Gappy Tales

What No Niche?

Lately (discounting of course the last couple of weeks in which I have been in a ‘price of secondary school uniform shocker’ induced coma) I have been blogging like a bastard.

It’s official. I am on blogging fire.

My bloggy cup runneth over, in fact I do believe the blog gods are looking down upon me favourably and smilingly once more.

I have gone from the dreaded – and what I thought might be irreversible – bloggers block to suddenly having ideas again. Where did they come from all of a sudden? I don’t have a clue but neither do I wish to argue. For the last month or so I have no longer had to drag posts forth, kicking and screaming as though ripped from my chest using every last ounce of my will and determination. No, this last month has seen the words fairly racing from my brain to my finger tips and effortlessly tumbling out onto the screen – not in a messy nonsensical jumble – but in a smooth, easy flowing order. And with this new sense of energy and effortlessness has come a renewed enthusiasm, not only for writing but for reading as well. Now all the children are back at school, I have more time to devote to both which pleases me greatly.

When I first began blogging I subscribed pretty much straight away to Problogger – not because I wanted particularly to be a professional blogger – but because for a total beginner like myself it was chock full of information about how to blog. Problogger taught me loads, from how to submit my blog to Technorati, to how to deal with really negative comments, all the way through to how to effectively engage with readers and other bloggers. I accept that I am perhaps not the best poster girl for Problogger if what you are after is an enormous following, and actually to be fair I don’t read it much these days now that I’m fairly confident I know the basic ropes, but in the beginning I did find it extremely useful.

One thing from Problogger that for some reason has always stuck in my head, is a vlog post (I can’t remember by who) that spoke of how important it is to have a niche, or at least a distinct category into which your blog can easily slot. The idea was that from there you can then work on becoming the best and/or most unique blogger within your chosen category or niche. Actually I think the reason I particularly remember this piece of advice is two-fold: firstly because the vlogger had a strange habit of pronouncing niche, “neetchy” – I now cannot look at that word in its written form without reading it neetchy so thanks for that Mr Vlogger-man – and secondly because my blog has always (both here and at my old Blogger site, Single Parenthood… Tales from the front line) jumped untidily from one subject to another, thus neatly avoiding any obvious pigeon-holing.

Now I have no intention of changing the way I blog in an attempt to increase my popularity (I’d quickly become bored if I stuck rigidly to just one subject matter and anyway I’m perfectly happy with the lovely readers I’ve got) but I do sometimes find myself wondering if perhaps this vlogger was right, and that I might enjoy more ‘success’ if I narrowed my focus – if I just concentrated on the ‘mummy’ aspect of my blog for example, or on the ‘personal’, or the ‘recovery’ posts. Perhaps my blog, and others like it, are the virtual equivalents of a jack of all trades, and therefore masters of none.

I do also realise that for some, blog posts about blogging tend to result in a loss of the will to live, and if this is the case with you dear reader then I can only apologise for not having warned you earlier. But I’m interested in how other bloggers feel about the importance of sticking within clearly defined boundaries when it comes to subject matter. Do you feel that it is important that your readers know what to expect from you? Do you consider certain subjects to be off-limits? Has there ever been something that you would have liked to blog about, but didn’t because it wasn’t in keeping with your usual fare?

Let me know what you think.

The Fish and the Bicycle

There tends to come a point in every telephone conversation at which there is a pause. A very pregnant sort of pause. A kind of settling, a hunkering down almost. The preliminaries are over, the necessary small talk exhausted. The ‘what have you been up tos ‘and the ‘how are the childrens’ are done and dusted and the two callers can finally now get down to the real matters at hand. Finally they can now ask the questions they have really wanted to ask all along, without appearing rude.

My oldest friends especially are a fairly nomadic bunch, and have been scattered far and wide by wanderlust and circumstance. Consequently rather a lot of my friendship maintenance now takes place over the telephone. Calls come out of the blue at strange times, and I’ll pick up to hear familiar voices shouting excited hellos down intermittently bad lines: “It’s me! How are you?” I’ll generally be fine – perhaps work will have been a bit stressful – but mostly fine. The kids will be great… yes, I will say, the eldest still loves reading and yep I’m afraid the youngest still loves bossing the rest of the family mercilessly about. Then will come the pause, the very pregnant sort of pause, and after it the inevitable question:

“So….. You seeing anyone?

