It’s a question as old as Christmas itself: how does Santa deliver
presents to every child on the planet in just one night? Many people
have developed theories but only Santa and his elves know for sure.

I asked my eight year old. He said that Santa knows how to stretch
time so that he has enough time to travel the world in one night. And
when he stretches time, he moves very quickly relative to us, and that
is why people rarely see him and have never captured him on video. The
eight year old is big into science and likes to understand exactly how
things work so he has asked a lot of questions about Santa over the
years.

I asked my four year old and she said that the reindeer can go very,
very fast. The two year just said “I don’t know”, which probably sums
up most people’s understanding of how it all works.

Santa actually has about 32 hours to deliver his presents. As
countries directly to the east of the International Date Line are 24
hours behind those directly to the west of the line, if Santa started
delivering presents at 10pm on Tonga, travelled west and finished at
6am in the Samoa Islands, that would give him a full 32 hours. But,
with about 2.2 billion children in the world, that is still a pretty
tall order. So how does he do it?

Dr Larry Silverberg, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering
at North Carolina State University, says that Santa’s advanced
knowledge of the space-time continuum, nanotechnology and computer
science helps him to complete his task. Dr Silverberg was head of the
first team of scientists ever to visit Santa at his North Pole
workshop when he travelled there two years ago. He explains that Santa
uses this knowledge of the space-time continuum to form “relativity
clouds”.

“Based on his advanced knowledge of the theory of relativity, Santa
recognises that time can be stretched like a rubber band, space can be
squeezed like an orange and light can be bent,” Dr Silverberg says.
“Relativity clouds are controllable domains – rips in time – that
allow him months to deliver presents while only a few minutes pass on
Earth. The presents are truly delivered in a wink of an eye.”

According to Danny Maruyama, a systems physics researcher at the
University of Michigan, Dr Silverberg’s theory is plausible. “While I
don’t know much about relativity clouds myself, I think it’s very
possible that a man who flies in a sleigh, lives with elves, and has
flying pet reindeer could have the technology needed to utilise
relativity clouds,” he says.

Ok, but what about all those toys? Dr Silverberg reckons that Santa
doesn’t actually carry all the toys in his sleigh, but that he has a
“magic sack”, a sort of nano-toymaker that uses a reverse
thermodynamic processor to create toys inside the children’s homes.
The presents would then be grown on the spot, atom by atom, much like
DNA can command the growth of organic material like tissues and body
parts.

And there’s no real need for Santa to enter the home via a chimney,
although Dr Silverberg says he enjoys doing that every so often.
Instead, the same relativity cloud that allows Santa to deliver
presents in what seems like a wink of an eye can also be used to
“morph” Santa into children’s homes.

One thing we do know for sure is that Santa is helped on his way by
NORAD, a joint United States and Canadian organisation that monitors
and controls the aerospace in that region. NORAD uses its ground-based
radars and satellites to help Santa take advantage of carefully timed
gravity assists from the sun, moon and Earth, which help him travel
faster and navigate more precisely. NORAD also uses satellites to
track weather conditions on Santa’s route to aid navigation. Rudolph
provides a good infrared source on which the satellite instruments can
focus – his bright red nose can be detected with great precision.

Huge improvements in weather prediction models are also credited with
helping Santa determine the most efficient route. “Numerical weather
prediction has certainly vastly improved in the past 20 years and even
the past 10”, says Joanna Donnelly of Met Eireann. “Santa is able to
make much better use of the jet stream and the strong winds in the
upper atmosphere to greatly speed his journeys between the
continents.”

So that is, as far as we can determine, how Santa makes it around the
world in 32 hours. To those who just didn’t think it was possible, I
have just one thing to say: Believe.

You can follow Santa’s progress around the globe on Christmas eve at
www.noradsanta.org.

The health service was happy to diagnose my medical condition, it just wouldn’t treat it. Thankfully our insurance paid for the procedure that fixed my husband’s infertility but mine was something I’d just have to accept or pay for myself.

I desperately wanted to have a baby that would be loved and cared for, educated and guided in the right direction, a net benefit to society. But this was not about society, it was not about children’s welfare and it was certainly not about patients’ welfare. Some people called it a lifestyle choice – why should they have to pay for it? But I didn’t choose to have that medical condition. I had no choice.

Around the same time, a friend confided in me about her pregnancy. She wasn’t in a good place, she wasn’t in a relationship and she was distraught. She knew that the most responsible thing she could do, for her, for any potential baby, was to have an abortion. But abortion doesn’t happen in Ireland; another country would have to pick up this statistic.

