Elsewoman

Aftermath

2012-01-29T21:10:00.001+13:00

China was great and I meant to do a proper post this week, but unfortunately fate intervened in the form of a really nasty stomach bug. I've only just started to feel slightly better, so I hope to catch up later this week.

A new year

2012-01-06T22:50:00.001+13:00

I know Harvey died a year ago, but sometimes that feels like a long time, and sometimes it feels very short. And now it feels strange to no longer be able to say, or think, "my husband died last year".
I haven't exactly made any new year resolutions, but I have come to a sort of general resolve: I need to try to live, as much as I can, in the present, and look ahead to the future, rather than turning back to the past. It's not easy; and not only because of the obvious, inescapable fact that I have more years behind me than ahead of me. As for many people my age, of those I've been closest to in my life, more have died than are alive. And I don't have any grandchildren to draw me on into the future.
But the past is a place to look back on, not to live in. Neither Harvey nor Patrick would have wanted me to dwell there. Both of them had an enormous zest for life and for making the most of their time, something I've often not been very good at, even when they were here with me.
So now I'm off to China to see my son Jonathan, while my visiting friend looks after the house. It's the third time I've been, and I've got to the stage where I enjoy going back to familiar places almost as much as I love seeing completely new ones. There'll be some of both on this trip, and once again I'll have a close companion to share it all with.
Of course it's not the same and it never can be, I know that. Harvey and I travelled very well together, though of course, since we were both bossy and each thought we knew best, and strange surroundings stress you out a bit, there would be the occasional disagreement (to put it politely) about where we were, where we were going, what we should do next, where we should eat...
In China there are no such moments, because Jonathan knows his way around and I don't. He also knows what I will like. What's more, I can't read a single word I see, it's all just pretty decoration to me. So I just trot round obediently after him, and it's very relaxing.
It will be a good start to this new year, and to living in the present. And in three weeks I'll write about it here. By then we will be in the year of the dragon, a very auspicious sign, embodying beauty, creativity, energy, confidence and fearlessness.

Getting through

2011-12-29T21:59:00.003+13:00

Thanks to friends and family, I can say that I had pretty much as good a Christmas as possible this year. I didn't realise until I got to Saturday that for me, it would feel like the day Harvey died, rather than Christmas Day itself, because the 25th was a Saturday last year. Fortunately a dear friend who has troubles of her own invited me to join her, and we took very good care of each other.
The astonishingly fine weather helped a lot too - it lasted from Thursday to Wednesday, which must be some kind of record for Christmas in Wellington. On the Sunday I was with people from 9.30 in the morning until 10 at night, and then I talked to my sister on the phone for another hour and three-quarters. By the time I'd finished clearing up and got to bed, it was after midnight.
I had been dreading Boxing Day, thinking everyone would be occupied with their own affairs, but again I was taken care of for most of the day. And so it's gone on all week, I've always had something else to look forward to, enabling me to get through the patches of time on my own without going under. (And all the wonderful food has been a great pleasure and distraction too - see my other blog.) So although I couldn't quite manage it for myself, I've been able to wish others a happy Christmas, and mean it.

Getting ready

2011-12-23T21:45:00.000+13:00

Since my little rant last week (which everyone was so nice about!), quite a lot has happened. Harvey's plaque ceremony went very well indeed. After dire forecasts for rain and gale force winds earlier in the week, it was cold but, thank heaven, fine. We read poems and spoke about him and walked home to have lunch together, and I thought "what a great group of friends". Here are the two poems I read. The first one, by Harvey, came at the beginning. It's the final one from his book "Room", which had a poem for each room in the first house we bought together.

Beyond the laundry clutter, out the back

patio, pumpkin, borage, ginger lily,

compost, worms, bees, snails,

cats, sparrows,

the bank held temporary by ivy and convolvulus

once a tui called to check the flax.

There is room for everything.

“Patrick, Jonathan, Ina, Rae & Colin,

we are gathered today at Anne & Harvey’s

home to witness & celebrate theirmarriage.”

Folly, magnificence the whole thing,

dew on cobwebs,

paint peeling off the house,

mortared brick,

any fresh start

spinning satellites defying common sense,

The embrace of a place

& one another.

The second one, by Janet Frame, I read at the end. The evening before, I had picked up Harvey's last anthology, These I Have Loved, and the book just seemed to fall open at this poem.

Poets
Janet Frame

If poetsdie young

theybequeath two thirds of their life to the critics

to grazeand grow fat in

visionarygrass

If poetsdie in old age

they livetheir own lives

they writetheir own poems

they aretheir own might-have-beens.

Young deadpoets are prized comets.

The criticsqueue with their empty wagons ready for hitching.

Old livingpoets

stayfaithfully camouflaged in their own sky.

It may evenbe forgotten they have been shining for so long.

Thereminder comes upon their falling

extinguishedinto the earth.

The sky isempty, the sun and moon have gone away,

there arenot enough street bulbs, glow-worms, fireflies to give light

and for atime it seems there will be no more stars.

Since Sunday, I have remembered that Harvey loved Christmas, and I'll do my best to enjoy it as much as possible. So now the house is full of flowers, and tomorrow night I'll put up the crib with the figures my son painted for me years ago. Here's how it was for Harvey's last Christmas in 2009. Thank you for reading my blog this year, and I hope that over the next week, you all have the best time you possibly can, with the people you love.

Helpful hints

2011-12-16T22:41:00.001+13:00

Just a little over a week to go until Christmas, but right now I'm focusing on this Sunday, because we're having a small gathering then to "unveil" Harvey's plaque. Of course it isn't really an unveiling, more of an unplasticking, because we'll peel back a piece of black plastic. I keep making lists of all the things I need to do before then, in case I forget something vital. Unfortunately the forecast isn't good, but I'm hoping it will just be showers and not settled rain. I think I'll feel both better and worse when it's over - I'm pleased to have the plaque completed, but it also feels like the last thing I can do for him; after that, there's nothing for it but just to carry on alone, through Christmas and beyond.

It's been, well, interesting over the last week or so, as the cards have started to arrive and the get-togethers have got under way. In a spirit of pure helpfulness (what else?) I thought it would be good to set down a few insider's hints on how and how not to deal with people like me at this time of year.

1. Cards require more thought than usual. Try not to send your bereaved friends and relations Christmas cards that are overly cheerful and upbeat. Jolly Santas etc. should be avoided in favour of something a little more soothing - doves or other birds are good.

2. Cards that feature messages urging the recipient to have a "merry", "jolly" or "wonderful" Christmas/holiday/festive season/New Year, when that is the last thing they'll be doing, will not go down well. A simple "Season's Greetings" is fine. Writing something inside that shows you've remembered what's happened since last Christmas, and know merriness is off this year, will be greatly appreciated.

3. At seasonal gatherings, try not to wax too eloquent about the happy holiday you're about to have with your partner. On the other hand, don't go in for arch complaints about having your partner around either. Doing either of these things will just hammer home the fact of partnerlessness.

4. Don't ask the bereaved person what he/she is doing at Christmas unless you really want to know. And don't make vague noises along the lines of "must have you round some time after Christmas" (often followed by "Of course we're away for two weeks, but maybe after that...") If you really do want and intend to have them round, come up with an actual day/night they can put in their (often alarmingly blank) post-Christmas diaries - the details can be sorted out later.

5. Please don't try to buck the person up by pointing out that there are many worse off than them, and/or helping some of these people out would be a great way to take their minds off themselves and their own troubles. They probably won't tell you to sod off, but they will want to.

