as it once was - all pitching in to help out - is just a memory. And like many well known facts, it's not actually true.
Firstly, the golden age was never that golden: yes, we're more mobile now, but people have moved away for work for centuries. And secondly, nearby or not one in three of us still have some help from grandparents with childcare. How come? Because the hidden consequence of families scattering far and wide is sometimes not the lonely parent, but the rise of the commuter granny.
I know people whose parents come weekly to London from Kent, Lincolnshire, Surrey, and Oxfordshire to help out. My own parents have bailed us out several times despite living three hours' drive away. The recent Family Commission report from the charity 4Children found that while most couples don't live near their extended families, 60 per cent still relied on grandparents for support. They're still helping, but from further away - and possibly at greater cost to themselves.
This column describing a lonely granny in the playground, surrounded by nannies and mothers who 'swan about in boots and swirly coats' but don't talk to her, made me think. Granny childcare round the corner, fitting the kids round their own lives, is one thing: but some commuter grannies can be stranded miles from home, knowing nobody locally, a generation older than anyone at playgroup. It's stressful to parent like that, so why wouldn't it be stressful for grandparents, however much they love the kids?
Yet to admit to struggling is to feel they've not just let down their grandchildren but the adult children who rely on them. No wonder grandparents in Spain threatened to go on strike earlier this summer. Are grannies here taking more of the strain than we realise?

how i spent your money

2010-10-18T07:03:00.000-07:00

I WANT thousands of pounds of your hard-earned cash starting next September, and that's just the start of it.
Sounds bad, doesn't it? Unless I put it the more conventional way, namely: I'm about to apply for a primary school place for my son, and I think his education (like all children's education) should be funded from everyone's taxes.
The looming threat of the Great Spending Axe falling this Wednesday set me thinking about what my family takes from the state - or more accurately what my son takes, since he's the spendthrift one (we consume public services most heavily when we're either fresh from the cradle or close to the grave).
From the minute he was born - expensively, if probably life-savingly, by Casearean - it can seem as if all he and I have done is hoover up perks. Health visitors, vaccinations, free prescriptions and dental treatment, child benefit, even free baby yoga at the local children's centre: then as he got older, free bookpacks, tax breaks for childcare via a salary sacrifice scheme, subsidised playgroups, swimming and library access, various over-anxious trips to the doctor, and a free part-time nursery place. For three years, we have been merrily spending your money. Were we worth it?
Hopefully, in decades to come his taxes will be funding your pensions. It is not impossible, I suppose, that he will discover a cure for cancer (though he currently wants to be a frog when he grows up). And of course, his parents paid their whack for decades, so you could argue we're just getting some of it back.
But to the one in five of our contemporaries who paid the same taxes and either didn't want or couldn't have children, that may seem (as the blogger Iain Dale suggests here) unfair. And while children are generally a good idea should one wish the human race to continue, the planet isn't exactly short of the blighters.
So as that axe descends and everyone feels the pain, I suspect a bigger debate may begin about what children contribute to the greater good, aside from ruining perfectly good restaurants by running round and shouting. Perhaps just as some childfree employees feel aggrieved (however unfairly) about parents' rights to time off and leave, as public money gets tight there will be a groundswell of indignation about spending on children. I certainly can't defend every single penny spent on mine.
Nonetheless, I still think there's a sound case for you subsidising my children, and me subsidising yours - and not just because early investment in infant health, nursery education, and family support saves millions being spent in adulthood on problems that could have been solved cheaply in the cradle.
It is a fundamental human instinct to protect and nurture the next generation, to hope for better times, to want more for them than we had for ourselves: it fosters longterm thinking, inspires human progress, drives us forward as a species. Let's just hope we are still going forwards after Wednesday.

parenthood & the art of fearlessness

2010-10-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

NAPPY brain. Preg head. 'She's just not as, well, committed as she was.' There are a million ways, subtle and unsubtle, to suggest someone with children is no longer up to her job. There are oddly few to describe the ways in which parenthood makes you work better - not just more efficiently (nothing like a nursery pickup looming to focus the mind), but actually better.
So it was cheering to see the TV presenter Claudia Winkleman identifying one of them in an interview with The Times at the weekend. She said she wasn't too daunted about taking over from Jonathan Ross on Film 2010 because "once you’ve had an episiotomy, you don’t give a toss about anything....That’s what I’ll be saying to myself, as we go live: ‘At least this isn’t going to end in stitches"'. The great unsung advantage of parenthood is, counter-intuitively, a new kind of fearlessness.
The highlight of pregnancy for me was the faintly tipsy feeling some women get in the middle trimester where, tranquilised with oestrogen, all suddenly seems hazily well with the world. I remember telling a friend I wished that feeling could last forever and she rather wisely said: it doesn't, but you will never sweat the work stuff in the same way again.
She was too kind to add 'because you'll be worrying yourself stupid about your kids instead.' But an unexpected bonus of motherhood for me, having been far too uptight about my work all my life, was indeed a more detached attitude. Stuff I wasted too much time worrying about - office politics, the odd story falling through, what other people thought of me - shrank into insignificance compared with the unthinkable prospect of something happening to my son. In a strange way, that liberated me to be a better journalist, to take more risks - something many women are too cautious about. Too much commitment isn't always, professionally speaking, a good thing. Shame they don't tell you that in What to Expect When You're Expecting.

the second shift

2010-09-23T12:24:00.000-07:00

HOW many batteries does the average family get through? Judging by how often a toy is yanked from its box only to find it's missing four AAs, probably a fair few. But not ten a week. Which is the number of lunchboxes a two-child family consumes between Monday and Friday.
The comparison is illuminating because according to this survey of 3,000 couples, battery changing is a daddy job in most homes and lunchbox-packing a mummy job. Other stuff couples apparently think is dad's responsibility includes teaching children to ride their bikes, playing sports, disiplining children: mothers, meanwhile are washing, ironing, doing the school run. Look at that list and watch the last 40 years melt away like it never happened: there is little on either that the average Seventies dad, in all his unreconstructed glory, or Seventies housewife wouldn't have done.
This list puzzles me, because we all know families who aren't like that (plenty of them read and comment on this blog). Perhaps all the families in which daddy makes the sandwiches while mummy is out addressing the United Nations were just too busy to do the questionnaire. Perhaps fathers aren't quite comfortable admitting to doing what was traditionally women's work.
But these findings suggest that at least in some families, social change hasn't run very deep at all. Men do more of the 'hero' jobs - fix the beloved toy when it breaks, to a chorus of adulation - and women more of the 'taken for granted' ones. Men take care of the one-off or infrequent tasks - building a treehouse, anyone? - and women the chores that get done several times a day, like cooking. (Interestingly, cleaning isn't on either sex's list: are they nobly scrubbing the loo together, or delegating to the au pair?)
Both sexes end up with an equally long list of chores, which might look fair, but they're not putting in an equal number of hours. Yet seven in ten mothers apparently thought this was a fair deal: why?
One reason could be that mothers are more likely than fathers to work part-time or not work, so might think it's reasonable for them to do more of the so-called 'second shift' at home. But if so, that raises an interesting chicken and egg question. Which comes first: women's desire to spend less time in the office (leading them to do more at home) or women's getting lumbered with more at home (leaving them too knackered to work long hours)?

Whose benefit?

2010-09-21T12:27:00.000-07:00

CHOCOLATE. Someone to do the ironing. A vat of Infacol. Just a few of the things I'd have been better spending my child benefit on than the stuff I anxiously bought my perfect firstborn (baby massage sessions to cure the colic, which he greeted with outrage; a stupidly complicated stairgate that never got built because we lost the instructions). But spend it on someone else's children? That sure divides the sheep from the goats.
This week the Liberal Democrats voted pointedly at their conference to keep child benefit universal - paid to anyone regardless of income. Their leader, on the other hand, said he and his lawyer wife Miriam don't really need it. Which suggests the Treasury is still considering whether (and how) to slash the child benefit bill for the Bugaboo-pushing classes.
One sees their point. I can't pretend I need £80 a month as much as single mothers facing swingeing welfare cuts or families clinging on with their fingernails. Why not tax it, or take it away from me?
The trouble is it's not so easy. Child benefit goes to mothers, and in Britain, couples are assessed separately for tax. So scrap it for higher rate taxpaying mothers, and the non-working Wag of a squillionaire footballer keeps it while a nursing sister whose husband is out of work could lose out.
You could find a way round that. But it might mean breaching the principle that the money always goes to mothers - repeatedly proven to be the best way of it reaching children, particularly in families where an abusive man holds the purse strings.
Or you could stop child benefit for over-16s still in education, which is largely a middle class perk (the poorest children tend to leave straight after GCSEs, so don't get child benefit any more). But for those kids from deprived backgrounds who do consider sixthform, it could be a powerful deterrent.
The Labour MP-turned-welfare-czar Frank Field's idea is interesting: scrap child benefit for older kids and pay a big lump sum in the preschool years, enough to make a serious dent in childcare costs or subsidise working mothers going part time. But it doesn't really save money upfront, so it probably won't happen.
We'll see what the Treasury does next month. But if it ducks reform, were I a coalition of children's charities I'd be tempted to exploit that liberal guilt and politely invite wealthier parents (starting, perhaps, with the Clegg-Gonzalezes?) to donate what they might have been taxed to a fund supporting poorer families through the recession. How terribly Big Society.

the meaning of jam

2010-09-15T13:21:00.000-07:00

Where did autumn come from, already? There is mist in the morning when I walk the dog, and the hedgerows drip with blackberries, crab apples, rosehips and sloes - one last mad flush of fruiting, before the cold sets in. I hate the descent of winter, but there is one consolation to these last fleeting days of sunshine: you can bottle it.
Making jam is the ultimate cliche of downshifting mothers. It's everyone's shorthand for what people do when they've stopped work - 'oh, she's moving to the countryside to, like, make jam or something' - and is one of those furtive fantasies many working women have about what they might do if only they had more time. Me included: the first batch I ever made was the summer after my maternity leave ended, with a glut of plums from the tree in our old London garden, stoning pounds and pounds of them at about midnight in some sort of lunatic attempt to compensate for my general lack of domestic goddessness.
I'm not sure why jam is such a metaphor for a certain kind of life. It takes time, of course, and a little patient stirring: it smacks of village fetes, and cream teas, and retro snippets of gingham for lids. It looks lovely lined up in glowing rows in the cupboard (or for extra fantasy points, in a pantry).
But not for nothing are jams, jellies and pickles known as preserves: making them is also about saving a bit of the good times for the lean months, holding on to a memory of summer. It's a reminder that once there were times of plenty and times of scarcity, not just all-year-round airfreighted fruit: and for me at least, it harks back to childhood. And not just all that Little House on the Prairie I read in my formative years, where most of the plot apparently revolved around bottling peaches.
My mother makes terrific jam (apart from the year she burnt the marmalade, distracted by President Obama's inauguration speech). And when I do the same, it feels as if I'm preserving more than fruit: a fragment of family history, a thread of continuity. I don't use a sugar thermometer because it feels uncomfortably high tech: I do the trick with ice-cold saucers and waiting until a drop of liquid jam solidifies on them, which is no doubt how my grandmother also did it.
We no longer have a plum tree here so it's blackberry jam instead, and maybe a crab apple jelly (for recipes, try foraging food blogger Norfolk Kitchen). And once the frosts have thinned the skins of the sloes, it will be time for sloe gin, which just happens to make the base of a particularly lethal champagne cocktail. Perfect to see us through the darkness to spring.

what not to wear

2010-09-04T12:44:00.000-07:00

Nothing says September like a new uniform, preferably one you won't grow into for about three years. And I'm not talking about the children.
I went to a girls' school with a purposely hideous uniform, designed presumably to make sure none of us would get pregnant before finishing our Alevels. If you were uber-cool (I wasn't) you shortened it and tightened it until you got sent home. If you were only ordinarily cool (I wasn't) you mutinously wore it long in school and rolled it over four inches at the waist to saunter home. Either way, one glance at someone's skirt and one at their tie (worn with fat knot, uncool: skinny side out, cool) revealed everything.
Sixth form was a long time ago. But if you think you're not still wearing a 'uniform' - and that others don't judge you on it - you're probably very wrong.
As this piece from science writer Ben Goldacre in the Guardian sets out, how women look can completely change people's perception of what they actually do: he cites a study showing female musicians were judged less proficient when they played in jeans than when they did so in a concert frock (even though the 'performance' was actually an identical tape recording, so musically there was no difference). If you don't look the part, you don't sound it.
Of course men are subject to similar judgements: would you trust a consultant in a scruffy Tshirt, or a white coat? But the big problem for women is managing careers where the 'right' uniform is really a man's: where you stand out like a sore thumb whatever you wear, because simply by being female you're not the norm. The strange obsession with what women politicians wear - from Jacqui Smith's cleavage to Theresa May's kitten heels - is partly because they can't wear what most people still think of as a politician's uniform, namely sober male tailoring: they stand out, no matter what.
My own uniform when I started covering politics was the dullest suit I could find: I was a young looking 26, constantly being mistaken for the secretary or the work experience girl, and desperately needed to look older. The big surprise was finding out years later that motherhood has an equally complicated sartorial code, where a brand of leggings or a Boden ballet pump can classify you as accurately as an old school skirt.
One of the reasons I've bought hardly any clothes for the last year is that I'm not sure what the dress code is for this particular stage of my life. Will I ever need a wardrobe full of suits again? If there's one thing more complicated than having uniform rules, it's not having any.

what mothers do all day

2010-08-22T11:59:00.001-07:00

I'm playing helicopters with my son, and as ever, he has grabbed the leading role. He is the pilot, and apparently 'you are the mummy.'
Am not sure what a helicopter pilot's mummy does in combat. 'Nothing,' he says cheerily. On being pressed as to what a mummy does generally, he is stumped for a while, before volunteering that 'you wear silly dresses.' (I'm in jeans, as usual). He can't think of anything else.
What does a mummy do? I've just been reading Naomi Stadlen's book What Mothers Do, which argues that all the mindless things you do blearily on autopilot with a small baby are pleasingly critical to stages of the baby's development. But it only applies to babies. Quite what mothers do for three-year-olds remains unclear.
The line about a mother being a CEO of her own household is well-meaning, but cannot be said with a straight face if you are English. I am absolutely nothing like a CEO. I couldn't honestly say I was in command of anything - offspring, husband, housework - except possibly the dog on a good day.
A CEO does not get woken up at 3am by the most junior member of their organisation, who quite fancies a drink of water. A CEO has people to get them coffee and fetch their drycleaning for them, not the other way round. A CEO is treated (at least in their earshot) with fawning respect. Nobody throws lego at a CEO.
There is no other job description requiring the same combination of daunting responsibility, occasional life and death decisions, and endless wiping things up. It's like being a brain surgeon, while simultaneously having to mop the operating theatre floor, with no actual job training beyond occasionally hanging out in Starbucks with other untrained brain surgeons.
Actually what it's like is building a house, where you are simultaneously the architect and the hired grunt shovelling earth. In the early stages the client asks for things and when you build them shouts 'Nooo! Not that one! ANOTHER ONE!'. In the middle stages, the client demands a house like the one everyone else at school has, only for you to discover halfway through building it that everyone else at school now has something different.
And in the final stages, the client bellows that they hate you and NEVER WANTED YOU TO BE THEIR ARCHITECT, and then borrows your car and crashes it.
But once the thing is built, mostly you're quite pleased with it. After a while everyone forgets their creative differences, and you may even come out of retirement to oversee some extensions. You just have to remember, while spending several years living in a bombsite covered in dust, that there will eventually be a house. Probably.

