So. This weeks shit list is as follows:

1. Work meetings that masquerade as being part of a consultation process when in reality any relevant decisions have already been made long ago and none of the people with any real power who made them give a flying frig what anyone says at the so-called consultation meeting which is by now clearly pointless even if cake has been provided.

That may have been a long and rambly sentence criminally lacking in any kind of appropriate pauses, but seeing as that’s entirely in keeping with the circumstance it describes, I’m going to let it stand. Oh how I just love to have my time wasted. It really is my absolute favourite thing.

2.  My son giving me a continual running commentary on… well pretty much anything really, but his Welsh homework in particular. So he has an assignment which is to write half an A4 page on what he has been up to over the weekend. It is precisely thirty minutes until his bed-time and he appears to be consumed by a burning desire to read me the one sentence he’s spent the last hour putting together… again. Also, he cannot possibly think what else to write. Have I got any ideas?

No, is the short answer. Because my Welsh is… at best… random. I can say ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘thank  you’, ‘good day’, ‘good night’, ‘come here’, ‘sit down’, and ‘number five please’ (the latter picked up from all the hours of my life I’ll never get back queueing in the post office). However from there on in, things start to take a turn for the strangely tangential. There is my latest phrase which is… ahem: ‘Dau gi bach dim un hoffi tywod‘, which translates roughly as, ‘Two little dogs don’t like sand’. Don’t ask. Plus there is also: ‘Wedi mynd, bell yn ol’ which means, ‘It’s gone, a while ago’. And that’s about it. Useful, I’m sure you’ll agree.

But whenever I attempt to speak to my children in Welsh, their response tends to be to stick their fingers in their ears and shout at me to STOP JUST SAYING RANDOM WORDS. Apparently I DON’T MAKE SENSE. Which is fine, but then DON’T ASK ME WHAT YOU CAN WRITE ON YOUR WELSH HOMEWORK. BECAUSE I’LL ONLY TELL YOU TO WRITE RANDOM STUFF LIKE HOW TWO LITTLE DOGS THAT DON’T LIKE SAND WERE GONE A WHILE AGO PLEASE THANK YOU GOOD NIGHT.

It’s funny really, because whenever I speak to my neighbour in Welsh, she seems to love it. Seriously, she falls about the place instantly. Hysterical is not even the word.

3. Testicle pictures. Because there’s this guy that works in our building now. One lone wolf man in our all woman work force. Apparently – so I’m told – he manages the place, but I’ve a feeling ‘building manager’ is in fact code for ‘besuited and vastly overpaid care-taker’. He certainly is fond of laminating things. Anyway, the other day, apropos of nothing, he showed one of my colleagues a medical photograph of his poorly testicle. Which, you know, pissed me off. And not because I wanted to see it either.

4. My own sense of direction. Which is worse than a decapitated chickens. This week I opened a full length cupboard door in the adjacent building to my office thinking it was the way out. Turns out not only had I got the wrong door, I had also got completely the wrong floor. Please do bear in mind this building is no larger than your average, three bedroomed domestic dwelling. Fact: I have the spatial awareness of an over-excited puppy on drugs. It is so bad I EVEN ANNOY MYSELF! Plus there is no surer way to convince everyone you work with that you are mental than trying to exit a building through a bloody cupboard door.

Yet more things that have annoyed me this week:

The rain.

My busted lawnmower.

Stupid skype notifications.

And that thin lipped bloke off The Apprentice who keeps asking for ‘specifics.’ (The one with the stupid hair has grown on me rather).

So yeah. Blah. Here’s to the weekend.

Made by producer/director Daniel H Birman, it tells a harrowing tale of the life of a sixteen year old girl from Tennessee who came to be found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to a life time in prison.

Cyntoia Brown had never sought to deny that she had shot and killed her 43 year old male victim. She is shown in her first police interviews looking weary and confused, her curly black hair scraped back from her face in a ponytail. There is no solicitor or any kind of representative present. She looks closer to twelve than sixteen.