The ghosts of Christmas past

2011-12-01T21:50:00.001+13:00

As I'm sure everyone who reads this blog will understand, I'm not exactly looking forward to Christmas this year. I'll be with friends on the day itself, of course, but that still leaves Christmas Eve, and Boxing Day, and all the rest of it. We used to love Boxing Day, we would sit around and nibble on leftovers and read our Christmas books, outside in the sunny garden if we were lucky, with a glass of Harvey's home-made ginger beer.
Of course I'll Manage, as other widows and widowers do. I'll Take Steps to make sure I've got things to do and people to see. But the ghosts of Christmas past will inevitably come crowding in, all the same.
Meanwhile the roses are out. My own Remember Me rose, the one we planted two gardens ago for Patrick, has definitely survived last summer's ordeal by weedkiller, but it's not going to do much in the way of flowering this year. On Monday my heighbour Jenn came over to bring me the first bud from hers. Now it's gone from its deep russet early colour to full salmony bloom. Here it is with a photo from Farm Road days.

The day after the night before

2011-11-27T23:17:00.002+13:00

I won't get started on what was depressing about last night, quite apart from the fact that Harvey, who was a total political junkie, wasn't there to sit through it with me - I did have two good friends to keep me company. One small mercy is that Don Brash didn't get in on John Banks' coat-tails, and looks likely to at last stop trying. One larger mercy is that MMP will stay. Just as well, because the results proved yet again that without it, women fare badly - they now hold only 18 of the 70 electorate seats.
Today, with my friends from last night plus Ali, I took refuge in a glorious Karori garden tour. One of the houses we went to was originally the farm cottage for the 150 acre dairy farm which existed in Parkvale Road until 1904. Katherine Mansfield wrote about visiting it as a child, and I found it oddly comforting to think she had been there. I'm so sorry Harvey couldn't have seen it - but of course I think that about something at least once a week.

And here's a beautiful kiwi sculpture from another garden - somewhat subdued, but still standing...

Something to think about for election day tomorrow

2011-11-25T20:36:00.004+13:00

I think child poverty is the most crucial issue facing our country - I hope you saw the documentary shown on TV3 this week. This is my last post before the election tomorrow, so I've decided to pass on a short version of what the Child Poverty Action Group has to say about the idea that solving child poverty is sole parents' responsibility - all they have to do is get paid work. You can read the full statement on the CPAG website . If you missed the documentary, it's being replayed by TV3 on Sunday at 1 pm, or you can watch it here.

According to the 2010 General Social Survey, sole parents with children are the poorest family group in New Zealand. 70% have incomes of $30,000 or less – the highest percentage of any group – while only 4% have incomes over $70,000 (the lowest of any group). Well over a third, 38%, describe themselves as not having enough to get by, more than double the next highest group (17% of those ‘not in a family’). Almost half report living in a house or flat with ‘a major problem’ (like the mouldy houses in the TV programme), a much higher proportion than the general population (37%). Sole parents are more likely than any other group to feel ‘unsafe/very unsafe’ walking alone in their neighbourhoods at night. Not surprisingly, one in seven sole parents, a higher proportion than any other group, report their general health status as ‘poor/fair’.
So this economically depressed group, more likely to be suffering poor health than the rest of the population, with an even chance of living in shabby housing in a neighbourhood in which they will feel unsafe walking home from the night shift, will be required to find 15 hours per week of paid work when their eldest child turns 5. When the children are attending school, 15 hours work per week hardly sounds onerous, and many sole parents (usually those with good support networks) manage this. But imagine living in a suburb some distance from family, with poor public transport, few childcare facilities, and the nearest employment hub is only offering jobs for night shift workers. Does Work and Income cut a mother’s benefit for turning down that ‘suitable’ employment at the local massage parlour (and there is mounting anecdotal evidence that this is happening)? Suppose the 5 year-old gets sick and needs hospital care (as shown in the TV programme)? Suddenly that 15 hours is a lot of time and effort.

Sole parents whose youngest child is 14 will be expected to look for full-time paid work. In the language of the government, they will be ‘encouraged’ to do so by being put onto what will be called a Jobseeker Allowance, which will replace the unemployment benefit (UB) and sickness benefit. At present sole parents on either UB or SB are paid the same rate as sole parents on a Domestic Purposes Benefit (DPB). It is not clear at this stage if it is intended for these rates to remain in place, or if parents with children aged 14 and over will be moved onto the lower single person’s benefit rate. If so, this would equate to a benefit cut of over $80 per week.

Many sole parents with older children already work full time, but evidence suggests it can be difficult. There is often a small army of family and neighbours supporting the in-work project and it takes little to disrupt the smooth operation of the household. Radio New Zealand’s Mary Wilson suggested to the Minister of Social Development, Paula Bennett, that 14 year olds required even more supervision than younger children. The Minister replied that it was legal to leave 14 year olds home alone. Arguing that something is appropriate because it is legal shows a profound lack of ethics or understanding (or both) on the Minister’s part

There is nothing about the state of the labour market to suggest that changes to social assistance will improve the lives of those on a benefit, notwithstanding claims that work is the way out of poverty. Rather, although the government claimed its policies were aimed at closing New Zealand’s income gap with Australia (although that policy appeared to be formally abandoned in early 2011), the widening gap suggests that increasing the pool of cheap, desperate labour is in reality a strategy to reduce labour costs for employers. With a median hourly income for part-time female workers being just $16 per hour (bear in mind that the median means half earn less than this), a sole parent working 15 hours would receive just $135 of her gross wages of $240 after taxes and loss of benefit, hardly enough to cover transport and childcare costs.

For sickness beneficiaries, their returns from work are even less as they lose their benefit at a rate of 70c in the dollar from earned income over $80. Indeed, with little or no job creation occurring in the economy, and some beneficiaries facing effective marginal tax rates approaching 90 cents in the dollar, it is difficult to see what purpose the government has in mind for its welfare reforms to achieve, other than increasing the pool of low-skilled labour.

Job growth is sluggish, and well short of the 170,000 jobs the government claimed (in both the 2010 and 2011 budgets) would be created. Those jobs will be required just to absorb those currently unemployed, let alone a new cohort of harassed sole parents, as well as school leavers and university graduates. Work will not be the way out of poverty. Wages for unskilled occupations are low, and increase well below the rate of inflation...
National has been selling its economic plan as one that will produce a skilled, innovative economy. So far it looks more like one designed to produce an unskilled, low wage workforce, with the child poverty that inevitably seems to go with such backward policies.

Two books

2011-11-04T11:07:00.002+13:00

Reading has always been absolutely central for me, and in difficult times it's my constant solace. When Harvey was taken to hospital after his last fall, I knew I'd probably be there for hours, so I grabbed Jonathan Franzen's Freedom - I'd given it to Harvey for his birthday but neither of us had read it yet. It saw me through that night and on through the gruelling days and nights that followed, into the New Year.
So while I finish off my new book, instead of a proper post this week (and thinking ahead to Christmas), I want to rave about two great new books I've recently reviewed.

The first is Fiona Farrell's The Broken Book (Auckland University Press, $34.99). It's her first non-fiction book - she had planned a book about walking, but the Christchurch earthquake broke into it and changed its shape. It begins with the neatly titled “Preamble”. Four long essays follow, each built around a walk: two in France, one in Dunedin with her granddaughter, and “A walk on shaky ground” covering the earthquakes from September to February. It ends with an Epilogue. Throughout the book, 21 earthquake poems interrupt the prose. In my review for the Sunday Star-Times (20 October).  I said:
       "This is some of the finest writing of its kind that I’ve ever read, and it made me jealous. The essays move apparently effortlessly back and forth through time and place, and other writing on walking and on earthquakes, from Mansfield in Menton, to R.L. Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey (Farrell followed his path), Voltaire on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, and the mental promenades of Rousseau, cut short by his death. The interpolated poems enable Farrell to shift gear and convey meaning in a different way...."
        "The two forms work impressively with and against each other. Farrell is not a flashy writer, and she doesn’t go in for showy effects. The words on the page speak quietly and effectively, getting across what she is thinking and feeling in finely paced, crystal clear words that add up to something of great depth and beauty... The transitions are especially well done, never feeling forced or contrived. And the poems cutting into the essays do give the sense of interruption, rupture, disturbance, that the earthquakes must have caused, both physically and mentally. They force you to stop and read them more than once, before you pick up the thread of the prose again. At the same time, their full sense becomes clear only once you have read to the end and know, for example, that the bagel shop in “Black and white” no longer exists."
          "Farrell didn’t lose anyone close to her in the earthquakes – if she had, she could probably not have written this book. But what she does do is take you into what it was like to have the familiar world so shaken and broken. And she does more than that – the walking she writes about, both real and metaphorical, moves you on through human existence, the best and the worst, in a way that leaves you feeling immensely enriched, as only very good books can do, enabling you to see things differently and better than you did before."

