Kirstie and me

I've always had a bit of a crush on Kirstie Allsopp. She's pretty and wears great dresses. I like the mix of successful career woman with crafty earth mother crossed with a dose of poshness and plenty of gob.

It manifests itself by occasional tweets in which I attempt, in vain, to get her attention. This never works  - even the one I send quite often asking where she got her fab black furry hat that occasionally appears on Location, Location, Location never gets a reply.

Now my crushes don't have to agree with me, sometimes the very fact they don't just serves to strengthen my crush, but sometimes there's that pivotal moment when alarm bells ring and, you know, you still fancy them but you just don't respect them any more. It happened with a man I dallied with some years ago, a fully paid up member of the Tory Party. I found the clash of opinions rather alluring, truth be told, and convinced myself that some Tories even want the same thing as normal people (to make lives better, all lives, starting with the shittest, in case you didn't know) and just have a different approach. And then one day, sitting on a hill with a view of the city, admiring each other and London, he said 'what's the problem with inequality anyway?' He dumped me in the end ("They only think of themselves, Tories, what did you expect?" said my Labour supporting friends ie nearly all of them) but when he said that, my ardour definitely died a bit.

So it is with Kirstie, suggesting women shouldn't go to university but should instead have babies in their twenties in this interview.

The thing is, I'm not beyond offering similar advice myself. A postgraduate student once asked me in a lecture on freelancing, how to ensure she isn't so busy trying to be a successful journalist that she doesn't find time to have a family. I don't know, I had to reply, it's why I lecture part time and freelance the rest of it. Do it now, I told her, have your babies first.

But I didn't really mean it. By the time I was in my thirties, even before the children came, I was tired of networking and drinking all evening with people looking over my shoulder for someone more important. I did it for ten years and I was bloody good at it, always the one at a reception or networking event flitting between people, gathering business cards, flattering and quipping and remembering key details to bring up in the next day's pitches. But that kind of thing has a limited shelf life, as it should. Otherwise you end up the old soak at the bar trying to wow interns with stories about how great you are whilst pretending you're not hanging out for one more glass of cheap white wine. Luckily, I did it for long enough and was good enough at it that I am still living off the contacts I made then. Start the ten year process post children, when you need to get home for the babysitter or get up at 6am to watch Tikka-fucking-billa on CBeebies? Not likely.

Then of course there are the added extras that are really what make your career. I've written about them before. Basically you might do your job really well, you might make money or have genius ideas or change the world, but what makes you appear to be doing all of these things are the extras, often last minute, like attending a breakfast briefing at short notice or working all night to finish someone else's project because they are sick or speaking at a conference. In my career it's punditry that makes you most visible. Kirstie's article is exactly the kind of thing that in the past would have led to me being asked for a response - for tv, radio and other print journalists. But that would have relied on me being able to read the article as soon as it was published, work out my response, answer the phone and get to a studio. I can't do that on days when I am looking after my children. And those women Kirstie talks about, who at my age would have kids just about to start secondary school, they wouldn't be able to either.

I love Anne McElvoy's response to Kirstie's interview in the Evening Standard.  Don't listen to Kirstie, she says, but get your education as soon as you can:

"...I would refer you to the inspirational Geoffrey Canada, who transformed the education opportunities of some of the poorest American children. He has one key piece of advice about why learning is useful. “When in doubt, do as the rich folks do.” And the rich folks, the world over, by hook, crook and private tutor, send their children to university."

That's it isn't it? Kirstie approaches this from the position of someone who didn't need to do that to have a nice life. The same goes for me of course - I fully acknowledge that while not plummy like Kirstie, life would have probably worked out okay whatever path I took, because I've had loads of opportunities from the very beginning. Like Kirstie, I was born lucky. I suspect that the difference between me and Kirstie is the same as the difference between me and the Tory boyfriend that wasn't - which is that I acknowledge this luck, and the part it has played. Oh Kirstie, we could have been so good together...

Mothers for abortion rights

When I became a mum I used to enjoy joking about the new found legitimacy this status gave me in being morally outraged. "As a mother," I'd say, "I really hate paedophiles," as if I thought abusing children was perfectly acceptable before I had one.

There is one area however where I think being a parent makes it even more important to stand up and be counted, and that is when it comes to abortion rights, particularly at the moment as Jeremy Hunt (Secretary of State for Health) has told The Times that he'd like to see the legal abortion limit halved from 24 weeks to 12 weeks.

This is because it is very easy to get confused when it comes to abortion and to think that it is about women not liking, or wanting, children.  Actually abortion is very little to do with children and everything to do with grown women looking at their lives and working out whether to ruin it or not by going ahead with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy or a pregnancy in which the foetus faces huge medical problems. In fact it is only now I have a child and realise how all consuming being a parent is that I realise how catastrophic having parenthood forced upon you would be.

This doesn't mean I believe in sugar coating what abortion is by using euphemisms about collections of cells or worrying about the exact number of weeks at which a foetus becomes, with huge medical help, viable.  We do ourselves a disservice when we do this, as if we cannot face up to what abortion is. Yes, abortion is killing a potential baby. But not allowing abortion is ruining an actual, not a potential, life. And faced with two horrible possibilities I would always choose the actual life. That's why Hunt is being dishonest with himself if he really thinks abortion is okay, but only until 12 weeks. Either it is okay, and we value the actual life more than the potential life, or it isn't okay and the number of weeks is immaterial.