So my friend went to another country, on her own, had an abortion, on her own and flew home, on her own. She had no choice.

I had my baby and my friend didn’t. There is a wanted child growing up in a ready and supportive home. A net benefit to Ireland. A lifesaver for me and for my friend. But only because we had the means to fund it ourselves.

Denying fertility treatment to those women who want to have a baby and denying abortion to those who don’t is not about morality, it’s not about children’s rights, it’s about denying women autonomy over their own bodies and their own futures.

The eighth amendment to the Irish constitution gives the “unborn” a right to life and equates this with the life of the mother. The Abortion Rights Campaign aims to repeal this to ensure the health and rights of Irish women are protected in line with international human rights standards. The campaign also wants to start the conversation that will lift the stigma surrounding all women’s reproductive options in Ireland.

The fourth annual March for Choice takes place in Dublin at 2pm on Saturday the 26th of September at the Garden of Remembrance, Parnell Square. It marks the Global Day of Action for Access to Safe and Legal Abortion.

The landslide vote for marriage equality and the passing of the Gender Recognition Bill this year shows the huge appetite for change in Ireland. With a general election on the horizon, it’s more important than ever to keep the momentum going. Repealing the eighth is just the start but it’s an important step towards giving women the right to make their own choices.

Pomegranate is my own infertility charity, raising money to pay for IVF for those who can’t afford it – please donate.

A recent TUC analysis warns that we are returning to ‘Burnout Britain’, with the number of people working excessive hours (more than 48 hours per week) up by 15% to 3.417 million since 2010. The TUC General Secretary, Frances O’Grady, says that:

“Britain’s long hours culture is hitting productivity and putting workers’ health at risk. Working more than 48 hours a week massively increases the risk of strokes, heart disease and diabetes.”

The TUC has called on the government to implement stronger rules on excessive work hours, urging them to renegotiate Britain’s responsibilities under the EU Working Time Directive.

The Working Time Directive provides a right to work no more than 48 hours a week. However, when the UK (reluctantly) enacted this into law in 1998, it allowed workers to opt out from the maximum working week. The UK now has the longest average working week in the EU and the highest work-related stress and absentee rates.

But are longer working hours just the price we pay for increased flexibility and autonomy? In a new book, Working Time, Knowledge Work and Post-Industrial Society, Aileen O’Carroll explains that while flexibility can sometimes mean increased hours, it also means a move towards irregular and unpredictable hours. In fact, the key change in our working hours in the last decade is not that they are getting longer but that they are becoming more unpredictable and this is linked to increased dissatisfaction. O’Carroll looks at this ‘autonomy paradox’ and investigates why autonomy and flexibility over our working hours tends to lead to a poorer work-life balance.

With flexibility, work time can spill over into non-work time, especially when a deadline needs to be met or something unexpected comes up. This ’emergency time’ is further facilitated by mobile technologies that allow employers to contact employees at any time. ‘Spaghetti time’ describes the intermingling of work and leisure time – workers can check personal emails, social media and websites throughout the day but are often expected to socialise with colleagues at lunch or after work. This results in leisure time becoming a grey area that is not quite work and not quite play.

The expectation is that workers will be rewarded for these inconveniences but these rewards can tend to be ‘disruptive bargains’ in that they are not straight exchanges of time for money. For example, a worker might put in extra hours at the start of a project or a career in the hope that there will be fewer hours at the end of it.

In reality, flexibility rarely results in fewer working hours and the unpredictability of the rewards on offer can cause tension in the workplace. There is also the fact that a ‘job for life’ has been replaced with a ‘job for now’ and workers face the stress and risks involved in frequent movement from one workplace to another.

O’Carroll clearly demonstrates the emergent culture of unpredictability and the way in which it attempts to set a new standard by which working (and by default, non-working) time is organised. In this new culture, employees may seem to have more autonomy and flexibility over their working hours but the irregular and unpredictable nature of it actually weakens their ability to control time in their own interests. This also impacts on their capacity to use collective approaches to negotiations.

These negative effects of flexible working hours are most pronounced in countries with weak working time regulation. So what’s the government’s response to recent revelations? In reply to the TUC, Minister for Europe, David Lidington, has stated that the government’s priority is “to retain the individual’s right to opt-out of the 48-hour limit in weekly working time” in order to promote “long-term, sustainable growth and labour market flexibility.”

Burnout Britain, here we come.

By Fiona McPhillips. First published in the Huffington Post on 17 September 2015.