On Nine to Noon this week, I reviewed Pam Ayres' memoir, The Necessary Aptitude (Ebury Press, $39.99). It's funny, of course, very funny in parts, but it's also a stunning evocation of what it was like to grow up as a bright working class girl in a post-war English village where class boundaries were still firmly enforced.
You can find and listen to my review here. Happy reading.

Leaps and bounds

2011-10-27T22:03:00.001+13:00

This week I've been involved in two things that look entirely different but are really closely related.

First there was the rugby. I've written before about my complete ignorance of Our National Game, and throughout the WC the most I ran to was knowing who was playing whom in the quarters and semis, and the results. Oh, and Dan Carter's groin problem. No one in New Zealand could have missed hearing about that.

But when Sunday was looming, I thought that if I didn't watch the final I would feel sort of isolated and Left Out. Also, completely irrationally, I got the idea that I ought to watch it for Harvey's sake. So I asked my 86-year-old neighbour Frances if I could watch it with her. I knew she'd be only too happy to explain whatever I needed to know about the rules. It would be the very first rugby match I'd ever watched all the way through.
The camerawork was so good even I could see that the French were playing well and the All Blacks - not so well. In the end they didn't so much win as not lose. Anyway, at least it was anything but boring and they did carry off the coveted cup. So I guess Harvey would have been happy. And I could join in all the post-match conversations.

From rugby to ballet is not all that big a leap. They have a lot in common - both require supreme fitness, flexibility, physical skills and teamwork. I'd love to see as much fuss made of our outstanding national ballet company as of our national rugby team.
Harvey loved ballet as much as he loved rugby, and we always used to go, but I hadn't been since he became ill. A party of friends were going and had a spare ticket, but I was booked up for that evening. So when Logan Brown's email newsletter arrived with a competition to win two tickets, I thought I might as well have a go. I wasn't at all hopeful, because I'm just not one of those people who win things.
But lo and behold, on Tuesday an email arrived from Steve Logan telling me I'd won and the tickets were mine! I couldn't have been more thrilled. I'm going to take Jenn, who came with me to the Catlins. She and her husband Barrie have been incredibly kind to us both, and as Jenn broke her arm recently she needed a boost. We're having LB's pre-theatre dinner first, and Mr Logan is shouting us a couple of glasses of champagne. Salut!

Anniversary

2011-10-22T23:59:00.001+13:00

It's 24 years today since my younger son, Patrick, died at 18. I wasn't sure if there'd be any messages from friends, but there were, and it made all the difference.

Harvey and I always went to visit his tree in the Botanic Gardens on his birthday, his anniversary, and Christmas Eve, but of course in recent years I've asked a friend to come with me instead, and I did that again this year.

I took a posy from the garden - a camellia for this house he never saw, forget-me-nots, hearts-ease, rosemary for remembrance, lemon balm for his love of good food, a sturdy stock, and mock orange blosson for the wedding he never had.

The tree is so tall now,
I have to reach up
to lodge the flowers
between its branches.

Later another friend, who has the knack of always turning up at the right time, came round with lilacs from her garden and bread from her oven. So I was very well looked after.

Painters and parrots

2011-10-15T21:19:00.003+13:00

It's been a busy week, with several meetings, book group, visitors, outings, book reviews, a phone call to my son in China (he's been very good since Harvey died, he makes sure to be home at a set time so I can phone him - much easier and cheaper for me to do it, and the line's much better than it used to be), and in among all this, sometimes successful efforts to get on with finishing my book. There isn't much to do - only one short chapter to write, another to finish, and a lot of tidying up. But I'm a superb procrastinator. Still, once I set a deadline I usually manage to meet it, and I've set myself to finish this by the end of November at the latest. If it runs any longer it will collide with other commitments, Christmas, travel, etc, and get pushed out much too far. So there may not be much blog posting going on for a little while, or at least just brief ones.
Today a friend and I went to Pataka in Porirua and saw Grahame Sydney’s exhibition ‘Down South', with 27 recent paintings. There are also 25 prints of photos from his new book, 'Grahame Sydney’s Central Otago'. I can't show you any, as of course they're all copyright, but the paintings took me back to the one trip Harvey and I had to Central, in the summer of 1980. We always meant to go back in the autumn, but never did.
As well as Sydney's more familiar landscapes, with gold hills and wide skies, there's a brilliant series of winter paintings. Some are of Antarctica, others are his beloved Central Otago in the depths of winter, almost empty of any human trace, with the horizon of the whited-out land disappearing into the sky. They were incredibly bleak and chilling, but I liked them - they seemed to me to be expressions of my worst times, only with a timeless, more-than-human sweep which transcended individual feeling. If you get the chance, go and see them. The exhibition runs until 6 February 2012.

Nothing could have been less bleak than Sirocco at Zealandia - I had the great pleasure of going to see him the week before. Of course he's nothing like a wild kakapo, as his custodian was at pains to point out, because he's been hand-reared since he was a tiny chick - the wild ones don't want anything to do with humans, whereas he clearly loves us and revels in all the attention. He's a parrot, after all, and if they start young they bond very strongly with us. I know it's an illusion, but he does look incredibly wise and benign.

I loved handling the little bag of incredibly soft feathers she handed round, but couldn't pick up the famed musky odour we were supposed to detect by sniffing the bag of his poo. (That's what happens when there are only 129 of you left.) And as it was night time, and no flash was allowed (it would damage his eyes), you'll have to make do with this little photo from the Zealandia website. To make up for it, here's one of my friend Camille's parrot Claude. Sirocco may be famous for humping Mark Cawardine's head, but Claude regularly humps Camille's hand - that's how she discovered he was indeed Claude and not Claudine.

Of course I've been doing this post instead of my book, and now I've run out of diversions, so I'd better get on with it.

Time travel

2011-10-06T22:49:00.000+13:00

I had a free trip to Auckland last week - my old school, Auckland Girls' Grammar, invited me to speak at Founding Day. Strange to remember what I was like then - my mother used to say I had "no brains for anything but schoolwork", and she was right. I enjoyed going back through the beautiful old building where we had almost all our classes and assemblies, though now it houses the staffroom and various utility centres - the 1400 girls and the library have moved to a much bigger smart modern block next door. Here's what I said - they laughed in all the right places:
"Half a century ago, in 1961, I was here at school in what was then the lower sixth. My classmates then are still my closest friends. Our class already had a dreadful reputation. In the fifth form we weren’t allowed to be called 5A1, and were known instead as 5X. (X didn’t have the X-rated associations it does today.) In the lower sixth we had to be allowed our proper name of 6B. One striking difference between my day and yours is the impressively large numbers in the senior school now. When I was here, although it was already a big school when , there was only one small lower sixth and one very small upper sixth. Very few girls went on to the upper forms, let alone to university. But we were not allowed to occupy 6B’s traditional home, the tower room.