We are shown snippets of her in court, and also in interviews with forensic psychiatrist, Doctor William Bernet, recounting past events from her life and the circumstances leading up to her crime. Again her tone seems weary, occasionally angry, but often deadpan as she recounts horrific stories of physical and emotional abuse, and of rape and forced prostitution.

Cyntoia had been living in a hotel with an extremely violent and sexually abusive man named ‘Cut’ who would often force her out onto the streets in order to “get money.” She left the hotel on a summer evening in 2004 with the intention of hitching a ride to the local red-light district, when a 43 year old man pulled up alongside her in a truck and enquired as to “how much?” After a degree of haggling, a price of 150 dollars was agreed upon and, despite Cyntoia’s suggestion they go back to her hotel – which was after all just down the road – the man insisted on taking her instead to his home.

Cyntoia recalled being frightened by his talk of how he was an expert marksman who owned many guns and had spent time in the army. He had seemed angry at women too, telling her bitterly that they only ever wanted him for his money. She is shown in court attempting to describe the lead up to the shooting, her often expressionless face suddenly showing uncomfortable and scared as she tries to articulate quite why she had felt so threatened. “Because he discussed guns and being in the army?” the prosecution lawyer asks incredulously. “And the way he was acting” comes the reply.

According to Cyntoia she had eaten some food and watched some television at the mans house before telling him she was tired and needed to sleep. They went into the bedroom, he undressed, and once in bed grabbed her violently between the legs whilst looking at her, “with a real fierce look on his face.” He then turned over with his back to her, appearing to reach for something. Convinced he was reaching for a gun and that he meant to harm her, Cyntoia grabbed a firearm out of her bag – given to her by Cut for protection – and shot him in the back of the head. Terrified of returning to her pimp empty handed, she then grabbed two guns from the mans house and sped away as fast as she could in his truck.

Despite her tender years, Cyntoia Brown was tried as an adult and found guilty of first degree murder, felony murder, and aggravated robbery. She was sentenced to a minimum of fifty one years in prison.

Her story broke my heart, not least because she is clearly an extremely bright and articulate young woman whose future may now be entirely laid to waste, but also because all through the film you are continually struck by a horrible sense of inevitability – a terrible feeling that all along, history was simply grinding inexorably on, intent on repeating itself.

Cyntoia’s biological mother, herself drug addicted and with a history of working as a prostitute, was unable to care for Cyntoia and gave her up informally to a local family when she was just a baby. Still only in her early thirties when her daughter is first arrested for murder, she is shown at her trial sitting anxiously in the courtroom, a tattoo spelling out the word suicide in delicate caligraphy across her right upper arm. As a girl she had witnessed a relative shoot themselves right in front of her. Many female relatives had committed or attempted suicide. Her own mother - Cyntoia’s grandmother – has her own story to tell, and speaks of a pregnancy as having resulted from a violent rape perpetrated by a local thug at the instigation of her own husband. A dreadful history of sexual abuse and mental illness runs back at least three generations through Cyntoia’s biological family, perhaps giving some genetic clue as to why she herself was diagnosed as suffering with a personality disorder while still a child.

As far as social background is concerned, Cyntoia’s adoptive mother seems to have been committed to her care, however her husband was known to be physically abusive, both towards her and Cyntoia. At the age of twelve Cyntoia disclosed to a member of staff at her school that he had also raped her. She later withdrew the allegation and continues to maintain to this day that it was never true, but her adoptive mother (who is now divorced) has since stated that she has never been fully able to discount the possibility.

Certainly Cyntoia was an extremely distressed and traumatised child. As she approached her teenage years she began to commit petty crimes, display violent tendencies and experiment with drugs. As she got older she would disappear from home for days on end, and in the months leading up to the shooting she was victim to multiple acts of sexual violence, at one point being drugged and raped over a period of two days in a motel room by a local drug dealer.

