It’s been a tough week …

I’m feeling pretty roughed up, though I’m not exactly sure why. It’s been a busy week – lots of to-ing and fro-ing, so I haven’t spent much time at home, and I think that’s a big part of it. I need that time at home, spending the time on the day-to-day maintenance/chores, to maintain my own feeling of being in control and on top of things, rather than being in a state of overwhelm and stress. Although I *can* tell myself, rationally, that because I am *choosing* to spend my time doing things outside the home, that the *consequence* of those choices is less time available to keep the house clean & tidy, but within myself, I don’t like the chaos and disorder. I *need* to have a calm, tranquil place where I can be, and I find it difficult to concentrate on other things – like my writing and my textile business – with the weight of un-done laundry hanging over my head.

The great fish-tank disaster really didn’t help, either.

On Tuesday, we piled in from school and the children were so high and happy and just needed to rush about the place for a bit …. unfortunately, before I could channel them into the garden, t’o-m came home from work. In the frenzy of rushing to greet him, Rumpus initiated a wooden hobby horse + door + fish tank collision. He managed to punch a hole right through the (20 gallon) tank, and the whole of our (open plan!) downstairs was engulfed in a tidal wave of water and fish and screaming children. I have *never* seen so much water …. and I am amazed that I managed to stay as calm as I did, getting Honey to run upstairs and ‘grab every towel you can find & bring them here NOW’ whilst simultaneously evacuating my fabric store to higher ground and ordering t’o-m to get the fish before they suffocated.  Bella thought the whole thing was hilarious and had enormous fun jumping in the puddles … didn’t help my stress levels, though, since those puddles were largely filled with jagged chunks of broken glass. We managed to get mopped up, saved the fish, and my stock, and thought we were going to get lucky, with only the loss of an already-very-tired rug. Not so. The next morning we came down to find that water had got underneath the (wooden) floor and had warped and buckled and now closely resembled the Alps.

Not good.

After a fair amount of faffing about with the insurance company – for data protection they refused to speak to me, because only t’o-m’s name is on the policy document – it turns out that we are *not* covered for this sort of accidental damage (if the fish tank were integral to the structure of the building AND we’d installed a door-stop as a reasonable measure against this sort of accident, we’d have been OK), so we’re going to have to foot the bill ourselves. It’s a bit eye-watering, since the quotes we’ve been getting so far have all been in excess of £5k. T’o-m is now talking about buying the flooring and installing it himself … which is possibly even more stressful, if less costly. It certainly looks like it’s put paid to our plans to bolt to Devon for the half-term break … I may still go with the children on the train, but t’o-m is now planning to stay behind and lay flooring instead. BAH! I possibly wouldn’t mind so much, but he’d literally just (last weekend) replaced all the skirting boards & we thought the downstairs living area was (finally) finished.

I guess sometimes life just has to jump up and bite you in the ass … though I’m finding it difficult to be philosophical about the whole business.

A rush order in the textile business, a trip to IKEA and a stack of other child-related aggravations plus a major bout of man-flu for t’o-m has added to the stress-mix, and I’m struggling to keep my head above water, and I have this constant knot of anxiety in my stomach like there’s a demon sat on me, crushing the breath out of me. I am having to constantly remind myself to relax, breathe, to release my shoulders from around my ears, and triage the tasks – critical stuff can and will get done, non-critical stuff – well, it can wait, can’t it? But it’s hard work, to keep that in mind, when the chaos is stacking up around me – I’m really not good at recognising what I *have* done. It’s far easier to beat myself up over the things that are making me fall short of perfection.

But hell, I’m not perfect, and never will be. I can live with that, can’t I?

What I do need to do is to recognise that yes, I have had a tough week, but not all weeks are like that one. Possibly, I have another one ahead – purely and simply because I’ve got a couple of commissions to get out of the door, AND I need to sort and finish Magpies stock for the gallery – now two galleries, since I’ve been asked for more stock in the Otterton one as well – ideally all before half term. Added to that, it’s a busy week with the children - a lot of non-routine activities – that throw me out of my ordered routine.

So, although I feel as though I want to take a step back and re-assess everything, I don’t think that’s particularly the answer. What I need to do is to remind myself, when it comes to making choices, how I feel when the house starts to slide into chaos, and whether it’s worth the sacrifice. What I need to do is to remind myself that some weeks are worse (or better) than others and just go with the flow, as far as I can.

What I need to remember is that flexibility is the key to all this – not just to recognise that I can’t do everything, but to actually *accept* it as well, and plan my weeks accordingly. After all, this week, despite the craziness, not one day went past when anyone didn’t have clean clothes to wear, and no-one went hungry (or unwashed) at any one time. So, in the scheme of things, it probably doesn’t matter that I didn’t get to the washing up on Friday, or that I haven’t vacuumed upstairs or cleaned the sink in the downstairs washroom.

As I’ve said before: Shit happens. Deal with it, and move on

I’m working on channelling Scarlett O’Hara with a little Sufi wisdom thrown in for good measure ….

This too shall pass, and tomorrow’s another day

I got called an ‘earth mother’ last week – and found it surprisingly offensive. The person who said it is a good friend of mine, and I don’t think she intended it in a perjorative sense, but still ….

The whole business took such a hold of me, that I needed to take a little time out to try to sift through everything and try to figure out just why I’d been so offended by the term. After all, as a committed environmental do-gooder, parent and gardener, it *ought* to be a compliment. Right?