6B, 1961 - I'm in front, reading

Why were the teachers so concerned about our class? Because we were irritatingly different. When we disapproved of a teacher, we united in silence strikes, refusing to answer any questions. Quite a few of us were unusually independent and strong-minded, finding creative ways to subvert what we considered petty rules, for example about uniforms and hair. Some of us wore black underwear, as required – but it was black lace. Yes, there were underwear inspections in those days.
         I see the senior girls can today wear pretty much what they like, presumably underneath as well as on top. You owe my class some thanks for that. In the lower sixth we fought for, and won, for the very first time, the right for senior girls to wear a different uniform. [Spontaneous applause broke out here!]You would have found it very weird – white blouse, straight navy skirt, and ordinary brown stockings instead of black ones – but it was the principle that mattered.
         We can’t have been all that bad. Members of our class went on to become, for example, a prominent journalist, a pioneer of women’s and patients’ rights who is now an Auckland city councillor, an internationally recognised economist, and the human rights commissioner. Being such a generally stroppy class had something to do with this. We listened and learnt, but we also thought for ourselves. And of course our teachers had a lot to do with it too. They gave us an excellent education and were obviously perfectly capable of running the place.
          But the example they set us also had one disadvantage – it stopped us noticing that in the world outside, women rarely ran anything except girls’ schools. When my friend went to the Herald to ask about becoming a cub reporter, she was told, “Oh no, dear! We don’t take girls!” When I was at Auckland University, I dreamt of an academic career. Foolishly I failed to notice that there was only one woman in the English department. All my other lecturers were men. Although I got first class honours, not one of my university teachers ever said anything to me about my future prospects – because in fact they were virtually nil. Not only was I a woman, I had married at 19 and had my first child at 20. So I just didn’t count.
           New Zealand has fortunately changed a great deal since then. And it has changed thanks, in part, to the most annoying girls in my class, and the teachers who gave them the idea that it was perfectly normal for women to use their brains and run things. It was my generation of women who started making this a reality – not just for a few exceptional women, but for all the women you now see around you everywhere, flying planes and working on the tarmac, running their own businesses, prosecuting, defending and judging cases in court, heading co-ed schools, a few boys’ schools, even the Ministry of Education. Or the women like my engineering geologist niece in London, who told me that on her new project site she’s the youngest, the smallest, the only New Zealander and the only woman – and she’s in charge.
           A study I did a few years ago shows that about a quarter of all men and women now work in jobs where they’re in roughly equal numbers – jobs like industrial designer, optometrist, accountant, finance manager, radiologist, pharmacist. But it’s not all good. There’s a whole layer of jobs that are still very strongly divided by gender, and by pay. About half of all men and women work in these jobs – exactly as they did when I left school. Men are drivers, mechanics, tradesmen. Women are caregivers, office workers, nurses. Equally skilled work, but they earn a lot less. And at the bottom, there’s another layer where men and women compete for necessary, useful, but very low-paid jobs, like cleaner and packer.
           There are two ways to fix this. Girls can do very well in the trades, and they’re badly needed. But we also urgently need better pay for socalled “women’s jobs”, the jobs that involve taking care of people, the jobs we can’t do without. If you do this kind of highly skilled, vital job, you shouldn’t have to pay the price in lower wages. And everyone deserves a living wage for a decent day’s work. Running through all this is the big problem that still faces women, and increasingly, men too: how do you combine taking care of a family with doing the kind of paid work you want to do? If you want to make a really important contribution to New Zealand, please focus on solving this one.
           We did our best to change the world for the better when we left school. Now it’s your turn. I’m sure you’ll be fantastic – and you’ll have a great time doing it."

Drunken Woman Fringed Head

2011-09-23T17:45:00.002+12:00

I am not a drunken woman with a fringed head, though I sometimes wish I were (I've never been any good at getting more than mildly tipsy). This is the brilliant full name of the lettuce Ali found for me to plant on Wednesday, when she came to give me my monthly gardening day.

"Italian Heirloom. Attractive bright green leaves with ruffled almost frizzy edges in deep bronze. Leaf lettuce type with dense centre that is very showy and slow to bolt."

Now that does sound like me, at least the slow to bolt part. And here's what they look like now.

They will grow. We put in Cos, too, for Caesar salads, and replaced the one casualty of the snow, the pansies. I know you're supposed to plant everything when it's NOT flowering, Harvey was adamant on that point; but I did that, and after weeks of waiting, when they were just starting to get buds, they were reduced to a sad brown mess. This time I crammed in five little pots in full flower. So there.

I needed them to cheer me up - as I half expected, I collapsed a bit after Harvey's birthday events were over, and wasn't helped by having to go down the road this week to the very nice people at Guardian Memorials and finalise the wording for his plaque. Still, it had to be done, and now it's settled, and I've had a very helpful talk with a friend about the draft of the latest book chapter, I've got through and done some good work. What happens, I think, is that a succession of small upsets accumulate, wihtout you quite realising it, to push you back down for a while. But then it passes and you cope better. And I'm really looking forward to eating the Drunken Woman, leaf by leaf.

Thank you

2011-09-15T21:42:00.000+12:00

I ran away for a couple of nights this week, to stay with a friend in Nelson, and just got back, so that's why some comments have gone unposted until now. I'll do a proper post later, but I wanted to say how very much I value everyone's responses over the last nine months, it's been such a help and support for me. I'll be feeling down, as I was tonight when I got home (it's always difficult, that re-entry to a silent house with no one here to welcome me back, even when I've been genuinely enjoying myself as I was this time)) - then I find a warm comment in my inbox and I feel better. So thank you, all of you, for finding the time to read, then write.

A birthday

2011-09-09T21:20:00.000+12:00

Next week it's Harvey's birthday. He would have been 77. He never thought he'd make 70, even, because none of the three most important men in his life - his father, grandfather, stepfather - had got that far.
             Over his last couple of years, the special days - birthdays, wedding anniversaries, Christmas and Easter - were always bittersweet for me. Somehow they seemed to bring forcibly home to me how much had changed in our lives because of his illness, and I found it hard to muster up the energy to celebrate them properly. This year I don't know how I'll feel, but I've made sure I've got plenty to do, and people to mark his birthday week with me. We have two very longstanding friends with birthdays close to Harvey's, so we always used to get together around this time, and we're doing it again on Sunday.
               This week, too, I received a kind of gift I've been waiting for: the DVD of his public memorial service, made by the National Library for its archives. I haven't watched it yet, I want to wait until I've got people who were there around me. I wish I had a DVD of him when he was alive.
               At least I've got photos. Strange how once upon a time, no one even had those, and only the well-to-do left any kind of image behind them; it must have made loss even harder to bear. I've just finished reading the excellent Claire Tomalin biography of Jane Austen. There's only one image of her, a sketch by her sister, which is known not to be a good likeness. Jane was the only member of her family to have no portrait done, not even a silhouette, and of course she's the one we most want to see.
              Harvey, like me, loved her books - Emma was his favourite, whereas mine is Persuasion, partly because the heroine is called Anne (and has a late happy marriage). He would have enjoyed this account of her life too. The story it tells drives home the iron facts of middle-class women's lives then: absolute dependence on their male relatives for every penny, with only a tiny handful of acceptable ways to earn any money of their own: governessing, running a school - and writing. She was only 41 when she died, but if she had married and been subject to the same almost constant child-bearing as her sisters-in-law, she could well have died sooner, as several of them did. And she might not have written at all.
              Another woman died this year at the age of 41. She was Melissa Neale of Christchurch, and she died in the earthquake on 22 February. Melissa's family chose to honour her memory by asking for donations to the Christchurch Women's Refuge, which has named one of the bedrooms in their safe house in her honour.
               Traditionally the rooms have been named after women who have championed women's rights, including Christchurch's Ettie Rout and suffrage campaigner Kate Sheppard. This month, on 19 September, it will be the 118th anniversary of New Zealand women winning the vote. You might like to mark the day, and think of Jane Austen, Melissa Neale and Harvey McQueen, another Cantabrian, as you do so, by making a donation to the Christchurch Women's Refuge here. It's the kind of birthday present he would have liked.