One can easily see how a young girl subjected to such atrocities might assume the man who had picked her up in his truck and taken her to his home might mean to harm her. But none of Cyntoia’s history was ever revealed in court. Dr William Bernet, the forensic psychiatrist to whom she had told her life story, was never asked to testify. The jury never got to hear any of the wider context in which her crime was committed. As far as they were concerned, the shooting had occurred in a vacuum. The prosecution then went on to portray the victim as a good samaritan whose only wish had been to help Cyntoia, despite the fact that he had been found naked in the bed and a witness had also come forward to give evidence that he had once raped her. In such circumstances a guilty verdict was always going to follow.

Cyntoia Brown’s case is to be reviewed in the Autumn, and I for one hope very much that she is finally given the shot she deserves at living a free and productive life. One notices throughout the film that shots of her in prison often show her writing, and at the very end we get to hear her read out some of her thoughts regarding her life sentence and what it might mean in terms of her future. Her obvious writing talent and philosophical display of magnanimity belie her years. I hope that a system which failed her utterly in the first place does not compound its failings by letting the whole of the rest of her life go to waste.

So first up we have:

This post concerning writing without fear by Iris Beard. It’s not that often I sit in silence for a few minutes after reading a blog post in order to fully absorb its impact. This was one of those posts.

If I didn’t have you is next. Just because I love Tim Minchin.

Happy Mothers Day by Diary of a Benefit Scrounger. DOABS is an excellent and necessary blog as it provides a rare insight into the real life of somebody who is forced to live on disability benefit due to health issues, as well as a good overview of the unworkability of the benefits system as a whole. I thought the Orwellian, sinister tone of this particular post made for a brilliant piece of writing.

I also enjoyed this post about bullying on the Gawker website. Written from quite a fresh perspective I thought. Perhaps ‘enjoyed’ isn’t the right word – but you know what I mean.

Next up, two fairly recent blog discoveries for me:

Firstly, Not Enough Mud. Erudite, really well written, and often with fascinating insights into the authors life and work in another country – I really rate this blog.

Secondly, Adventures in Boogieville. Funny, feminist, and did I mention really funny? I fell in love with her as soon as I saw her vulva cupcakes.

And lastly, this hilarious parody of Walk Off The Earth’s cover of Gotye makes me laugh every time I view it.

You’re welcome.

But before we begin, may I suggest that if you’re not a fan of being in receipt of too much information you click away right about now…

Still with me?

Ok. So I once went for a Brazilian wax. I know. What can I say? I was curious, a friend had shared a rather, um, compelling reason as to why it might be a very good idea, I was due a trip away with a new man, and I am no more immune to social pressures than anyone else, so to my eternal shame I indulged my inner lemming and booked an appointment at the local beauty salon.

Fucking hell. NEVER AGAIN.

Talking purely in terms of sheer unpleasantness it is right up there on a level with cervical smears and persistent thrush. For a start it is horribly undignified. One is required to remove their underwear in front of a total stranger (in my case a very brisk looking woman in her mid-fifties), don strange paper knickers that look as though they belong in a psychiatric institution, and lie down on what looks like a thin hospital bed while said total stranger moves said paper knickers this way and that in order that they might better access your most intimate parts and smear hot wax on them. Comfortable it is not. I shudder to my very depths just thinking about it. And not in a good way.

Then of course there is the pain. I had been advised to take two paracetamol an hour before my appointment. A bottle of whisky may, on reflection, have been a better option. It is a shocking sort of pain. A tearing. One that makes you gasp, breathless, your mouth gaping open to form a traumatised O. Pubic hair is not designed to be ripped out at the roots. In fact I’m rather surprised that imaginative dictators the world over have not co-opted the ‘intimate wax’ as a particularly nasty form of torture.

Lastly, we have the resultant look. Odd, like a plucked and strangely juvenile chicken. Like a mannequin. As though I were made of plastic, the normal boundaries and demarcations of my body had become blurred and the woman staring back from my mirror looked unreal. Like a sexless doll. A blank.

And in that moment, I felt suddenly ridiculous. Why had I done this to myself? Why did we do this to ourselves? I had spent what was hardly an insignificant amount of money, only to be embarrassed and physically hurt, and for what?

I never did go on my weekend away.