Before you start your house renovation, know this: it will take longer than you planned, be more stressful than you imagined and cost more than you can afford. These three things will happen. You won’t know how you’ll find the time, the perseverance and the money but somehow, someway, you will. And in the end, it will be worth it. Every day, I wander around my renovated and extended 1930s semi and marvel at how bloody amazing it is. But it wasn’t always like that – let me take you back…

Two years ago, my husband and I bought a “blank canvas” property, i.e. a shell. Apart from the addition of a couple of electrical sockets, the house had not been updated since it was built in 1934. It needed rewiring, replumbing, central heating, insulation, new windows, new floors and a kitchen. Yes, a kitchen. The original scullery with sink and stove was still (barely) functional.

On the plus side, the house did have all its original features and, because it had never been built on or altered in any way, most of those features (archways, doors, architraves, picture rails, fireplaces) were in relatively good nick. It sounds adorable and it kind of was, it just wasn’t liveable.

Before and after: Hallway

The pre-purchase survey had thrown up all the visible issues and more but thankfully the house was structurally sound. The next step was to hire an architect. This is probably the most important decision you will make as your architect is the person on whom you will rely throughout the project for advice, moral support and basically talking you down from the ledge when you’re standing in a pile of rubble, looking at a hole in the roof that you’re pretty sure was not in the plans.

Before and after: Front of hall

1. Hire a good architect

When people ask me, “But do I really need an architect?”, I have to stop myself from laughing rudely at their naïveté, remembering that I was once too a novice. If you’re doing any sort of structural design work then yes, you need an architect. Yes, even if your brother-in-law’s cousin is an engineer/quantity surveyor/brickie and has built an extension with her bare hands. Especially if your brother-in-law’s cousin is an engineer/quantity surveyor/brickie and has built an extension with her bare hands.

Many people imagine that an architect simply draws up plans and then their work is done – that’s what I thought. Having known a few architects, I knew that they trained for seven years but I never really thought about what they learned in the same amount of time it takes to become a doctor. And let’s face it, we can all attempt self-diagnosis via Dr Google and the outcome is unlikely to be as catastrophic as pretending to be an architect. Turns out they know all about design, engineering, building, materials, planning, regulations, tendering, compliance, project management and most importantly, people management. And they’ve been through the entire process many times before.

Before and after: Back of house

My advice is to get yourself a decent architect to manage the whole project and you will cut your workload by 90%. But what about the cost? Fees are around 10% of the overall project cost and yes, that is a huge amount of money, no matter what your budget. However, a good architect will have a relationship with tradespeople and suppliers, which will allow you to avail of trade prices and discounts.

So how do you find a good architect? A personal recommendation is always best – ask your family, friends, colleagues, online acquaintances. Look at the architect’s website for photos or visit the finished product, if possible, to get a feel for the style and quality of their work. Houzz is a fantastic resource for design and architecture inspiration and also has a large directory of professionals. If you find an architect whose work you like, call and ask for references so you can talk to someone who has worked with them. The key phrase is “made it all so easy” – if you get that, you’re onto a winner.

Before and after: Staircase

2. Start your planning now

Along with a great architect, the key to making the most of your renovation (and minimising the stress) is pre-planning. Even if you think you know exactly what you want, it’s worth spending endless hours looking at Houzz, Pinterest, Google, magazines and friends’ houses – you can start this months or even years in advance. You might be surprised at how much your tastes change or are honed by looking at other people’s houses, and what you think you like now can evolve considerably. And how else will you know that you absolutely must have an understairs playhouse/cat shelves/a mudroom?

Before and after: Bathroom

3. Move out

So, you know what you want and you know how to get it – it’s time to move out and let the destruction begin. That’s right – move out, just go, anywhere you can. I know it’s costly, I know it’s only for a few months but if you value your sanity, you need to leave. If you really have to stay, set up house in a single room. This room will be your bedroom, living room and kitchen so make sure the zones are clearly defined. But know that no matter how hard you try to avoid it, everything will still be covered in dust so learn to deal with it.

Before and after: Shower room

4. Source fixtures and fittings at the start of the project

When you fall in love with a tile/stove/shower head, find out where to get your hands on it as soon as you can. There can be several weeks or even months lead time on products and when your contractor tells you “we need your sanitaryware on Monday”, that is not the time to go looking for it. If you know what you want (e.g. a 7.5mm flat, matte, white metro tile) but can’t find a supplier, message boards are a good source of info – Mumsnet has seen most home design scenarios in its time.

Extension – kitchen and dining area

5. Buy the best you can afford

You won’t be doing this again any time soon so don’t skimp on quality. This applies when you’re hiring professionals too.