No wet pours here, thanks

2011-09-04T23:26:00.002+12:00

I tried to post earlier today but my connection was down - it's been very unreliable lately - and of course, I then couldn't post until now because I had to watch Rage on TVOne. It's ironic that just when TVNZ has its charter cancelled, so it's no longer obliged or expected to do anything at all except make money for the government, it suddenly comes up with a superb Sunday night series of four outstanding New Zealand dramas. Given my earlier complaints about free-to-air programmes, it's been a real pleasure to have such fantastic TV to look forward to for the last month - fine scripts, brilliant acting, classy productions all round. Thanks, everyone, you've given me four great evenings.
              On the other hand - if this is what our TV makers can do when they get the chance, how come we've had to wait so long for them to get it, and how many other great dramas have we missed out on in the process?
              AND none of it had anything to do with the W.C., though I suppose you could see tonight's one, about the Springbok tour, as distantly connected with it. (I only recently found out what "off-side" means - I vaguely thought it was when some guy got too far over on the side, but my 86-year-old neighbour recently explained that it's when someone gets too far in front of everyone else on their team or "side". Which sounds more like "in-front" or "far-out" to me.)
               It was probably just a brief respite. Overall the W.C. quotient in the media is steadily going up. Today the Sunday Star-Times reported on the vitally important question of how beer will be served at Eden Park. The Alcoholic Liquor Advisory Council (Alac) is concerned about caterers being able to serve four beers at once, and also about the fact that they will be cans, because cans can be thrown. So one caterer said in its liquor licence application that it would "reduce the 'high' risk of injury to fans from flying cans by ensuring staff opened the vessels [sic] before giving them to customers". No wonder Harvey long ago gave up going to live rugby games....
                But now another caterer is complaining, because "the time taken to open all beer cans to stop them being used as missiles will 'negatively impact the experience for fans'." Though presumably not as much as being hit by a full can would. Translated, I think this means: 'If we have to open the cans it'll take longer and we won't be able to sell as many" - and at a reputed $8 a pop, no wonder the caterer is concerned.
                Alac would have much preferred what is known, I have now learnt, as a "wet pour" - serving beer in plastic cups, which can't cause injuries - but the park's $320 milion makeover didn't allow for this. Here's the unforgettable way David Allott, Eden Park Catering's venue manager, explained the problem:
                "Eden Park does not have the infrastructure to wet pour beer into the public areas of the stadium."
                 What a shame. It would have been so much quicker just to hose it straight in.

The quiet house

2011-08-27T22:29:00.002+12:00

The house is utterly quiet again, because Julio left today. He loved Wellington and had a great time, and so did I - I'll miss him. But having him here has, I feel, sort of shifted me along to another standing-place where I'm more able to cope wth my new state, even though I'm on my own again. I'm still not at all sure what the point is, but the feeling of pointlessness is diminishing, and I spend less time staring blankly out the window.
At the same time, I can't help grieving because having Julio here has also emphasised that the distance between Harvey and me is widening. It's as though we'd been travelling together for a long time and then he suddenly had to stop where he was, while I have to move on and away into new territory and new experiences he can't share, leaving him further and further behind.

Snowbore

2011-08-20T23:07:00.001+12:00

I'd looked forward to a lovely week, with my friend Rosemary coming down for Wellington on a Plate (foodies go here). We were lucky - she was on a reasonably early plane, so she just caught the fine clear patch before our second lot of snow arrived, settling on top of the first lot. I know I'm turning into a snowbore, but it was all so astonishing I had to take more photos.

On Monday night the power nearly went off - the one remaining transformer (out of four) was hit by lightning.
By then even the drive was covered in snow.
On Tuesday night it was white again, so we caught a taxi to friends for dinner - only a ten-minute drive, but it was up a reasonably steep hill and I was too chicken to take the car out. They had a big snowman across the road, but it was too dark to take his photo.

It was great having Rosemary here - I wouldn't have fared nearly as well without her, especially when the snow gave way to freezing wind and rain. Despite being an Aucklander, she was completely unfazed by Wellington's worst weather for decades. The faithful heat pump kept us warm, helped by three layers of underwear and two of merino, and her company thoroughly cheered me up.

Weeping waters

2011-08-14T23:03:00.000+12:00

It's Sunday evening. Julio is talking to his wife on Skype, and I'm very weepy because I can't talk to my husband and I've just watched Tangiwai: A Love Story. Harvey would have absolutely loved it, it had everything - romance, cricket, tragedy, and a superb portrayal of a slice of New Zealand history he would have remembered so clearly - including the divide that used to exist between Catholics and Protestants. So I'm crying partly because he couldn't be here to share it with me, and partly because those poor people died, as he did, at Christmas, and the grief of those who loved them was so movingly conveyed.
And the other reason I'm feeling his loss so keenly tonight is that this afternoon, astonishingly, it snowed in Karori, and not just on the hills but in my own backyard. It wasn't a few flakes melting when they hit the ground, as happened twice in the twenty-seven years we lived in Northland - it was real snow, falling for long enough to cover the grass and trees in white. And he wasn't here to see that either.

Looking and being looked after

2011-08-04T22:18:00.001+12:00

It's over four years since I went on a long car journey, so it was a great treat to be driven halfway up the island. The mountains were more thickly covered with snow than I'd ever seen them - they looked as if they were wrapped in shiny plastic, gleaming grey in the shadows. We talked all the way, of course, so the trip went very quickly, and both sisters looked after me so warmly and kindly, especially as it was a busy time for them both - one teaches, and one grows orchids.

I saw my mother twice, and it went as well as could be expected. I think the unfailingly kind and considerate people who work there are saints. As I expected, she didn't say anything to me about Harvey, but she didn't ask how he was either, as she's done every other time. My son had sent a special email for her from China, all about his life there, and she enjoyed hearing it. On Sunday I showed her this photo, taken on a walk near my sister's (as you can see, it was a brilliant day), and instead of her usual response of "How lovely!" she said, "Idesia."

But I came home newly resolved to Get On With It - in this case, my book - while I still can. And this week I did make what feels like some real progress.

There's been progress in the garden, too. Ali came round on Tuesday to give me the first go of my birthday present - a day a month working in it with me. We planted the big purple violets she brought me from her garden (like the ones Harvey grew in abundance and picked for me in Farm Road); two new shrubs to fill a gap in the mulched garden (at this stage the labels look much more interesting than the plants)...

...and a new tree in the far corner, a kind of magnolia with a splendid name fit for a Victorian heroine - Michelia Maudiae.
Ali also presented me with a beautiful old-fashioned badge which I wear with totally undeserved pride. It's green, with gold lettering, and it says "HEAD GARDENER".

Out of town

2011-07-28T18:40:00.000+12:00

Just a quick post, because shortly I'm off to see my birth mother and sisters up the island. Julio will take care of the house while I'm gone. I've known my mother for close to thirty years, and she's now 91 and in a rest home, so visits have to be carefully organised - she gets tired after about an hour. my sisters will lok after me very well, it's always good to see them. Then on Sunday night I'll stay with a dear friend whom I haven't seen for ages, so all in all it should work out very well.

So many books

2011-07-24T22:12:00.002+12:00

This weekend the Downtown Community Ministry held its famous Bookfair. For a bookaholic like me it's a major event. Every year I had to decide how to resist buying ridiculous numbers of books - given that I just didn't have any room for more, unless I removed some first (though I've sometimes resorted to buying them one year, reading them, and taking them back the next year.) This year, with the gaps left by Harvey's poetry collection, I knew the temptation would be even worse than usual.
          For some years, too, I've been wanting to go down and help sort the books beforehand. Of course I really did want to help this brilliant organisation with tis biggest fundraising drive of the year, and I knew I'd be pretty good at sorting. But also - I thought that if I was helping in this way, I would get an early look at what was available and maybe just confine myself to one or two books I really couldn't live without...
          Harvey's illness put this idea on hold, because I couldn't help for long enough to be useful. But this year there was nothing to stop me. Unfortunately I offered my services too late - they already had enough sorters. They did want help, though, on the weekend itself. I thought about it, and said yes. After all, I figured, if I was helping I wouldn't be exposed to nearly as much temptation - but I would still get to look at the books for a little while at least.
            It all worked out perfectly. I got myself down there early on a wet, cold Saturday, met loads of lovely people I knew, and managed to be useful handing out plastic bags, pointing people in the right direction, and above all, giving free rein to my inner librarian by going round picking up piles of discarded books and returning them not just to their correct table, but to the right section. (I even rescued one of my own books from "Women's Health" and moved it to its rightful place in "Women and Politics".)
             And at lunchtime, when the crowd thinned out a bit, I did have a quick browse, confining myself to biography and picking up just five books - such restraint!

