Occasionally I get strange emails from companies who say things like: Hey Jane I really am like your blog and read it most times before going on to breathlessly inform me that they wish to offer me a great online opportunity to make $2000000000 a day without even trying!
Or I get further stuttering emails along the lines of I read your blog freelance mum and thought that because of your interests your blog would be perfect to promote our new range of crotchless pants/makeup/eco-seaweed necklaces. (?!)
Today however I was chatting with a friend about Red Flags in relationships and how I want to make sure that when The Girl is dating, I tell her all about them because if I'd known what they were it would have saved me a heap of bother. For example, if a man phones you ten times in one evening because he's worried about you he's not worried, he's trying to control you. Or if he sulks because you want to spend time with your girlfriends, no it's not because he cares it's because he wants to cut you off from your friends. And if within a very short space of time he's talking about marriage and babies, it's not true love it's (all together now) control. All teenagers should know the red flags. I only really opened my eyes and saw my ex-boyfriend for the mentalist he clearly was when I wanted to go out to dinner with a girlfriend and he started to tear his shirt off in the middle of the street, like the Incredible Hulk. Luckily we were in public. I say lucky for me because I started laughing and he wasn't pleased. But when he started sobbing and gripping my hair and saying it was only because he 'loved me' even I couldn't ignore the flashing red light above his head saying: 'RUN RUN RUN'.
So after this chat with friend, I get home and there's an email from a company asking me to blog or tweet about the launch of a new APP 1in4women experience domestic violence at least once in their life. It's the first time I've agreed to promote something but I'm not being paid and it's important.
Tuesday, 16 August 2011
Wednesday, 3 August 2011
Greed in Italy
So I’ve just returned from a week in Italy – Sienna, Lucca and Pisa since you ask and yes the weather was wonderful and yes, Italian men do sport brightly coloured trousers and ponytails without shame. I spent a lot of time shovelling pasta and ham so dark – no light could penetrate – into my mouth - while grabbing my dining companions and shouting: Oh my GOD you have to try this - hang on sorry, I've finished it. But in between my sweaty and piggy wanderings I noticed a few things.
Having been brought up a Catholic I find the gloomy theatricality of the religion both depressing and depressive – a constant attempt to romanticise misery. You only have to read about the lives of the saints as I did as a child to catch on pretty fast that the majority of female catholic saints were deeply disturbed young women or just barking mad. St Catherine of Sienna – anorexic who drank pus from the sores of a cancer patient. Yay! Let’s all copy that one girls. But – the churches in Italy are just staggeringly fabulous. Maybe their coolness and walls bursting with art are such a relief after the dazzling outdoor heat, but there is something so lush and loving about the curves and paint – it puts you under a spell. There’s no incense smell either – it’s more a soft orangey scent that permeates the churches. Signor Sheen probably but it’s deeply restful.
Italian families do this thing called the passeggiata which means they wander the streets in their best clothes taking up lots of room on the pavement and chattering. Then they all go out to eat and behold – the babies eat exactly the same food as the older family members. Not a breaded dinosaur shape in sight, just small children hovering up massive plates of pasta like tiny mop headed dust busters. The normality of this could also be down to the fact it’s illegal in Italy to serve deep fried food in school cafeterias.
So yes I loved Italy – even the Catholicism is sensuous and life affirming somehow. So coming back to this headline that girls as young as five are being treated for anorexia and are models to blame or celebrities or who is to blame – says the Daily Mail who love – oh how they love - to print pieces on why DO women hate their bodies? Gosh – I wonder too – and then you turn to the next page and it’s a picture of a woman who now looks older than she did thirty years ago. See? Isn’t that disgraceful? Next to the picture of the female celebrity with cellulite.
However, much as I’d love to see the DM go the way of the NoTW I sadly think that it comes down to us parents. All the distorted, airbrushed pictures of teeny tiny Cheryl Cole on her latest diet ‘to get Ashley back’ in the world are not going to have much of an effect if the child has a family life where food is not seen as The Enemy or has a massive amount of power – the power to make you feel shit because you ate A BISCUIT. This terrible mental illness seems to be a toxic stew of low self esteem, perfectionism, a desperate desire for some sort of control and a fundamental refusal to be an adult female because it seems so complicated and problematic with the curves and the flesh, blood sex and food.