the joy of filing

2010-08-16T13:50:00.000-07:00

I am now the proud - and embarrassingly, I do mean proud - owner of a filing cabinet, only lightly distressed with coffeestains and paperclip scratches. I spent half the afternoon digging it out of the secondhand office warehouse down the road and heaving it up our stairs, but the research materials for my book which were previously strewn all over the spare bed are now satisfactorily stowed away in its drawers and I feel virtuous every time I look at it (which is fairly often, unavoidably: it takes up half the bloody room).
The irony of working from home and then making my house look like an office isn't lost on me, especially as my old office now looks more and more like a home: the paper moved last year to new headquarters that are all sofas and coffee machines and chillout areas to make everyone more creative. Unfortunately, having my own sofa and coffee on tap at home makes me not so much creative as inclined to lie around reading magazines and eating chocolate: hence the need for the grim Seventies office vibe. I was, I told myself, saving time and making myself more productive in the long run by spending a few hours getting organised.
Except that the more I think about it the more I suspect it's the (semi) grownup version of spending hours painstakingly colouring in your revision timetable with millions of different highlighters. File that under P for Procrastination, then.

a window of one's own

2010-08-11T13:34:00.000-07:00

Something's been bothering me for ages. It's bothered me ever since we moved into our old house when I was vastly pregnant, and therefore not agile enough to stop my husband annexing what was in theory our joint study by filling it with guitars and great tangled snakes of cable and pointless bits of paper that CAN'T BE MOVED BECAUSE I MIGHT NEED IT ONE DAY.
It has bothered me probably more in this inbetween house, where there's no study and I work from the spare bedroom - surrounded by unpacked boxes, random articles of skiwear that haven't seen snow in years, and small people raiding the desk drawers.
And it is the main reason, if we're honest, I fell in love with the crumbling wreck of a house we are now attempting to buy. It's got enough room for a study, but even though I now work from home and my husband from an office, I'm resigned to it not being entirely mine. But what it has is deep, thick walls: and that means there could be windowseats.
Admittedly, the windows are so rotten they're falling out and the walls are crumbling around them but still: windowseats! I have ALWAYS wanted a windowseat.
There could be piles of cushions, and streaming sunlight, and ideally very long curtains to hide behind: and that might buy me easily three minutes with a book and a cup of tea before someone comes running to make me play 'truck games, mummy!' or ask where the phone charger is.
Everybody needs somewhere in a home to hide. Men have sheds, in which to smoke furtively and read motorbike magazines: children crawl under tables; my grandfather had a greenhouse in which to hide from my grandmother (I don't think he even pretended there was another purpose to it). I'm not even asking for a room of my own, just a bloody window.
Although don't get me started on the idea of a pantry....

is fatherhood a feminist issue?

2010-08-01T13:19:00.001-07:00

AT first glance it looks like just another of those cheery "ladies! having kids will ruin your career!" stories. Half the headhunters questioned in a survey said taking a career break to have a family held women back from senior executive jobs (ie roles paying £150k and upwards).
Except if you read the small print (as the NewsAboutWomen site did here) the headhunters said the same was true of men taking time out for any reason. In other words: ladies and gentlemen, having kids will ruin your careers.
So far, so grim. But having taken part the day before in a debate on Radio Four's Today programme about feminism, it did leave me wondering: what do you call the campaign against this rather depressing state of affairs?
Feminism is the natural home for anyone believing that, on the whole, women who get pregnant need not be tarred and feathered and dispatched to a job in the postroom.
But believing in equality between the sexes only goes so far. It is after all equality (of an admittedly rubbish kind) if working fathers get just as lousy a deal as working mothers. The problem here isn't sex, but parenthood.
British law still tends to see things in gender terms: traditionally women disadvantaged by motherhood have sued for sex discrimination. Men who interrupted their careers to look after children have been relatively rare, meaning legislators haven't been forced to think about them much until now.
As they get more common, it is of course possible that recruiters will relax and simply stop binning CVs with breaks in them. But it's also possible that some men will join women on the 'daddy track' to nowheresville at work, and promotions will go to people who either don't have children or are willing not to see them so much.
So is fatherhood a feminist issue? Or, given so many more mothers than fathers still take career breaks, is that missing the point?

life on a plate

2010-07-29T12:04:00.000-07:00

Nothing tastes of childhood to me like a stolen strawberry, filched straight from the plant. My father used to grow them and we'd come in from the garden, faces smeared red, valiantly denying eating them.
So that's my excuse for an afternoon raiding the local Pick Your Own, where we went faintly mad and came home staggering under soft fruit. My son loved it, but in all honesty so did I.
I like picking my own fruit in the same way I like buying eggs at the farm gate: no middleman, just you and the person who produced it. I love the way the eggs come still covered in straw, with the odd wonkily-shaped one: I love that there's an honesty box for the money and that 'free range' means the chickens scratching about on the driveway in front of you. (And yes, farm eggs are even cheaper than Lidl's).
Living in the country offers a different relationship with food than we had in the city, and as someone who loves to cook and also frankly to eat, that's great. But is it, I dunno, really progress?
One rough measure of the intelligence of a species is how much of its time it spends looking for food: the more spare time it has to play, the more advanced it's likely to be.
So primitive man spent long days hunting mammoths and scavenging for berries. Then we invented farming to save us going out and finding stuff, and a few millennia later evolution finally reached its natural conclusion: the Ocado delivery. Short of having someone actually eat for you (and who knows, possibly Posh Spice does this) it couldn't be more convenient.
So how do the pampered middle classes respond? We start wandering farmers' markets, growing our own, and doing complicated things with celeriac. We watch/read/blog about food porn: as the cliche goes, we make food the new fashion.
And so we make our foodie life as timeconsuming and as difficult as we can. We're literally back to foraging for berries - though admittedly in more convenient surroundings (our local Pick Your Own has en suite kids' adventure playground, something I doubt early homo sapiens enjoyed).
In evolutionary terms, it makes no sense. On the other hand, I'm eating these strawberries as I type and they taste amazing. Does anyone know what I can do with about half a ton of blackcurrants?

competitive (non)holidaying

2010-07-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

So we're just back from a big, rackety, extended family holiday: the blissful kind where small children run feral, and adults don't wear shoes for a week. Sand pours out of every bag I unpack and the fridge is full of sour milk, but even that can't dampen the general sense that all is once again right with the world.
Which is why one snippet in particular leaped out from my beach reading. A third of Americans don't take all their statutory holiday,even though it's a stingy (by European standards) 14 days a year on average. The most common reason is being too overworked to, well, stop work.
Friends working in the US have long grumbled about a corporate culture where, at senior levels especially, taking a vacation is frowned upon: the done thing is to be loudly and ostentatiously at one's desk all summer, at least if you're seriously ambitious. Now the lunacy seems to be spreading: this survey suggests at least one in five Brits has cancelled holiday due to work pressure.
I admit I've done it myself, in the days of having a Proper Job, and understand the feeling that there's no alternative: but the trouble with presenteeism is that it's contagious. Once enough people in an office waive their holidays, the pressure's on everyone else to do the same or risk looking uncommitted.
I'm reminded of an exchange a few weeks ago between the five candidates for the Labour party leadership, in which David Miliband appealed for a sort of holiday non-aggression pact where all the candidates took a break from campaigning in August to spend time with their families.
Everyone nodded virtuously, but I couldn't help wondering who might be tempted to get one over on their rivals by working nonstop through the summer.
Competitive holidaying - bragging about one's month diving in the Maldives, while everyone else is camping in the rain - may be irritating. But competitive non-holidaying, among those who can afford a break? Now that's seriously antisocial.

on housetraining boys

2010-07-11T05:43:00.000-07:00

ACCORDING to today's papers, a 29-year-old man has held his mother hostage at gunpoint on the grounds that she wouldn't do his ironing. He didn't want to do his own, apparently, because 'it's woman's work'.
Only in America, obviously. But it did set me thinking. I doubt my son will grow up into a homicidal loon with overly high domestic expectations (not least because I don't even iron his stuff now). But I wonder about the attitudes our boys absorb towards housework.
A recent survey from the Children's Society suggested most teenage kids now do hardly any chores: three quarters of 11 to 16-year-olds have apparently not loaded a washing machine, something a supervised toddler can do. It's unclear whether both sexes were equally useless or boys did less than girls, but anecdotal evidence usually suggests the latter.
I used to be adamant my son wouldn't grow up assuming domestic stuff was women's work, for the sake of any poor future daughter-in-law: my generation may have battled in vain to convince our partners the fridge isn't restocked by pixies, but we could at least bequeath housetrained sons to the next generation.
Three years on, I'm not sure I succeeded. The small boy's love of machines means for a while nothing thrilled my son more than stuffing washing in the tumbledryer, but the older he gets - and the more interesting machines he discovers - the more interest has waned.
More worryingly, with a female childminder and a mother working part time from home, it's mostly women he sees doing domesticated things. I won't be doing his ironing when he's in his 20s. But I'm a bit worried his poor girlfriend might.

growing up

2010-07-08T06:02:00.001-07:00

There is a pile of baby clothes on top of the tumbledryer, waiting to be folded and put away for my smallest nephew. The nappies my son no longer needs are already in the loft, shortly to be joined by the now scorned pushchair: and I can't put off the laborious process of converting his outgrown cot into a real bed much longer, even if I have lost all the relevant screws.
Time to face facts: my baby is, if not exactly grownup, definitely not a baby any more. The all-absorbing, intensely physical years of early childhood are over and while doubtless the next phase isn't exactly easy, I suspect it won't be quite so primal. For the first time in three years - more, if you count pregnancy - a bittersweet liberation beckons.
Bittersweet partly because I had always kind of assumed by now there'd be another baby, and the same cycle starting all over again. As time goes by however, it feels safest to assume there won't. Hope is invasive, consuming one's life: a certain sadness is maybe easier to live with.
But then again, there's an undeniable giddiness that comes with leaving the early motherhood years behind. Somewhere in the distance glimmers the prospect of a life where one wouldn't always have to get up at 6am, there wouldn't be weetabix soldered to every available surface, one wouldn't have permanent backache from picking up wailing small people, and leaving the house needn't necessarily involve a ton of wetwipes and spare clothing.
There's even the dizzying possibility of civilised conversation with said child's father: perhaps even some work involving rational thought. Who knew?
It's a miniature version of the sudden burst of energy I've seen older women get when their children leave home: as if the shackles, in the nicest way, were broken. Empty nests are painful but can also bring a relief from guilt, from the huge part of motherhood that consists of just being needed (which is both a joy and at times a struggle).
And it's a useful reminder that careers, like marriages, ebb and flow. There are times when it's easiest just to keep on keeping on, and times when you have the energy to change direction. Now feels like a good time for change.
If there are to be no more prams in the hall, that leaves room for something else. And for me that's going to be a book. It's going to be called Half a Wife, it'll be published in 2012 by Chatto & Windus, and it's going to be about the future of work and the massive changes in family life that are coming together now in one big bang.
I promise I'm not going to plug it endlessly here - although I'll be wanting to pick readers' brains from time to time. But I hope it's going to fulfil one of the conditions I set myself when I left my Proper Job: that I'd take the chance to do something careerwise that I'd never have done otherwise. It's time to get out of my comfort zone.
And to stop getting sentimental over baby clothes, obviously. They are going up in the loft: they really are. Any day now...

Reaping what I sowed

2010-06-30T13:48:00.000-07:00

So a good three months after I planted our strawberries, I've gathered in the harvest. Both of them were lovely: sadly, not quite enough for all three of us to have one each. I reckon, allowing for plants and compost, they cost about £2.50 a berry - slightly more than I paid for two vast punnets of delicious ones from the supermarket.
Yup, yet again I've fallen into the annual trap of thinking growing your own is somehow thrifty, rather than being a ruinously expensive hobby.
This year I planted tons of rocket, spinach, lettuce and red mustard seeds; half a dozen strawberry plants; another blueberry bush, to make my supposedly self-fertilising bush actually fruit; some french bean seeds, tomato seeds and (a bit optimistically) red pepper seeds.
And now? The salads have been great: a couple of quid on seed (I had some left over from last year) will keep us in leafage until autumn and has genuinely saved us money. Herbs are also a nobrainer for anyone who cooks.
The blueberries are now fruiting, but as a £10 bush produces a small punnet's worth, it'll probably take about six years before it's in profit. The beans are all flowering and might even cover the cost of their compost.
And the tomato plants are worth it for the gorgeous smell of warm tomato leaves alone, which reminds me of my grandfather's greenhouse when I was tiny. Just as well, since although they're covered in tiny green globes I doubt they're worth it on economic grounds (all that expensive compost again: I know, I know, cheaper if you make your own, but we've not lived in this house long enough to get a heap going).
And to my surprise there are eight pepper plants, although no sign of any peppers. Hell, if they don't fruit they can be recycled as very boring houseplants.
One of the reasons for growing my own this year was to teach my son that vegetables don't all come shrinkwrapped in plastic, and that bit worked. There's something magical about turning a seed into a sprout, then into a flower and a fruit (and not just for three year olds). So educationally, it's been a triumph.
Recreationally, I've rather enjoyed pottering around in the evening sunshine ineptly pinching out tomatoes with a glass of wine. Financially, however, it's been a washout - apart from the salads and herbs, everything would have been cheaper at Waitrose.
I bet I do it all again next year.

why twitter is the new fag break

2010-06-29T02:17:00.000-07:00

When I gave up smoking, many years ago, it wasn't really the nicotine I missed. What I pined for was the smoking room at work, where all the renegades of the newsroom congregated to spread filthy rumours, slag off the management and bemoan the end of the golden age of news (translated: the age when you'd be doing this in the pub, not the smoking room). It took far longer to wean myself off that habit, not that I ever really did: bitching about the boss by email was fortunately invented shortly afterwards.
That same familiar feeling flooded back yesterday, going back to my old office for lunch with a friend who still works there. Bumping into a few nice ex-colleagues reminds me that the one thing I miss about office life is the people.
That's people both in the particular (the Guardian and Observer staff are an unusually nice bunch) but also the general. One of the great joys of freelance life is the absence of office politics, bruised egos and power games: but while I like not having to deal with it, I do miss gossiping about it. I miss the watercooler stuff: rumour, innuendo, the stuff of other people's lives.
These days, I rely heavily on Twitter for my virtual fag break/watercooler moment. Many of my old friends and colleagues now tweet, which helps, but as a bonus I also now get the rest of the world's office gossip too.
I waste a lot of time on social media, but perhaps it's not so much of a waste. We all need human interaction, but tend to assume that online socialising doesn't really count: that it's for cold-hearted geeks who can't deal with flesh and blood friendships.
Well maybe not, if this American study is right. It argues that using social media bumps up our levels of the hormone oxytocin (the 'bonding' hormone, which rises when you're with people you love and makes you feel happier) just as 'real' socialising does.
I'm dubious about the writer's claim to have got the same hormone spike from ten minutes on Twitter that a bridegroom got from his wedding: if true, I wouldn't bet on that marriage lasting. I'm not convinced we react the same way to words on a screen (or in a letter, or a phone call) even if we know the person they're from, as we do face to face.
But for the kind of casual office banter I miss, social media is not a bad substitute. Which means not actually having a boss is no longer a barrier to communal moaning about the boss: what a relief, eh?

sex & the art of headline writing

2010-06-20T08:27:00.001-07:00

Call me oldfashioned, but the screaming headline 'You'd think I could GET A DATE' over an interview with the actress Kim Cattrall does kind of infer she was discussing her frustration at being single.
So quelle surprise to find she actually told Saturday's Daily Mail it wouldn't be the end of the world if she didn't find a (fourth) husband because 'I'm free to do what I want..My big passion these days is my work.' Hmm.
So far, so normal: newspaper brings a successful (ok, forget about Sex & the City 2) woman down a peg or two by inferring that she might have an enviable career but hell, nobody wants to sleep with her. The Cattrall piece is unusual only in the sheer determination required to slap a 'woe is me' headline on these quotes.
So I'd have left it there but for opening the Times's review section to a Tracey Emin interview headlined 'I've got my sex drive back.' What followed was an intelligent and balanced interview, under a weirdly phew-what-a-scorcher headline.
Sexism again, deliberately reducing women to the level of you-would-wouldn't-you rather than taking their professional lives seriously? You'd think so, but for the awkward truth that firstly much of Emin's work is about her sex life, and secondly a male artist who said he was now dying to 'go out and f*** the world' would doubtless also find it made the headline. (See Lynn Barber's interview with Rupert Everett in the Sunday Times mag the next day: headline 'I used to be so sexually driven, but that's completely turned off'. Maybe Emin could give him some tips).
The issue isn't just sexism: it's sexuality as commodity. I know why sub-editors write headlines like this, because it automatically makes more people want to read it. I just did the same in this blog title. Feel conned? Well, me too.
This will sound as if I want to rush around covering up piano legs lest they give rise to impure thoughts, but it would be nice if occasionally writing could be sold on the back of something - anything - other than the obligatory saucy Sex Quote.
As a journalist, you're always relieved to get it (hurrah! now I know I'll be able to get this dreary interview with actor hyping film/model who is the new Face of National Prune Week/preview of the Budget in the paper). But it would just vary the tone a little if occasionally the same headline importance was given to, I dunno, art. Or work. Or money (Emin's attitude to her wealth is fascinating). Or power. Or whatever.
Except it won't happen, because as newspapers go digital the one surefire way to get your article clicked on is to make 'sex' a keyword. Stand by for much, much more of this.