I don’t know quite why this question annoys me so much. It’s not that I think it’s none of their business, I mean I suppose technically it isn’t, but the fact is I do sometimes discuss relationship issues with my female friends, and besides, I know they’re only concerned with my happiness. I think it’s more the assumption – even from very independent women – that because I’m single, finding a new partner is – or should be – a priority. And it just isn’t. I’ve got three children to support – I am actually far more concerned with finding myself a reasonably well paid and permanent job. As for personal fulfillment, well I hope I never cease to be struck by the glorious irony of my autonomy doing far more for my self esteem than any relationship ever did. And of course I have my writing.

Writing was always something that I had wanted to do, but didn’t because I was afraid of not being any good at it. There seemed no real point in putting anything down on paper because then what would I do with it? I couldn’t show it to anyone, what if it was rubbish? What if they shuffled about desperately damning it with faint praise? The thought made me curl inwards with embarrassment. Anonymous blogging has been a revelation for me in that it has given me an opportunity to have a go at writing, but not only that, to be able to share my efforts with other people without any of the emotional investment and pressure attached to showing it to someone who knows me.

But I am veering off on a tangent. Back to the original point of the post. It’s not that I don’t miss anything about being in a relationship, nor that I am dead set against one. If a man who just happened to be sexy, interesting, clever, witty, independent, slightly left leaning, kind and lovely but still with a bit of an edge, walked into my life, that would – I’m sure – be wonderful. It’s more that the things I miss the most are not the things that people tend to assume women want. At 35 (just) I have long completed my family and do not want any more children. Nor do I wish to share my home. I much prefer having the majority of my free time to myself to read, write, see friends, and pursue my own hobbies. I do not want a partner as such – it is not companionship I miss. It is excitement. The excitement of strong mutual physical and intellectual attraction, of anticipation and longing, of fun. I don’t need a man for practical, economic or emotional support. But I miss sex – is that such a shameful thing to admit?

However – and it is a big however – all this does not mean I wish to be having casual sex. I certainly don’t. Sex that is devoid of any emotional attachment inevitably leaves one disappointed in my opinion. Nor would I countenance becoming involved with someone who was already involved with someone else. And therein lies the problem. In my experience, men my age tend to want either to begin a family and settle down, or they want a casual bit on the side. I don’t want either of those things but something in between – a loving, respectful and monogamous relationship with someone I really like, or even love, but who does not expect to monopolize my time or move in. I’m not holding my breath.

One particularly helpful friend did at one point suggest that I try placing an ad in The Guardian’s Soulmates, but honestly, can you imagine what sort of response I’d get if I wrote what I’d written here – that I wasn’t looking for a partner as such and that I was mostly looking for ‘excitement’? Ahem. I think not. Besides, I don’t care enough about finding a relationship to go actively looking for one. Someone will either turn up or they won’t I suppose. I am however following Slummy Single Mummy’s trek through the internet dating jungle with interest. I’m working on the assumption that if a woman of her caliber can find someone that fits her bill, then there’s bound to be hope for me too.

One day.

Motherhood: Just How Hard is it?

I have a good friend (who for the purposes of this post shall be referred to as H) who is due to have her second baby any time now. She is delighted and I am delighted for her. He or she is a much longed for second baby, and H has endured great loss to get to this point.

H is one of the cleverest, most talented women I know. She is full of positivity, compassion, and humour. We never run out of things to talk about, and have been known to spend hours on the phone or in person debating this and that; alternative therapies, breastfeeding, attachment parenting, and gender politics being just a few of the things we don’t always agree on. H is fiercely pro-breastfeeding and attachment parenting, I am less so. Even though I chose to do both of those things with my own babies because they suited my circumstances and felt right to me at the time, I have come to loathe the way in which these issues polarise women, setting us against each other when we could be supporting one another and uniting in our insistence for equal rights and freedoms. Divide and rule; such an age old concept but still – unfortunately – remarkably effective. Working mothers berate stay at home mothers, breastfeeders sneer at bottle feeders, Debra Jackson devotees sling mud at Gina Ford fans. And whilst we are busy bickering amongst ourselves, nothing changes. Women continue to do the vast majority of unpaid domestic work, there is no real improvement in the pitiful rape conviction rate, and we still get paid less than men for doing the same job. In the face of all this shared experience, do we really need to be using our different parenting choices as sticks with which to beat each other? Surely motherhood is a tough enough gig without all that to contend with as well.