But the whole episode has made me think a little deeper about the trend for pubic hair removal. And I have come to wonder – if we are prepared to put ourselves through that – whether there is anything that women will not do for male approval. Do we really covet male desire to the extent that we will torture and degrade ourselves in a bid to elicit it? And if so, is it any wonder that a proportion of men view us so contemptuously? If the pornographic industry, and therefore men, decided on a whim that it was desirable and attractive for women to begin having enemas in public, would we all do that too?

I imagine interviews being conducted with famous actresses and models declaring how liberating they found having a public enema. How much cleaner and fresher they felt afterwards. How it made them feel sexy and empowered. Entire industries could spring up around the administering of such public colonic irrigations. Women would be filmed on the news queueing to get theirs done, giggling nervously in anticipation with their friends. Enema parties would become popular for hen nights. Nuts magazine would run articles stating that modern men were now refusing to date women who had not been recently flushed, and giving advice to their readers as to how they might go about “sensitively” persuading a reluctant girlfriend to give it a try. Marie Clare would run articles stating that truly free thinking, open minded women should guard against simply dismissing the idea of public flushing out of hand, especially if they expected to be able to hold their mans interest for any length of time.

You can call me ridiculous and say that it all boils down to personal choice. But it doesn’t. Because personal choices are not ever made in a vacuum. Context is everything. Do we imagine great swathes of women would “choose” to have their pubic hair painfully ripped out at the roots if bare vaginas had never featured in pornography, and men claimed to find them disgusting? No. Of course not. Are huge numbers of men to be found spending their hard earned cash on humiliating and painful procedures in the vain hope that we women might deign to give them a few crumbs of our attention? No! Men are far too busy pursuing their own goals to devalue themselves en masse in such a way.

The main point I’m trying to make is that we don’t have to do this. We can say no. Just no. No, we won’t have our pubic hair pulled out, because it is unpleasant and we’ve better things to spend our time and money on. No, we won’t be subservient to male ideas of how we should groom and decorate ourselves. No, we don’t care if you won’t sleep with us or marry us as a result – if you want a woman who looks as though she is made of plastic, go buy yourself a blow-up doll.

Women of the world, hear my call. When it comes to wax, just say no.

I mean please don’t get me wrong; it’s awful. As in properly awful. I always feel faintly embarrassed whenever I read it – not because I’m nuts deep, so to speak, in a ‘mucky boook’ as I like to imagine my Scouse mother in law (if I had one) might call it – but because the writing is so mortifyingly bad, so unimaginative and ridden with cliche, that I’m never quite sure whether to laugh or cry.

And yet… having said all that, I can’t put the buggering thing down.

The plot of course has been done to death: young, naive, mousy virgin falls for powerful, handsome, ‘brooding’ man, and a darkly flavoured relationship develops. It follows very much in the tradition of mainstream romantic fiction in that respect, and certainly the sado masochistic sexual power-play between the submissive ‘Ana’ and the dominant ‘Christian’ seems often in the book to play second fiddle to the examination of the relationship dynamics as a whole. In other words, for a novel deemed to be pornographic, there could have been far more fucking in my humble opinion.

The sex scenes that do exist however, are nothing short of hilarious. One wonders at times if the book can really have been written by a woman. We are, for example, expected to suspend our disbelief and just roll with the idea that a virgin who has never so much as masturbated herself to orgasm, achieves her first ever climax as a result of having her nipple sucked for all of three seconds. Also that whilst administering her first ever blow-job she discovers she is, conveniently, sans gag reflex and so can effectively deep throat with the best of ‘em.

Call me cynical if you like (shrugs), but it just seems unlikely to me.

Nevertheless, despite a main female character who habitually uses exclamations such as, “holy cow!” and, “Oh my” with a straight face, and insists on repeatedly channeling her “inner goddess” for fucks sake – plus a deeply unconvincing male dom who I personally find a bit wet – there is something about Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s a page turner, pure and simple. The Dan Brown of the romantic/erotic fiction world. A guilty pleasure like Chris de Burgh (um that was a joke.)