Is stay at home motherhood a class issue?

2010-06-15T13:47:00.001-07:00

The health visitor who did the first home visit after my son was born didn't stay long. She weighed him, whizzed through her questionnaire on autopilot, gathered up her handbag and said she was sure I'd be fine.
She was right, luckily, but I doubt she deduced that from her questions, having barely listened to the answers. I suspect she just scanned the livingroom for signs of your classic middle class mother (Habitat cushions, Earl Grey avaliable on request) and mentally moved on to more vulnerable clients.
I was reminded of this last week, chairing a Labour leadership hustings, when Diane Abbott got onto the subject of lone parent benefits. She said she always wondered why when middle class mothers stay at home fulltime that's considered a good thing - lovely for the kids, a noble sacrifice for the mother - but when poor single mothers stay at home it's suddenly bad. One mother is a pillar of society, especially for the conservative right: the other's a drain on the state and should be driven out to work with a cattleprod.
That double standard always bothered me, and particularly now the government is offering tax breaks to stay-at-home married mothers but simultaneously expecting single mothers to get jobs. Why is what's 'good' for the children of married parents strangely bad for the children of lone parents, who might arguably need them around even more if there's been a traumatic family breakup?
The answer's partly that the mother on benefits is subsidised by all of us through our taxes, while the married mother is subsidised by her husband so it's nobody's businesss but theirs. Except that isn't the whole truth.
When I worked full time, I paid a lot of tax: now, I use just as many public services but pay less tax, because I earn less. Doesn't that make me a burden on the state too, since I'm not working as hard as I arguably could?
Which leaves the question of whether this is about class. Middle class mummies get mocked for our pushiness and ponciness but we usually get the benefit of the doubt from authority figures, be it health visitors, teachers - or the media. Poorer mothers are negatively stereotyped from the start.
Yet parenting is blatantly easier when you have the money for everything from the big things (good childcare, house in the catchment of a good school) to the small (treats and activities that get you out of the house). The welfare issues are complicated, particularly at a time when public spending is under such pressure: but we're more likely to reach a fair solution if we can stop subconsciously dividing mothers into slummy or yummy according to income.

in which i knit my own yoghurt

2010-06-09T12:10:00.000-07:00

Q: What's the difference between milk and nice expensive Greek yoghurt? A: Eight hours in a warm airing cupboard.
It's just under two weeks until George Osborne's Budget of Doom, my deadline to hack back my spending to downshifting-friendly levels. So this week, I knocked a good 15 per cent off the weekly supermarket shop by instigating three new rules.
1. Goodbye A Leading Supermarket Chain, hello (whisper) Lidl. Shopping here is a bit like going back to the Seventies: strip lighting, strange German brands you last saw inter-railing, and none of that wafting-bread-smells guff supermarkets use to convince you they are actually a leisure experience.
Not everything is cheaper, although the fruit and veg is a steal: luxury stuff like mangos and avocados is half the price. And I had to go elsewhere for some stuff Lidl doesn't sell (breadflour, kids' toothpaste, chicken that looks like it occasionally enjoyed the use of its own legs). But the main reason the bill was faintly unbelievable is that the general ambience encourages one to get the hell out fast, thus spending less.
2. Once it's gone, it's gone. No nipping back to the shops midweek for anything other than cornerstones of human civilisation (coffee, looroll, milk for offspring). If an ingredient needed for dinner turns out to be missing, alternative dinner must be improvised.
3. No more convenience foods. And I don't mean readymeals. The breadmaker I'm often too lazy to use has been hauled out: a loaf in this costs about half its shopbought equivalent. Enough pizza dough for two pizzas, topped with rocket from the garden and oddments of meat and cheese from the back of the fridge, costs less than a tenth the price of a takeaway.
As for the yoghurt, I used this Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall recipe: heat milk, stir in a bit of (bought) posh live yoghurt, leave somewhere warm overnight et voila: yoghurt that tastes like the brand it was made from, but a quarter of the price.

The thing about downshifting is you move from being cash rich but time poor to being skint, but with free afternoons. And that means the time I won back by giving up my Proper Job isn't exactly free: some of it has to be re-invested in fiddlier but cheaper ways of living.
The saving grace is that this is stealth economising: should one not want people to know one is saving money, simply pretend to be making one's own bread from sheer, smug Cath Kidston-style oneupmanship. Nobody need know that the reason for the homemade gnocchi is that it's a fraction of the price of deli stuff (it's just mashed potato, egg and flour - how have I paid through the nose for this for years?)
Unless, of course, you blog about it.
Damn.

run and become

2010-06-06T12:18:00.000-07:00

I've always secretly envied running bores. You know: those evangelicals who go on about runner's high, and how the stress just rolls away, and how they get their best ideas when they're running, and the marathon was the best day of their life even though their toenails fell off, bla bla bla.
I envy it because I've always hated running, and the few times I've tried to make myself persevere (because it's good for you, cheap, quick, and you can do it anywhere) it's always ended in failure. And the comfort of hot buttered crumpets.
So imagine my surprise when I forced myself out for a run tonight and actually enjoyed it. Well, didn't actively hate it, anyway.
It helps that running along a riverbank is more invigorating than picking my way through abandoned takeaways in a London park. Sheer vanity is definitely there too: who was it said that until your 30s you have the body you're given and after that you have the body you earned? After three post-baby years merrily doing no exercise, I so don't want the one I've earned.
But it also feels luxurious to have a bit of time purely for myself: more so, actually, to have my body to myself for a bit. Life with small children often feels like one long physical demand, from the hazy days of round-the-clock breastfeeding to the constant desire of toddlers to clamber on you.
The problem now is how not to give up. After all, I've got to this stage before and then fizzled out through sheer boredom/laziness/refusal to go out in the rain. So, evangelical runners, I need to know: how do you keep making it interesting?

the daddy wars begin

2010-06-04T13:08:00.000-07:00

THIS week saw the first shots exchanged in what you could call the 'daddy wars'. On one side, David Cameron and Nick Clegg changed the time of a Cabinet meeting so they could take their kids to school first - sending a powerful signal to fathers and employers about the importance of family life.
Fire was returned with both barrels by the Daily Mail's Richard Littlejohn, who complained in his Friday column that when his children were small he left home at 5.30am and only saw them at weekends. The Mail's diary column says Cameron and Clegg 'invite our contempt', a view I suspect the Mail's editor Paul Dacre probably shares. I'm sure some older male MPs are muttering similar things, and there may be jitters around Downing Street.
Well, I hope they stick to their guns. Littlejohn reflects what many British men, particularly older men, probably think. But there is another generation of fathers who don't want their children to grow up in their absence, and Cameron and Clegg owe it them to show the sky doesn't fall in if you occasionally put family first.
The 'daddy wars', just like the much better-chronicled mummy wars, are often rooted in guilt: if a man announces he won't sacrifice his children to a career, men who have essentially had to do just that are bound to feel criticised and defensive. There's a sense of 'I had it hard, why shouldn't they?'
And men who disagree don't always dare say so. Some years ago when the Commons was debating changes to late night voting, those campaigning for more humane hours were nearly all women (and mothers) while those against were nearly all men. A male MP (and father) told me he and several colleagues were privately on the women's side but staying quiet because it was easier to let the women take the flak.
Well, where working fathers and working mothers share the same frustrations about office life it's time they made common cause. Cameron and Clegg have a unique chance to make a difference: I hope they grab it with both hands.

home economics: the sequel

2010-06-02T07:22:00.001-07:00

Oh dear. Just totted up what I've actually spent in the last seven days as opposed to what I think I spend, and am genuinely appalled. How have I got through £260 without anything decadent to show for it? The only things I bought for myself were an intray to sort out my overflowing pile of invoices (tax deductible, maybe?) and a mint plant from the garden centre.
OK, it was a bad week for presents: wedding anniversary, niece's birthday, housewarming for a friend. The silliest thing on it is £35 for a couple of months' supply of the dog's stupidly expensive diet food, as instructed by vet. I could hire it a macrobiotic chef for less.
Nonetheless. The efficiency savings hitherto announced are coverdue. Inspired by David Laws's first decision at the Treasury - cancelling the office potplant budget - it's time to get cracking, or my downshifted career will last approximately as long as, well, David Laws's.
So far have identified the following grievous wastes of money in this house:
1. Leaving the immersion heater switched on for, like, ever (that would be me).
2. Leaving every single electrical appliance in the house on standby constantly (my husband)
3. Buying aubergines. I don't really like aubergines, but buy them for the odd recipe in which I don't mind them, and then never do anything with the inevitable leftover half. I have wasted literally POUNDS on inefficient aubergine use over the years.
4. Parking fines, congestion charge fines (him again), library fines and extra charges for overnight delivery because I never order birthday presents in time (me).
When the Treasury made £6 billion efficiency savings, they axed advertising budgets and management consultants. We are what you might call between management consultants right now, but a flick through the bank statements reveals I still pay a £4.99 a month subscription to lovefilm, despite giving up on them after a couple of scratched DVDs. Ha! No longer. There is also a subscription I forgot to cancel for a childcare website through which we didn't find a childminder months ago (top tip: directgov.uk's list is free). Zap goes another £12.99 a quarter. This is quite fun.
Then I turn the thermostat down a degree (even though the heating's not on) and turn off everything electrical that is blinking: washing machine, laptop left plugged in and half-on, microwave. I turn off all the lights in rooms we aren't using, feeling virtuous.
My son, who is playing in the kitchen, complains that if the lights aren't on in the livingroom simultaneously 'I'm worried little people will come from under the sofa and bite me.'While demonstrating the lack of snarling little people under the sofa, I find some missing Lego. I bet George Osborne is having similar experiences all over Whitehall.
Next step: the axeman cometh for the supermarket shop. Aubergines are just the beginning.

home economics

2010-06-01T05:19:00.001-07:00

IT's one of the oldest tricks in politics: ooh, don't mind me, I'm just a housewife. Margaret Thatcher told us in 1980 that spending cuts were essential because 'every housewife has to' stop shopping when there's nothing in the purse. During the election, David Cameron suggested that shaving squillons off public spending was just the sort of scrimping on pennies that households do all the time. No doubt we'll hear it all again during this month's Budget.
Which is timely, as a bit of frugality is long overdue in this downshifted household. So to cheer myself up during the grim process of spending less money, I'm conducting a little experiment. Where possible, I'll be channelling current Treasury thinking when I take the scalpel - or possibly, given my last bank statement, a whopping big axe - to the Hinsliff finances. Who knows what we might learn about the real economy from this not-even-remotely-scientific model, eh?
So here are the ground rules:
1. I won't cut back on frontline services. After careful thought, am defining these as: things that genuinely make three-year-olds happy; gin and tonic; occasionally getting out of the house.
2. I will act in the true spirit of coalition, ie I haven't really told my husband what I'm doing. I am by nature stingy, fretful and given to hoarding bits of string in case they come in handy: he cheerfully blows money on what I regard as total rubbish. This, I feel, may give me a useful insight into the relationship between the Tories and the LibDems.
3. I shall consider the merits of salami slicing all budgets vs boldly axing big programmes, or what I call The Highlights Question: viz, I could save a fair bit of money by no longer being blonde. Or I could keep going to the hairdresser and cut back a bit everywhere else. Hmm.
4. I will devolve spending locally. Which means: first for the chop is money spent via corporate giants with rude call centres. Last to go is anything bought from shops you can walk to, where they hold the door open for pushchairs.
So for the next month, we shall be Delivering More With Less Money on this blog. And Making Things Better Without Just Spending Money. And, of course, being Brutally Honest About The Results (that last is the only one that is not an authentic Cameron slogan, by the way) on here. If you're doing the same, please join in and share your ideas.
Tomorrow: the efficiency savings begin....

lessons from the vegetable patch

2010-05-31T13:59:00.001-07:00

Time to face the truth: I'm not nearly ruthless enough to grow salad. Reading this has given me the courage to confess my own similar dilemma with the vegetable patch - like its author, I just can't bring myself to do thinning out.
I know you have to pull out the weedy/surplus seedlings so the rest have space to grow. But a combination of stinginess - I hate throwing away perfectly good (embryonic) rocket - and soppiness makes me wimp out every time.
Surely if the spindly, yellowing ones were lavished with a few weeks of top quality fertiliser/sunshine/twice-daily watering/private education, they too could grow up to be spinach! All that potential gone to waste is so sad. Even if it was only ever destined to be lettuce.
This deep feebleness has, of course, resulted in a salad jungle: vast thickets of red mustard, great tangles of rocket - none of which will mature properly because they don't actually have any room.
My fellow garden wimp, Douglas Carswell, saw his veg patch as a metaphor for coalition government: weak policies have to be weeded out to let other ideas flourish. Hmm. My overcrowded, stunted lettuces are reminding me more of the first law of working parenthood: you can't do everything, and failure to prioritise only means nothing gets done well.

how to tell you're a grown up

2010-05-26T05:38:00.000-07:00

My son turned three recently, which has prompted several conversations about what being grownup means. He seems confident he's more or less there now, but does concede there are a handful of desirable things that only grownups can do. After much debate, he has boiled these down to:
1. Cut with sharp scissors
2. Shave
3. Change a lightbulb when it's blown
4. Drive a cement mixer
5. Swim in your pyjamas (I think this relates to some older kids he saw doing lifesaving practice at the local swimming pool)