A big part of my reaction stems from the fact that I just don’t like labels – those attached to people, at any rate. I believe that they become a limiting factor both for the person labelled, who finds themself almost conforming to the norms that label engenders, and for the person doing the labelling, who then sees all that other person’s behaviour through that filter. It closes off the possibility for either of them, certainly without rethinking the relationship as a whole, to see either sets of behaviour in any other light, and becomes incredibly restrictive. No single label can ever define an individual in their entirety. It can, perhaps, explain certain aspects of character or behaviour, but if it becomes the whole story, then that person ceases to become an individual and becomes a two-dimensional cardboard cutout fulfilling an externally-imposed role. Once a relationship is set into that course, it takes pretty drastic action on one side or another to break out of it. In this instance, my immediate reaction is a desire to do something that will smash the perception, but that’s perhaps not a sensible course of action to take, since the behaviours normally associated with the label ‘earth mother’ are largely positive behaviours I want to carry on doing.

That, in itself, raises questions about why I don’t like the term.

If the values and behaviours associated with the term ‘earth mother’ are something I identify as positive, then why should I be offended, beyond a reaction (or over-reaction) to a label used, possibly just as a flyaway comment.

Digging deeper, I see the label as something that isolates me, that identifies me as something ‘other’ than what the labeller would identify as ‘normal’ (or perhaps ‘like me’ would be more apt). If being an ‘earth mother’ puts me into another, separately identifiable group from that to which the labeller belongs (‘people like me’), then possibly it also puts those values and behaviours belonging to ‘earth mother’ into a separate group as well. By separating them from the ‘norm’, then those behaviours and values become something that those in the ‘people like me’ group can ignore. From my perspective, those values and behaviours are not particularly onerous or stringent or ascetic or puritanical or restrictive, nor do I believe that in terms of time or effort or finance or other resource, they are particularly burdensome things. They are (relatively small) things that everyone *could* do, that *would* (in aggregate terms) make a pretty big shift in the way society uses, interacts with and responds to the environment. So, to find that even those who I thought broadly shared my values consider my position as one more extreme than theirs, so much more extreme than theirs that it warrants a separate category, makes me feel a little disappointed, and a little angry. By identifying this separation, they are identifying an excuse (or reason) for not adopting similar measures.

That probably sounds a bit evangelical and over-zealous. I’m not on a mission to convert everyone to my way of doing things, nor am I involved in any sort of deep ecology movement that would entail dramatic change in a normal household. The actions I take *are* small-scale, and they are more shifts in thinking that lead to related action, than shifts in action without the supporting thinking underpinning the change, and as such I see myself as broadly in line with most people. To suddenly find myself categorised as some sort of extremist for these actions is rather startling, and makes me wonder how far out of step I actually am with my peers. It’s kind of unsettling, and a little bit worrying in terms of the long-term prospects for change and recovery.

And it’s still not the whole story.

There’s another level to it, one that goes back to the origins of the term itself.

‘Earth Mother’. It conjures up an image of hippyish sentimentality, of compassion and lentils and incense, kaftans and cymbals and astrology, and a whole raft of loose-headed new age thinking and hoppity-skippety happy-clappy spiritual claptrap driven by emotion rather than reason that sits very uncomfortably with my own self-image.

Perhaps this is an odd statement to make.

After all, Earth Mother also conjures an image of a strong woman, very grounded, very centred, with home and hearth at the heart of everything she does. That aspect of it is not so terrible, nor is the association with certain aspects of the Goddess movement coming out of the second-wave of feminism – a further step away from accepting the values and norms of a patriarchal and often misogynistic culture. Little to object to there, perhaps.

Maybe so, but the bitter aftertaste lingers. Partly because I’m not totally convinced that feminism has been the triumphant victory once heralded. Sure, women are now allowed to compete with men on all fronts, and sometimes they even win. But there has been no fundamental shift in attitude or behaviour or values, in real terms, in the way society operates. Some concessions have been made - men are more willing to show emotion, more willing to involve themselves with domestic pursuits, women are able to hold senior positions in respected organisations, and so on and so forth – but the structures and systems of our society have just been enlarged to accomodate women, rather than being fundamentally changed by any increasing influence of women upon them. Instead, there has been an irrational rush to fill these structures as quickly as possible, to introduce emotional, compassionate empathatic gestures and posturing into everyday life, without any supporting intellectual or rational vigour, or considered and effective supporting actions. The morals, ethics and standards of the despised patriarchal past have been torn down and tossed aside, but without any considered standards to replace them – rather, women and men alike have rushed to fill the void with strident evidence that each gender is as capable of behaving as badly and selfishly as the other (with blinkers firmly on to all evidence of exploitation and the need for moderation, checks and balances), whilst insisting that they have a right to do so. Nonsense on stilts. From where I’m sitting, it looks like the ‘liberation’ of women has just lead to a greater degree and range of exploitation, and greater acceptance of that exploitation in the name of ‘freedom of choice’. In my mind, the term ‘Earth Mother’ is a straight-line connection from the feminist movement of the 60’s to the present day catastrophe and death of reason, and I don’t much care for those sorts of connotations.

My position stems much more from a considered, rational piece of work than some emotional response to seeing fluffy bunnies being slaughtered, but, by calling me ‘Earth Mother’, I feel I am being deprived of the respect or recognition that these rational processes deserve. Again, I’m not claiming to be an intellectual giant in the field (or any field, for that matter), however, I do resent the implication that my standpoint is driven out of some irrational, emotional piece of hippyish sentimentality, high on empathy and compassion but low on any sort of intellectual rigour or application of logic.

Of course, for the person who used the term, ‘Earth Mother’ may not have any of this negative baggage associated with it, and perhaps she would be surprised if she knew what a strong reaction she’d provoked in me. Certainly, when I started unpacking it, I wasn’t expecting that my objections would run so deep and to such a fundamental level. It certainly made me think about how much power there can be in a name.