So would I ultimately recommend Fifty Shades of Grey? Yes, despite everything, I would. It’s very easy to read, pure escapist, often unintentionally funny, nonsense. And so far I’ve rather enjoyed it. So sue me.

There were loads of really great answers such as:

Kelly Exeter: “A blog is connection … because there are more people in the world like you than you think”

Hesperas Garden won with this entry: “A blog is that vice-clenching pain in your heart that explodes through your fingers while the words in your head run at a million miles an hour. It is the shadows and the sunlight in your every day life. A blog is life. Transcribed.”

And Mrs Woog er… didn’t win, with this one: “A blog is something I do about 4 hours after I eat a Vindaloo with a double beer chaser.”

I began blogging before I had any real idea of what a blog actually was. Luddite that I am, I had only just bought my first computer and been connected to the internet (a friend had finally dragged me down to PC World after hearing that I had asked my mother for a set of encyclopedias for Christmas) when I decided, impulsively, to buy a copy of Blogging For Dummies. I went painstakingly through the step by step instructions for how to set up on blogger with absolutely no idea what I was doing, and began writing.

Looking back, my lack of internet nous was hilarious, or possibly dangerous, depending on which way you look at it. I honestly believed I was just writing to and for myself. When I received my very first comments, I was… confused. Where were these people coming from? And why were they reading my stuff?

I learned fast though. And now, although this is something I generally avoid saying in public because it tends to make people look at you as though you’ve just sprouted an extra head, I am absolutely passionate about blogging. It’s something I believe in, something I can get behind, and the reason for that is because to me it creates a space in which ordinary peoples voices can be heard. The internet, in my opinion, represents free access to information for all and is therefore the greatest equalizer of our time. Blogging itself means that anyone with an interenet connection can, in theory, smash through the elitism of the journalism and mainstream publishing industries and broadcast their thoughts to a potentially huge audience. Blogging is exciting. Anarchic. Subversive. Its scope is massive.

Which is why I find being bombarded with sponsored posts and reviews and suchlike so utterly galling. There, I said it. Great swathes of our wonderful blogosphere are seemingly now being turned into one huge corporate marketplace and I hate it. I hate it because for me it is the absolute antithesis of what blogging is supposed to be about. I come here to share ideas, to learn, to be inspired, and to make connections. I do not come here to be advertised to.

But but but. I do understand that blogging means different things to different people, and that my views are not where everything begins and ends. Some people enjoy the odd freebie and would like to make a little bit of money from their efforts. Fine, ok, that is their business. But I don’t have to like it, and I certainly don’t want to read it.

There has been a lot of discussion of late concerning Google’s stance on search engine rank manipulation, and how this might affect bloggers who effectively sell links to companies and organisations via sponsored posts and reviews. I have to say that for me this is a complete no-brainer. Clearly it is unethical and unfair for a brand to be able to climb its way up the search engine rankings by means of dishing out money, bungs, and free products. Any ranking system is rendered meaningless if it becomes simply a case of who can afford to buy their way to the top, and I for one am glad that Google is beginning to police this rule a little more stringently.

But more interesting to me have been the discussions generated about how one might get around this new policing, and whether it is possible to carry on as before with sponsored posts, reviews and do follow links, yet somehow find a way of avoiding any page rank penalties.

Now as I have said before, I understand that some people would like to make a little money from their blogs, get sent a few freebies, maybe have some nice free days out with their kids, and they are entitled to do that if they wish.

But, again, I don’t want to read it.

And so I feel that perhaps we need to re-open a discussion about what it means to blog with integrity, as lately I have found it harder and harder to discern, on a minority of blogs, whether a post is sponsored or not, and my concern is that this may have something to do with an attempt by some to fox the google spiders (although the argument in terms of ethics remains the same either way so no matter really.)

An example of this would be coming across what appears to all intents and purposes to be a perfectly ordinary blog post with a perfectly ordinary title. I will have already read half way through it before perhaps noticing a slightly incongruous link. My suspicions then raised, I scroll down to the very bottom of the post only to find a tiny little notice, written in a tiny little font stating, ‘this is a sponsored post‘. I feel duped, tricked and – justifiably I think – pissed off.