Extension – living area

6. Be flexible

There will be delays, guaranteed. Try not to obsess about or rely on a specific finish date. This is a moveable feast that you will enjoy when the time comes.

Extension – dining area

7. Make the most of your interior

Buy only what you need and make sure you love it. If you love it but you can’t afford it, save up and get it later – you don’t have to buy everything at once.

Think about colour and the flow of colour from room to room.

Buy second hand. Buy online. Haggle.

Try and stay away from mass-produced furniture.

Do obsess over the perfect sideboard, cocktail chair, paint colour. But if you find yourself drowning in choice, just make a decision and move on – the end result does not hinge on every tiny detail.

Don’t forget your budget.

Take a step back at times to see the difference between what you really need and what you think you need. Just because Houzz has done a feature on fancy kitchen taps does not mean you need to spend £400 on a tap. Because a friend did that and the, ahem, friend is still thinking the money could have been better spent elsewhere.

Extension – Dining area and kitchen

8. Enjoy your beautiful new home

You will survive, it will be beautiful and it will be all because of you.

Extension – living area and kitchen

Thanks to John Flood at DMVF architects who made it all so easy.

By Fiona McPhillips. First published in the Huffington Post on 4 September 2015.

A video has emerged showing hundreds of people standing and watching while an incapacitated woman was gang raped on a beach in Florida during spring break celebrations last month. The police officer investigating the incident said the footage was the “most disgusting, sickening thing” he had ever seen.

“There’s hundreds, hundreds of people standing there – watching, looking, seeing, hearing what’s going on. And yet our culture and our society and our young people have got to the point where obviously this is acceptable somewhere.”

How is it acceptable? Why did nobody do anything to help? Once the initial rage on reading the media reports had subsided, two things came to mind.

The first is the bystander effect, which refers to the phenomenon whereby the greater the number of people present, the less likely they are to help a person in distress. The three main reasons for this are diffusion of responsibility (someone else will do it), ambiguity (am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?) and cohesion (not wanting to stand out from the crowd).

If you saw what appeared to be an incapacitated woman being gang raped on a beach, do you think you would call the the police? Would you assume someone else had called for help or would you wonder if, somehow, the woman had actually consented to this? Or asked for it? I mean, it’s spring break, she’s obviously had a lot to drink and is probably wearing a bikini or other skimpy beachwear. And how embarrassing would it be to find out that one of the men was actually her boyfriend and she had begged him to have public group sex with his friends while she pretended to be asleep?

Can hundreds upon hundreds of onlookers simply have been paralysed by inertia or did many of them just not think there was anything wrong with what they were seeing? Maybe we are so used to hearing sexual assault victim-blaming myths that we use them to justify our own complicity. And maybe we are so desensitised to seeing abusive porn that we find it hard to tell the difference between consensual sex and rape.

Earlier this year, the DPP issued new instructions to police and prosecutors for assessing the issue of consent in rape cases. Now victims are considered unable to consent if they are incapacitated due to drink or drugs or if the suspect holds a position of power over the victim. But how are teenagers supposed to know about consent when they learn about sex by watching mainstream porn routinely depict the humiliation and abuse of women?

A recent NSPCC survey of 12-17 year olds found that one in five 12-13 year olds think watching porn is normal. 20 per cent of those surveyed said they had seen pornographic images that had shocked or upset them and 12 per cent admitted to being part of or making a sexually explicit video.

Prof Christian Graugaard of Aalborg University in Denmark has called for porn to be shown in sex education classes to help teenagers learn the difference between what they watch online and real sexual relationships. While it’s unlikely that such a scheme will make it past Britain’s moral guardians, the need to talk to teenagers about porn, consent and sexism has never been greater.

Once we start the conversation about consent, then awareness of the bystander effect should help combat the bystander effect. In Jackson Katz’s much-cited Ted Talk, ‘Violence against women – it’s a men’s issue’, he advocates using bystander intervention to challenge abuse. If you’re not a perpetrator or a victim, then you’re a bystander and your silence is a form of consent and complicity. As bystanders to rape culture, it is every reasonable person’s responsibility to call out abuse and to create a peer culture where violent and sexist behaviour is unacceptable.

By Fiona McPhillips. First published in the Huffington Post on 24 April, 2015.

A common accusation levelled at feminism is that men and women are equal now so any gains that women make would come at the expense of men. Women can vote, they have access to equal pay in law, they can rise to the top of any profession, what more could they want?

