Eccentric Seal

Way back in 1994, when I was 14 years old and picking my GCSE subjects, I thought about studying childcare. After all, I liked children, I thought I might like to have children one day, so it might be interesting to learn how to look after them.  I was called into a meeting with my parents and told I was not allowed to take this subject. Childcare, it was explained, was a subject for pupils with no other choices, who did’nt stand a chance of getting proper GCSE’s in other subjects.  Not for people like me who could take the academic subjects and might go to university one day if I worked hard.   So I did’nt get to do Childcare after all. I did Electronics instead and spent 2 years learning to solder light sensors onto little circuit boards. And it is for this reason, that I have spent the first 3 weeks of my sons life, blissfully unaware was supposed to be winding him, and indeed of how such a thing might be done.  Many thanks to the h...

I’ve recently left work at the Citizens Advice Bureau to take maternity leave. My work is primarily in benefits advice and I am a huge benefits geek. It’s a combination of the intellectual exercise of manipulating regulations along with the pleasing sense of mastery over a system that appears all powerful and capricious when you are on the other end of it. I love it.  One interesting thing about the benefit system is that every government since its inception has tinkered with it to some degree and marked it with its own ideology, so that the regulations resemble rock strata, each layer reflecting the social narrative of its time; the prevalent views about unemployment, the social contract and the minimum standards of dignity which citizens should be afforded. The majority of benefits claimants I come across at work are dealing with the most modern form of the system, the means tested benefits. Jobseekers Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance (the recent replacement ...

I have a collection of blog posts sitting uselessly on a memory stick.  They are waiting for me to polish them up.  They are waiting for me to make them "good enough" for the internet I have a list of possible blog post subjects saved on my mobile phone. They are waiting for me to have time to do them justice.  In reality they are waiting to become documents on the memory stick that will never see the light of day because they will wait and wait and wait for me to get around to making them "good enough" to be seen by the world.  Enough of this! The internet is not the library at Alexandria. My blog is not the Time Literary Supplement. There is no standard to be met. There is no "good enough." We've all seen the total crap that's out there for Christ's sake.  This is my personal blog. the whole point is to be rough and incoherent. The whole point is to put out your half formed ideas, for them to be chewed over and shot down and built...

Breastfeeding involves up to 15 minutes attempting to get a latch and you aren’t sure if the baby’s making the mistakes or you are. Getting little hands through little arm holes in vests is really really difficult. You fail to manuover a (ridiculously overlarge) pram around a tight corner and end up doing some kind of elaborate three point turn while a queue of other pedestrians build up behind you. You have no idea that getting (still ridiculously large) pram on the underground is going to be a problem until you are standing at the turnstile unable to get the pram through, hearing the platform attendant telling you to fold it up and knowing that you will never be able to work out how to do that. You spend your time thinking “is he too hot?, is he too cold?, if I put a blanket on he’ll definitely be too hot though, hang on, is he still breathing?” It takes you three days to get around to writing a blog post about being a new parent.