Or is it? The other day on one of my regular bimbles around the blogosphere, I came across this article written by a woman called Jacinta Tynan and entitled ‘Is Motherhood Really That Hard?’ Tynan, you see, doesn’t quite get what all the fuss is about. According to her, motherhood “is a cinch”. There is nothing difficult about being up all night with “the love of your life” and we could all apparently do with learning a thing or two from our mothers and grandmothers, who worked far harder than us and yet never uttered so much as a word of complaint. Our generation meanwhile supposedly acts “as if we deserve a medal.”

I thought of H when I read this and laughed to myself, because despite her compassionate nature, she can also sometimes be heard to grumble that no-one ever writes anything positive about having a baby these days, and that really she’s fed up with all these books that go on and on about how bloody awful being a mother is. Some people spend their entire adult lives longing for motherhood and she happens to like it – is that so bad? Is she some sort of traitor now?

I also like it for the most part these days. I relish the strong bonds between myself and my children. I enjoy their company and am happy to accept that the largest part of my identity is now bound up in caring for them. I take pride in being the best that I can be for them and I love them dearly.

But it wasn’t always like that. My earliest months of parenthood were filled with darkness, with fear, and a howling desperate desire to escape. It is the only time in my life that I have ever prayed – to who I don’t know – but I can remember being on my knees, both physically and metaphorically, begging to just please be allowed to wake up and there be no baby. I can remember sobbing that I had changed my mind, that I would do anything, anything other than be a mother. The child on whom I now dote felt like an imposter.

I was in fact suffering from a severe and undiagnosed post-natal illness, but I think anyway that the relentless demands of early motherhood in particular can be enough to send even the healthiest woman over the edge. I am thrilled for Jacinta Tynan that she is enjoying her new baby so much – really I am. I would wish for every woman that sort of easy transition into parenthood. But I think she would do well to remember that lots of women don’t have a lot of the luxuries she does – a fulfilling part time job for instance, good childcare, a supportive partner and a reasonable income. When I read her article now, I’m afraid just one word springs to mind, and that is backlash. It was always inevitable I think. Acceptance of women finally feeling able to speak out about the darker side of motherhood, of finally being allowed to admit that they don’t always like it, is still so recent. Society still has such a huge vested interest – both social and economic – in perpetuating the myth that motherhood is all pure undiluted pastel joy, that really it was only a matter of time before we were told to get back in our boxes and stop whingeing.

Neither unfortunately does it surprise me that the main thrust of the backlash is coming from women. We have been effectively policing each other since the dawn of patriarchy. My feeling is that the sentiment expressed in Tynans article will become the fashionable opinion to hold, and that the result will be so many more women suffering in silence, their isolation ultimately causing their children also to suffer.

Because yes, motherhood really can be that hard. To seek to deny it does us all a disservice.

My Little Girl

My Little Girl is three.

Although do not expect her to allow you to forget that she will soon be four.

My Little Girl is clever.

I watch her discreetly from behind my newspaper. She is sitting at the kitchen table, her legs swinging, her box of differently coloured, differently shaped wooden bricks scattered about her. She is building towers, utterly absorbed in the task at hand. Under the watch of her furrowed little brow, grand scenarios unfold. At her will, entire civilisations of cubes, triangles, and rectangles rise and fall. But in an instant the spell breaks and I feel suddenly and vicariously through her – like a dart – the pleasure of something clicking into place: “Look mummy!” she says. “I can make a diamond with two triangles!”

My Little Girl is funny.

She invents her own jokes that only half make sense. It’s the way she tells them.

My Little Girl is a thinker.

She even has a thinking face. Head cocked ear to shoulder, eyes cast diagonally upwards, nose wrinkled, and pursed mouth pushed seriously to one side, she can always think of a reason why. She demolishes my reasons as to why not. She begins hesitant sentences with “so……” and the sound of miniature cogs whirring is almost audible until aha – she has it! Yesterday when I said that we would do something special tomorrow, she sat for a while with her thinking face until she eventually said: “But tomorrow is always the next day.”

My Little Girl is a dare-devil.

A thrill seeker, she hurls herself like a little canon ball towards anything that looks even remotely as though it might propel her round and round or up and down extremely fast. We go to the swing park and collect all sorts of glances. With her curls streaming out behind her as her swing lurches wildly through the air, I can be pushing with all my might and still she will be shouting herself hoarse commanding, “faster, faster!!” I can only watch with awe as she swoops and squeals and soars. She is so unafraid. Glances of amusement or alarm or even disapproval bounce off her unnoticed, like ineffectual arrows made of polystyrene. Fly my little girl, fly.

My Little Girl is kind.