The other news of the week (and the reason this post is a bit late, sorry) is that my first paying guest has arrived. I advertised with the universities for short-stay visiting academics, and Julio replied. He's a young mathematician from Brazil, and we're getting on very well indeed (see Something Else to Eat). I'm so pleased I got up the courage to do this. As I told him today, he's setting a very high standard for anyone who comes after him.

Parrots, plaques and prose

2011-07-16T23:21:00.000+12:00

As someone who spends a lot of time with words, I really enjoy getting away from them - drawing and painting or, much more frequently, cooking and sewing. This week I did my first sewing for a long time. I had a friend of over fifty years coming to stay, and a week ago I found a remnant of furnishing fabric that I knew she'd love - brilliant tropical flowers, leaves, and parrots.
Her house is full of bright Pacific artwork, cushions, etc, and she actually has her very own parrot, the devilishly clever Claude. (Parrots are notoriously hard to sex, but she knows he's a boy because he likes to hump her hand.) Whenever he does anything wrong, he tries to blame the cat by shrieking "Puss!" He lives on the verandah, and when a sudden gust of wind toppled the clothes airer, full of washing, he screeched endlessly. When she came out to see what the fuss was about, he was lying on the floor of his cage with his claws in the air to show her what had happened.
I found a couple of bright red cushion covers and stitched on squares of parrots and flowers. There was just enough left over for a table mat. She loved them, and I loved making them.

I've never felt nervous sleeping in the house on my own, but I'm always just that little bit more relaxed when I have someone staying here. So by the time she left, I was well set up for my next undertaking - going to Guardian Memorials to look at the options for Harvey's plaque. I didn't go alone, I had a steadfast friend with me, and it also helped immensely that the person who dealt with us was a warm, empathetic young woman.
From a quick look at other plaques in Karori Cemetery, I'd thought black granite was the only option (I didn't want bronze). But you can get different colours, and we chose a lovely dark green that looks like pounamu, a good fit for Harvey's love of nature and gardening. Now I just need to work out the wording, and later we'll get together for an unveiling (I don't think that's at all the right word, but there doesn't seem to be another one).
And earlier this week, I finally managed to begin work on the next chapter of my food memoir, after a nine-month drought. I used a trick I've often taught to other people: you turn off the computer screen, so you can't see what you're writing and have to concentrate on the words in your head. Two hours later I had 2,500 words, not all of them useful, of course, but still - it's a good start.

Getting there

2011-07-07T21:03:00.002+12:00

I'm never quite sure what people mean when they're in difficult circumstances, you ask them how they are, and they say, "Oh, we're getting there". But this week I did feel as if I was getting there too, at least as far as the house is concerned.
         First, I've been moving books around, filling up the shelves which once held Harvey's magnificent collection of New Zealand poetry, amd making room upstairs for a better arrangement of my own books, papers, notebooks, sewing things, cards, photos...
         Today I also managed to deal with a pile of Harvey's files and folders, keeping all the important things, such as his references right back to when he left his first teaching job at Morrinsville (as a writer and former bureaucrat, he kept his paper history in very good order), and throwing away the rest, such as the letters and forms and instructions sent to us by the many, many agencies we had to deal with because of his health problems, from the three different hospitals which took care of him to the people who lent him vital equipment like walkers, grabbers and shower seats. I didn't enjoy any of this, but there was a sort of sad satisfaction in getting it done.
         And on Monday Ali and David came and added the top layer of mulch to my new garden bed. I thought it would be just that dull plain brown stuff, but I was wrong. They brought eight bags of their own mulch, made of trees and trimmings from their section, all ground up and left to mature for a while. Instead of being dull brown, it was a gorgeous rich many-shaded chestnut. The garden looked as if a great pile of autumn leaves had drifted down and miraculously landed neatly in exactly the right place. I keep forgetting to take a photo before the rain and wind come back, but as soon as I get one, I'll add it. (Done!)
        So that was very satisfying too. I'm sure Harvey would have been delighted. And I got Jan's comment (see "Six months", below). All in all, it was a good week.

Six months

2011-06-25T21:56:00.004+12:00

It's exactly six months today since Harvey died on Christmas Day, and once again it's a Saturday. I knew I'd need to be occupied, so it was good when a couple who'd known Harvey for a very long time, and visited faithfully when he was ill, invited me for lunch. Geoff was at Canterbury University with him, and they'd often been taken for brothers.
The sun helped too. I took Geoff and Pam a pot of hyacinths, and on the way home I bought one for myself. Harvey loved them and always used to plant a bowl of them for me, then for a couple of years I did it, but last year I bought them instead. Only three, instead of the six or eight we used to grow, but they'll be beautiful.

Last Sunday I got through another of the things that had to be done - handing most of Harvey's superb library of New Zealand poetry over to Mark Pirie, who published Harvey's poetry from 1999. Harvey wanted him to have the books, knowing he would fully appreciate them and make very good use of them.

But the empty bookshelves look bereft - "Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang". Looking back to last year, the sadness of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 seems to fit perfectly.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Yes. Except that he did manage to sing a little almost to the end, and I need to show the same spirit and courage. Here he is at about 50, looking wonderfully Shakespearian.

Out of it

2011-06-19T00:02:00.002+12:00

Only a short post, as it's 11.21 pm. But I wanted to write briefly about what happens when I get completely absorbed in a longish and demanding piece of writing, as I did tonight. I know all the experts tell you to start writing first thing in the morning, but I've rarely done that; mostly I start in the evening, often after 8, and carry on till rather too late. I couldn't follow this pattern while Harvey was ill, as I had to be on deck for him in the morning, but it's how I naturally work. The danger is that I'll get distracted or tired or find some other excuse not to start at all, but providing I can overcome the resistance to sistting down and getting on with it, I'm away for the next few hours. And for that time, I forget everything else.

I remember reading that happiness is a by-product of absorption. (Thanks to Google and Clive James, I can tell you that it was T.E. Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - who wrote this.) Writing is the most absorbing thing I do. I'm not sure that it makes me happy, exactly, but it occupies my attention so completely that I become unaware of anything else. We set up a bell for Harvey to ring when I was upstairs and he needed me, but every so often when I was writing, I would not hear even that. (I sometimes used to wake suddenly from a deep sleep because I seemed to hear it ringing; even now, this still happens at times.)

This deep absorption in writing is somehow necessary to me; if I haven't experienced it for a while because I've been evading writing (and it is evasion, rather than simply avoidance, especially now, when I have no valid excuse for not doing it), I start to feel the way I imagine runners feel when they haven't been running. It's what Tillie Olsen meant when she wrote about the importance of a woman writer working "to the fullest extent of her powers". I don't think I'm doing that yet, but every time I write in a way that takes me "out of it" - completely away from my everyday life - I feel I'm getting there.