The more I look at this list, the more I think it roughly covers it. As for the moment I finally gave up on the illusion that I am in any way still young, it was probably last week, walking through some water meadows nearby which are popular with tourists.
I didn't just tut at the rubbish left behind by last weekend's picnickers: I actually picked it up and took it home.
Which means I have finally become my mother.

back to the kitchen cabinet

2010-05-13T13:01:00.000-07:00

There is a line, in the Winnie the Pooh book with which my son is currently obssessed, about Kanga suddenly feeling 'motherly, and wanting to count things', like vests for Roo and clean spots on Tigger's feeder. It must have been on my mind, because this week - when I was planning to do absolutely nothing, after a month working flat out - I've found myself mostly wanting to count things instead.
Or not so much count as sort. There is a great, underrated pleasure in sorting: ruthlessly chucking out old paperwork, tangles of chargers whose phones are long gone, laddered pairs of tights. It's an almost physical relief.
And the great bonus of being mostly slatternly is that on the rare occasions you do spring clean, there are so many surprises. Who knew there was sunlight outside, once the windows were washed? Or that I'll never actually need to buy another biro in this lifetime, given how many were lying around the house?
There is a secret, retro pleasure in this bringing (if briefly) of domestic order to chaos. The urge doesn't strike me very often but it tends to come after an intense period of work: I think there's an element of wresting back control, reasserting yourself in the domestic world you've become disconnected from.
And this time, maybe some displacement activity too. A new government has formed, and for the first time in four elections I don't have a ringside seat next to it.
Perhaps what I'm really doing is confronting the fact that, after a month embroiled in my old world during the election, it's time to move on. It's Cabinet reshuffles for them, and reshuffling kitchen cupboards for me.
Oh well. I still don't quite know what the future holds: but at least now I've chucked all the jars long past their sell-by dates, it's less likely to hold salmonella.

why this hasn't been a Mumsnet election

2010-05-04T06:11:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, a woman about my age came up to me on the street while I was out with my son. She apologised for bothering us but said she was desperately looking for some part-time childcare for her daughter, who's recently started school.
She worked at a local hospital, which often meant late evening shifts: but she couldn't find a local nursery or childminder open much past 6pm, while afterschool clubs aren't open that late either (and even if they were that's a terribly long day in school for a four-year-old.) I guess a nanny was too expensive on an NHS salary, and there were no grandparents nearby.
If she couldn't find someone, she would no longer be able to do her job: and she was getting desperate, which was why she was stopping complete strangers like me, hoping that the local mummy grapevine could somehow magically produce a solution.
And as we chatted I thought: during almost four weeks of this so-called 'Mumsnet election', with politicians supposedly targeting middle class mothers in marginal seats, I have heard nobody even come close to offering practical help with problems like this.
We live in a 24/7 economy, with supermarkets open round the clock and millions of people in the public sector working night and weekend shifts, yet childcare is still too often organised around an 8am-6pm working day. How do you hire and hold onto parents in those circumstances?
But nobody wants to talk about complicated things like that. What we get is photo opportunities amid the fingerpaints to promote tax breaks for married mothers or toddler tax credits (worth £3 a week and just under £4 a week respectively: hardly enough to compensate for having to give up one's job) and gushing talk from the leaders' wives about what great dads their husbands are.
As a bunch of eminent (and clearly cross) women make clear in this letter to the Times today, too many of the really big questions for women haven't even been touched. If this was the Mumsnet election, god help us when politics reverts to normal.

oh yes, the camera does lie

2010-05-01T14:06:00.000-07:00

For as long as I can remember, I've hated being photographed. My best friend couldn't claim I'm photogenic (my passport was once returned to me at Customs with the words 'I'd change that, it's doing you no favours'): let's just say there's a reason this blog is illustrated by a picture of a road.
So when Grazia magazine said they wanted to shoot me for an article I'd written about what it was like giving up my Proper Job, I just hoped it would all be over quickly. What follows, folks, is the truth about what it takes to turn a haggard old crone into the Grazia-fied stranger in this week's edition. And no, the lovely mac is not really mine. Sob.
That one oh-so-natural picture took a team of five (photographer, photographer's assistant, stylist, makeup artist, shoot stylist) half a day to create. They arrived, trailing two rails of clothes and a high street's worth of shoes, just as the builders were fitting a new door to replace the one wrecked in the burglary. I think it's fair to say ruralshire builders are not used to the fashion world.
Nor, I'm fairly certain, were the sensible matrons out walking their dogs nearby who rounded a corner to find me poncing across the river meadows in (borrowed) designer labels trailed by the full Grazia entourage, with the makeup artist dashing forward every five seconds to top up my lipgloss, while I tried vainly to look as if I was just out for a stroll.
Freddie was a little confused ('Why are we going for a walk but not walking anywhere?'). The dog let itself down by licking the camera. And the lovely Paul & Joe dress didn't quite zip up my non-model back: thank God for that mac, really.
Still, the end result is about the only photograph I've ever seen of me that I quite sort of like. The bad news is that left to my own devices, I look absolutely nothing like it.
Oh, and my son keeps asking loudly in public places when 'the makeup lady is coming to do you again'....

competitive parenting & the art of lunchboxes

2010-04-27T12:23:00.001-07:00

It's fair to say things have been a bit slack domestically of late, given how distracted I've been by the election: slack enough to induce some irrational pangs of guilt. I've fallen, in short, into the competitive lunchbox trap.
Three days a week my son goes to a childminder, which means three packed lunches to make. I used to be fairly inventive about these but lately it's been done on autopilot: sandwich, yoghurt, fruit, zzz....
So this week I resolved guiltily to be more adventurous, cultivate his inner gourmet, all that. The result? Today's offering - a smugly healthy, deeply labour intensive Annabel Karmel-ish thing - was rejected point blank on the grounds that 'it tastes of chairs', apparently
There are two lessons, I think, here:
1. You can overdo this motherhood thing. Other mothers might occasionally be impressed (or more likely irritated) by uberparenting, but your own child will usually be utterly unmoved.
2. Don't knock a cheese sandwich.

teaching (not very old) dogs new tricks

2010-04-20T13:19:00.000-07:00

Day Five of the dog's assertiveness training, and it's not going well. When he was a puppy, we taught him not to bark when someone came to the front door since it woke the baby: handy then, but since we got burgled there's been a rethink. Hence the deeply ludicrous process of trying to teach a dog to, um, bark.
Our dog is what canine behaviour experts call 'food orientated', ie fat. So every time he makes a noise at anything he gets a dog biscuit to encourage him. After a few days of this, a breakthrough: when the postman comes, the dog sort of huffs once embarassedly under his breath and then sits looking pointedly at the biscuit cupboard.
Hmm. Perhaps the problem is too many incentive regimes running in this house. Life with a small child is one long round of bribes/threats, obviously (or is that just me?): and then there's the NHS 'quit kit' that arrived for my husband, who is supposedly giving up smoking. He was unamused by its main component: a toddler-style sticker chart, complete with irritating little symbols of rainbows and sunny days.
I was keeping the sticker chart for my son, but now I'm thinking I might try it on the dog. This morning he enthusiastically welcomed the man fitting the burglar alarm and then, when I took him for a walk, barked furiously at a yoof in the park for no apparent reason.
Which leaves two possibilities:
1. the dog is engaged in a sophisticated form of offender profiling, with potential civil liberties implications
2. the dog is thick.
Either way, we're nearly out of biscuits.

why freelancers don't take holiday

2010-04-13T06:59:00.000-07:00

It has been one of those 'two worlds colliding' weeks, when work has gone crazy (the election) coinciding with my childminder going on holiday (Easter).
My parents are currently here helping out but as we speak, the house is also full of builders drilling things: yesterday, it had all the above plus a BBC film crew setting up in the dining room. We're still househunting, and just to complete the picture, we got burgled at the weekend: hence the builders, busy installing an alarm. The mobile never stops ringing, and my head is exploding.
What I need, I realise, is a holiday. When I was working fulltime, I eked out my time off so that I never went more than three months without some kind of break: often we didn't go away, but it was just a chance to stop and breathe.
Yet now that I'm freelance, and don't have to ask my boss to book holidays any more, I've forgotten to ask myself. It dimly occurs to me that I stopped work one Saturday in November and started a freelance commission two days later. There hasn't been a week since where I didn't do something, workwise.
Which means I've fallen with a thud into the part-timer trap: firstly being too scared to stop (what if the phone never rings again?) and also subconsciously thinking of my non-working days as 'holiday'. Yet despite its charms, even the boldest travel agent would hesitate to sell looking after a two-year-old as a relaxing vacation.
Obviously, the middle of the most important election in 30 years is a bad time for an ex-political hack to down tools. But once it's over, I'm turning the phone off for a week. No really, I am.

toys for boys

2010-04-10T14:00:00.000-07:00

'Knights and castles! with swords!' is what my nephew wanted for his fourth birthday. So there I was rootling through a hundred boxes of Playmobil in our local toyshop looking for suitably armoured horses, when I saw it. Among the assorted pirates, Roman gladiators, cowboys and (thankfully) knights sat Playmobil Office. A little plastic figure in a suit complete with desk, computer, a filing cabinet and even his own lovingly crafted set of folders. I think there was also a wastepaper bin.
I can't imagine a toy the average small boy would less like to play with: it does rather smack of a token gesture designed to placate parents. The vast majority of boys' toys are action heroes, swashbucklers and derrers-do: they live by the sword (or at least the fire hose), and they're intensely physical. They don't do much filing.
Boys' toys are far more exciting and inspiring than the fluffy pink tat aimed at little girls. No wonder parents of daughters worry about the passive role models created by all those fairies, princesses, and ballerinas.
But boys' toys reinforce a stereotype too, even if it is a more empowering one: they're all about physicality, strength, and daring, brawn rather than brain.
Bringing up a boy has changed a lot of my ideas about what's ingrained and what isn't, having watched as the passion for diggers, fire engines and bin lorries emerged early and continued steadfastly regardless of whatever toys we offered. And of course I know toys are about fantasy, not real life: the fact that most of the little boys who grow up playing knights and castles will probably end up working in offices doesn't mean they should be playing with filing cabinets now.
But nerdy as it sounds, I wouldn't mind seeing a few more toys that made the connection between doing well at school (the one thing parents of sons inevitably worry about, as boys fall behind at GCSE, Alevel and university) and doing something exciting in later life. I can't be sure that playing astronauts will make my son more likely to take Physics A-level in 15 years' time. But I doubt the prospect of becoming poor old Mr Playmobil Office would make any self-respecting little boy knuckle down to GCSEs.

how to make a paper boat

2010-03-31T12:57:00.000-07:00

So I spent my day making paper boats, to float in the bath. Hours of high quality toddler entertainment, fiddling with the half-remembered folding technique that makes a reasonably watertight gondola. Then experimenting with different papers for optimum non-sogginess (hot tip: pizza flyers, the stiff shiny ones from dodgy looking outlets on industrial estates. And glossy magazine covers. Those featuring Jennifer Aniston seem particularly water repellent).
There won't be many more relaxed days for a while. The election's no doubt going to be called next Tuesday, so bang goes the next month (I have, obviously, broken my promise to myself to stay out of it. But am MOSTLY staying out of it. Ahem).
But the paper boats were a useful reminder of two things. One, obviously, that if you're two the best things in life often really are free.
But secondly, how much harder parenting would be without the interweb. I couldn't remember how to make paper boats, so obviously I googled it. (What DID parents do pre-Net? Talk to each other? Hand wisdom down the generations? Surely not).
There are millions of variations - I picked this video at random. But almost all those I looked at were not trying to flog anything (what paper boat-associated merchandise is htere? old paper?), advertise anything, puff anybody's paper boat-related book, sucker you into being their friend, or get your bank details.
People just go to the bother of filming themselves making paper boats and posting it online for the sheer joy of - what? Maybe some origami-based sexual fetish, but more likely just because there is a compulsive human need - and one particularly strong among parents - to share stuff that might make others happy, and to teach what you know. For all the ugliness and criminality online, there is sheer altruism too.
Also please note: say what you like about online news, but you can't make a boat out of it, can you? I rest my case for old-fashioned newspapers.

why i'm a rent girl

2010-03-29T05:40:00.001-07:00

So after about six months of househunting, I finally saw a house this morning that might work, in a pretty village with a great school. And it has a treehouse. So we could always live in that when the leaking roof gets too much.
But it's made me think again about renting. The hardest part of the downshift for me was selling our much-loved family house in London: we've been renting for six months in ruralshire, which makes us feel camped out here, permanently on the edge of flight. It's unsettling.
Unlike many Europeans, the Brits kind of look down on renting: it's something you only do when you're young or when you can't afford to buy. But it has upsides too. It's somebody else's problem when the boiler doesn't work, and it's cheaper than a mortage. We could just leave if we decide ruralshire is not for us. Why not rent for a bit longer? Doesn't look like house prices are soaring ahead any time soon.
In fact, the appeal of renting doesn't stop at houses. I read a really interesting blog by Brian Kaller recently about applying the library principle to other things. Do we all really need our own barbecue, or lawnmower, or cake tin, or anything else you use less than once a week but still feel compelled to buy and keep? Why couldn't there be neighbourhood 'libraries' for these things and we could all take turns borrowing them as needed?
Ok, maybe not the barbecue - we'd all want it on the same sunny Saturday night in August - but half the stuff cluttering up my garage is there because I might need it ONE DAY, not because I use it frequently. Think how much money I'd have saved by borrowing, not buying it.
The trouble of course is that stuff we acquire isn't just stuff: ownership of stuff is a way we demonstrate we've made it, a way we define ourselves, a source of pride even.
Ownership equals spontaneity and freedom - you don't have to book in advance, you just decide that morning you're going to have a barbecue or go for a bike ride. We're used to the convenience of ownership.
And actually ownership equals a healthy economy: it's more lucrative to get everyone to buy their own lawnmower rather than to have a central pool of it that everyone can borrow. Owning big assets like houses also makes sense because they can make you money, although the vast majority of stuff we have (from rusting barbecue to not-yet-rusting car) is actually losing value the longer we own it.
But maybe the recession is a chance to rethink renting. You can now rent designer handbags, jewellery, big-night-out dresses online - for those who want designer, but can't afford it. There are sites where you can hire your own expensive but rarely used things like ski stuff out to others who only need it briefly and don't want to buy.
We're used to timebanks letting us barter our skills: so why not neighbourhood asset banks, which would let me swap my (shamefully underused) lawnmower with you once a week if I can borrow your food mixer? It's the sort of trade that happens constantly in small villages, but not necessarily in inner cities, where people may actually own less and benefit more from asset 'renting'. It could even encourage people to talk to their neighbours.
And after all, if we buy this moneypit of a house we'll never be able to afford to buy anything else ever again. I'm going to need a communal barbecue. Swap you for a turn in the treehouse.

vegetarians, stop reading right here...