It is a natural kindness, unaffected by learned and phony social graces. If one of her brothers cries, she will instinctively go to hug him. If someone is hurt she will ask if they want a kiss better and does it need a plaster? When she thinks no-one is listening she sings quiet songs to her teddies and treats them with such exceptional tenderness, I find myself wondering if she believes them capable of real feeling.

My Little Girl is beautiful.

She is so beautiful it actually makes my heart ache. I look at the fluffy halo of reddish curls that surround her happy little upturned face and I am sometimes overwhelmed with feeling. I want to scoop her up in my arms and bury my own face in her hair and take great gulping sniffs. I want to drink in her perfect essence, to eat her up, and to hold her close forever. I think if only I could tell her everything I know. I would tell her don’t listen, my little girl, to people who only ever notice how pretty you are. It is because deep down they think pretty is the best thing a girl can ever be. Do not allow them to stifle you with their lack of imagination. You have a million and one stars that pepper your sky like glitter. A million more stars than just plain pretty.

Stand Back, I’m Going In

Yes, that woman on the left – in case you were wondering – is me.

I know what you’re thinking. Is there any particular reason as to why I am dressed like a cross between an Animal Liberation Front activist, a bank robber, and a ninja?

Well yes actually, there is. Bear with me. It all began with a phone call I made first thing yesterday morning. Imagine if you will, a slightly crotchety Gappy, a phone ringing somewhere in a dusty rural council office, and a gruff, heavily accented male voice on the other end of the line, “Hello?”

Me: Hello, am I through to pest control?

Male voice on the other end of the line (who from now on shall be referred to as MVOOEOL): Yes. What can I do for you?

Me: I’m afraid I have rather a large wasps nest in my garden shed. I can’t get in there to access the lawnmower – I’ve already been stung on the back once – and the grass is fast reaching my childrens ears.

MVOOEOL: Well we can certainly come and take a look at that for you, our call out service is free of charge….

Me: (cutting in) Oooh fantastic.

MVOOEOL: (carrying on despite my interruption) …and then if you want us to remove the nest, there will be a charge of fifty pounds.

Me: Oh. What?! Fifty pounds??!!! (I let out an involuntary splutter of disbelief. A feeling of mild irritation followed hot on the heels of the splutter. Of course I wanted him to remove it. What did the silly man think – that I was inviting him over to admire it and then go away again?)

MVOOEOL: Well, you could be eligible for a discount. All you have to do is write to us requesting an application form and then once you’ve filled it in, send it back to us along with proof of your income, although bear in mind that we can’t accept photocopies so you do need to send us the original documents, then depending of course on your circumstances we could reimburse you up to as much as twenty five pounds.

Me: (having rather heroically, I think, resisted the temptation to say something sarcastic) Right.

And so I put the phone down with a sigh. There was nothing for it – I was going to have to sort it out myself. My friend J came round for lunch, and had a quick peek in the shed:

‘Oh my god Gappy’, she said, ‘it’s fucking massive!’

‘Yes’, I said. ‘Thanks for that.’

So yesterday afternoon saw me and the children all off on a family outing to B+Q in which we compared and contrasted the various methods for ridding ones garden shed of a ‘fucking massive’ wasps nest.

The evening (after the children were safely in bed and the windows all tightly shut) then saw me scrabbling around in the laundry pile for clothes that would cover every possible area of skin with a protective layer, and then creeping outside leaving the back door open, ready for a swift dash back in to safety. At which exact point my next door neighbour suddenly popped her head out of her kitchen window, took one look at me in my black poloneck, black leggings, black hoody and black gloves with my eldest sons camouflage scarf wrapped around my face, and promptly doubled over laughing:

‘Gappy, what are you doing?’

I held up my can of wasps nest destroyer by way of an explanation, which just made her laugh even more:

‘No wait wait, don’t do it yet. Let me go and get my camera’….

At which point I had something of an aha moment. Of course there was a way to post a photo of myself on my anonymous blog. I just needed to take a picture of myself in my wasp fighting costume! Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

The rest, as they say, is history. I flung open the garden shed door and like a comedy terminator, blindly sprayed the nest and anything that moved with what looked and smelt like toxic shaving foam, before slamming the door shut again and running as fast as I could back into the house.

This morning, dressed once again in my wasp fighting ninja get up (much to my childrens amusement) I tentatively crept back to the garden shed and opened the door. This is the sight that greeted me:

The wasps were all dead, their home turned to ashes. Just one live wasp buzzed around forlornly, bereft and confused. It seemed mean to gloat.