It has made me wonder if there have been times when I’ve thrown out the odd comment or phrase or label that has meant little to me, but has had a profound impact on the person to whom I addressed it. If that is the case, then I’ll apologise retrospectively for not considering the implications more carefully before using it. I wonder how many other people have found themselves in a similar position – tagged with a name or a label that is not, on the surface, offensive, but has deeply affected them?

Has it ever happened to you?

We had our first full week back at school, and I can’t believe how fast it shot past.

It’s been a tough week for us all. After the comedown of last weekend’s excitement, it’s been all about getting our heads down and re-establishing routines and, for me, starting to tackle the holiday backlog of projects and deferred housekeeping – in the house, the garden, in my writing and in my business.

In a way, it’s a huge relief to move away from the unstructured chaos of the holidays and back into something approaching regularity – we’re not quite there yet, but we’re pretty close.  In others, the expectation that I/we would just drop straight back into it and hit the ground running was unrealistic.

For one thing, Bellaboo has decided she no longer needs her post-lunch nap, so trying to adapt my business working routines is going to be tricky: losing that two hours of uninterrupted time is going to be hard to replace. I think, in theory, that I should be able to get most of it done with her around, but it’s frustrating because it’ll mean that everything takes that bit longer because my concentration can’t be as focussed as it otherwise would be.

I also didn’t anticipate how much the switch back to a ‘working’ routine would drain me – and the children – and that a certain amount of ‘easing back into it’ is in order. Thankfully, the school didn’t load them up with homework, so despite protests about it all being hard work (it is), I think we’ll be back into the swing of it.

The big disappointment, for me, has been that my writing has been slipping. I’d hoped (again) to write six scenes for the CONTAIN THIS HOUR series, but in between exhaustion, unanticipated parental visits, dance class and a night of insomniac infantness, I’ve only got three done.

Possibly, I wouldn’t have even got that, because my lack of any sort of real progress on these stories had started to build itself up into a massive, monolithic monster of self-fulfilling failure, and I was finding myself starting to look for excuses why I shouldn’t write it, that I needed to make some massive changes to the basic premises of the story, that I didn’t have the skills to tackle it YET, that I should shelve it and move on.

But being the persistent devil that I am, in a non-quitting sort of way, I wasn’t prepared to give it up without a fight.

It turns out that a simple routine switch did the trick – I decided to have a shot at writing in the morning, and shifting my textile work to the evening … and it worked very and extremely well. I guess not being tired was a major factor, but I also think that just putting myself into that mental state of “I am going to sit down here and for the next hour I am going to do nothing else but work on this story” was enough to jolt it loose, because I’ve successfully worked on it in the evenings since then. Textiling, I can do when Bella is awake. Writing novels? Not a chance, so the loss of that nap means I can’t make the routine switch permanent. Perhaps, when she goes to pre-school NEXT September, I’ll experiment with the switch again and see how it goes, although, of course, phonecalls &etc can only happen during business hours, so we’ll have to see how that goes.

What is a big (re-)learning point for me is that I do need to re-establish working without distractions. The first part resurfaced quite quickly – that I need to plug headphones in and listen to music appropriate to the genre/period/style in which I’m writing. This week, LastFM has saved me, and I’m actually getting quite into big band music. The second remembered habit came out of the daytime writing session - emails, forums and blogs need to wait until AFTER the daily writing goals have been achieved, and whilst I’m working on them, I must stay disconnected from all distractions.

It has amazed me how easily all those hard-won learning points from earlier THIS year fell away over the slack, pressure-free days of the holidays and how it has taken so much effort to bring them all back on-line so I can get back to productive work. I suppose I need to be grateful that I *am* remembering my effective habits and gradually slipping off the ones that hold me back, but it’s made me feel like my writerly mojo is something that does need to be trained, and kept in good condition, just as an athlete trains their body, to be able to perform well. And, without that regular training, it’s become flabby and less strong, and what was simple is now painful and tiring.

What I’m hoping is that I haven’t lost too much condition, and that I can ramp back up to peak performance pretty quickly: on the plan, I need to have CTH finished by the end of September. Given that it’s projected at 8 stories of 3-5k each, then I think it’s going to be feasible to work 2-3 a week so I should, should, just about squeak in, given a clean run at the rest of the month.

Fingers crossed, eh?

I knew going away on holiday in the middle of the growing season would cause me problems … I hadn’t, though, quite anticipated the scale.

It’s so terribly demoralising. Two weeks ago, I left a bunch of good healthy crops all on the verge of being ready to harvest, and I was in lip-smacking anticipation that I’d come back from holiday to find my garden overflowing with good things – courgettes and beans and cabbages and squashes and lettuce and spring onion and tomatoes and and and and …

Instead, I come back to find that contrary to the reported weather, it’s been very dry in the garden, so although nothing has outright died, the ground is very dry and hard and there hasn’t been much productive growth.

That, actually, I could live with.

What is appalling is how quickly the pests have moved in and DECIMATED what I have. I’ve taken out my Rodale’s guide to Companion planting and given it a very stern talking to.

The companion planting of marigolds and fennel and other distractions has not deterred the various cabbage white butterflies one whit, and where I went away leaving burgeoning ranks of cauliflower and red cabbage and calabrese and savoys and purple sprouting brocoli, now all I have is stiff, pathetic, skeleton-veined remnants, fragments of their former selves. What’s more, those fragments were still crawling with the drasty caterpillar fiends that had so ravaged them.

War is now declared. The children are horrified at my casual genocide, but I’m going to save those plants if it’s humanly possible to do so. To that end, I’ve been out in the garden (with my gardening gloves on) hand-picking the wretches of my blasted brassicas and dropping them into a bucket of water. Caterpillars can’t swim, but, as I said to Honey: it’s them or you that gets the meal – what’s it to be?