2010-03-26T15:01:00.001-07:00

Spring is sprung in ruralshire, and everywhere you look is new life: lambs gambolling in the meadows and - thanks to our local farm shop and their willingness to let small children rampage around the farm - piglets too.
Ah. The farm shop. The flipside of all this rural idyll stuff is the link you can't avoid in the countryside: the one between animals in the field and animals on the plate. When we were townies, meat came shrinkwrapped from the supermarket: now, you can buy it a few yards from where it was previously living. And even the boy has started to work it out.
It started with 'Where does chicken come from?' one teatime. Um, from chickens. Yes, like the ones outside the house down the road. 'Why don't the chickens need it any more?' Um, well, because it sort of IS the chickens. Ones that are sort of, um, er, dead. 'Why are they dead?' Weelll, they had a very long and happy life, and then when they got very very old, and had finished being chickens, well, um, er....
I have made a complete hash of it, obviously. I was expecting to tackle the big metaphysical questions sooner or later, obviously: but I was thinking expired pet goldfish, not dinner.
Yet I've been surprised on two counts. Firstly, the boy has taken it all rather matter of factly: small children aren't sentimental, possibly because the towering ego of your classic under-3 does not allow for empathy with chickens.
Secondly, I'm also less squeamish about this than I thought. Perhaps because I was brought up in the country myself, getting closer to the source of my Sunday roast hasn't put me off it.
But it has made me care more about where our meat came from, and what sort of life it had before: we now eat meatfree once a week and more fish too. It feels appropriate that meat should no longer be a daily thing. Unlike those lambs, whom we see every morning.

because im worth it (um, sort of)

2010-03-23T09:30:00.001-07:00

It's nearly the end of the financial year, and so I've spent the afternoon reading baffling letters from HMRC all of which contradict the previous one. Ah, the joys of being self-employed.
But it made me realise: this blog has dwelt on the emotional ups and downs of working for myself, but the financial ones? Not so much. Yet it's part of any honest reckoning.
First, looking back over my earnings since going freelance, the good news: it's more than I expected. Hurrah! Though admittedly, the bar was set on the pessimistic assumption I'd sink into a pit of unemployabliity.
But secondly, it probably could have been more. Going freelance has exposed my financial Achilles heel: like a lot of women I am rubbish at negotiating my own pay.
Some years ago, I was headhunted by a rival newspaper: I wavered, nearly took the job, and when I decided to stay my husband suggested I negotiate a payrise from my employer as a reward for loyalty.
I'm not really sure what happened inbetween me striding into the managing editor's office with a watertight case for a rise (surprise surprise, asking male colleagues on other papers it turned out I was paid less than all of them) and slinking out emptyhanded. But as my husband groaned halfway through my version of the meeting: "Just tell me you didn't volunteer for a paycut."
Let's just say the rest of my Fleet Street career was not a shining advert for industries where you mostly negotiate your own salary. And I don't think I'm alone. Too often, women don't earn what they could because unlike men they don't ask (the other reason, of course, is that when they ask they don't get: this extract from the book Women Don't Ask is worth a read).
Too often we blithely assume everyone will nobly pay us what we deserve, when actually businesses are wired not to spend money if they don't have to. Too often we're satisfied with approval from our bosses, where men demand cash (this blog from WhereTheBrightWomenAre is brilliant on why women get suckered into doing stuff at work that doesn't count).
Well, self-employment has been painful but liberating.
Now, I have to negotiate fees for every new project, and to be honest: I hate it. Because I've always had a salary rather than a per-hourly rate, I had no idea initially what to charge for my time: I was far too quick to say yes without even asking the fee, or just accept that what people offered was the going rate. At the back of my mind is always a tiny, insistent voice questioning whether I'm worth whatever I'm asking for.
Yet it's been illuminating having to calculate exactly how long it takes me to do any given piece of work, and so how much my time should be worth. It's made the money I earn seem more real: finally there's a direct link between the hours I put in and what I get back, which there wasn't on a salary.
And it has been liberating, on the few occasions I've rejected a job because the fee was too low, to discover that magically the fee then usually rises. Rather cheeringly, it turns out I am (sometimes) worth it. Wish L'Oreal would make an advert about that.

how i got the needle

2010-03-20T13:42:00.001-07:00

This week it has been, occasionally, a bit sunny. Which triggers the usual end of winter panic: realising that I haven't got anything to wear. What the hell did I wear last summer? Why does this happen every summer? I can't have spent the entire season in the office.
This time, however, retail therapy is not an option. I am supposedly downshifting, for god's sake: I am meant to rise above material things, not lie in the bath reading fashion magazines wondering if cutoff grey tracksuit bottoms are someone's little joke.
So instead I spent an afternoon foraging at the back of the wardrobe and in what I euphemistically refer to as the 'sewing box' (ie stuff that's been waiting to be repaired/ altered since approximately the 1980s).
And this is what I found, to my surprise. Who knew?
Exhibit 1: long pale blue shorts that I never liked. Chopped short, rehemmed et voila - reasonable knockoff of £95 pair in this month's Elle.
Exhibit 2: silk combats, not worn since last time they were in (not sure, but I was definitely single) yet by bizarre cyclical fashion logic now deemed v spring/summer 2010. Though I learn they are called 'the silk cargo pant' this time. Love that fashion singular.
Exhibit 3: One pair muchloved jeans with rip in knee (from years of changing nappies on the floor) + scissors = denim shorts. Very Kate Moss. Obviously as worn by her older, fatter sister, solely in the privacy of her back garden.
Exhibit 4: Grey TopShop jacket that I loved so much I refused to stop wearing it when pregnant, despite a bump so huge it was visible from space. The seam split and I never got round to mending it. Five minutes with a needle, and it's back.
Exhibit 5: Pale blue Diesel trousers, not seen since drunken sailing holiday in Croatia, feared drowned. But no! scrunched up in the sewing box, it turns out. Now reinvented (well, rehemmed) at 2010 just-above-ankle length. To wear with heels, in the unlikely event I ever go out again. Which brings me to
Exhibit 5: After counting shocking number of pairs of heels, firm resolution not to buy any more. Especially if, like the teetering orange pair bought for a friend's book launch which make me look like a lapdancer, I can't cross the road unaided in them. Let the fashion mags claim it's now 'all about the kitten heel'. Last year it was all about the lapdancer heel, and I know how that ended up: in an undiginfied heap on the pavement in Clapham, that's how.
I'm not saying I'll never darken the doors of Selfridges again. But the joy of being thirtysomething is finally seeing fashion turn full circle: from now on, pretty much whatever the trend, you've probably got one stuffed at the back of a drawer from last time round. If that's not God's consolation prize for ageing, I don't know what is.

time and the (half)working mother

2010-03-18T04:36:00.000-07:00

I am having trouble with my time zones. Not in the way I used to (husband fogbound at Washington airport, me in London at overrunning meeting, ergo nobody home for bedtime). But I have three different sorts of time now, all moving at different speeds.
First, there is toddler time. This is not time as the laws of physics would know it. Toddler time can go backwards, forwards and sideways: it can take half an hour to walk a few steps (if there's beetles on the ground to investigate, or things that need poking with a stick, or just because I DONT WANNA!!! WAAAAHH!). But it can take a fraction of a second to grab a knife out of the dishwasher when your back is turned.
Toddler time responds badly to being organised, or attempting to achieve anything specific. On rainy, badtempered days an hour of toddler time can last forever. Yet the years between babyhood and disappearing off to school can somehow flash past in an instant.
Second, there is housework time. Initially I thought this worked to the toddler clock: that it basically involved wafting around, pegging out washing in the sunshine, inbetween playing. But wafting does not get stuff done. Wafting leads to everyone running out of socks. Domestic time actually needs to be organised, methodical, linear: it means shopping lists, schedules, and making packed lunches the night before, and it's therefore not brilliantly compatible with toddler time.
Third, there is work time. In an ideal world, this would be on the same latitude as housework: structured, efficient, running to a strict timetable. But for me it's another time zone again: short, creative bursts of being absorbed in what I'm doing and making sudden leaps forward - mixed with long hours of faffing about eating biscuits. It goes in slow motion for days, when I can't summon any kind of urgency about the task ahead, and suddenly speeds up to a frenzy about three hours before deadline.
Switching between these three time zones isn't so easy. I keep having to remind myself when I'm with my son to slow down and forget the idea of getting anything done: no sooner have I got the hang of that then it's time to kickstart myself into organised mode, or work mode. I finally understand now what people mean about part-time work involving more frequent gearshifts.
I'm not moaning: I prefer all three of my new timezones to the old never-enough-time one. But I do think I've got jetlag.

I'm not a feminist, but...

2010-03-08T01:35:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, I went to a press conference involving the two then government women's ministers, Tessa Jowell and Margaret Jay, and their colleague Helen Liddell, launching some initiative on women I now forget. I asked all three of them whether they would define themselves as feminists. One by one, they all squirmed and wriggled and said something along the lines of, ooh, well, er, no I wouldnt say a FEMINIST exactly, but....
This is daft. I knew all three well enough to know that in private that's exactly how they'd describe themselves (in fairness, I guess they'd now be happy to do it in public: this was back in the late 1990s, the Labour government was new and very nervous, and I was working for the Daily Mail.)
But it's also very common. "I'm not a feminist, but..." is a mad thing for any thinking woman to say. (But what? But on the whole, I'm in favour of having the vote? But ideally, I wouldn't stone women to death for adultery? But I'm not a total idiot either?)
The problem is with feminism's image. To many women it equals killjoy, man-hater, harridan: it equals not being allowed to shave your legs, banned from appreciating fashion or fun, lacking a sense of humour. This American poll illustrates the problem nicely: 70 per cent of American women wouldn't call themselves a feminist, but when feminism is defined for them neutrally (and accurately) as 'someone who believes in social, political and economic equality of the sexes', suddenly 65 per cent of them are feminists after all.
Similarly while over a quarter think the women's movement made their lives worse, when asked what made their lives better, the answers - equal pay, or more choices in life - lead straight back to the scary old women's movement. We just don't like to give it the credit.
So for anyone still hesitating, here are some myths about feminism laid to rest.
1. It's rubbish that stay at home mothers can't be feminists. Yes, Germaine Greer argued that economic independence from men was the foundation stone of women's freedom. If you rely solely on a male breadwinner for the longterm, you need to know you're gambling your economic future on the risk of divorce, bereavement or male redundancy.
But feminism is also about the right to make your own intelligent choices: it's about saying that nurturing other people shouldn't be regarded as 'lesser' than paid work, just because it's women who more often do it. Feminism can be about attacking the way working life is organised (to suit men with a wife at home) rather than about forcing women to fit into a male pattern of work.
2. It's not compulsory to hate men. Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th century philosopher and early feminist, said she did not wish women 'to have power over men, but over themselves'. You can live with and love someone without having to be completely subservient to them.
3. Feminists do wear lipstick. They just do it knowing precisely who they're dressing up to please (could be men, could be themselves, doesn't matter) and they don't torture themselves to unnatural and/or ruinously expensive degrees trying to meet some loony vision of female attractiveness (corsets so tight you faint, cosmetic surgery that leaves you maimed, a size zero figure that means you can't actually eat).
4. Stuff doesn't happen by accident. If you enjoy having the right to vote, to get a mortgage in your own name, to get contraception without requiring your husband's permission, to be paid the same as the man sat next to you, to get pregnant without getting sacked, to an education, to say no - then you should give credit where credit's due. Happy International Women's Day.

the truth about homeworking

2010-03-06T13:14:00.000-08:00

There is very little I won't actually read,when I am at home and meant to be working. Scanning the newspaper headlines, obviously, is allowed: that's part of my job. And I can sort of get away with opening the post.
But when I catch myself reading the Lakeland catalogue that fell out of last weekend's papers from cover to cover, it's time to face the fact that I'm doing absolutely anything to avoid starting work.
There are plenty of people who are fantastically productive working from home: on the rare occasions I managed it in my Proper Job I got more done than I ever did in the office, because there were fewer interruptions. But now I'm entirely my own boss, it's different.
Last week I had two days' childcare and more than two days' work to do in it. The first day was surprisingly productive, basically because I was out of the house: interviews, a long meeting of a taskforce I'm sitting on, lunch with my agent about the book proposal I'm supposed to be writing, sorting out a blogging project.
The second day, I was at home, with nine solid hours in front of the computer ahead of me. Ha!
Let's just say by the end of the day I'd hoovered the entire house (I hate hoovering), walked the dog, made endless lists, faffed about on Twitter for hours, spent an inordinate amount of time making lunch, and...oh, and then it was time to pick the boy up from his childminder.
My biggest worry about working from home was that I'd get lonely. But I'm surprised how much I love having time to myself (an odd way to describe work, perhaps, but I like writing so much that's how it always feels to me).
In fact, it turns out the biggest hurdle is that I'm a deadline junkie. Years of working in newspapers means I can't really take anything seriously until I've got less than half an hour to do it: give me a whole day, and I'll wander about making endless cups of tea until I'm right up against the clock, where it feels comfortable. Having always thought of myself as driven (and having always behaved that way at work), I'm surprised to discover that all along there's been a procrastinator inside me trying to get out.
Or actually not trying to get out. More likely reading the Lakeland catalogue, and telling itself it'll definitely get out later. Sigh.

going to seed

2010-02-23T13:51:00.000-08:00

It's been snowing all day, yet again, but I am in denial. I am not listening. I am reading seed catalogues. One day it may be spring again, and chez Hinsliff there is - no really, there is! - going to be a veg patch.
It's not going to be the kitchen garden of my fantasies (brick walls, box hedges, mysterious absence of slugs and snails, me wafting about in river cottage-fashion picking homegrown peaches, etc). And I'm resigned to the fact that most of it will obviously die.
But hey, growing vegetables is the big downshifting cliche. I can't not have a go.
What I want is edible stuff that is idiotproof, quick-growing, of interest to toddlers (we may struggle to inspire a passion for gardening by way of courgettes) and can be grown in pots on a patio - we're househunting, and I don't want to have to leave it all behind if we move. Can just see my husband's face when I tell him we need to cram rows upon rows of snail-ravaged stumps into the removal van.
Ideally I'd also like to grow stuff that's expensive to buy in supermarkets, although (see the Great Potato Debacle of last year), in my experience growing your own tends to involve spending a small fortune on materials in order to produce one weedy runt that would be rejected by Lidl.
So far I'm thinking salad leaves, especially rocket; tomatoes (haven't got a greenhouse, but have a sunny back wall); blueberries (my one sad, nonfruiting bush is going to get a mate, even though it's supposedly selfpollinating). Have done Chinese mustard leaves before which were good, so would like to have a go at pak choi or some sort of vaguely stirfryable greenery.
I'd quite like some sort of bean - I grew borlotti beans last year, which were fantastically poncey and very pretty but I had no idea what to cook with them: maybe broad beans this year?
And I'd quite like raspberries, which will allegedly grow in pots, although I'm not sure how well. But as you can tell, I am mostly clueless. Does anyone out there have green fingers?