When I was less than a week old, in 1978, I went to a party. It was to mark the first anniversary of the opening of the day care abortion service, where my mum worked as a counsellor - though she was on maternity leave at the time. Some people may find this odd - taking a baby to celebrate abortion. But it wasn't to celebrate abortion, it was to celebrate the fact that women could end pregnancies, if they chose to do so, safely and legally. That is, it celebrated the opportunity to save lives, not end lives.

That's why abortion is one of the areas where mothers in particular need to stand up and be counted when it comes to supporting access to abortion. Because the anti abortionists, and those who want to limit access to abortion, need to know that women who are in favour of access to abortion are not baby hating monsters. In fact they may well already be mothers, very good ones probably. No, they just like women, actual women, with actual lives, and want to help those lives go as well as possible.

Man's Work

I first saw this book a few weeks ago in the library and I was so taken with it I bought a copy for home on Amazon. In fact I bought several copies as I felt it was so good many of my friends deserved a copy too.



Man's Work (All in a Day) by Annie Kubler is a picture book with no words in which we see, over the course of a day, a dad and his child do what many people think of as 'women's work' - putting away toys, hoovering, ironing, cooking etc. I thought it was the ideal book for any child who mainly sees women do this work, be it their mum or a cleaner, to help them understand that actually this kind of task is not intrinsically something women do.

But as there are no words it relies on the person 'reading' the book to make up the story, so actually it becomes whatever you want it to be. Is the dad doing all this because the mum is away and it's a novelty to keep house? Or are they doing it as a surprise for mum? Perhaps it is a stay at home dad and this is the kind of thing he does every day? Or maybe he is the 'manny' rather than a dad and his job involves light cleaning duties? See, when you think about it it is as complex as Milton's Paradise Lost trying to justify the ways of God to men. Whatever your story though, I am sure that normalising men doing housework is an excellent thing.

Incidentally, another lovely picture book with no words is The Baby's Catalogue by Allan and Janet Ahlberg:

The shower monologues

I don't shower every morning - what mother of a baby does? (oh, you do - bugger) - but on the days when I do and when the baby is not in the mood to wait for me with her toys in her cot or nap while I do it, she sits in a highchair in our bathroom chewing a rubber duck and watching me. And because we are both happiest when there is a steady stream of chatter, I explain to her what I am doing, what shower gel is, why suds need rinsing, the difference between shampoo and conditioner and that kind of thing. And on the (increasingly rare) occasions when I shave under my arms or defuzz my legs or deal with the bikini line, I try to remember to tell her that these things I am doing are what some mummies do, but they aren't necessary and she should never feel that she has to remove body hair, but that it's okay if she wants to as long as she doesn't feel pressured into doing so, and to come to me for advice before she does it so that she doesn't cut her teenage legs to shreds with a cheap bic razor, and that if underarm hair is good enough for Julia Roberts it should be good enough for everyone else etc etc.

Boy do I tie myself up in feminist knots. Luckily for me children rarely take notice of who their parents were before they existed, so she will probably never take in that I wrote a book on feminism or that The Times, one heady day in 2009, listed me as a feminist icon alongside Nigella Lawson and Michelle Obama (hahahahaha!) and will come to her own conclusions about hair removal, no doubt influenced by whatever the fashions for it are at the time. But while I hope that she makes up her own mind about most things in life, I hold on to the belief that these 'discussions' will help lead her to consider herself a feminist, and that my ramblings in the shower will have some influence, and go in at some level. However on the days she goes downstairs to sit in the same highchair and watch her dad shave I bet she's not subjected to such monologues and I bet he's not tortured by getting the conversation right. But that's because men's beards are not a feminist issue - something I must remember to talk to her about next time we're in the bathroom.

Fifty Campaigns to Shout About

While I was pregnant I wrote a book, Fifty Campaigns to Shout About. It's about issues that you should care about and what to do about them, from being nice to refugees to ending loneliness to cleaning up the seas. It's about changing the world one act at a time. It highlights the issues and makes concrete suggestions for things you could do to make a difference, from becoming a school governor to signing petitions to holding companies to account. It also has interviews with campaigners and case studies about successful campaigns so you can learn exactly how to write to an MP, hold an event or get the governments of the western world to drop third world debt. 

It is my second book. The first, The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism, was published before I became pregnant. I guess then, in my pre baby days, I may have flippantly called it 'my baby'. Certainly I went all out to publicise it, talk about it and write about it. 

Fifty Campaigns to Shout About had competition however. It was published when my baby was five months old. Not only was I tired and incapable of writing articles to alert people to its existence, but I had a real baby on my mind. It slipped from my agenda a little. 

But my brain has come back a little now, I am less tired and I am raring to go. So forgive the self publicising (which all blogs are after all) but here is my nothing-like-a-baby-but-a-good-worthy-book-you-should-most-definitely-buy.