I know I do tell them that one shouldn’t harm living things, but I find it amazing that they can get tender-hearted over ravening pests, but don’t turn a hair when they eat the ever-so-much-cuter lambs and pigs and cows and chickens that pass over their plates. Admittedly, the critters aren’t slaughtered in front of them, which I’m sure makes a difference, but to me a bug is a bug is a bug. Unless it’s a spider or a ladybird, both of which are very welcome in my garden.

It gets worse: the dry weather has destroyed my lettuce, and what didn’t shrivel has been mightily snacked on by the slugs and snails, as have the beans and peas, and they also seem to have a particular fondness for courgette and squash flowers. I’d hoped the gastropod effect would be pretty minimal whilst I was away, but it seems I’d been lulled into a false sense of security by their apparent absence and the dry spell before we went away.

I don’t use slug pellets: although I’m not an organic purist, I do try to avoid using chemicals on the garden as much as possible, and try for natural solutions to problems and pests as far as possible. With the slugs and snails, although there are organic pellets available, I worry about the onward effect in terms of the birds and hedgehogs that include these pests in their diet of wholesale elimination. I’ve tried various other deterrents – the ’slug stoppa’ granules had no effect, and, worse, looked like cat-litter on the ground which had obvious and unpleasant results. Beer traps just seem to attract more slugs into the garden, and copper rings are expensive and have little apparent effect, particularly when trying to protect a whole bed rather than an individual plant. I tried – once – my grandmother’s tried-and-tested method of going hunting through the garden and snipping them in half with a pair of scissors … whilst most forms of bug-death are tolerable, that’s one I can’t repeat – I almost lost my lunch, and just the memory of it makes me want to heave. My compromise had been to hunt them down in the early evening and collect them in a lidded bucket, and then alternate between releasing them into the woods, a good hundred metres away from my garden, and offering them up the next morning on the bird feeder.

This evening, my desire for vengeance got a bit blood-curdling: instead of my usual method, every one of the blighters got dumped into the bonfire pile.

Yes. I did light it.

I’m not sure how many of the plants will recover and go on to produce anything edible … but I’m going to be doing my best to help the garden recover in the next few weeks in the hope I can salvage something out of it.

What it means going forward, I’m not sure. It’s been a hard and painful lesson, but I’m loath to net the vegetable patches and swathe things in horti-fleece, purely because it is *so* unsightly, and I certainly don’t want to start spraying my food with chemicals just to keep the pests off – but they have been so much worse this year than in previous years, so I don’t know what to do for the best.

I guess the planning for next season will have to include some more research on natural pest control methods – and I’m wondering too, with the brassicas, if either spreading them out around the garden more, so that there’s less concentration of attractive fragrance for the butterflies and/or companion planting with different strong-scented plants might work  too. I sense some library time coming up. I guess we might also have to reconsider when we holiday, although I feel a little churlish refusing to holiday because of the garden. I wonder if I could find another gardener with co-ordinating holidays who’d sort my pests out & do a little watering & light weeding if I did the same in return? That’d be good ….

My one consolation is that the root crops – carrots and beetroot and parsnip and potatoes – are all looking very splendid. I just hope that I don’t find them riddled with carrot-fly when I dig them, or that the same evil weevil that tunnelled through my radishes with such abandon has also savaged my remaining healthy-looking plants.

from Goldfish Nation by Wendy Cope (Serious Concerns)

The summer holidays are almost upon us again, and the annual debate about whether the schools’ long summer holiday should be curtailed has started up again.

The proposal is that the school summer holidays should be curtailed from the current six-week stretch, to a two-week blast “just like the rest of us”.

The arguments supporting this point of view are powerful. For working parents, it avoids the need to juggle holiday, and it also avoids the stress and expense of finding suitable and affordable childcare to cover the portion of the holiday that the parents can’t cover – day camps, childminders, grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends all get pressed into service and the children can end feeling rather passed from pillar to post, well and truly farmed out. At least until they are old enough not to need formal childcare, but that’s a transition that brings its own set of problems and anxieties. The whole business is an inconvenience that ought to be avoided, and an anachronistic hangover from the days when village children were needed on the farm to cover the busy harvest period.

Our agrarian days are well and truly over, so surely we should put a stop to this outdated practice?

Maybe, or maybe not. There are some other perspectives that ought to be considered here.

Firstly, back to those working parents. From my corporate days, I can still remember the hell that was negotiating holiday during the summer period. Only a limited number of people could be on holiday at any one time, given that the corporate machine needs to keep functioning. So, bidding for summer holiday leave started early, and caused so much resentment and argument that it was a permanent issue at staff meetings – in every organisation I encountered. Cutting the summer holidays to two weeks means that *every* parent in a given office will be trying to book holiday for those weeks, to maximise that precious family time. However, unless we are going to go down the French route with the ‘grand vacances’, when basically the whole country closes for August, it is not feasible to even imagine that allowing all employees who are also parents holiday in a given two-week period will leave a viable corporate function in its wake.

Secondly, consider it from the children’s point of view. Here in the UK, our children start school – formal education – younger than pretty much any other First World country, and both their school days and terms are longer than most other European countries. And, when it comes down to it, most children would prefer *not* to be in school. They want to play. But, we send them into school, and they work long and hard, and then we often add homework and after-school activities to that workload. The short Christmas and Easter breaks really don’t give them enough time to recharge their batteries in full, and by the time the summer holidays come around, children are exhausted, mentally and physically. They need a good long rest to recover their energy, space to settle the business of the previous academic year, to reflect and organise and absorb - often subconsciously – everything they’ve learned in the past year.

They need time to play, to not have the responsibilities of school and homework, and the pressure of expectation and performance on them. They need time to rest, to be themselves, to explore their world and their environments and their relationships with their families and others without the constant stress of school routines. Education and routine is important to the adults in their lives, less so to the children themselves. We need to be aware that we are not dealing with mini-adults here, and we are not training them up to be productive and useful cogs in the corporate machine.  Learning should be less about stuffing them with skills needed for the workplace – it should rather be about igniting their imagination and curiosity, and the summer holidays – endless weeks of long, lazy days – give them precisely that opportunity.