Not bad eh

2011-06-09T23:27:00.001+12:00

I'm quite pleased with myself. Thanks to the company of friends, I've had one long (for me - maybe an hour?) walk through a bush reserve on Sunday; all the way from Courtenay Place back through town on Wednesday (don't laugh); and along the waterfront today. The weather has had a lot to do with it - still remarkably good for June.
         One of the many advantages of living where I do is that the wonderful Marsden Books is so close. On Tuesday evening I went there to hear sisters Atka Reid and Hana Schofield talk about their book on the war in Bosnia, Goodbye Sarajevo. (New Zealand is such a small place - turns out that Atka is married to a good friend's husband's cousin... )
          Something Atka said struck me as applying very well to my own situation, even though what she and her family went through is of course incomparably more harrowing. She said that during the siege of Sarajevo, "we just had to get on and work out some structure for our life, based on the things we could control".
           I thought, yes, that's exactly what I have to do too. I couldn't control Harvey's becoming ill and then dying and not being here, and I can't entirely control the sadness that wells up in me because of that. I just have to accept those things as a given. But I can control pretty much everything else in my daily life, and that does give me plenty of scope for working out how to live.

Have advice, will try

2011-06-02T21:48:00.001+12:00

Thank you very much to all the helpful people who sent me ideas for exercise - though some had more potential than others (I haven't been able to wear even very low heels for years and I don't think they make orthotic-friendly tango shoes). Visitors are about to appear, so apologies for this short post, but I will ponder the exercise question further - and at least I'll have someone to go for walks with this weekend. I like the idea of the rebounder, and they're easy to buy on Trade Me - except that they all have ads that go like this: "My partner used it a few (maybe half a dozen?) times and it's been stored away carefully so it's in perfect condition. I'm only selling it because she doesn't use it anymore." Which is a bit of a worry.... Anyway, just writing about it is a spur to getting on with it, as it would be great to be able to report how well I'm doing!

PS: Today's post over on Something Else to Eat is about another aspect of living alone - the difficulty of deciding what I want to eat now that there's only me to consider.

Couch croissant

2011-05-29T13:49:00.001+12:00

I am the least sportive person on the planet. I spent my secondary schooldays working out creative excuses for getting out of physed (the teacher did notice if you "had your period" every two weeks) and I managed to completely avoid all non-compulsory team sports (though I did have to take part in the traditional lower sixth team marching display). Why go rushing around a muddy field when you could be reading instead?
          I can at least speak cricket - I find that saying "I see the middle order's collapsed again" is almost always relevant for the NZ team - but not rugby. When Harvey was watching, I used to wander in and ask which teams were playing and what the score was, but as he started talking about loose forwards or getting offside, I would say "you're losing me" and wander off again. (He played as a child, but broke his collarbone, twice, and got told he was a wuss for going off the field. "How old were you?" I asked. "Six.")
          I know exercise is good for you, especially as you get older, and when we lived in Northland and Harvey was well, we used to go for pretty regular walks. At the age I am now, he had a very demanding full-time job, but in fine weather he usually walked down to work on the Terrace as well. Of course he gardened, and when he retired he went to his club's gym, and liked it.
          I have never set foot in a gym. For several years, in both Northland and Karori, I went to a nice local exercise class for over-50s, but as Harvey became more frail his morning routine made getting there on time more difficult, and it was all too easy for me to give up. I know I'm not fit, I thought, but I'm actually really healthy, so too bad.
           But then I heard Kim Hill interviewing Barbara Strauch about her book, Secrets of the Grown-up Brain, and Strauch came up with the first compelling reason I've come across for making myself get more exercise. She said you need it to keep your brain working well, because the brain needs oxygen. Obvious, really, but I just hadn't heard it put so clearly before.
           So now what do I do? Unless I'm on holiday with the strong inducement of seeing new things, I seem to have been born without whatever gene it is that drives people to Get Moving, or whatever the latest health-promoting slogan is. Walking on my own, unless there's a point, like having a coffee or visiting a friend, feels boring and futile. I have the Strong Women Stay Young book, and the basic equipment, but every attempt to stick to the undemanding 30-minutes-twice-a-week routine has failed. Friends have offered to take me to Scottish Country Dancing, and it's true that dancing is the only kind of exercise I've ever liked, but my inherited funny feet have now introduced me to the wonderful world of orthotics and the clumpy shoes that go with them, so I don't think that will be a goer.
             If you're like me and have found something that works for you, please let me know. Meanwhile it's a lovely day, so later I'm going to park far enough away from my afternoon appointment to get in at least a short walk, with the inducement of tea and cake to come.

A birthday

2011-05-20T21:53:00.004+12:00

Yesterday was my birthday. I had been apprehensive about it, but it turned out fine, in every sense. I had at one stage thought of having a party, but realised I just wasn't quite up to that. So instead I made sure I would have plenty of people to talk to and things to do.

I started with having my French friend to dinner on Wednesday night (tomorrow, see Something Else to Eat - too late to get that post up tonight). Thursday was glorious, sunny, warm and calm. It took me all of a leisurely morning to open my mail (including a large parcel full of goodies from my sister), answer the emails and phone calls, eat a giant lemon danish with my coffee, and get ready to go out to lunch at a harbourside restaurant with my dear friend Lesley (we have a nice custom of shouting each other posh lunches for our birthdays). I didn't get home till after 4 - and then I found a penguin card and a tussie-mussie from my neighbour on my doorstep.

As it happened, of course, it was also Budget day, and that created its own momentum. Every year the Public Health Association holds a Wellington Post-Budget Breakfast, and for a few years now I've been one of the speakers, on behalf of Child Poverty Action. This year CPAG and the PHA were the joint co-hosts, and the speakers were economist Bill Rosenberg, economist and director of policy at the council of trade unions; Alan Johnson, social policy analyst with the Salvation Army and co-convenor of CPAG; and me.

What's this got to do with my birthday? Well, it meant that in the evening I knew I'd be flat out putting my talk together, once I'd seen the Budget and commentary and input from Susan St John and others at CPAG. And so it proved - I finished at midnight and set the alarm for 6 am. Along the way I had a great exchange of emails with my son in China. I was supposed to phone him at 8.30 our time (it's much easier and cheaper for me to call him), but I got so caught up in writing that I forgot, so he sent anxious enquiries, and I did finally manage to talk to him about 11 pm. Here's what he sent me earlier, all in fancy type - no wonder I went off to sleep smiling:

HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO A TRULY BRAVE AND COURAGEOUS MOTHER!

THIS IS YOUR OFFICIAL CERTIFICATE FROM THE GODS IN CYBERSPACE.
IT CERTIFIES THAT ANNE ELSE ...lately Anne Else-McQueen ...is surviving the toughest time of her life to date, and doing it splendidly. She has a loving son, lots of magnificent friends, a lovely home, and an ongoing career as editor and soon to be well known writer and memoirist.
Three cheers for ANNE, HIP HIP HOORAY, HIP HIP HOORAY, HIP HIP HOORAY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Signed INTERGALACTIC FEDERATION FOR APPRECIATION OF MARVELOUS WIDOWS (INC).

The breakfast was packed (four MPs and the mayor came) and it all went very well. Radio NZ quoted me at midday and Alan at 1pm (you can read it all soon, plus Susan St John, on http://www.cpag.org.nz/). Then I went to lunch with another friend at the new Roxy cinema in Mramar (they have carpet! you can hear each other!) and was treated to a magnifique French dinner by my delightful neighbour Frances, and more to come in the weekend. So I couldn't possibly have been better looked after.

Up from under

2011-05-11T22:55:00.000+12:00

I woke up this morning feeling infinitely better than I have for most of the past two weeks. At home I've been dragging myself around, getting just the bare essentials done, coping okay when there were people around but collapsing when there weren't. The best thing about today was not just that I felt so much lighter and more energetic, it was that I realised all over again (I knew this already, but it's so easy to forget) that feeling so terrible is a state that will pass - and return, and pass again.

I don't think anything in particular triggers it off, just as nothing in particular makes it go away. It's just endemic to the situation I find myself in. But every so often I find a piece of writing that seems to speak very clearly about the complicated feelings - regret, guilt, hopelessness - that rise to the surface and push me under. Here's one from the superb book I've just finished, Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout:
"…love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered."