The Road to Recovery

Alcoholism – you may remember – is something that I have written about before. I wrote about it and then I dropped it. I metaphorically wiped my hands down the thighs of my jeans, sighed and said, “Well there’s that done and dusted. I don’t have to hide anything anymore… good. Now then, what to write about next?” I didn’t want it to define my blog because I don’t want it to define me.

But recovery, I have discovered, requires vigilance. It requires you to not drop your guard. It requires you to remember. The moment you forget and begin to think that you are better – that you have recovered as opposed to being in recovery - is the moment you start to convince yourself that there’s no harm in a teeny weeny little glass of something. After all, you can stop any time you want right? You’ve proved it right? You’re FINE, RIGHT??

I am fine. But I am fine because I’m sober. I realise that to most people this must seem like a no-brainer, but when you have a relationship with alcohol that is as screwed up as mine is, your brain will play all kinds of tricks on you in order to make drinking seem like a good idea again. Like this thought, taken purely at random from a whole big stupid selection that I have had this week: “Wow. A whole eight months in recovery. Surely that deserves a glass of wine or two.” See what I mean? It would be funny if it, you know, wasn’t.

Anyway, last weekend something happened to pull me up short. Something happened which served to remind me to remember. I’m writing a post about it to give myself something to refer back to in times of temptation, and because, in a funny sort of way, writing about my issues with alcohol and knowing that people are reading what I write, makes me feel a little more accountable.

I went to a party. A party at my mothers house. I drank lime and soda and hung out with my younger brother who had also invited a few of his friends. I was nervous. The last party that I had been to at my mothers was almost exactly two years ago. I had been drunk and there had been a scene - a scene which proved to be the catalyst to my deciding that enough was enough and that my drinking couldn’t go on. It took another year of spiraling downhill before I finally accepted that I could not do it alone and needed to ask for support, but I will always remember that night as being the turning point. The point at which I was fully confronted with just how bloody ugly it had all become.

There were to be some of the same people that had been there that night at this party too, and if I’m honest my shame nearly got the better of me and I came within a hairs breadth of not going. But I decided in the end that I was/am not prepared to hide myself away forever. Life goes on in spite of our mistakes and disasters and I’ve as much right to enjoy my life as anyone else. It is a waste of time to live in a past that you cannot change. I knew my family were behind me and wanted me there. I would go.

It went fine almost up until the end. With my lovely brothers supportive arm around my shoulder (“y’alright sis?”) I started to feel more confident, and soon I was chatting to people and having a pleasant enough time. It wasn’t until the party was beginning to wind down that the last guest arrived. It was another friend of my brothers, someone whom I recognised instantly from two years ago. He had already been drinking all day at a family gathering of his own, and over the next hour or so I watched as he sped inexorably towards, then tipped finally and inevitably over, that clear but invisible line that separates drunk but o.k. from no longer in control. You don’t cross that line as many times as I have without developing a sixth sense for where it lies in other people. It is disturbing to view the trajectory through sober eyes, like a car crash happening in slow motion. I could also sense his awareness of me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his head periodically flicking towards me, like he was just waiting for an opportunity to say something.

In the end it came apropos of nothing. “Do you remember last time we met…” he began, and then – with a nasty glint in his eye - proceeded to describe in lurid detail the events of the party two years previously. I simultaneously felt the floor slide out from underneath me and the contents of my stomach turn to liquid. I honestly didn’t know what to do. When I eventually replied that I didn’t feel it was a particularly appropriate situation in which to be discussing it, he tried another tack and began to rapidly fire very personal questions at me. Where were my two youngest children he demanded to know, and did I really think it was fair on my eldest son to be asleep upstairs when there was the noise of a party downstairs? By this time the room had gone silent.

His verbal attack was so carefully aimed and so vicious, it left me almost speechless. My son was at his grandmothers party for goodness sake, surrounded by family that loved him. He was safely tucked up in bed, fast asleep. The music was playing at a perfectly normal level on the living room stereo and the only person who was dangerously drunk was the man currently and publicly berating me for no other reason than that he had sensed my vulnerability and decided to go for the jugular.

I went to bed feeling both mortified and devastated.

But I have since had some time to process what happened. And I can see that while he certainly embarrassed me, it was his own colours that he truly put out on show. I take comfort in the fact that while I have taken steps to clean up my side of the street, his is still looking decidedly grubby. But mostly I just feel incredibly grateful for my sobriety in a way that I didn’t before. Being sober served me in that situation, and ironically, the situation itself served my sobriety. It reminded me to remember. To remember just how ghastly that place was that he described.