No strictly technical wrong doing there perhaps. But ethical blogging in my opinion means giving your readers a choice. And giving them a choice means clearly labelling a post as either sponsored or a review, in the title right at the top of the post so that they can decide then and there whether or not they wish to continue reading. It means being absolutely clear on Twitter and Facebook if the post you are promoting has been paid for (and yes, receiving free products in return for a review does constitute a payment) so that readers can choose whether or not they wish to click through to it. It means being absolutely transparent.

I fear that increasing monetization of the blogosphere is sucking the heart out of it, and that makes me sad. However at least if we have proper transparency this will allow readers to sift easily through to want they want to read, and therefore find their way to the real heart of the blogs they love.

Because that’s always where the good stuff is.

There is much that lurks under the radar in the generalness of the day to day. Small things perhaps, insignificant to a degree, not calling for our immediate attention, and yet…

A dripping tap, the interminable noise of the tumble dryer, the low level toothache that rumbles on quietly in the background. One never quite realises the negative impact these things can have on our sense of peace and wellbeing until they are gone.

I remember once, alone in my childhood living room, listening to a Paul Simon album that belonged to my father. Lifting the needle so gently and carefully (my hands have never been terribly steady) and settling it over and over in the vinyl groove that marked the start of my favourite song. I considered the words, and absolutely convinced as I was that ’50 ways to leave your lover’ must really be a woman’s song, I set about attempting to re-write the chorus. I still have the little notebook in which I pencilled:

You Just slip out the back, Pat
Make a new plan, Jan
You don’t need to be coy, Joy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Cass
You don’t need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Fi
And get yourself free

I couldn’t think of a woman’s name to rhyme with bus but it was a defining moment for me. Ha! I was a feminist. Just like my mother and all her friends. And I believed in that moment that defining myself as such would insulate me from all of the things that made the other girls in my class unhappy, because feminists were strong and they knew better what mattered. Feminists didn’t fuss over boys or worry about having ‘tree trunk’ legs or mind if their hair got rained on. So now everything would always be ok, because I was a feminist and that meant I was safe.

But a political awakening, however defining, cannot protect an eleven year old girl from a father who does not have her best interests at heart. It cannot stop her science teacher from never really acknowledging her or any of the other girls in his class while he teaches his lessons to a crowd of swaggering boys. It does not save her from the myriad indignities suffered at the hands of predatory opportunists as she grows into a woman; neither from harassment by older men in the workplace, or by strangers in the street.

We are all of us women and girls living and growing in the same patriarchal culture, and as such we have much in common. It turned out in the end that those feminist beliefs I inherited and still hold so dear didn’t make me walk any taller, or mean that I was stronger or more proud or invulnerable than anyone else. They did not allow me to bypass my own personality, forget my own fear, or to avoid being an ordinary woman, a work in progress, just like my mother and all her friends who had seemed at the time so invincible.

Feminism is a necessary movement – a life-line even – demanding social, economic and political equality for women. I believe absolutely that achievement of full equality will empower women everywhere and that this empowerment will work towards improving female self worth. But good self esteem also comes from within – from taking good care of ourselves and making positive choices that serve our own best interests even when it is difficult to do so; and as a feminist I’m not necessarily any better at that than anyone else. Neither was my mother, or any of her friends I should imagine.

Inspiration will always live to be drawn upon however. Remember:

You Just slip out the back, Pat
Make a new plan, Jan
You don’t need to be coy, Joy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Cass
You don’t need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Fi
And get yourself free

Get yourself free indeed. This week I made the decision to walk away from a situation that – although not without its fair share of allure – did not suit me, and instead of feeling terrible as I predicted I might, what I have found instead is that somehow that annoying dripping tap seems suddenly to have remedied itself; the interminable noise from the tumble dryer has finally fallen silent; and that the low level toothache previously rumbling on quietly in the background has faded simply and magically away.