Time for a reality check

2010-02-21T08:11:00.000-08:00

Last night, the dog managed to get fed twice. He did this by rolling mournful, starved eyes at me until I opened a tin: and then when I went to put the boy to bed, repeating the routine for my husband, who assumed I'd forgotten and opened another tin.
This is not good. This is a trick the dog pulled off regularly in the chaotic days of us both working full tilt, when we were too busy to notice who'd done what. Three months on from giving up my Proper Job, I am confronting some home truths.
1. The mountain of ironing that never got done when I was working fulltime? Still there. Not exactly the same ironing (actually, possibly much the same ironing) but still not done.
2. The exercise I never had time for back then? Um, still not doing it. I did go swimming last week. It nearly killed me.
3. The family photos I meant to sort out? The albums still stop abruptly at the point my maternity leave ended (we did take photos after that - we're not completely rubbish parents - but they're either stuffed in a drawer or still on my camera's memory stick. As they were when I worked fulltime. Ahem)
4. The house is not noticeably cleaner or tidier for me being here more. Without the civilising influence of our nanny, it is in fact noticeably worse.
5. I do not seem to have learned Mandarin/read Proust cover to cover/broadened my intellectual horizons in my newfound free time. I have, though, wasted more time on the interweb.
In my defence, up until a fortnight ago I didn't have childcare, so work rather than domestic bliss has swallowed up any free time.
But nonetheless, I was wrong to blame my job for everything that had been squeezed out of my life. It turns out I don't actually care about ironing (well, not enough to do it) and that I don't go running every day because I'm frankly too lazy, rather than because I have no time.
Which is not to say I regret my choice. The bigger goals I set myself upon committing career suicide - getting to know my husband and son again, and trying new things professionally - have actually worked better than I hoped. We are a more relaxed and united family, now all pulling in the same direction (except, possibly, the dog). I am happier personally, and to my surprise also professionally: some interesting projects have come to my way.
But I would sound a small caveat about downshifting. In any life, there's stuff you just don't have time for: and the nature of that stuff may reveal much about that life, and what it's costing you.
But it can also reveal something about your priorities. I fear mine, like the dog's, are not always noble.

What's wrong with a 21-hour week?

2010-02-13T12:22:00.001-08:00

THERE's nothing I like more than someone flying the flag for part-time working, obviously.
So in some ways, hurrah for the report from thinktank the New Economics Foundation arguing everyone should work a 21-hour week, then do good deeds for each other (and the planet) in their new free time.
It highlights the madness of millions of Britons working miserably long hours, while others are unemployed but would love to work. Why not share it out? After all, that's how we ended up with a five day working week: six days was standard, until the Great Depression made us divvy up what little work there was.
But then again: um, not so hurrah. The report does gloss over the slight technical difficulty that working 21 hours means, well, getting paid for 21 hours.
Author Anna Coote's argument that many of us 'live to work, work to earn, and earn to consume' - so why not consume less, and not need to work so much - does resonate. I did used to feel trapped in a mad cycle of working long hours to earn the cash to pay for stuff (nanny, house nearish the office, gin) that let me, um, work long hours.
But that's really a middle class professional argument. What about the very many people who earn to eat, and pay rent? How do they manage on 21 hours of pay?
Apparently, we will all now have time to grow our own food, and walk or cycle everywhere instead of driving, thus saving money and carbon.
Which sounds lovely, and it's true I've rediscovered both my bike and some half-used seed packets since giving up. But this has not, sadly, compensated for halving my income.
In fairness the report does suggest a higher minimum wage, presumably to help those who needed to work long hours. But how is that affordable? If everyone halves their hours (and salary), we pay less tax and NI to the Exchequer. How do we then fund public services, pensions, and benefits?
If it sounds like I'm carping, I am. But only because this report makes me confront two tricky questions.
Firstly, its suggestion that if we had more time we'd all be 'better parents, better citizens, better carers and better neighbours' makes me feel guilty. Beyond the loaded question of whether stopping work makes you a better parent (and believe me, there are days when I think the nanny did a better job)I'm not really spending my new free time to the benefit of society. (I do some voluntary stuff, but then I always did.) Definitely food for thought.
And secondly, it reminds me that choice has consequences. Going part time may be great for the individual, but if enough of us do it we'll deprive the public purse of cash (because we're paying less tax)that might have reached people needier than us.
Which makes me wonder: is stopping work ultimately a selfish act?

maternity leave? what maternity leave?

2010-02-09T08:18:00.000-08:00

How did you feel seven hours after giving birth? Me, I was quite perky (it was a Caesarean: I was off my head on painkillers) but nonetheless I wouldn't have tried anything as complicated as, say, getting out of bed.
Feeble stuff compared to Helen Wright, a headteacher at a private girls' school who apparently went back to work seven hours after having her third baby. She is terribly gungho about great it all is having the baby at work with her, but it's hard to read without feeling faintly exhausted and depressed.
Nonetheless, the kicking promptly administered by today's Daily Mail, who seem to think she should have been sectioned instead, seems unkind.
When Wright says parents at her school expected to see an 'excellent role model' in the job I did wonder whether she felt under pressure not to be away: did she worry the parents wouldn't have tolerated a head absent on maternity leave, when they're paying the fees?
It's all a bit reminscent of Rachida Dati, the impossibly glamorous French minister (as was) and single mother who went back to work days after giving birth. Everyone condemned her for general heartlessness: a few weeks later, Dati was dropped from government, and it became clear that she had actually rushed back because she was terrified of losing her job if she didn't.
And she won't be the only one. When I was writing a piece about the impact of the recession for the Observer last year, one of the saddest things I heard was that nurseries were seeing an increase in very young babies (six weeks and up) coming into their care because their mothers didn't dare take proper leave while redundancies were flying around. In parts of the City, it's normal not to take longer than three months max (otherwise you don't look committed) while in politics, it can be even less (I know at least one MP who dictated letters all through her labour and was back doing constituency work within two days, terrified that her constituents would revolt if she didn't).
It's probably too early for figures to be available, but I'd be really interested to see what impact the recession has on uptake of maternity leave. I doubt many people have cut it to seven hours, but maybe Dr Wright's approach isn't as unusual as it seems.

UPDATE: The Daycare Trust, whose annual report on childcare costs is out today, apparently confirms anecdotal evidence of rising demand for childcare because of women taking less maternity leave during the recession.

This episode is brought to you by the letter W

2010-02-04T12:41:00.000-08:00

That's W as in wifi, without which my life this week would have fallen apart.
I have been a Luddite all my life, basically suspicious of anything with a plug. I don't like gadgets, my husband has to load my ipod for me, and I prefer paper to screen. I kind of regret the passing of the quill.
But now, finally, I get it. The point of technology is to liberate parents (and anyone else who wants liberating) from having to be in the office: to let you pretend to be at work when you're at home/on the move, and to flip between home and work mode wherever. Like many women, I've wasted so much time being intimidated by something that was actually on my side.
I don't know who invented wifi, or how it works (electrickery in the air?). But for itinerant freelance tramps like me with no office, the ability to flip open a laptop in St Pancras eurostar terminal and via free public wifi check your email, file an article to a magazine and check some facts before going off to another interview, literally makes it all possible.
Wifi at home, meanwhile, means I can surreptitiously check my emails in the kitchen without the boy really knowing what I'm doing - rather than going to the proper computer in what is laughably known as the study (cum spare bedroom/dumping ground for everything not yet unpacked from the move/home to heaps of paperwork and mouldy coffee mugs abandoned by my husband).
I realise the rest of the world already knows this. So please drag me into the 21st century. What techy stuff makes life bearable? What tricks am I missing?
Oh and on technical matters - some have complained that the light-text-on-dark-background thing this blog had going on is hard to read. Hence the revamp. I'm not sure which I like better: let me know what you think, and democracy shall prevail.....

How to tell you've spent too much time with small children

2010-01-27T07:14:00.000-08:00

Four ways for parents to tell it's time for a leetle more adult company

1. You drive past some kind of heavy machinery and cry "Ooh! Look! A big fire engine! Nee-nah, nee-nah!". And realise too late there is no small child with you in the car. Just adults giving you puzzled looks.
2. You make a sandwich for yourself and automatically cut the crusts off.
3. You no longer have any clothes that require drycleaning. (Actually you do, but they are past saving).
4. You accidentally refer to yourself as "mummy", in the third person, when speaking to someone in officialdom.

This has been rather a watershed week, hence the shamefully light blogging action. Freelance work is now piling in thick and fast enough that I can't put off the need for some kind of childcare any longer.
I've never thought I was cut out for full time motherhood, greatly as I respect those who can manage it: I'm essentially too selfish for it, and need the stimulation of work. Nonetheless, although the plan was always to work part time, I've been dragging my feet and dreading re-entering the whole childcare thing.
There's nothing more terrifying than trying to choose someone to be in loco parentis, even if it is for only 20 hours a week: I'm torn between fiercely not wanting my son to be with anyone but me, and realising that trying to squeeze work in around him is doing neither of us any good.
Right now work infiltrates all of our life together: I'm fobbing him off during the daytime while I check my emails or take a phone call, then staying up until the small hours writing while he's asleep. The family isn't getting my full attention and I'm never really able to relax.
What I'm hoping is that a couple of days' childcare will make me better at drawing proper lines in the sand: I have to learn to confine work to the two or three days I planned for, leaving the rest of the week for the family, rather than letting work sneak its way in and around everything else. Like damming a river in one place, rather than letting it flood unpredictably everywhere.
So after a few false starts, we think we've now found a decent childminder: cross your fingers for the settling in period.
Am cheering myself up by thinking that at least I'm not Katie Holmes. Allegedly (well according to Grazia), Tom Cruise is seeking an actress to play Mary Poppins 24 hours a day in their home, instead of a real nanny for their three year old daughter Suri (she of the rather disturbing toddler high heels). Apparently Suri saw the musical and said she wanted La Poppins to look after her.
I dimly remember vowing never to judge anyone else's childcare choices, so I won't: I really won't. I will just bite the keyboard, quite hard.

on hiring a 30something woman

2010-01-18T12:41:00.000-08:00

I owe my old boss a lot. But I've never exactly felt he deserved a medal for his bravery in offering me a job.
Which is why I'm so annoyed at myself. I was interviewed today on radio about giving up work, something I've done before. But I've never been asked this particular question.
Surely, said my interviewer, my boss had had to think twice before appointing a woman to a senior job like my old one?
I was so surprised that instead of saying what I thought (er, why? Obviously you need to know if someone could do the job, but why should you be specifically more worried about that if they're - gasp!imagine it! - a woman?) I spluttered something about hoping that wasn't the case. I wimped out.
Thinking about it on the way home though, I wondered. This may well be unfair, because he never said a word about it, but I do wonder if my gender crossed my boss's mind. If for no other reason than because I suspect a lot of men appointing a 33-year-old woman to a critical job worry whether they'll get pregnant and leave. It shouldn't enter their thinking, but I bet it often does.
And of course, I did get pregnant two years later: and eventually leave, nearly five years later. Nevermind that if I was childless, I'd quite possibly have left for a new job elsewhere. (There is a brilliant study I can't currently find showing men leave jobs more frequently than women, because they defect for promotions - so actually if you want a committed employee, maybe hire a woman).
So perhaps the interviewer was right to ask. If so, depressing how little has changed. I was talking a few days ago to a friend of a friend, a GP who trained in, I guess, the early 70s. She was asked directly at her medical school interview if she meant to have children and what she would do about it, a question that's illegal now under sex discrimination law. She knew the only acceptable answer was that she'd be a fulltime doctor no matter what, so it's what she said.
Interviewers don't usually ask that question openly now: but I suspect a fair few still ask it silently in their heads. Changing that will take more than legislation.

on thawing out

2010-01-14T08:02:00.000-08:00

A slushy, dripping sort of day. Which means, thank god, that about a month's worth of snow might actually start melting.
Never thought I'd be glad to see the back of the magical stuff but am fed up of taking half an hour to get a wriggling child dressed to go out in the morning (gloves, hat, fourteen jumpers, waterproofs, coat, boots...oh, sorry, it's lunchtime). Plus there's nowhere to go when we are finally dressed, what with playgroups and everything else being cancelled for bad weather. I have exhausted all cunning methods of entertaining a bored toddler on my own.
Actually, that's a lie: I have really exhausted all cunning methods of entertaining myself. The boy would probably happily play cars and build snowmen for months, but I've got cabin fever. We need company: which in a place where we are new arrivals and know nobody, isn't easy.
Later this week I have to referee a debate between some MPs in front of possibly hundreds of people. This doesn't remotely worry me: it's a piece of cake, compared to walking into a new playgroup and attempting to Make Friends. I've interviewed prime ministers and been to war zones, neither of which were as scary.
Everything about it makes me feel like the new girl at school, arriving two years after everyone's already made friends: it doesn't help that I went to (and hated) an all-girls school, gaining a lifelong suspicion of all-female environments.
While I had a fabulous mummy network in London thanks to two NCT groups, there's no such easy means of breaking into the circle here.
Apparently I'm not the only one. "Everybody with any sense hates playgroups," says my veteran stay-at-home mummy friend, rolling her eyes. Another friend who gave up work says it took months of 'plastering on a smile' and being relentlessly chatty before the playgroup clique thawed enough to admit her.
I know, I know: they're just perfectly nice mothers and toddlers, and in time we'll work out. But for now while I pretend we are going to playgroup for the sake of the boy's social skills - sharing, taking turns, responding in civilised manner to being whacked with a toy - it's actually mine we're working on. I need to learn to play nicely: if, that is, anyone will play with me.

Inbetween days

2010-01-08T13:00:00.000-08:00

Whenever my son sees a picture of Big Ben, he always calls it 'mummy's office'. He's sort of right: I did used to have an office in the House of Commons, but of course it isn't mine any more, as I keep telling him to no avail.
I'm really reminding myself, of course. This week's been dominated by the failed coup against the prime minister. In my old life, I'd have been right in the thick of it all: even now I couldn't resist tweeting on it, and dabbling at the journalistic edges.
But it's made me realise how unresolved I am about my current multiple identities. Anyone attacking working mothers makes me bridle, because I still count myself as one: but then I sort of consider myself to be full time at home, too.
Because I don't yet have childcare (finally found a part-time childminder, but we're too snowed in to get to her) any writing must be fitted in when the boy's asleep -so I'm essentially fulltime mother by day and working mother by night. I'm neither fish nor fowl: I honestly don't know which side I'm on.
And there are a lot of us around. We all know parents at home who say that in their heads they're still working - either because they want to go back some day, or they're planning to set up a business from home, or still doing a bit on the side. Likewise I know people who've gone part time and count themselves primarily as being at home, because it's so different to their former career. Many of us don't see our current roles, whatever they are, as permanent.
The old labels don't seem to fit: too many of us are like gapyear kids who know they're going to university eventually (even if it's much more than a year out, and even if some of us decide to stay in our chosen land of home). We're inbetweeners, zigzagging between both camps: it's like being a second generation immigrant, no longer belonging entirely to your parents' culture but still a bit adrift from the culture around you.
Does it matter? Sometimes it's liberating to have multiple identities, to choose which world to be part of today. The element of surprise - not being predictable, or easily pigeonholed - is fun.
But there needs to be a better word for it, if it isn't to feel uncomfortably like limbo.

Are working mums taking the rap for the rest of us?