To remember that I never want to go back.

Fire Fire

When I was a girl and I would go and stay with my mother at Greenham Common, it was always the campfires that fascinated me the most. I loved them. In the evenings I would snuggle into my mothers woolen caftan, almost disappearing entirely in the folds, and watch the fire slowly change its shape. The bed would always remain steady and constant, a glowing molten pool of orange, while the hypnotic flames on top danced and leaped about, sometimes high, sometimes low, but always slowly and determinedly consuming and twisting into strange forms the sawn up logs that created such a wild splash of sparks every time they were thrown on, so casually, by one of the circle of women that sat, singing and talking and wishing an end to all war, around the fire.

Sometimes I would have a small stick of my own to poke the fire with. My response to any exhortations to be careful would always be to chant “but I only want a little bit of fire on a stick.” I can remember repeating it over and over like a mantra, and my mother laughing, joking that I was her little pyromaniac. She was proud of my curiosity and my lack of fear – I knew that. I could sense it, and so I played up to it all the more, prodding the embers with my little twig untill the end of it caught alight and I could wave it around like a sparkler, writing my name through the air, mesmerised by the trails of light that streaked bright, then quickly faded in the nights black.

I still love fire. And in my free time when I’m not blogging, especially in the summer when the evenings are warm and still light, I can often be found in my back garden spinning poi. Poi are like long chains with wick wrapped around one end and leather straps which you hold onto at the other. The vast majority of the time mine are not lit. I simply practice with them as they are, watching my reflection in the large glass panes of my back door, trying to master new and ever more complicated moves and patterns. My next door neighbour often sits in her back garden too and we chat over the low fence – the children finally in bed – her sipping a glass of wine and smoking a cigarette, and me twirling and spinning my fire chains.

Occasionally though I get together with a certain friend when it’s properly dark. We fill empty food tins full of paraffin, lower the wick end of our poi into them, then set the poi alight, spinning them around our bodies, getting lost in the rhythmical roar of the fire whooshing past our ears. I sometimes find myself falling into an almost trance like state watching someone else spin fire, the trails of light so evocative for me, old not quite forgotten feelings of comfort mixed with strange excitement rising to the surface in the cold night air. I have even come to love the acrid smell of the paraffin.

This video here isn’t of me – it’s a man for starters – and I should probably also be clear that I’m not nearly as good as him either, but it gives you an idea of what fire poi performance looks like, how magical it is and how beautiful it looks. This is Zanoo, I found his video on YouTube. Enjoy.

Real Women?

Good women of the blogosphere. This week has indeed been a momentous one. This week will, in future years, come to represent a turning point in the way in which we view our very worth. This week has seen us encouraged to throw off our shackles and unite in striking a significant victory blow for females everywhere struggling with issues around body image and low self esteem. And it is all thanks to our Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone who has taken it upon herself to declare that from now on there should be no more need for endless fruitless quests to achieve the ‘supermodel on the verge of collapse’ look with starvation diets and laxatives. Oh no. Because apparently – according to her – the ‘ideal shape’ for us all to now aspire to is that of the perfect hourglass (as modelled by the lovely Christina Hendricks on our left.) Any treacherous woman seen to be lacking in the correct amount of flesh can now consider themselves to be a fake. They will no longer be classed as a ‘real’ woman.

Phew, what a relief eh girls? Don’t we all just feel so much better about ourselves now! Sorry, what did you say? What’s that noise? Oh, dear me, please excuse me. It was just me… banging my head repeatedly against my desk.

I mean how could a woman who is the government minister for equality have got this so badly wrong?

How exactly did she arrive at the conclusion that simply swapping one unachievable ideal body type for another might engender some sort of progress in the very real battle for the improvement of women’s self-esteem? Oh I know what some will say: perhaps if Hendricks’ purportedly size 14 figure comes to be seen as the new ideal, we will have less young women starving themselves in an effort to look like Kate Moss. Perhaps. But we will have just as many young women unhappy and dissatisfied – saving up their money to buy cosmetic surgery so that they can finally look like ‘real’ women – money that could have been spent on getting them through university, or travelling around the world, or setting up their own businesses.

Out of interest, and in order to do some basic research for this post, I took the liberty of typing Christina Hendricks’ name into google. There have been many articles written about her recently and I read a lot of them. She’s an actor in case you didn’t know – that’s her job. But I have no idea whether she is any good at her job or not because not one of the articles I read even briefly mentioned her acting ability. Of course, who would wish to dwell on such irrelevant trivia as a womans actual merit when the dimensions of her hips and breasts are up for discussion?