And yet my own mother was on a diet for as long as I can remember. My sister and I would eat her wonderful homemade food while she picked on soups, shakes and on one occasion, what looked like a pile of twigs. She later said it was ‘The Cambridge Diet.’ And it worked for a while. As most diets do. Well wouldn’t anyone lose weight on a diet of twigs? She was reading something about Aktins when she had the accident that would kill her a few months later. So why didn’t my sister and I end up with food issues? Probably because we were both lucky enough to inherit a narrow frame, we ate very little processed food and we were both too greedy to diet anyway. And I mean greed in a good way. I loved the greed I saw in Italy – not the wretched tearing self hatred of being caught in a food compulsion, but proper licking bread wiping, dripping down the chin greed. Where you feel a teeny bit full after but a walk will sort that out and there’s a smile on your face. Really - that linguine with chilli prawns will stay in my heart forever.
Having been brought up a Catholic I find the gloomy theatricality of the religion both depressing and depressive – a constant attempt to romanticise misery. You only have to read about the lives of the saints as I did as a child to catch on pretty fast that the majority of female catholic saints were deeply disturbed young women or just barking mad. St Catherine of Sienna – anorexic who drank pus from the sores of a cancer patient. Yay! Let’s all copy that one girls. But – the churches in Italy are just staggeringly fabulous. Maybe their coolness and walls bursting with art are such a relief after the dazzling outdoor heat, but there is something so lush and loving about the curves and paint – it puts you under a spell. There’s no incense smell either – it’s more a soft orangey scent that permeates the churches. Signor Sheen probably but it’s deeply restful.
Italian families do this thing called the passeggiata which means they wander the streets in their best clothes taking up lots of room on the pavement and chattering. Then they all go out to eat and behold – the babies eat exactly the same food as the older family members. Not a breaded dinosaur shape in sight, just small children hovering up massive plates of pasta like tiny mop headed dust busters. The normality of this could also be down to the fact it’s illegal in Italy to serve deep fried food in school cafeterias.
So yes I loved Italy – even the Catholicism is sensuous and life affirming somehow. So coming back to this headline that girls as young as five are being treated for anorexia and are models to blame or celebrities or who is to blame – says the Daily Mail who love – oh how they love - to print pieces on why DO women hate their bodies? Gosh – I wonder too – and then you turn to the next page and it’s a picture of a woman who now looks older than she did thirty years ago. See? Isn’t that disgraceful? Next to the picture of the female celebrity with cellulite.
However, much as I’d love to see the DM go the way of the NoTW I sadly think that it comes down to us parents. All the distorted, airbrushed pictures of teeny tiny Cheryl Cole on her latest diet ‘to get Ashley back’ in the world are not going to have much of an effect if the child has a family life where food is not seen as The Enemy or has a massive amount of power – the power to make you feel shit because you ate A BISCUIT. This terrible mental illness seems to be a toxic stew of low self esteem, perfectionism, a desperate desire for some sort of control and a fundamental refusal to be an adult female because it seems so complicated and problematic with the curves and the flesh, blood sex and food.
And yet my own mother was on a diet for as long as I can remember. My sister and I would eat her wonderful homemade food while she picked on soups, shakes and on one occasion, what looked like a pile of twigs. She later said it was ‘The Cambridge Diet.’ And it worked for a while. As most diets do. Well wouldn’t anyone lose weight on a diet of twigs? She was reading something about Aktins when she had the accident that would kill her a few months later. So why didn’t my sister and I end up with food issues? Probably because we were both lucky enough to inherit a narrow frame, we ate very little processed food and we were both too greedy to diet anyway. And I mean greed in a good way. I loved the greed I saw in Italy – not the wretched tearing self hatred of being caught in a food compulsion, but proper licking bread wiping, dripping down the chin greed. Where you feel a teeny bit full after but a walk will sort that out and there’s a smile on your face. Really - that linguine with chilli prawns will stay in my heart forever.
Sunday, 17 July 2011
Just once more . . . and some gossip
I was knocking up some chicken stock tonight. One of my favorite dishes is risotto - a simple lemon one and it helps if you've got great stock. Anyway as I bunged some onion and carrot onto the carcass - a series of rambled thought occured:
My mother lives on through her chicken stock
In lemony bones her essence is distilled.
And when I find a jar of her dark sticky marmalade
She is here
When irritation rises at The Girl just being her
And answering back because she's clever
She is here
I linger by the coco pops and hear: There's more nourishment in the box
My hair is hers - thick and lush on good days
Effing Mick Hucknell frizz bonnet on bad ones
She is there and there
And always here.