2010-01-04T07:01:00.000-08:00

There is a sad and alarming piece of research out today showing the number of children who have trouble learning to talk (four per cent haven't said a word by age three). As usual, TV gets the blame: but more explicitly than usual, so do working parents.
Jean Gross, the government's communication champion who oversaw the research, is quoted saying parents should 'think about what children need. It's not expensive toys and big houses. It's you.' - ie, they should work less.
That follows an interview in the Sunday Telegraph with the brilliant GP Dr Sarah Jarvis in which she is quoted blaming obesity in kids partly on working parents who are 'so knackered at the weekend they let their children stay in front of the television' instead of going to the park. Suddenly, it feels like working parents are in the dock for everything.
This is a tricky one for me. After all, I gave up fulltime work because I wanted to be with my own son more: I wasn't worried about his development (he had a brilliant nanny before) but obviously I hope me being around will have a positive effect. And yet this stuff makes me uncomfortable.
Is it really only working mothers (or their childminders/nannies/whoever) who ever park kids in front of the TV instead of reading to them or going to the park? Really?
Telly and sugar happen to be the two things I am fascist about: I just don't watch TV with my son unless he's too ill to get off the sofa, or unless we're at someone else's house and their kids are watching.
But I admit that was easier to stick to when I was working: I'm definitely more tempted by CBeebies now, with only so many ways to fill a long rainy day.
Before, I was always incredibly conscious of needing to do lots of stimulating, educational, virtuous things with my son in my spare time: it was a way of compensating for my absence. Probably overcompensating, if I'm honest: I am a more relaxed, less driven parent now and we are both happier for it. I suspect I'm not alone in that.
So is there any hard evidence that working mothers threaten their children's development?
Well, not in the survey published yesterday, there isn't: it's a YouGov poll of 1,000 parents and it doesn't even record which of them worked.
Admittedly there was a recent study from the Institute of Child Health, suggesting that working mothers' children watched more TV and were more likely to be driven to school instead of walking.
But that was contradicted a few weeks later by a massive study from the Institute of Education arguing that working mums didn't really affect children's development: a stable home life mattered more.
Of course, Gross is an eminent educational psychologist, and presumably knows what she's talking about. She might also say she isn't blaming parents, but bad childcare - which is still too often the only kind some parents can find or afford.
Nonetheless, I feel uneasy about using this as yet another stick with which to beat working mothers - at least until we have clearer evidence.

It's not exactly a resolution, but...

2010-01-01T13:56:00.000-08:00

There's a Swiss ball in our garage, which occasionally gets used as a giant beachball by visiting kids: the dog also likes chasing it around the garden.
The one person who never uses it is the one who bought it so she could do loads of situps, and thus recover her pre-pregnancy flat stomach. I did about three situps total, before remembering my stomach wasn't flat even before I had a baby.
So with that triumph in mind, I'm not making New Year's Resolutions. But having said back in November that I'd give myself a year to get my life back, I do need a plan.
So here, roughly, is what I'd like to have done by November 2010:
1. Learned to use my old skills differently, but also taught myself to do something totally new. There's no point leaving a great job and just dabbling in the same thing, freelance: I need to stretch myself a bit.
2. Established a mix of work and living that actually makes me happy. Which right now probably means working no more than 2-3 days a week, and using the rest of the time to be a mother and a wife, and a good friend, and a daughter, and a sister, and an aunt, and a vaguely useful part of a community. And maybe do some exercise. Ahem.
3. Have contributed properly to the family's income. Ok, not like before. But I'm used to earning, and I don't like the idea of asking my husband for pocket money.
4. I'd like to find time for something creative. Probably something I'm rubbish at, but anyway.
5. Last but not least: it can't all be about me. When I resigned my Proper Job, the criticism that stung was someone suggesting that work was about more than my personal gratification: what about contributing to society, she said sternly?
So at the risk of sounding nauseating, I also want to further a cause in some tiny way. If I can work this out (or even if I can't), I'd like my experience to be of use to others caught in the same trap.
And if I can do all that by November, I'll still have a month left before the next New Year - which I will, of course, devote entirely to situps.
So that's my plan. What's yours?

January blues (and it's still only December)

2009-12-29T12:38:00.000-08:00

Well, I suppose I've been waiting for this: the first lousy day, the first time I've had doubts about the new life I've chosen.
Not sure exactly what started it, except that I do hate this time of year, the limbo between Christmas and New Year's Eve. The excitement is over, the tree's drooping, everyone feels fat and hungover: the old year is finished, the new not yet begun.
A 24 hour vomiting bug hasn't really helped the mood, and ironically I think having had a brilliant Christmas this time (all sledging down snowy hills and rampaging children and good food and conversation)makes the comedown worse.
Normally I'd be in the office through this period, and to be honest it's the best place for me to be. The high point of today, however was trudging through the rain to the supermarket with a howling, thrashing toddler in tow (seems I'm not alone in the January blues).
Suddenly the fact that I'm living in a half-unpacked rented house, in a town where I know nobody, in a life turned upside down is getting to me. The only surprise is it took two months.
I do, admittedly, deserve a good slap for moaning. I had two calls today about interesting work (a radio programme, and a literary festival gig): the boy and I had a nice, soothing afternoon making cakes. I have nothing really to complain about.
But today's definitely been a reminder of the bleeding obvious: that there will inevitably be days when I miss my old life (or at least, am fed up with the new one).
So what to do about it? So far I'm planning to write this week off like a bad debt: spend it blitzing all the boring trivia (the annoying niggles I never get round to tackling, from the printer that doesn't work to the buttons I haven't sewn back on my favourite coat), and at least hit January with a clear deck. Which may just leave me clear to concentrate on the small matter of what I do with the rest of my life...

What does Mrs Christmas do?

2009-12-22T16:17:00.001-08:00

I have no idea where this Mrs Christmas thing came from - when I was a child, Father Christmas was definitely a confirmed bachelor, all alone but for the elves.
But somebody has told my son there is a Mrs Christmas, and now he wants to know (roughly every ten minutes) what she does. So far, I don't have a satisfactory answer.
Given the stage of Christmas preparations I've now reached (Def Con 2 and counting) am sorely tempted to hiss through gritted teeth: "Everything! She does everything! Right up until ten to midnight on Christmas Eve, when Father Christmas casually wanders past and says 'so have we done the stockings for the entire world this year, then, or what?'"
But that's not in keeping with the spirit of the season. Nor will I promote the idea that she cooks and cleans for Father C, mucks out the reindeer, skivvies for the elves, etc. I'm worried enough about what kind of role model I've become by giving up full time work.
So in the end I said Mrs Christmas goes out to work so that Father Christmas can afford all the presents. This did not go down well: admittedly it's not very magical. I feel I have let Mrs Christmas down with the job description.
The boy is still asking, so if anyone has any better answers, please shout. Meanwhile since she has appeared on the scene, I'm wondering whether along with the mince pie and sherry for her husband (plus carrot for the reindeer, obviously) we should be leaving something out for poor exhausted Mrs Christmas on the 24th?
I'm only guessing. But if a large gin and tonic and a family size tin of Quality Street, say, were left by our fireplace then I bet it would be gone by morning. Magic, eh?

so much for a frugal christmas

2009-12-16T12:49:00.000-08:00

Time to confess: this Christmas isn't working out as (thriftily) planned.
Like many families, our festive spending had got a bit over the top: I threw money at it (panic-induced present shopping, getting stuff delivered) because I ran out of time.
So I assumed we could probably cut back quite painlessly this year. You can't move now for people touting a frugal, homemade, recessionary Christmas (led by Kirstie Allsopp and her icing polar bears) How hard could it be?
Well, after a fortnight roadtesting various tips, it turns out homemade can sometimes be a surprisingly false economy. It's a lovely way to spend a rainy afternoon with small children, but it can end up costing more money than buying the lot from a shop.
(Relatives who'd rather not know what they're getting for Christmas: look away...)
I thought about homemade christmas cards, but worked out I'd spend more on glitter and card than the usual big box from Oxfam - and the Oxfam ones include a donation to people rather needier than me. No contest.
Homemade presents, then? Ms Allsopp's chutney was out (I made loads in summer, but suspect none of my relatives will be terribly excited to get it for christmas).
So I made Lindsey Bareham's recipe for bottled preserved lemons instead. It's a joy to make - you warm the lemons in the oven to make them juicy, so the whole house smells of citrus, and it made me feel terribly virtuous - but using unwaxed fruit (I don't like using waxed ones if you're eating the peel) meant about £5 on lemons alone. If I hadn't already had seasalt and a glass jar, the whole thing could have cost nearly a tenner. Big jars of preserved lemons are about £4 in shops. Hmm.
It all reminds of the Great Potato Fiasco, when I grew potatoes on our London patio. After buying seed potatoes, special growbags, compost and the rest I could have shipped in Jersey Royals by private jet for less than my supposedly thrifty homegrown veg.
But in some cases the maths did add up. In no particular order:
1. Homemade decorations. Lots got broken last year by exuberant dog/toddler, but instead of buying more I did pine cones (scavenged from woods, stuffed in airing cupboard until they open up, rolled hamfistedly in glue and glitter by child) and dried orange slices (slice two oranges thinly, spread on baking sheet in oven on lowest heat until hard and crispy, arrange artistically on tree so light shines through them). Free child entertainment and orange-scented kitchen thrown in.
2. Cooking from scratch. We usually do this anyway but Christmas cake, pudding, chocolate truffles, bread sauce, brandy butter, etc are all satisfyingly cheaper homemade than bought.
3. Writing out cards in time to send them second class. Next year, will save on stamps by starting earlier and distributing by hand when I see people. In, like, July.
4. Using more imagination, and taking more time, buying presents. Remembering small children are so overwhelmed by big piles of stuff that they don't actually play with it.
5. Homemade wreath. Wreath ring about 60p from garden centre and the rest was free: moss to use as a base dug out of manky back lawn; fir and ivy from garden; berries, rosehips, holly, crab apples etc collected while walking dog. Wired together with garden twine: final cost about £19.40 less than last year's florist effort.

Not bothering with a wreath would, of course, obviously have saved another 60p. And I reckon I could've skipped the cards without offending anyone.
And that's the big lesson: it's too easy to get suckered into thinking you need lots of Christmas stuff that is utterly unnecessary. All those magazine articles hyping gourmet turkeys and iphones for the under-fives have an insidious effect, yet these are not the things that make the day memorable.
We're not quite down to a turkey sandwich, plus a hoop and a stick, in this house. But it has set me thinking. If you pared Christmas back to the absolute essentials, what would those be?

what i miss about the office

2009-12-09T13:30:00.000-08:00

The works Christmas party at Hinsliff Inc is going to be a quiet one this year. Just me and, um, me. (Due to recessionary costcutting, the dog's not invited). The drawback of freelance life as opposed to having a Proper Job is being forced to provide your own festive warm white wine.
But it's made me think about what I miss about office life. So, in no particular order:
1. The IT department. Oh god, I miss the IT department. Now when my computer breaks, I have to tell myself to switch it off and switch it on again. And then deal with (shudder) the O2 call centre. Never again will I infer that inhouse IT geeks are, well, geeks. They're GODS.
2. Sausage sandwiches from the canteen on press day. Just not the same at home.
3. PAYE. Money just drops into your bank account, by magic, every month! Someone else does your tax and NI! You never get told misleading and inaccurate information by the HMRC so-called 'helpline'! I get misty-eyed thinking about it.
4. Gossip. Not watercooler stuff about last night's telly, which I can get online. Proper juicy gossip about colleagues and rivals doing hopefully embarrassing things.

And before I get nostalgic, things I don't miss:
1. Meetings. I reckon I spent about three hours a week in internal office meetings. That's 150-ish hours a year: six days of my life i'll never get back. And at about two biscuits per meeting, god knows how many calories.
2. Commuting by tube, nose jammed in sweaty stranger's armpit on Circle line.
3. Office politics. The flipside of office gossip: endlessly watching your back, analysing what your competitors are up to. Makes real politics look easy.
4. The Ten to Six feeling. This is the panic that overtakes working mothers on realising that they have to leave the office in ten minutes' time to pick the kids up: and that they have a lot more than ten minutes' work to do.
See also Ten to Midnight feeling, the bleary-eyed realisation that it's nearly midnight, you are still in the office and you still have more than ten minutes work to do.

But what really tips the balance in favour of freelance life is that I just got an invite to my old employer's Christmas party (old colleagues taking pity on me). Phew. Now instead of just getting drunk as usual, I plan to spend the evening being exceptionally nice to IT people....

What matters most

2009-12-06T00:18:00.000-08:00

Torrential rain again, in our delightfully floodprone street. We've only lived here a few weeks but the neighbours, old hands at this, have told us that one more downpour and they expect a flood. So it's time to move the valuable stuff upstairs.
Which begs the question: what is valuable to this family, precious and/or irreplaceable, as opposed to merely expensive? All the obvious things - TV, stereo, all that - are covered by insurance. Which leaves us with the things no insurance company could replace.
So far in the queue to go upstairs we have: all the photographs (from Olden Times, pre-computer storage); the box of still unpacked and unhung pictures pictures; lots of books. Could in theory be replaced on insurance, but we'd never remember the exact mix we've acquired over three decades of reading, and even if we did they'd never have that lovely wellworn feel old paperbacks get, never fall open at the favourite page.
A file of dull paperwork: birth certificates, tax records, bank statements, bla. My journalist's contact book, obviously: phone numbers that took me 15 years to wheedle out of people.
Then it gets more eclectic.
About 20 assorted jars of jam and chutney (results of a bumper crop from the plum tree in the garden of our last house). Yes, I know jam is available at the corner shop. But this is different: it represents a stab at domesticity among the chaos this summer, and reminds me of the old house which I loved.
The Christmas decorations under the stairs. We can always buy more tinsel. But not another fairy like the one we've had for years (admittedly non-traditional: it's a bearded Action Man in a white frock, bought in Soho: long story). Not the lights my husband and I bought the first Christmas we spent together, which probably don't even work now, but anyway.
The blanket chest inherited from my greataunt, even though the dog chewed the corners as a puppy so it looks a bit scruffy. A fistful of children's paintings. Nil for artistic merit, but that's not the point.
As for what we're leaving downstairs, personally am willing to sacrifice my husband's Xbox to the flood, plus a copy of Babar and the Christmas House (the boy has insisted on reading this three times a day for a month now: am heartily sick of the elephant dictator).
Debate rages re the dog: leave him downstairs as usual at night, so he can bark at the first sign of water and rescue entire household, Lassie-style? Or not, given that he is both stupid and very fond of water, and more likely to paddle around happily while the laptop floats past him into the street?
But anyway. Nothing else on the 'rescue' list is worth more than a fiver, but it turns out these are the things we would least like to lose.
So what would you save in a flood/fire/act of God?

the point of blogging

2009-12-04T11:27:00.001-08:00

I must be a glutton for punishment. After a rather bracing exchange of views here on marriage, I've just written for the Guardian's Comment is Free on Sally Bercow (wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons and wouldbe Labour MP who gave a rather eyewatering interview about her own past and her current views of David Cameron). The brief was what happens to relationships when two people of opposite political convictions fall in love.
So I was already thinking about how to have a civilised argument when I saw halfthestory's comment on the marriage post, saying that "I prefer to argue with people whose opinions I value even if I don't agree with them."
I thought that rather briliantly summed up what I hope this blog will be about: sometimes fierce but always civilised exchanges of views between people of general goodwill, who are open to learning from each other. No doubt we'll disagree from time to time, but it needn't always lead to divorce. Have a nice weekend (yes including you, man who thinks I look like Hitler's mistress...)