And there we have the crux of the matter in my opinion. It matters not a jot whether the ‘ideal figure’ that we should all be aspiring to is larger or smaller, curvier or flatter. It is an irrelevance; a red herring, because the real point is that as long as there is a supposedly ‘ideal’ figure, there will always be a majority of women who do not have it, who have no realistic chance of attaining it, and who are made to feel less than beautiful – and less than worthy – because of that.

Womens self-esteem will improve when we cease to be judged on the basis of what we look like, and start to be given proper credit for what we do.

Pretty basic stuff for an equalities minister, you would have thought.

Books

I love books.

I love the quiet comfort of reading them, savouring them, getting lost in them, and learning from them. I love the look and feel of them. I love the smell of the paper.

There was a time when I was unable to keep many books. My way of life was such that there was never enough space, and what books I did have tended to get damp and damaged anyway. So when I finally moved into a house with lots of room and central heating, I went a bit mad. I’d go on day trips to Hay-on-Wye and spend hours browsing around poky little cellar rooms, the paperbacks that stood floor to ceiling selling for as little as a pound each. I’d come back with armfuls and then spend happy evenings lovingly sorting through them, separating them into categories, and putting them onto brand new shelves I’d either bought or built myself.

Now I have a house full of books, which is something I always wanted. Friends and family tease me mercilessly because I haven’t read them all, but I don’t care. I am slowly making my way through my collection and I love that there is always something new to read, an array of choice, right there in my own home. There is absolutely no question in my mind as to which possessions I would fight my way through smoke and flames to rescue.

The inspiration for this post actually came from two others I have read recently. First Babyrambles and her post What’s Your Favourite Book? And then Charlotte’s Web and her post Summer Wish List. Reading those made me want to write my own post about books, to share my favourites and to fish for recommendations. I have even taken some photos:

These shelves are in my living room. The ones on the left house fiction, autobiographies and cook books. My favourites there are the novels written by Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s Ark, The Playmaker) and Maya Angelous six volumes of autobiography (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings probably being the most well known.) I first read Angelou for my English G.C.S.E. and she was the first writer to actually leave me speechless with awe at just how powerful someones words on paper could really be. I also very much enjoy slumping on my rather regal looking blue sofa after a hectic day and reading cookbooks for pleasure. Elizabeth David, Nigella Lawson and Claudia Roden are all talented writers as well as great cooks. The cookbook I like best is Claudia Roden’s, The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the Present Day. With beautiful rich text full of social and cultural history as well as recipes, this book is a treasure chest of information that will only become more precious as time goes on.

The bookcase in the middle is devoted to classics, politics and history. It has some of my favourite books of all: Bronte’s Wuthering Heights which I love unashamedly, The Great Gatsby, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which may quite possibly be my favourite book of all time. It also has a penguin copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; a book which try as I might, I simply cannot get on with. The furthest I have ever got is about half way through. The truth is, I actually can’t stand magical realism. Perhaps it’s a failure of imagination on my part, but I can’t bear to be just starting to get my teeth into a character, only to have them float away on a bloody leaf. Where’s the sense in that?

The shelves on the right are dedicated to fiction as well, but also provide a home for all my hardbacks. My treasured hardback copy of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas lives there. If you have never read Cloud Atlas then I urge you to do so. It left me open mouthed and marveling at Mitchells vision and imagination. It also has one of the most beautiful covers in my whole collection.

These are the shelves at the top of my stairs that I built myself. You can tell they’re slightly bodgy if you look closely – the shelves are not quite flush with the struts – but they do the job well enough. It’s all fiction here too, and at the very bottom is my series of Janet Evanovich crime novels, do you know the ones? One for the money, Two for the dough e.c.t….. Every woman needs a bit of light entertainment from time to time, and bounty hunter Stephanie Plum and her trusty sidekick – former hooker Lula – are definitely my heroines of choice.

Books on my “To Read” list for this summer include:

The Dolphin People by Torsten Kroll – a present from my mother.

Me Cheeta by James Lever - nominated for a Booker and recommended by a friend.

and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown – I know it’s supposed to be awful but I want to see what all the fuss is about.

How about you? What is your favourite novel or novels of all time? And what are you going to be reading this summer?