However, as women have taken steps towards equality in the public sphere, there has been very little change in the private sphere. There has been no equivalent increase in men’s caring compared to women’s increased participation in the workforce and women are still responsible for the vast majority of care work. In fact, men’s very economic independence and greater earning power are based on their avoidance of care. Caring is culturally-constructed women’s work. It attracts low status, low public policy priority and low levels of funding. This is true even in areas where men are the predominant care recipients, such as suicide care and prevention.

While feminist scholars have taken a keen interest in care, it has not been well-researched in masculinities studies, which have tended to focus on male power and privilege. In Masculinities, Care and Equality, Niall Hanlon investigates the relationship between masculinity and care and looks at what it means to be a man from this perspective.

From the start, Hanlon sets out the gendered nature of care practices and the reasons why men’s lack of caring is invisible. Caring is thought of as feminine and hegemonic masculinity involves writing out femininity from men’s lives. Therefore, engagement in caring activities can feel like subordination to men.

The competitive nature of hegemonic masculinity is a driving force in men’s lives and feeling a failure at this can create a sense of inadequacy for many men. Hanlon describes how these emotions can contribute to the domineering practices of homophobia, misogyny and gender-based violence, as men seek to deflect feelings of shame and project inferiority onto others. Furthermore, the denial of weakness prevents them from caring for themselves or seeking support.

Hanlon conducted in-depth interviews with 21 men about their experiences of caring and care. Participants spoke of care relations becoming a dumping ground for men’s feelings of shame in the form of gender-based violence, homophobia, misogyny and suicide. In fact, men’s investment in masculinity has been shown to be a key risk factor in men’s violence. There was also a sense that marginalised men who held low status were especially prone to feelings of failure and inadequacy.

Eddie and Tom, who worked extensively with Irish traveller men, felt that their experiences of powerlessness and class and ethnic oppression often fed domineering practices against the women in their lives. Alex, a support worker for gay men, also found that men’s lack of self-esteem could lead to homophobic bullying.

Hanlon explains how masculinity’s denial of vulnerability makes many men unable or unwilling to access emotional support. Anthony Clare, author of On Men: Masculinity in Crisis, argues that male suicide is a demonstration of the ultimate keeping of control. Male suicide in the UK outnumbers female suicide by a factor of 3 to 1.

Older men’s support worker, Paddy, found that men were reluctant to admit the need for care and support because it contradicted their sense of self-reliance so intrinsic to their masculinity. Cathal, a single parent, found that he received increased recognition from women for his caring work but that it was rarely understood or appreciated by other men. Dave, a social researcher, felt that giving up a job to become a primary carer would amount to changing one’s own identity.

Hanlon’s research shows clearly the harm that hegemonic masculinity does to both womenand men, particularly in terms of affective relations (those that are concerned with love, care and solidarity). He asserts that it is only through affective equality that we can address other issues of equality and allow men to develop emotionally fulfilling relationships.

Hanlon explains that thinking about how men provide and access love, care and solidarity as separate from inequalities in social, political and economic life allows us to see both the inequalities that men experience and how men contribute to inequality by avoiding caring. He feels that looking at gender inequality in terms of affective equality has the potential to unite men and women, something that reactionary voices often fail to do.

So how do we approach this? Hanlon says that public policy needs to view citizens, not just as producers and consumers, but as carers too, especially in a country that defines care as a private concern. Care-friendly workplaces and social policies are often seen as a net economic cost but they are actually linked to greater participation, productivity and satisfaction in work.

Along with policy changes, men must be given opportunities to alter their practices and not just have their attitudes criticised. We must change how men are represented as carers in the cultural sphere and produce new models of masculinity for men to emulate. An important aspect to recognise is that the current gender-based care models are not socially inevitable. We need to examine the benefits of equality in men’s lives and the ways in which diverse, caring masculinities can be nurtured.

Public discourse on masculinity is happening. While in 2013, masculinity was said to be in crisis, now discussion has turned to how perceptions and portrayals of masculinity are changing and what it means to be a man in 2014. The mental health charity, CALM has named 2014 the Year of the Male. CALM’s director, Jane Powell, explains: “We think it’s time to ask some big questions about men and work, health, the media, education, relationships and family and ask what it really means to be ‘man enough’?”

From the 31st of January to the 2nd of February, the Southbank Centre will host a festival entitled Being a Man, in which voices as diverse as Billy Bragg, Grayson Perry and Jon Snow will explore all facets of masculinity and male identity.

Feminist debate has long been derailed by the question, “But what about the men?” Hanlon’s book answers this sensitively and comprehensively and lays the foundations on which we can start to build a model of affective equality.

Masculinities, Care and Equality by Niall Hanlon is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

By Fiona McPhillips. First published in the Huffington Post on 24 January, 2014.