We should not force children into adult routines as soon as we can – they have no interest in alarm clocks and commutes and office jobs – rather we should allow them to enjoy the only period in their lives when they have no (or few) responsibilities and have to bear little of the daily stresses and compromises that will characterise adult life. We should celebrate their  playful natures, and allow them this precious time of freedom when they can wallow in their ignorance and innocence, and let their souls and dreams take flight.

They have playful natures. Let them play.

Noon, hiving sweets of sun and flower

Has fallen on dreams in wayside bower,

Where bees hold honeyed fellowship

With the ripe blossom of her lip;

All silent are her poppied vales

And all her long Arcadian dales,

Where idleness is gathered up

A magic draught in summer’s cup.

Come, let us give ourselves to dreams

By lisping margins of her streams.

(From “A Summer Day”, L M Montgomery)

Summer has stolen over my garden, and the straggly, underpopulated days of spring have given away to lush, flower-crammed borders and burgeoning crops.

Garden Chair by Nutmeg66 (Flick Creative Commons)

For a gardener, it’s a difficult time of year, even more so than Spring’s mad rush to get everything planted.

In Spring, I’m rich with hope and the frantic need to get the planting done so that I can reap the benefits in the summer – the soil treatments and early bug treatments set the scene, and when those first shoots start coming, it’s pure heaven.

Come the summer, and just when everyone is coming over idle, the second wave of gardener’s enemies invade … weeds and pests come marching in, and the plentiful germination of spring gets decimated unless the gardener keeps a watchful eye out … and even then, there’s always casualties.

We have a number of perennial pests – from slugs, snails and aphids to brambles, nettles and bindweed – that always threaten to rampage through the garden at this time of year, given half a chance. The slugs and snails I’ve been dealing with using nematodes, and the destruction of every single one of the nicotiana seedlings I planted out this week have pointed out that I urgently need to retreat. It’s also proved once and for all that the ‘Slug Stoppa’ granules I bought as backup this year are worse than useless, so I shan’t be bothering with them again. So far, I’ve been able to clear the aphid clusters on the roses and herbs using my gran’s old remedy of dissolved soap flakes in water and misting the infected plants … I’m wondering whether or not to order a job lot of ladybirds and see what they make of all the little critters. It’s strange that we haven’t seen nearly so many this year as we would normally. I’m a little worried about them.

It’s been good fun getting the two older children involved in the garden more this year: both on bee watch – which they’ve thoroughly enjoyed – and in clearing out the nasties. Honey, in particular, has developed a peculiar affinity with caterpillars, and has spent at least an hour every day in amongst the brassicas clearing all the cabbage white grubs into her caterpillar hotel – a move that I’m more than happy with! Rumpus has contented himself with the odd shield bug and a collection of ants in his bug gallery, but it’s a start, and they’re both getting good at spotting ‘good’ predator bugs and ‘bad’ munchers and taking action. I’m enormously proud of both myself and them that they’re much less squeamish about bugs than I am, and they’ve set up a protective watch over a mother-spider guarding her big bundle of eggs under the curved arch of a savoy leaf … they’re desperate to see the spiderlings hatch … I’m just hoping they don’t do what the ‘daddy long legs’ spiderlings do and eat their mother when they hatch out …

We’ve had a couple of early cabbage – Spring Hero – which worked so well I shall be putting them on the list for next year, and the first sowing of early peas – Feltham Firsts – is podding up nicely. I keep running an experimental hand over them but I think it will be at least another week before we can gorge ourselves on them!!

I’m over the moon that we’ve got little crops on both the blackcurrant and raspberry I planted this year – I really wasn’t expecting anything from them, so it’s lovely to see little cluster of black jewels on the currant, and the promise of a handful of raspberries on the canes. I shall be making sure I get to them before the blackbirds do!

It is gratifying that the hard work of the last couple of months is paying off, if rather daunting that there’s still a lot of hard work to be done when I’d like to be lying back and enjoying the sunshine – the front garden is a neglected, weed-ridden disgrace that I absolutely *must* attend to this week, so if the weather’s good the house may well have to tend to itself whilst I garden – but there’s something so relaxing about pottering one’s way through a vegetable bed and checking out what new delights are on their way – the first of the calabrese are starting to head, for example – whilst grubbing out the little weedlets, that it doesn’t always feel like work.

And, of course, now the summer harvest is starting to set, it’s time to start planning for the next rotation, and the next set of planting …. time to go back and see what worked and what didn’t, and to start pawing through those seed catalogues for the late summer/autumn plantings and the next wave of veggie delights …

What is this life, if, full of care

There is no time to stand and stare

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows

No time to see, when woods we pass

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass

No time to see, in broad daylight

Streams full of stars like skies at night

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance

And watch her feet. how they can dance

No time to wait til her mouth can

Enrich the smile her eyes began

A poor life this, if, full of care

We have no time to stand and stare.

(W H Davies)

I have been stalled, badly, to the extent that I’m barely scratching the surface of the things I want to get done, for some weeks now. In fact, ever since we had the half-term holiday & I was forced to take a break. Ever since, I’ve been struggling to pick myself back up and get off that break and back down to serious work. There are a number of reasons why. Having that time off gave me a little pause: it lifted away the weight of the daily grind – the damn schedule, the to-do list – that demands my time and attention more than any of the children, always nagging away with that must-do sequence of jobs – housework, kidstuff, Magpies, writing, and gave me a taste of freedom.