On another note altogether I heard on very good authority that two days ago, Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brookes were informed there was no room in The Ledbury or The River Cafe! To which the only mature response is well it can't be as bad as being arrested. And if Ms Brookes gets sent to jail? How will she cope without Frizz Ease?*
*Only girls will get this.
My mother lives on through her chicken stock
In lemony bones her essence is distilled.
And when I find a jar of her dark sticky marmalade
She is here
When irritation rises at The Girl just being her
And answering back because she's clever
She is here
I linger by the coco pops and hear: There's more nourishment in the box
My hair is hers - thick and lush on good days
Effing Mick Hucknell frizz bonnet on bad ones
She is there and there
And always here.
On another note altogether I heard on very good authority that two days ago, Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brookes were informed there was no room in The Ledbury or The River Cafe! To which the only mature response is well it can't be as bad as being arrested. And if Ms Brookes gets sent to jail? How will she cope without Frizz Ease?*
*Only girls will get this.
Thursday, 14 July 2011
I'm not Bikini Ready
In a few weeks I'm going away for a few days and not only am I not bikini ready (I wish there was a sarcasm ) - I'm leaving the inevitable wax to the last minute, to give those little strips something to get hold of. But in the meantime I'm faintly alarmed by the profusion of sprouting hair. There's even one lone hair that twirls in singular splendour just below my belly button, saying 'Here I am!' What's that all about? Is it a nasal hair that lost its direction? Or some dark reminder of what might eventually happen if I left my bikini line to go Amazon Forest? Should I even be wearing a bikini? According to one of those surveys - you know the ones that the gleefully pounce on, women of forty six and over feel invisible. Fortunately there have been a few swift comebacks to the soul destroying idea that women of a certain age should nip off for a cauliflower perm, and a nice pair of Mary Whitehouse specs. Unfortunately Christine Odone's smart response in The Telegraph featured - as an example of mature womanhood, Nancy Del Olio whose self confidence not only borders but crosses way way past the delusional.
I do love the way (and when I say love I mean hate) from March onwards, magazines, features and Lorraine Kelly et al start going on about being 'bikini ready' as though the entire female population intend to spend the next six months lolling about in a string two piece. Instead, if we're lucky we might get a few days off to lie by the sea or the pool and all we're ready for by then is a large gin.
I'm still bothered about that bloody single hair though. It mocks me with its single twirliness.
I do love the way (and when I say love I mean hate) from March onwards, magazines, features and Lorraine Kelly et al start going on about being 'bikini ready' as though the entire female population intend to spend the next six months lolling about in a string two piece. Instead, if we're lucky we might get a few days off to lie by the sea or the pool and all we're ready for by then is a large gin.
I'm still bothered about that bloody single hair though. It mocks me with its single twirliness.
Monday, 11 July 2011
I got a message today from the lovely Gillian telling me in the nicest possible way to get orf my lazy arse and start writing again. So I am and thank you Gillian.
I then spent loads of time deliberating what to call my first post in nearly two months. In My Absence? Too pompous. What I've Been Doing? Well frankly who cares? No point in using the 'I've been soooo busy' line. We're all busy. So this is what's been happening.
I've finished teaching at the Open University for the year and am now supposed to be using the time productively to write a play for Radio 4. But something is stopping me. I think it's called Bone Idleness.
The Boy got through his first year of college and was so relieved he decided to buy a suit. I've no idea either.
It's been nearly a year since mum fell down the stairs and died - long enough for me not to choke up when I find old jars of her home made marmalade, and to think instead about her funny little habits. Like the way she would serve up rock hard avocado - I mean you could chip your teeth on them. 'Just let them ripen a bit,' I'd say but she'd have no truck with that. 'I'm writing to the supermarket to complain!' she'd announce like Boudicca, waving her slice of stone hard avocado like a sword. The thing is, she kept on buying rock hard avocados and she kept on writing to the supermarket to complain. Sometimes she got her money back and a whole load more of avocado.
She also wrote to the bank to complain about the location of the cash machine. 'The sunlight shines directly on it' she complained to the hapless spotty eighteen year old cashier. And after she died I found out that she was in the middle of what politicians call a 'frank and fearless' correspondence with Weatherspoons about their crap food. You'd think crap food at Weatherspoons would be a given but mum apparently wasn't taking their deep fried mushrooms lying down. She even put in her will that if we (her family) disobeyed her instructions and bought an expensive coffin she vowed to 'come back and haunt us.'
