Tuesday, May 29, 2007
ps
In an update to the bra shopping, I visited a friend of a friend who's a celebrity psychic last week. She told me in her reading, 'The spirits are telling me you have to go to Rigby and Peller'. I said I had only just got myself measured. 'No,' she said, 'I know it sounds crazy, but the spirits are insisting you must go and get yourself measured again and at Rigby and Peller.' Will update again when have done so!
'Little angels'
While ensconsed in the parental home this bank holiday weekend, soaking up the Londoner's monthly-odd dose of rural familial comfort, I was reminded how rude visitors can be.
I should preface this by saying that my parents were very sanguine about the experience and extremely forgiving and non-judgemental of the guest. It was me, sitting viewing the goings-on from my vantage point in the kitchen (what the butler saw, indeed), who got offended on their behalf!
My parents had a large lunch party and one guest they didn't know very well, who had been invited with his partner, decided it would be better to leave her behind and bring, in her place, their two children aged around five. I thought that was kind of impolite to start off with. He also insisted on my father picking them up and dropping them off at Oxford station rather than just getting a taxi or a bus. But the real issue was that he clearly wasn't bringing up his children to have any respect for other people. You can't bring two unruly small children to a grown-up party and just let them run wild. You either book a babysitter and leave them behind at home so you can mingle at the party, or you take them to the party and keep an eye on them at all times. This man basically just let his children run through the house into every room, where they caused carnage. He halfheartedly followed them intermittently but, and this is what really shocked me, just left the mess they had made, making no attempt to clear up or apologise.
Going upstairs, I found they had taken my mum's antique wooden sewing box from my parents' bedroom and the man had allowed his kids to scrawl on it with blue felt tip pen. They had also unravelled all the cotton in the box. The man saw this, but just stuffed the cotton reels back in it still trailing metres of thread and left the box open and graffitied on the floor. No apology or even acknowledgement. He had let them play in my parents' room and he saw that they had left it with the cover pulled off the sofa in there and the duvet partly off the bed, and he just left the room like that where I tidied it up and put the sewing box back and wound up the threads. But the felt tip pen has ruined the box.
He then gave the children my sister's old guitar to play with. What kind of parent gives a small child someone else's guitar as a toy? Of course, the next thing we knew, they had pulled out two of the strings. When the man saw it, he was overheard by my sister's boyfriend saying 'Oh it's just a guitar'. We couldn't believe he wasn't apologising profusely and offering to pay for the strings to be fixed.
This guy then had the cheek to get my dad to drive him back to the station without telling my parents about any of these goings-on.
I don't blame the children one bit - I was just shocked by this father. It wasn't just the way he didn't at any point say to the children 'This is someone else's house, please be careful of things'. You could see from the way his children were unable to communicate with adults politely that he has brought them up not to have any manners. I kept comparing them in my head to the way my friend J has brought up her beautifully polite 3-year-old son. He is able to respond politely to adults and plays quietly and nicely, and it's because she watches him every second and is very firm with him, in a hugely loving way.
As a child, I was all too strongly aware there were nice, well brought up children, and nasty, badly brought up ones. The whole experience on Sunday reminded me of how I used to hate it when I was little and my parents' friends brought badly brought up children to play with me while they had lunch or dinner. The little devils would stamp on all my things and scribble all over my books with pens while their parents glibly refused to tell them to stop.
I should preface this by saying that my parents were very sanguine about the experience and extremely forgiving and non-judgemental of the guest. It was me, sitting viewing the goings-on from my vantage point in the kitchen (what the butler saw, indeed), who got offended on their behalf!
My parents had a large lunch party and one guest they didn't know very well, who had been invited with his partner, decided it would be better to leave her behind and bring, in her place, their two children aged around five. I thought that was kind of impolite to start off with. He also insisted on my father picking them up and dropping them off at Oxford station rather than just getting a taxi or a bus. But the real issue was that he clearly wasn't bringing up his children to have any respect for other people. You can't bring two unruly small children to a grown-up party and just let them run wild. You either book a babysitter and leave them behind at home so you can mingle at the party, or you take them to the party and keep an eye on them at all times. This man basically just let his children run through the house into every room, where they caused carnage. He halfheartedly followed them intermittently but, and this is what really shocked me, just left the mess they had made, making no attempt to clear up or apologise.
Going upstairs, I found they had taken my mum's antique wooden sewing box from my parents' bedroom and the man had allowed his kids to scrawl on it with blue felt tip pen. They had also unravelled all the cotton in the box. The man saw this, but just stuffed the cotton reels back in it still trailing metres of thread and left the box open and graffitied on the floor. No apology or even acknowledgement. He had let them play in my parents' room and he saw that they had left it with the cover pulled off the sofa in there and the duvet partly off the bed, and he just left the room like that where I tidied it up and put the sewing box back and wound up the threads. But the felt tip pen has ruined the box.
He then gave the children my sister's old guitar to play with. What kind of parent gives a small child someone else's guitar as a toy? Of course, the next thing we knew, they had pulled out two of the strings. When the man saw it, he was overheard by my sister's boyfriend saying 'Oh it's just a guitar'. We couldn't believe he wasn't apologising profusely and offering to pay for the strings to be fixed.
This guy then had the cheek to get my dad to drive him back to the station without telling my parents about any of these goings-on.
I don't blame the children one bit - I was just shocked by this father. It wasn't just the way he didn't at any point say to the children 'This is someone else's house, please be careful of things'. You could see from the way his children were unable to communicate with adults politely that he has brought them up not to have any manners. I kept comparing them in my head to the way my friend J has brought up her beautifully polite 3-year-old son. He is able to respond politely to adults and plays quietly and nicely, and it's because she watches him every second and is very firm with him, in a hugely loving way.
As a child, I was all too strongly aware there were nice, well brought up children, and nasty, badly brought up ones. The whole experience on Sunday reminded me of how I used to hate it when I was little and my parents' friends brought badly brought up children to play with me while they had lunch or dinner. The little devils would stamp on all my things and scribble all over my books with pens while their parents glibly refused to tell them to stop.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Feminists in the media
I've just been interviewed by a PhD student researching women's experiences of working in the media. She told me that many of the young women she has interviewed, especially those working on women's magazines, don't believe in feminism. Apparently women working in newspapers and women with children are more likely to call themselves feminists.
It makes me really sad to know I'm in the minority as a 20-something journalist and feminist. A lot of women my age seem to believe feminism is dead, or some kind of Spice Girls 'girl power' thing connected to going pole dancing, which is just depressing.
It makes me really sad to know I'm in the minority as a 20-something journalist and feminist. A lot of women my age seem to believe feminism is dead, or some kind of Spice Girls 'girl power' thing connected to going pole dancing, which is just depressing.