Lazy Day on the Beach by Ohnasch.de (Flickr creative commons)

When I came home, the weight of it all settling back onto my shoulders was almost unbearable.

And the list stretches an eternity before me, never-ending, an infinite toil without thanks or hope of completion. Suddenly, having had the time to look up at the view, to see what was around me right now and to spend some time in the moment to just ’stand and stare’, has made me feel what dull drudgery I wallowed in before.

I felt defeated, overwhelmed and demotivated. I’m never going to finish that list, so why even bother starting?

And this is where a little past form comes into play: a life littered with half-completed projects, and I’ve sworn over and over again that I will either complete or close the lot of them. A further factor: my ‘Belbin’ profile.

Allow, if you will, a brief digression whilst I explain myself. Belbin is a management theorist who defined, in context of organisations, an assessment that gives insights into an individual’s behaviour in a team environment, based on the expression of traits for the various team roles. These traits are, to a degree, flexible in that most individuals will fit more than one of the 9 team roles, and that their traits will vary depending on the make-up of the team in which they find themselves. A more complete explanation of the “Team Inventory can be found over at Wikipedia.

In my corporate days, I went through several of these assessments (always a favourite on ‘team building’ exercises ), and I almost invariably came out strongest on three roles: my primary role was that of  ‘plant’ – the creative, uncommunicative, off-the-wall free-thinking problem solver (funny that), with secondary roles as the Implementer (as the name implies, the one who puts their head down, gets the job done & delivers the goods) and the Completer-Finisher – the picky perfectionist who insists it’s all done right.

When it comes to getting things done, these three are powerful traits that continue to do me great service.

Where they undermine me is in my core thinking. That damn Plant generates ideas like a little dynamo, always spinning new projects, solutions to old problems, better ways of doing/being/working. Trouble is, the Implementer gets hold of them before they’ve been through any sort of feasibility or practicability assessment and just wants to get at them, and then the Completer-Finisher gets totally frustrated that it can’t all be done in the available time and throws all the toys out of the pram, and I’m left exhausted and feeling like a total failure because I haven’t met the impossibly high standards I’ve set for myself.

So there’s the rub.

I’ve been wallowing – unable to get moving, paralysed by the weight of the almighty list in every area, and with little energy to move or change things.

Until last week, when I read Christine Kane’s blog, and, more importantly, her post “Are you leaking?”.

It made me realise that my mind was as cluttered up with ideas and projects as an attic-full of old boxes, and that the amount of energy they were draining off me was crippling me. I need to sort them out, and discard those I won’t ever use again. I realised that when faced with seems like a sisphyean task, I’ll divert my force around the immovable object and start frittering away my time on whatever time-sinks come to hand, so that I don’t have the time to even start the big project.

It also made me realise, obliquely, that it’s not neccessary to delay starting something because I can’t finish it in its entirety in the immediate timeslot available. It is possible to break these big tasks down into smaller, incremental chunks, and to accomplish those in series, over a period of time, will get me there as surely as trying to slog it through from start to finish and paying the price in exhaustion and loss of love in the project.

I’d been so focussed on completing the tasks, that I’d forgotten about enjoying myself.

I’d forgotten that these things on the list are the things I *want* to do, that they are things I *enjoy* doings, and that they are more important to me than all the daft (but fun) ways of wasting time I’ve been indulging myself in so that I don’t have to face up to those realisations.

So I’ve started making some changes.

I know it won’t be easy, and I know I won’t get it instantly right, but I know that it will be worth doing.

I’ll continue to disconnect from all those distractions, to avoid the time-sinks that eat up my minutes and leave me with nothing. And I’m going to carry on attacking the energy drains.

A simple thing I’ve done this week: if I notice a job needs doing, if it takes less than 5 minutes, I do it there and then. I have set times for certain tasks, and outside of those times I simply don’t do them. If they’re that important, I’ll do them in their slot when that next comes around – e.g. housework – but they get prioritised against the other housework tasks that need doing. And I’m building breaks into my day – two periods where I stop working and play with the children, allow myself to have a little fun.

We’re all doing well on it.

I’m feeling more energised and less stressed, and not having a to-do list hanging over my head is making life much, much easier. For the ‘work’ areas – writing and textiles – I have lists, but they’re worked out and prioritised. What I’ve done is to remove the timetables – as far as possible (textile commissions always come with deadlines ) – and just allow myself to take as long as it needs to take to get the job done. And of course the children are enjoying getting to spend more time with a less-stressed parent …

My Implementer isn’t totally happy about the lack of schedule, and my Aspie-self is more than a little uncomfortable with the new routines, but overall, I feel like the weight of tasks has lifted and I’m much, much happier.

Finally, I feel like I’ve got some breathing space.

What is really, really strange – and something I haven’t quite figured out yet – is that by consciously deciding to do LESS, I’m actually achieving more.

This week saw the UK lurch from the expenses debacle into the European and local council elections. Despite predictions that the expenses scandal would precipitate a high voter turnout to ‘punish’ politicians and send a clear message that these sorts of abuses won’t be tolerated, it looks like the turnout will be at a record low.

Why should this be? Is voter apathy making democracy irrelevant, or is a lack of perceived true democracy driving voter apathy?

I’m not sure there’s a simple answer.

Local council elections are rarely well supported. Certainly, where I live, you could put a Conservative badge on a donkey and it would get elected, so there’s little incentive for supporters of opposing parties to stand up and be counted, because there’s never enough of them to make a difference. And, if the main parties can’t make a dent on the Conservative stranglehold, then there’s little point in independents making the running, either. It was sad to see the likes of UKIP and BNP putting candidates up locally, and even worse to see them attracting votes – I find it disturbing that UKIP did better than Labour, though I’d imagine those are votes that would have otherwise gone to the Conservatives, rather than anywhere else. One does wonder, though, which way the 62% of the local electorate who did not vote would have gone, and whether that would actually have made any difference to the overall outcome. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that they didn’t turn out to vote. Aside from the general perception of the local result being a pretty much foregone conclusion, I think there is a general understanding that local councils really have very little power.