Just like everyone else, I’m still learning.

It works well, I think. The children have good relationships with their fathers whom they see consistently and regularly, and I get some much needed time off being the sole carer. This is our normality – the way family life works for us.

Over the years I have got used to other people’s, especially other mothers, assumptions – nay, expectations – that I must be terribly upset by this set-up. “Oh gosh, I don’t know how I’d cope with that. Don’t you miss them?” I have been asked countless times over by seemingly everyone from the local pub landlady to the new mum in the playground.

And what I have learned is that my truly honest answer is not a socially acceptable one. That if I am to say truthfully that no, it’s only a couple of evenings a week, so I don’t really miss them, in fact I am often glad of the break and the opportunity to do my own thing, I am met with faces that don’t know quite how to arrange themselves. They don’t approve. I have said something wrong.

If I were to spontaneously weep and make strangulated sounds whilst reciting poetry about the blessed fruit of my womb, this would no doubt go down better.

And occasionally I have wondered if I am missing something. Some gene or other, or a specific wire in my brain. Other mothers appear not to be able to bear being separated from their children. They stare at me with wide eyed sympathy when I say that my children are due to go away for a few days and that I will have an empty house and time to myself. What will I do with myself, they ask?

Meanwhile I am planning nights out with friends, time to read and write in peace, and relishing the prospect of being alone for a while. I know this is supposed to make me feel guilty, but it doesn’t. I have come to be annoyed by the question, ‘what will I do with myself?’ What do they mean, what will I do with myself? I am a person in my own right am I not? I exist as a separate entity from my children. Do these women have no interests outside of caring for their offspring? What do they *do* with themselves when their children are in bed, at school, or playing over at a friends house? I am certain no-one has ever asked a man what he might do with himself when he is not caring for his children.

I love my children dearly. Our attachments are healthy. My life revolves around them because it must. I worry about them, ferry them around to dance and karate classes and buy special treats to surprise them just like any other mother. We laugh a lot in our house. I like being a parent; my kids are the most important part of my life. But they are not my whole life. Does that make me a bad woman? A terrible mother? And if so, why?

I just do not understand this desperate, all encompassing need to never be separated from our children and to devote all of our emotional energy to them all of the time, that we mothers are clearly supposed to experience.

I don’t feel it. I’ve never felt like that. What’s more, I don’t want to feel it. I need some of my energy for myself. Because I matter too. Why oh why does that have to be such a radical statement?

There is nothing selfish about self preservation. And I wonder whether this feeling of undiluted and selfless maternal devotion is a truly authentic reality for many mothers, or whether it is simply, as a result of social conditioning, something we think we ought to feel and express.

I cannot claim to know the reality of other peoples innermost feelings. But I think in a truly equal society women might feel better able to acknowledge, and make time for, their own needs; and that by doing so, we might then become even better role models for our sons and daughters.

Here is a definition drawn from Wikipedia:

Subvertising is a portmanteau of subvert and advertising. It refers to the practice of making spoofs or parodies of corporate and political advertisements. A well produced ‘subvert’ mimics the look and feel of the targeted ad, promoting the classic ‘double-take’ as viewers suddenly realize they have been duped. It cuts through the hype and glitz of our mediated reality and, momentarily, reveals a deeper truth within.

Here are some of my favourite examples:

For more examples of subvertising in action, click here. There’s also some good examples of subvertising in Manchester here. Enjoy.

These have led me to thinking, because it doesn’t really do to be an English patriot these days. Waving the St George’s flag has in itself become a controversial act, synonymous as it is for some with racism, xenophobia, and the parties of the far right. But the letter published in The Telegraph was interesting to me as I feel it typifies a new kind of thinking; a backlash if you like, against that stigma, and that it signifies a recent and, dare I say it, rather fashionable desire to reclaim a legitimate pride in English cultural identity. I imagine it to be the kind of ‘progressive patriotism’ Billy Bragg had in mind.

The letter made a very valid point, I can see that.