Misery Porn

The other day whilst pushing a wayward trolley around a huge fluorescently lit supermarket in the kind of automated daze that tends to be induced by those kinds of surroundings, I found myself in the book aisle. In true testament to Tescos hypnotic power, I have no idea how I got there, but what I did notice was that amongst the smiling Rachel Allens and seductive pouting Nigellas were what seemed like several tons of paperbacks dedicated to the true telling of ‘tragic life stories’.

Hmm. I’ve seen them popping up all around work as well. In the small overburdened wooden bookcase in the main waiting area of our information centre, glossy covers depicting small, sad looking children with plasters on their knees and forlorn, ragged eared teddies dangling from their hands are absolutely everywhere. Not a day goes by without me hearing at least one person say something along the lines of, “Aww… have you read that? Oh it’s awful isn’t it…. wicked it is, just wicked.” Which to me rather begs the obvious question: So why on earth would you want to read it then?

These days misery lit is obviously a hugely popular genre. Not only that, it is clearly very BIG business. I have to admit to finding it all extremely unpalatable.

It is not that I am personally expressing any doubt as to the veracity of the claims made in these auto-biographies. Fear of being disbelieved is one of the biggest barriers to the disclosure of abuse and I do not want to contribute to that culture of suspicion and dismissal with anything I write. Neither is it that I feel people shouldn’t ‘air their dirty linen in public’. Far from it. That sort of attitude only serves to protect abusers and shame their victims. No – what leaves the nasty taste in my mouth is that these gruesome tales – true or not – are being served up as cheap voyeuristic entertainment for the masses, providing grim titillation for those who would appear to like nothing better than to spend their time salivating over other peoples gory misfortune, whilst simultaneously generating huge profits for publishers and retailers.

Perhaps you think I am being unfair. I know that Dave Peltzer – author of A Child Called “It” – the book widely regarded as having been the spring board for the genre, has said that he believes his first book to be mainly concerned with issues of resilience and survival (he has in fact gone on to become a motivational speaker and has just published his fourth self-help book) and that he hopes him having put his experiences to paper has helped readers to understand that a traumatic childhood needn’t prevent one from making a success of their life. Constance Briscoe, author of Ugly, who went on to become one of Britains first black women judges has expressed similar sentiments. It all smacks very much of the American dream doesn’t it, this idea that anyone, no matter what their background, can become anything if only they try hard enough. But the life paths of Peltzer and Briscoe have been extraordinary by anyones standards, and while yes of course it is possible for the devastating effects of childhood abuse to be overcome to the extent that the survivor is able to live well and with a reasonable degree of contentment, it is not within everybodies grasp to become a judge or a best-selling author. Many things over which we have no control can and do affect our life chances, including the quality of the parenting we receive.

Many other mis-lit authors have spoken of the cathartic benefits of having written their stories, and their hopes that reading them will enable others to come to terms with their own, perhaps similar, pasts. But again, I would question the therapeutic value of an afternoon spent poring over the obscenely graphic details of someone else’s childhood abuse. Perhaps some readers may empathise with the authors experiences and find that it serves to bolster them, however others will be deeply triggered and perhaps even re-traumatised by what they read. And then what? Where does the reader then go with those feelings? There is a real cynicism and irresponsibility in the aggressive marketing and promotion of misery memoirs I think, especially when you consider the disturbing fact that for a small proportion of people, a very dark sort of enjoyment is to be derived from reading them.

Another ‘for’ argument is that these books help society to confront the issue of child abuse which has always been untill recently swept under the carpet. Again, a noble enough aim, but I’m not sure they do. I think the very fact that they are wrapped up in glossy covers and elevated to the top ranks of the bestseller lists simply reinforces the commonly held notion that these are extreme and unusual experiences - the sorts of things that happen to other people and not the sort of people that we know and that live in our towns and communities. Present society, it seems to me, is extremely confused in its attitude towards the abuse of children. On the one hand we are obsessed with paedophilia and protecting our kids from it. On the other, the focus always seems to be on the predatory stranger and the on-line groomer, when in fact it is relatively rare for a child to be abused by someone they don’t know. My opinion is that this mass hysteria serves to allow people to avoid an ugly truth, which is that the vast majority of sexual abuse is committed by someone close to the child – usually a family member. For all our moral outrage we are a long way from accepting that children are actually most at risk from their own fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, and occasionally mothers.

It is the perfect climate for misery lit to flourish. These books feed our grim obsession whilst still allowing us to believe – by virtue of them having been made into a book – that these experiences of familial abuse are rare. They aren’t.