I’m not sure that this is correct. Certainly, in terms of big-picture politics, local councils are pretty much hamstrung by the increasing degree of state centralisation in terms of both budget and target setting for local services, but certainly I’d say that local councils are the state bodies with which most people have most direct contact, AND the state bodies who have most impact on the day-to-day lives of most people: things like road and public transport provision and maintenance, refuse collection and environmental services can have a huge impact on quality of life. Grumble though we do at the council tax, it does fund a raft of services that make life workable, and I’ll be the first to say that we are fortunate to live in an area with high property values and therefore proportionately high council tax incomes – this means that the local councils have the luxury of extensive green policies in terms of sustainable development & energy policies and recycling facilities which I know are not common across all councils.

These, then, are worth voting for.

It would be a happy day if control over emergency & healthcare service provision and education could also come back to local councils, instead of being driven by central government. The one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work, and it makes a mockery of the supposed ‘user-chooser’ model the government promotes. The reality is that there is little choice available – certainly, in the education system, it is all very well and good that in our local area we have Specialist Colleges at secondary level – one in the sciences, the other in sports – but that is meaningless if secondary schools are, by-and-large, allocated on a catchment basis rather than student aptitude or parent preference. If these came back to local level, and there was the ability to make a real difference in the provision of these services depending on which way one voted at local council elections, voter interest and turnout might well increase.

And this touches on the key of it: potential electors do not vote in local elections because there is a widespread perception that the power of local government is so limited, it makes no difference who is in power, and which is why, in turn, votes for those parties who are not the dominant party in the area tend to be protest votes and/or votes recorded by staunch supporters of the minor parties.

The same could be said of UK national elections. The expenses scandal has exposed a parliamentary system that appears to be almost completely morally bankrupt. Yes, very few of the MPs exposed actually broke the ‘rules’, but when the rules themselves are set so as to allow and encourage a degree of self-interest that few, if any, employments would permit. Here is a system that is secretive, self-supporting, and with little or no accountability, and no sense that any of its component members feel any sense of personal responsibility. I have written before about how large organisations cause personal responsibility, accountability and autonomy to dissipate, and the same thing is happening here.

Yes, the electorate is pissed about the expenses, but it’s more that the expenses furore is just the latest in a long line of political incompetencies, idiocies and downright corruption. But when it comes down to it, who do you act against? No one party is cleaner than the other, so there’s no alternative. One party is much the same as the other – there’s so little political ground between Labour and the Conservatives, that it effectively comes down to personality politics. Cameron is no Barack Obama, but when you compare him to the dour Brown and the lacklustre Clegg (who is he? I couldn’t pick him out of a line up – could you?), he’s downright dazzling.

And there’s another nail in the coffin of UK democracy.

There’s no real difference between the main political parties, so what does it matter which one of them is in power?

And it’s true. Not only is there a widespread belief that government exists to support the interests of business and property over the rights of the individual (and an examination of the legal system supports this perception), but there is also the fact that membership of the EU has brought the UK to a point where large swathes of national policy are dictated by Europe-wide treaties. This, in itself, is not a bad thing. Common European social policies should allow for the formation of a huge common ground on which all participating nations can connect with and build on each others’ diverse, unique and precious cultural heritages. Common European trade policies should allow individual nations to play to their own strengths, whilst taking advantage of the wider influence and power of a bigger trading bloc, so that a group of otherwise geographically, demographically or economically small nations can compete with the bigger global powers in a way not otherwise possible.

It is a beautiful dream.

It is shame the reality doesn’t live up to it. When I voted last Thursday, I was saddened to see that of the 14 possible choices, 7 were anti-EU right-wing organisations, committed to taking the UK out of the EU altogether. In part, one can see why. The EU, as an organisation, is broken. The idea of the individual nations coming together to determine progressive social and economic policies, guidelines that enable & facilitate success, is struggling to be seen against a backdrop of non-accountability and personal advancement that makes the Westminster expenses scandal look like a vicarage tea party, and it is this lack of accountability, and the predominance of a few powerful national figures who are interested only in protecting and advancing their own interests, that have opened the door to let the invidious miasma of these xenophobic organisations waft through our political awareness. They feed off the anger and awareness that a large number of our rights to self-determination have been eroded, without the corresponding payback of the benefits that such a union should bring us.

I am not anti-Europe: I think that only by acting in concert can individual nations make a real difference to the globalised environment in which we now all live and work – that is an unescapable reality. However, to make that difference, nations still need to have the ability to take local actions which are right in context of their own populations, economies and environments, and the wider EU organisation needs to have both the flexibility and accountability to deliver that. The hearts of pro-Europeans sink to hear tales of MEP expense claims, and the preponderence of good legislation that is either diluted or defeated by national or business interests, or bad legislation that is passed without debate or consultation at national level by unelected commissioners who hold more real power than the elected representatives.

This is something that needs to change.

However, the voices of the reformers (rather than the refuseniks) are few and far between, and so the electorate is left with no choice and no voice. It should not be a surprise, therefore, that voter apathy is rife. Our democracy is an illusion: not all members of society have equal access to power, and our freedoms and liberties are being gradually eroded in a system with such an uneven distribution of political power that the right to vote has become a meaningless gesture that has no real impact in terms of how that system is adminstered, or in how it responds to internal and external pressures.

We are in a system that is bankrupt in so many ways, that the attempts to patch and salvage it look increasingly desperate and futile, on an economic, social and environmental level. Until the political mechanisms start to accept that, and offer real alternatives to get us out of the current mess, alternatives that recognise the needs and rights at individual and local level whilst taking a broader, strategic and long-term perspective, the electorate will continue to vote with its feet and find better things to do with its time on election days.