But still… I am uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because I loathe nationalism in all its forms and because I believe patriotism to be its slightly more benign, smaller sister. Uncomfortable because I find utterly embarrassing, any sentimental ‘Land of our fathers’ type nonsense. And it is nonsense. Look far enough back into anyone’s family history and you will find a mish-mash, a rich and diverse heritage from far and wide. We are all of us a mixture. I must admit I tend to view ebullient displays of patriotism as I do grown men weeping at a football game when their beloved team lose; in other words as a socially acceptable outpouring of emotion and desire to belong that in fact has nothing whatsoever to do with football or culture at all.

I do not seek to deny that humans have an innate tendency to form into distinct social groups based on shared interests and an affinity with each other; evidence for this can be seen in everything from feminism to the Dungeons and Dragons Society. However this does not support, as some would claim, the idea that nationalism itself is somehow ‘natural’. How could it be when nations and countries are in fact entirely arbitrary, artificial, and in some cases very recent constructs, “their boundaries drawn in the blood of past wars” to quote A C Grayling? Just look at North America, Australia, The Former Yugoslavia, and the entire continent of Africa. No; what nationalism in fact does is exploit this human tendency to want to band together, especially in the face of any real or perceived threat. Our nations leaders know this well, and that is where its danger lies.

There is a fine line to be drawn you see, but no-one quite seems to know where it is. When does a pride in our own traditions and way of life become a belief in their superiority? If one believes in a more modernistic patriotism, ie a Britishness as defined by the values of tolerance and inclusivity, what is one then saying about the values of others? It is unacceptable to perpetuate the lie that Jewish people are inherently money grabbing and involved in a conspiracy to render themselves disproportionately influential. So why is it acceptable to claim that British people are inherently more moral?

Where I live there is a large Polish community who have earned themselves a reputation for being very hard working. Yet I cringe when I hear people making such statements as, “The Polish are a very hard working people.” Certainly, circumstances have meant that in order to make a decent life for themselves, local people hailing from Poland have had to work very hard. Not only have they mostly been given low paid jobs, meaning they are forced to work all the hours god sends in order to earn a living, but they have had also to overcome a degree of stigma and hostility from people who have lived here longer. A commendable response to a specific set of circumstances is not however an indication of an inherent characteristic. People are not genetically more hardworking, moral, lazy, intelligent, or anything else simply due to the patch of land they happen to have been born on. People are just people wherever you go.

Driving about where I live, one can also see various bits of graffiti proclaiming ‘English Out!’ daubed onto the bridges and road signs. This anti-English sentiment is a direct response to past oppressions and the perceived ongoing threat to the ‘indigenous’ culture and language. It is a perfect example of the fierce nationalism that can often arise out of such circumstances. It also illustrates perfectly the moral ambivalence often felt in the face of such nationalist feeling. One can compare this to the African nationalist movements that sprung up in direct opposition to colonialism, the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state in order to provide a homeland for arguably the most persecuted people in human history, and the desperate attempts of an ill equipped Kosovo Liberation Army to protect Albanians from being ethnically cleansed out of Kosovo by the Serbs. All good and noble causes surely?

Of course things are never quite that simplistic and the question becomes how to unpick the many and complicated threads. Robert Mugabe was once a revered freedom fighter who has now destroyed his own country in the name of anti-colonialism. Israeli massacres of Palestinians and their approbation of Palestinian land have been described as a ‘slow motion genocide’, and ethnic tension in Kosovo was rife well before the disintegration of The Former Yugoslavia, with many atrocities also committed by Albanians against the minority Serb population.

My son has also been punished at school for speaking in his mother tongue.

You may say that these examples have nothing whatsoever to do with a harmless and sentimental fondness for our green and pleasant lands and our meat and two veg. But they do. Patriotism and flag waving and sports stars getting teary over the national anthem just represent the thinnest end of the wedge.

What I hope for is not that we look backwards to some halcyon bygone time when to be English was to be proud, but that we may look forward to a more international era where human beings value and feel loyalty towards each other equally, and are united by the universal laws of decency that reflect our very common and very human values.