Why Delia is always right

2009-12-03T07:14:00.001-08:00

We made mince pies yesterday. A bit early for Christmas: but I am greedy, and the boy likes the rolling out/cutting bits, and it was raining. The plan was to freeze them and take them to my parents' for the big family Christmas, but we seem to have accidentally eaten most of them.
The family rule is that whichever of my mother/my sister/me gets away with not hosting Christmas contributes something towards it: I used to do a ruinously expensive sprint round Borough Market. But three years ago I was pregnant, sugar-crazed, and nesting, so I made some mince pies.
I wouldn't normally attempt the voodoo that is pastry, but for once it worked: must've been either the hormones, or this Delia Smith recipe. On a high, I hosted the whole bloody Christmas the next year (I was on maternity leave: seemed like a good idea), and made everything by hand according to St Delia.
By last Christmas, I was so busy I didn't have time to breathe: I should just have bought sodding mince pies. But I didn't want to. Not in a I-Don't-Know-How-She-Does-It way (Allison Pearson's book opens with a working mother bashing shop-bought mince pies around to make them look homemade, so other parents don't judge her): my family are very laidback and couldn't have cared less.
It was just a stubborn refusal to accept that I didn't live a life that allowed for leisurely pastrymaking. I'm not very creative, but I like occasionally making things, and that's not a side I could indulge at work: it was important to me still to do stuff like this at home.
So I ended up making them at about 3am one night, using hastily defrosted shop pastry because I was too bloody tired to make my own, and they were genuinely vile. The dog backed away sneezing. My nephew made surprisingly realistic barfing noises. I ended up making a load more mince pies, properly, in my mum's kitchen.
This year, it's back to Delia. I did it just after finishing a column on David Cameron for tomorrow's New Statesman so it was a perfect antidote. By the end I felt I'd had a taste of my old political life, but also a bit of what was always missing from it.
One problem: there's a reason Delia is not assisted on TV by a floury small boy demanding to "squish it all up". Featherlight, they ain't.
So this is not just a tribute to Her Royal Delianess (whose new Christmas series starts tonight on the BBC). It's really about lowering my family's expectations this year. Shopbought ones would probably have been nicer.....

in which i rant about marriage

2009-12-01T06:27:00.000-08:00

I like being married, really. Which maybe has something to do with my parents still being happily together after 40something years; something to do with me being boringly conventional; maybe even something to do with my husband. What I don't think it's about is money.
David Cameron has given a mildly panicky interview in today's Daily Mail insisting he still backs tax breaks for married couples, including those who don't have children.
Let's assume for now that he can fund a multi-billion pound perk out of thin air, in a recession, in ways so far mysteriously unclear.
Let's also assume that marriage specifically - not rock-solid, permanent relationships where both parents are around; not heroically hardworking single parents; but something unique to a ring and a frock and a biiig argument about the guestlist - is nirvana for childrearing. Let's assume everyone should get, and stay, married.
How do we make them do it? Not by looking at why couples get divorced, and why that so often follows the arrival of children (and onset of the frantic juggling years).
Not by unpicking cultural expectations of marriage, in a generation many of whose own parents divorced acrimoniously.
Not by removing welfare disincentives (single mothers risk losing benefits if a partner moves in). Not even by examining factors like high UK property prices, which - combined with a faintly mad belief (or was that just me?) that you must buy a house together before you get hitched - tends to delay marriage.
Nope. We're going to do it like a cheap supermarket deal. Buy a wife, get money off! Once you've paid the (average £10k) cost of a wedding, obviously.
We keep being told that childcare tax credit for higher rate taxpayers is an unaffordable luxury in a recession: it's likely to be withdrawn for those on over £50,000. Tax breaks for moral virtue, however, are just dandy: no word on them being restricted to low earners.
So there we have it: decent childcare is less important to children's welfare if their parents work than the fact you cut a cake and grimaced through the speeches together.
And if you're childless newlyweds, you're more deserving of taxpayers' cash than if you're a struggling cohabiting couple working three lowpaid jobs between you to support your kids. If that doesn't send a clear message about family life, what does, eh?
One thing to consider: according to reports last month, lesbians make the best parents of all. Don't hold your breath for gay-only tax breaks.

Balance shmalance

2009-11-26T07:01:00.000-08:00

Not a bad day so far. I've taken on a new role that I hope will be interesting (of which maybe more later), sorted out a writing commission and a radio thingy, all before lunch.
But the difference now is I did it from my mobile, knee deep in mud, walking the dog across a sunny ridge high in the Peak District.
Three weeks after quitting my job, and about two weeks and six days after breaking my promise to myself not to start anything new until after Christmas, I'm settling into a rough pattern where, um, there ain't a pattern.
Once my day divided fairly clearly into time at home (never enough) and time in the office(never enough either), with the occasional bit of guilty crossover (taking work home, nipping out at lunchtime to buy a birthday present).
Now the lines have blurred: everything's jumbled up, all the bits interleaving, sometimes all at once in a big tangle.
I might spend mornings at playgroup (fielding the odd call in the middle), hit the laptop at lunchtime when the boy is asleep, see a friend in the afternoon (with a bit of surreptitious email checking) and then I'm working out a column in my head while I cook dinner. I work in shorter bursts, and am having to learn to snap in and out of work mode and mummy mode sometimes several times in an hour.
The advantages? I'm definitely fitting in a wider mix of things - work, being someone's mum, a social life, time with my husband, stuff around the house - than before, and so I feel I'm wringing more out of the day.
The disadvantage is I still haven't worked out how to get time for myself (it's so long since I had any, I can't remember what you do with it) and it's harder to switch off work, as there isn't an equivalent of leaving the office at night.
But I now see what people mean when they suggest forgetting about work-life balance (which makes the two things sound like competing opposites always pulling in different directions) and thinking instead of each day as a blend of different things. Apart from the fact that I've always hated the phrase, I'm not sure balance is that useful an idea.

occupational hazards

2009-11-22T12:17:00.000-08:00

This is baffling, given that working from home has given me an unrivalled opportunity to hoover up all the small boy's leftover fishingers. But my clothes are noticeably looser than they were before I quit.
So far I have two possible explanations:
1.It's official: stress makes you fat! (something to do with, um, hormones, and cortisol, and fat deposited around the waist - it must be true, it was in the Daily Mail)
2. It's official: eating KitKats from the office vending machine all the time makes you fat! Who knew, eh?
Other noticeable health effects so far: I've pretty much stopped getting migraines, which I used to get about once a week (not sure if that's getting more sleep, not staring at a computer screen all day, or possibly Kit Kat related again.)
On the minus side, my back is killing me from lugging a small child around. So far, the health jury is out....

too much information

2009-11-20T05:40:00.001-08:00

Have just gone 36 hours without broadband - the rural equivalent of being stranded at sea in a rowing boat and forced to eat your fellow passengers.
No email; no blogging; no twitter feed; no online news; no online banking; no sneaky Christmas shopping.
My initial reaction was hyperventilation, shouting at call centres, and being firmly on Liz Truss's side in the Turnip Taliban vs Notting Hill Tories row (reliable rural broadband was her big idea for South West Norfollk, apparently)
But after a day of deprivation, I was noticeably calmer. Now I'm restored to the real world, it has made me think about what an information junkie I've become, and whether it's worth it.
As a fulltime political journalist, I woke up to the Today programme, read every national newspaper, ate lunch to The World at One, had my afternoon punctuated by the PM programme, read Hansard on the train home and usually rounded off with more evening news - with Sky on constantly in between.
I surfed the main political blogs and Twitter, and that's just the public sources of information: my job was winkling the unofficial stuff out of people too, so I was constantly reading, talking, analysing, putting together bits of political jigsaws, keeping up with books and ideas. My mind whirred: I couldn't sleep even when I was knackered.
But I was in the loop, at the heart of things, and I found it endlessly stimulating: I liked knowing stuff first, and knowing the stuff that didn't get printed too. The hardest thing about changing careers has been giving up that information addiction.
Basically, I like finding stuff out and I like spreading gossip. Of course, for my new working life I'll still need those two skills (well, not really skills: more bad habits). But not to the same degree. And I'll go mad if I try to keep track the way I used to.
It has to stop, but how? Giving up the Today programme would be like going without breakfast, and I do find PM a soothing backdrop to toddler teatime.
I can also justify Twitter because it helps me manage information as well as distracting me endlessly (if you're not on it, try it: you don't have to tweet if you don't want to, just follow people who are knowledgeable about stuff you like - they'll act as your filter on the world, posting about stuff that's likely to interest you. It's like bespoke news tailored to you, with random extras).
But I'm rationing myself to two newspapers a day max. And maybe an extra one on Sundays. If they've got a free DVD. And maybe the odd other one online.
And obviously I really want to read the ghastly Palin autobiography, and loads of other books, and I want the New Statesman and the Spectator and Private Eye and maybe the Economist and occasionally I like flicking the Washington Post, and and and...
Just as well the broadband's unreliable, really.

tightening the belt

2009-11-16T14:03:00.001-08:00

I rang a close friend last night: disconcertingly, she answered with a distinctly suspicious voice.
It turns out she just didn't recognise the number as mine - it's so long since I've actually been at home enough to ring anyone from a landline rather than a mobile (usually while simultaneously doing something else). Landlines for me were some 1950s thing to which only my parents are still inexplicably attached.
Now I'm paying my own mobile bill, instead of having it provided by work: let's just say, I've quickly rediscovered the landline. The last cheque from my Proper Job is due next week, and so it's time to start with the economising.
We bit the biggest bullet before I resigned, and sold our much-loved family home in London: we're now buying a smaller, cheaper wreck in the country.
Next bullet: trading in the car for something older and duller. I can't tell the difference between a porsche and a tractor (NB: it wasn't a porsche) so am not much bothered but my husband is mourning.
My new thing is the supermarket bill. Value labels instead of brands all the way, faintly stalinist menu planning, and no more out of season blueberries: I've discovered www.eattheseasons.co.uk (there's also a US version eattheseasons.com), and am cooking a lot more from Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries (entirely seasonal cooking) and The Kitchen Revolution (big on leftovers).
Some things in the country are cheaper than the city: insurance (home and car), playgroups, bar prices, and temptation - I don't buy lattes on the way to work or cabs when running late, and I don't get sucked into Selfridges.
But more of my old habits now look hard to justify. If forced at gunpoint, I would admit:
1) I am not naturally blonde. I am expensively blonde.
2) I seem to have rather a lot of shoes
3) We have more books than we will ever have bookshelves
Something has to give.....

the toxic sisterhood

2009-11-14T05:30:00.000-08:00

I LOVE the primal feeling of relief after a big storm: that forgotten animal reflex, presumably dating from the days when howling winds threatened more than just the roof tiles.
So during a brief lull in the torrential rain we took the dog across the meadows to the swollen river, on the principle that there is nothing a toddler enjoys more than inspecting wreckage they haven't personally caused
After an hour of the boy rapturously dragging broken branches about I'm feeling unusually calm. Calm enough to tackle a tricky subject.
Last week, the Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman wrote a piece for the Daily Mail arguing that women are making themselves harder to hire with their pesky demands for time with their kids.
Yesterday, the Times columnist Janice Turner wrote a piece arguing mothers should stop whining, including a dig at "media mummies penning tear-stained farewells to careers that they can’t combine with caring for one small baby." Who knows who she had in mind?
I admire both as journalists: I agreed with large parts of Turner's column, which was actually about selfishness, and bits of Shulman's. But what both pieces shared was a whiff of "I had it hard, so should you."
Turner hurt because I (usually) love her column: Shulman I found disappointing because of her feistiness in challenging issues like fashion's fixation with thinness. But either piece, written by a man, would have neither surprised nor troubled me. So why does it matter that they were written by women?
Many women harbour expectations that female bosses will be "sisterly" - help other women up the ladder, empathise with family pressures - and feel far more betrayed by senior women who don't play this game than by their male counterparts.
Margaret Thatcher still gets attacked for not putting women in her cabinet, while the US politician Madeleine Albright suggests a "place in Hell reserved for women who don't support other women". Policies aimed at getting more women into senior roles are based on assumptions that doing so will change the culture.
And many female bosses do go out of their way to stand up for younger women: the Elle magazine editor Lorraine Candy wrote a brilliant column rebutting Shulman in the same paper, while Red magazine's Sam Baker argued on Twitter that flexiworking meant hiring great women for less money - what's not to like?
But while it's heartening when you see it, is it realistic always to expect sisterliness?
Given that managers often promote people who think like them, is it surprising if a woman reaching the top of a tough environment turns out to share the views of the (mostly) men around her?
Who knows what pressures she is under to keep that job? Does every female boss have to be defined by her sex? Who can judge how far her views are sharpened by any private defensiveness about her own choices?
Having just ignored an invite from a newspaper diary to get drawn into a silly catfight with (yet another) female columnist, I also suspect working women don't benefit from the divide and rule strategy of inviting us to scrap in public.
So I'm setting myself some rules on this blog. I'll take issue with anyone's public stance (their views on policy, or what they do as employers). But I'll never judge their private or personal choices around mothering and work.
I'll try not to apply higher standards to women than to men. And nothing I say about my own life should ever be interpreted as a criticism of anyone else's choices, from lifelong stay at home mother to full on fulltimer.
And if I break these rules I'll happily be called on it by anyone reading this blog. Meanwhile, I'd love to know about your experience of either being, or working for, a female boss.....

Tell me what it's really like

2009-11-13T06:17:00.000-08:00

Enough about me, already. I need to know more about you.
I've been asked to write a piece for a women's magazine about worklife balance. Rather than me droning on about myself for hours, I want to speak to as many different women as possible who manage things (or don't manage things, on a bad week) in as many different ways as possible, so that what I say is as honest as it can be about the bigger picture.
So if you feel like you've finally got it right, please come and tell the rest of us how you did it: if you're drowning, please come and explain why, and what needs to change.
So if you wouldn't mind talking to me and having what you say published (either totally anonymously or under your real name, depending on how brave/angry you're feeling) please get in touch at gaby.hinsliff@googlemail.com before next friday.
thanks a lot. normal service will now shortly be resumed!
ps on the subject of what to tell your children about worklife balance, this piece from today's Guardian is interesting.
Is this headteacher being realistic, or too limiting? Should schools be sending messages about this kind of stuff, or is it for parents and others closer to the family?

the truth about the pay gap

2009-11-12T05:55:00.000-08:00

This really ain't sexy, and I am revealing my inner anorak by writing about it. But stick with me while I drone on. I've just read through the annual statistics on pay and earnings, and I was surprised.
Everybody knows about the pay gap that means women earn less than men, and one of the reasons is that four out of ten women work part time, where pay is often lousy. A lot of mothers end up sliding down the ladder into more junior jobs that fit round the family better but don't pay as well as their pre-kids role.
But these figures show the quickest way to a godawful salary is to be a part-time man. The salary league table goes fulltime man, fulltime woman, then part-time woman, then the 11 per cent of men who work part time (median earnings £7.71 an hour before tax against £7.86 for part-time women and £12.97 for a fulltime man). That's comparing hourly rates, so even taking into account the fact that part-timers work a shorter week, they suffer extra just for not being fulltime. Why?
Maybe because men are less likely to downshift after having kids - some fathers still don't think it's socially acceptable to ask - these part time men are largely those who have always been part time. That might mean more of them are lowskilled, or in poor health, and therefore don't get a crack at wellpaid jobs.
But it feels like there's something curious going on. A lot of overstretched working mothers would like to consider both parents dropping down to part time for a bit while the kids are small, sharing the load. Yet if the paycut for doing that is even worse for men than for women, fathers are not going to want to do it.
I don't for one minute think the pay gap between the sexes isn't still a big deal - of course it is. But the gap between part time and full time pay (36.5 per cent less per hour, according to these figures) for BOTH sexes is worth thinking about separately.
The other interesting thing is that this was the year the recession really hit: lots of people got payfreezes or tiny rises. But fulltime women's earnings went up faster than men's (it was the other way round among part timers)
Why? Was it because of changes in the law, or because more women work in the public sector (where the pay gap's shrunk this year) than the private sector (where it's got worse)?
Or was it anything to do with the recession, and anxious women whose partners' jobs were vulnerable taking more on at work? It's too early to tell yet, but I am really curious about where this recession will leave working women.