I’m not a regular watcher of television, let alone reality television, but the combination of half-term holidays and Honey’s enthusiasm for Britain’s Got Talent drew me inexorably into watching the show on Saturday night.

Most of the acts left me cold, including the much-vaunted Susan Boyle (Cinderella-like acscension notwithstanding), but I loved the three dance acts – Flawless, Aiden Davies & the eventual winners, Diversity. All three showed a magical combination of musicality, athleticism and storytelling, with so much energy and precision that it looked effortless, and it was a joy to watch. We’d already agreed that Honey could make a single vote on the night, and I was pleased that she chose Diversity: their choreography was amazing.

If you missed it, here it is from youtube

I’m glad they won on two counts: firstly, I did think they were by far and away the best act on the night. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I felt great that a young, forward-looking act had won. There’s no doubt that Susan Boyle has talent, and that she represented the most astonishing surprise package of the series, but if she’d won, I think it would have been a retrograde move back to the staid and stuffy solemnity of ’serious singers’. Diversity’s victory, I think, is an incredible positive because it brings a freshness of approach and direction to the rather dull Variety Show, and, perhaps more importantly, because I think it offers hope to the dance establishment in this country, should they be in as much need of it as they often claim.

Listening to BBC Radio 5 later that night, much was being made about the short shelf-life expectancy for Diversity, that they are a novelty act, and that there’s no money to be made from promoting them. This sort of negativitysurprised me, until I realised that the ‘expert’ they were interviewing was running his own variety show, which was a ‘wartime cavalcade’  of some sort (I’m envisioning lots of Vera Lynn & Dad’s Army/It Ain’t Half Hot Mum acts). His audience is not the audience for a group like Diversity, for obvious reasons (even though I’m sure that my grandmother, a huge dance fan who taught tap-dancing to the over-60’s back in the day , would have loved them) and, perhaps more to the point, if we’re talking about short shelf-lives …. well, it would probably be cruel & tactless to labour that particular point. Maybe Simon Cowell won’t make money out of them (something to which I remain supremely indifferent), maybe he will, but I can’t help but feel that appealing to a younger audience is a better bet in the longer term.

This chimes in with the regular hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth from the dance establishment that they are not attracting enough young people to shows, and that the future of dance is in jeopardy and is rapidly becoming a declining, elitist irrelevance. I know from Honey’s ballet experience, that boys in dance are few and far between (there is one in her class, and none in either of the prior or subsequent grades). Yet here on television we see not only whole groups of boys – dancing – but that there is obviously an appreciation and appetite for watching them. I’d say that there’s an opportunity waiting to happen here, though whether the arts establishment and the media moguls are quick enough to seize it is another matter.

I think that the 3 performances on BGT silenced once and for all the criticisms that street dance is not a valid form. Flawless and Diversity both presented coherent pieces of dance with distinct storytelling elements, delivered with skill and precision. What is not to like? Thye were fast, fresh, attention grabbing, visually and aurally appealing and both made an oblique comment on the experience of living in this society. I see no reason why acts like this wouldn’t fill dance venues that regularly and successfully host ethnic and street dance forms from other parts of the world – I’m thinking of venues like Sadlers Wells’ Peacock theatre.

Furthermore, if you combined acts like Diversity and Flawless with other groups that were in the same continuum of contemporary and street dance, is there any reason why those who came to see Diversity wouldn’t be as struck with, say, the Cuban spice of Havana Rakatan or the hot, raw flamenco of Paco Pena and Sara Baras, or cool, controlled Capoeira, or the expressive, polyrhythmic dances of sub-saharan africa, all of which influence the development of the both the street dance genre and contemporary dance?  How could such interest not benefit the wider dance community?

The potential is mouthwatering. I hope I see some of it realised.

There’s a third reason I’m glad Diversity won BGT: I think they offer an alternative vision of young Britain at a time when we need it.

The newspapers fall over themselves to portray the young people of this country as knife-wielding, hoodie-wearing thugs, intent on causing death and mayhem wherever they go; worthless, directionless wasters to be feared and whipped back into line and turned into ‘productive’ or ‘useful’ citizens. So, whilst I’ll appreciate that this might apply to a minority of Britain’s youth, AND that not the whole of that demographic is dancing in their bedrooms (or the streets), I think the presence in the final of that most mainstream of shows of not one, but three, ultra-talented hard-working dance acts who combine that talent with obvious courtesy and decency is a big step towards disproving that unflattering stereotype.

I think there’s little doubt that their generation do not fully share the same values and norms of either my generation or that of my parents, but on what basis should be demand that they should? I do not think we are in a position to take the moral high-ground, given our track-record, and when we are failing so abysmally to solve any of the problems we have created for ourselves, why should they look to us for the answers to any of their questions? To expect them to do so exposes us to the same accusations of arrogance that we level at them, particularly when we exist in a society which actively excludes young people – financially - from so many of its benefits and opportunities.

I don’t think that Diversity’s victory will significantly change things: after all, they are only a dance act, not ambassadors for a generation. What I do hope is that their performance, their talent, and their passion and dedication to what they love doing will make ‘Middle Britain’ think twice the next time they look away rather than make eye-contact with a young person, or cross the road to avoid a group of young friends, or condemn them for not conforming to a lifetime of boredom and drudgery without a struggle. They’re not all bad, and we shouldn’t label them as such.

We should accept them, and welcome their talents and their fresh take on things when we have run out of steam, out of ideas, and pretty much out of time.

Diversity won Britain’s Got Talent. If we take their passion, dedication and enthusiasm to heart, we could all be winners.