Eccentric Seal

This trip origionally started life as a visit to see my parents in Colchester. But I soon realised that given the very long train jouneys involved, it would make sense to break the jouney in London. Which then meant catching up with London friends, which in turn meant extending the trip by a few days to fit it all in. Leaving us with this ludicrously ambitious 7 day itinary: Day 1: Travel to London by Virgin Pendalino- stay the night at my sisters place Day 2: Natural History Museum with Dad Sis and London Pals. Take the train back to parents place in Colchester with Dad Day 3: Chill out at Mum and Dads place Day 4: Colchester Zoo Day 5: Travel back into London, chill at sisters place Day 6: Olympic Park with my sister and London pals Day 7: Pendalino  back to Glasgow My travelling companions were a 2 and a half year Jimmy and a five week old Kirsty. Just so you know, I had intended to write some observations on the galloping pace of gentrification in London and the excelloration...

Way back in 2013 I wrote this piece about the feminist concept of male privilege and how it plays out for economically underprivileged men. Now I'm wondering what happens at the other side of the class divide. How does male privilege work out there? This is something I can only observe from the outside. Sometimes through the pain of others. The particular difficulties posher friends seem to have with their fathers. Their strangely rigid and studied performance of femininity that seems somehow linked. There's a distinct "flavour" to upper and upper-middle class gender relations. One that is difficult for me to put my finger on. When the subject came up on a gender discussion forum I speculated on historic differences in gender roles. Going back a century- working class women were expected to do hard physical work at home, while their men did hard physical work outside. Meanwhile upper class men were running industry and empire while their women were expected to...

Shockingly, it has been over a year since I last wrote anything for this blog. Since then a few things have happened. Firstly, I am pregnant again. Secondly the middle class job I was humble-bragging about in my last post (never underestimate the element of humble-bragging in any left wing acknowledgement of privilege) has gone completely tits up. With the result, that I am now, once more, a housewife. And, true to stereotype, I am returning to Mummy-Blogging. So far today, I have got up with my 2 and a half year old, gone to toddler group, come home again and put him down for a nap. Now I am pissing about on some feminist facebook pages and writing a blog post. This is my life now. It is the kind of gentle existence that is just perfect for someone still licking her wounds after failing disastrously to hold down a job. I fully expect it to be stultifying boring in about 6 months’ time. So, just to break the blogging inertia, here are some observations on my current situation. First...

This is how my profile on the Mumsnet bloggers network reads: “A working class, socialist mum living in Glasgow writes about her life and draws wider political conclusions where she can.” It is not true and I should change it. I am from a working class background, true. But I have not actually been working class for, oh, two whole jobs now. My moving into the (lower) middle class is pretty much a consequence of moving to Glasgow. Nick persuaded me to do this back when we were in our one room flat in London. We could no more afford a two room flat than we could figure out where to keep a baby in one room. So we came up here, as I like to euphemistically to put it- “for the house prices” Once here, however, some other things happened: Whereas jobs for welfare rights workers were being cut left right and centre in England, the Scottish government is actually funding more of them. This allows the SNP to demonstrate their commitment to alleviating the Westminste...

Maternity leave is over. Five mornings out of seven, I get up at six, feed Jimmy his milk and banana, wash and dress while he’s still eating and leave, shutting the door behind me; by 7.30 at the latest. I don’t think about him at work. I even try not to think about work when I’m with him. I just concentrate on doing one thing at a time, to the best of my ability.  It’s easy because I enjoy almost everything I do. I live a good life. A man’s life really. I shut the door behind me and go off to argue with tribunal judges, write training materials on the bedroom tax, talk to other adults and eat lunch while reading the paper.   I enjoy the security and pleasure of a family life without any cost to my career or my sense of self. I reckon if I was a stay at home mum, I’d want a husband like me. One, who helps in the mornings, gets home for the bedtime routine and still does a hand’s turn around the kitchen. Nick  doesn't  always agree. There are certain thin...

23 rd to 27 th of June was apparently breastfeeding awareness week. This is the kind of information you become party to in the Mumsnet Bloggers Network. Some bloggers have used this as an opportunity to post about their own breastfeeding experiences- so I thought I’d have a go. A little late, but still…. Jimmy was born by cesarean section: a little scrap of life, just 4lb 2oz, whisked away from me before I could hold him. I was bouncing off the walls from morphine, and shaky from some really dramatic blood loss when I was asked for permission for the nurses to “just give him his first feed” of formula. This I happily did, taking the “just” at face value. It wasn't like that of course and Jimmy ended up spending a full 10 days on SCBU (Special Care Baby Unit). He wasn’t even drinking formula in the end.  He was so little that any kind of sustenance made his blood sugar jump about like a metronome in an earthquake. They fed him glucose through a dri...

There's a description in Carol Craig’s excellent book: The Tears that made the Clyde   of women and children hanging around the gates of factories and shipyards, or outside pubs. It was pay day and they were hoping to run into their men folk and shame them into giving them something from their pay to run the household, before everything was drunk away.   At the time, it was common, accepted practice, for the man take all the money and spend it on his own pleasures. So much so, that trade unionists, recognising alcoholism as a problem, had a campaign to persuade landlords to refuse service once half of a man’s pay had been drunk. In other words, the most progressive, left wing men around at that time thought that it was reasonable for one member of a household, to spend half of the entire money for a family, for one week, on himself, in a single night. I read this, with a short lived sense of relief at how far we had come. Short lived until I noticed the number...