Dad is recovering from the nightmare revelation that if he wants a woman to continue to clean up and cook for him, he is going to have to pay her. I remember years ago reading Shirley Conran's Superwoman in which she said, if you want a good man grow your own. I wonder if it's a particularly Irish generational thing to have a grown man so utterly domestically incompetent. I know that mum infantilised dad but he went along with it. And even though he knows on one level that my sister and I work for a living and have better things to do than cook and clean for him - on another level that's all he really recognises women as doing. Which is very sad. But also incredibly annoying. When I left dad's house, hours later I would find endless missed calls from him. He was ringing to ask where the washing up liquid was. Or where I kept the milk (?) 'Ok dad - where would the milk be most likely to be? A - in the bathroom cabinet or B - in the fridge? 'Ok'. Five minutes later the phone rings again. 'Where did I leave my glasses?' It's thinking that the womb is a location device. It's not spending five minutes thinking about where the vacuum cleaner bags might be but immediately defaulting to the nearest person with a womb because she'll know. For his entire life dad has never had to consider anything domestic. So we've got hold of a company who are used to dealing with older people who will come and clean for dad and do small errands.
And I really don't want The Boy turning out anything like this. So he's got himself a job and by the end of this summer he's going to be cooking dinner a few days a week. That's The Boy, not dad. He'll be sitting in his chair shouting at the telly while the nice ladies from Home Instead vacuum round his feet. And then expect to be paid for it.
So now that dad has been sorted out, hopefully normal service will resume.
I then spent loads of time deliberating what to call my first post in nearly two months. In My Absence? Too pompous. What I've Been Doing? Well frankly who cares? No point in using the 'I've been soooo busy' line. We're all busy. So this is what's been happening.
I've finished teaching at the Open University for the year and am now supposed to be using the time productively to write a play for Radio 4. But something is stopping me. I think it's called Bone Idleness.
The Boy got through his first year of college and was so relieved he decided to buy a suit. I've no idea either.
It's been nearly a year since mum fell down the stairs and died - long enough for me not to choke up when I find old jars of her home made marmalade, and to think instead about her funny little habits. Like the way she would serve up rock hard avocado - I mean you could chip your teeth on them. 'Just let them ripen a bit,' I'd say but she'd have no truck with that. 'I'm writing to the supermarket to complain!' she'd announce like Boudicca, waving her slice of stone hard avocado like a sword. The thing is, she kept on buying rock hard avocados and she kept on writing to the supermarket to complain. Sometimes she got her money back and a whole load more of avocado.
She also wrote to the bank to complain about the location of the cash machine. 'The sunlight shines directly on it' she complained to the hapless spotty eighteen year old cashier. And after she died I found out that she was in the middle of what politicians call a 'frank and fearless' correspondence with Weatherspoons about their crap food. You'd think crap food at Weatherspoons would be a given but mum apparently wasn't taking their deep fried mushrooms lying down. She even put in her will that if we (her family) disobeyed her instructions and bought an expensive coffin she vowed to 'come back and haunt us.'
Dad is recovering from the nightmare revelation that if he wants a woman to continue to clean up and cook for him, he is going to have to pay her. I remember years ago reading Shirley Conran's Superwoman in which she said, if you want a good man grow your own. I wonder if it's a particularly Irish generational thing to have a grown man so utterly domestically incompetent. I know that mum infantilised dad but he went along with it. And even though he knows on one level that my sister and I work for a living and have better things to do than cook and clean for him - on another level that's all he really recognises women as doing. Which is very sad. But also incredibly annoying. When I left dad's house, hours later I would find endless missed calls from him. He was ringing to ask where the washing up liquid was. Or where I kept the milk (?) 'Ok dad - where would the milk be most likely to be? A - in the bathroom cabinet or B - in the fridge? 'Ok'. Five minutes later the phone rings again. 'Where did I leave my glasses?' It's thinking that the womb is a location device. It's not spending five minutes thinking about where the vacuum cleaner bags might be but immediately defaulting to the nearest person with a womb because she'll know. For his entire life dad has never had to consider anything domestic. So we've got hold of a company who are used to dealing with older people who will come and clean for dad and do small errands.
And I really don't want The Boy turning out anything like this. So he's got himself a job and by the end of this summer he's going to be cooking dinner a few days a week. That's The Boy, not dad. He'll be sitting in his chair shouting at the telly while the nice ladies from Home Instead vacuum round his feet. And then expect to be paid for it.
So now that dad has been sorted out, hopefully normal service will resume.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)