And here's another, from Linley Boniface's last column in the Dominion Post (it ended on 14 February, and I miss it) that seems to show why this not-knowing is almost impossible to avoid - and strikes you so forcefully when you're alone:
"It's impossible not to take love for granted, because the thought of not having it is too frightening to contemplate. Only when someone dies, or leaves, does the thing you've lost show itself in all its terrible clarity."

Yes. But one morning you suddenly find you're able somehow to shift perspective and focus instead on how lucky you were to have it, and him, as long as you did, and you pick yourself up off the bed or the couch and carry on with your life as best you can.

Doing as you would be done by

2011-05-04T22:55:00.002+12:00

Thanks for all the understanding comments and suggestions about my tv dilemma - I'm certainly not out on my own about this. Ah well. I've joined Film Society at a friend's urging, which means that on Mondays at least, I always have the option of a 6.15 movie followed by a later dinner, either at home or cheap and cheerful ethnic (this week it was delicious Vietnamese, $12).
             Tonight was good too. A longstanding friend rang today and suggested she come round for dinner. I do like it so much when people call me to suggest doing things. I can't help but worry that I'm being a nuisance when it's always me calling them.
        One of the things I've come to realise, though, is that most people tend not to alter their usual behaviour. If you have friends whom you value, but have almost always had to call because they hardly ever call you, that will tend to stay the same no matter what happens - even major events like your partner becoming an invalid, and then dying. They probably won't call to see if you need support, because they're just not in the habit of doing so.
         This isn't meant to be a complaint or whine. I'm extremely lucky because I do have enough beloved friends who reach out to me, often with what seems like instinctively good timing, to offer me exactly what I need, when I need it. And I, in turn, feel comfortable contacting them, because I'm confident they won't think I'm a burden.
          Then there are the ones who, faced with a major change in your life, do step right up and make a commitment to provide ongoing support. Even if they were not a regular part of our home life before, they quickly became so. Harvey had some splendid male friends who did this for him, and we loved them for it.
          But with others I'm finding that I have to recognise they're not going to change, despite the huge change in my circumstances. So I either accept the relationship as it is, without harbouring resentment about it, or decide that I don't want to continue with it. Which isn't difficult - all I need to do is stop calling them.

The despairing watchwoman

2011-04-28T21:14:00.001+12:00

One of the changes in my life is that I watch - or rather, often want to watch - rather more television than I used to. As I wrote over on Something Else to Eat recently, I need to have the TV on while I'm eating dinner on my own, otherwise it feels too lonely. Radio or reading doesn't work, it has to be TV. But that means finding something that I can watch relatively calmly. And as I don't have Sky, I'm restricted to the "free-to-air" channels. (Odd, isn't it, how that's become such a disdainful term.)
         The first half of the news is okay, but as I usually eat round 7 pm, that means waiting till then and watching TV3 news on the channel where it runs an hour later. Alternatively, I can watch Campbell Live, provided it isn't too appallingly banal (Mark Sainsbury isn't even in contention), or - probably the pick of the bunch - the Simpsons. And that's pretty much it. If I run any later than 7, there's sometimes a cooking programme, but I've discovered that cooking programmes and dinner just don't mix. All they do is make you dissatisfied with either what you're eating or what they're making or both.
          Later on it gets worse. Biggest losers, swapped wives, bratty children, serial killers, cold cases - I think I hit rock bottom the night the two main-channel mid-evening offerings were The Worst Teeth in Britain and The [British] Neighbours from Hell.
           On Anzac Day, TVOne did have what looked like an interesting, relevant documentary (an extremely rare beast these days) about the RSA. Only one problem - it was screening at 6.25 am, just when those who would most want to watch it would be at the dawn service. Both TVOne and TV3 had obviously decided that if it was good enough for shops to open at lunchtime, it was good enough for them to completely ignore Anzac Day from then on.
             Maori TV, which so often becomes the default public broadcaster these days, did a great job, but I had to wait until after 10 pm to watch Dancing in the Sky, a docmentary about the first airman to win a VC, in World War I - who just happened to have a Maori grandmother. It was very good, but a bit late - ensuring many potentially keen people would have missed it.
              Lately I've been immersed in reading Harvey's journal. He kept it for about ten years, until he started his blog in 2009. The lovely thing about it is that it brings back for me all those days, weeks, months, years of ordinary life, when nothing particularly extraordinary happened - the days that make up the fabric of a happy relationship, but then slip away into the past and are so hard to recall.
             What he writes wouldn't be of much interest to anyone except me. He records what each of us did each day, what we ate, where we went, who we saw - and what we watched on TV. One of the things that astonished me was how much better the programmes were then. This isn't just rosy-tinted nostalgia. As well as brilliant programmes like Whose Line Is It Anyway and Frontline (the Aussie satire on current affairs shows), the art of making good local documentaries was much more in evidence.
               But now? Most nights of the week, finding anything even faintly worth watching in prime time is well-nigh impossble. And no, I don't think getting Sky would help much. There are only so many Grand Designs and war footage compilations I can cope with.

The speaking voice

2011-04-20T22:34:00.003+12:00

First, I'd like to thank everyone who's written or spoken to me about the interview on Nine to Noon last week, or has made earlier comments on this blog. It's been very heartening, and reassuring.
           I did, and sometimes still do, feel rather nervous about "going public" in relation to an experience which is very personal, and therefore might be seen as something that it isn't appropriate to speak of even in a blog, let alone on national radio. But as far as I could see, everyone who took the time and trouble to respond understood what I am trying to do.
            As I said in the interview, I'm a writer - and so was Harvey. The way we make sense of what's happening to us is by writing about it, and talking about what we're writing. What's more, when you can no longer talk to the person with whom you used to share your life, and in particular you can't talk to them about the experience of losing them, writing enables you to feel that you can speak about what's happening to you in a different way. And that's exactly what I'm trying to do in my writing - give the sense of a voice speaking to the reader.
             Not all of this writing is made public - some of it is solely for me. But most writing is meant to be read, or "heard", by others, and that means "publishing" it, making it public, either here or in the memoir I'm putting together. The hope is that they will find it relevant to their own lives, and perhaps even useful, if only because it shows that someone else is having a similar experience to theirs. But before it can be useful to them, it has to be useful to me - and that's why the need to make sense of my life for myself is where I start.

Radio interview

2011-04-14T15:41:00.001+12:00

Kathryn Ryan interviewed me today on Nine to Noon about this blog and the experience of becoming a widow. You can listen to the interview at
http://static.radionz.net.nz/assets/audio_item/0005/2484716/ntn-20110414-1007-Feature_guest_-_Anne_Else-m048.asx

A ribbon of garden

2011-04-14T07:42:00.002+12:00

When we moved here, the lawn between the house and the fence had a number of roses and three camellias dotted around. Harvey was still able to do some gardening then, and he had very definite ideas about what he wanted to change. So we took out the two least attractive camellias, letting much more light in on the struggling roses along the fence, and added a neighbour's gift of the apricot abutilon. For his birthday Ali and David gave us a lovely red Dublin Bay climber to plant in the gap opposite the sitting room, right where Harvey could see it. But it still looked very spotty, everything dried out quickly, and when I had to take over I found it hard to keep up the watering.
          When Ali stayed with me the week after Harvey died, she thought about my garden. A little later on, at exactly the right tactful moment, she talked to me about the idea she had for improving it: digging up the lawn along the fence in a long curving ribbon shape, to take in all the plants, and covering it in mulch to keep the soil damp.
           Hopelessly ignorant about gardening as I am, I could see straight away that it would both look much better and be much easier to manage. Somehow the prospect of making a real change like this gave me something to look forward to and really lifted my spirits. I did wonder what Harvey would have thought of it. But long before he had said, very sadly, that it was now up to me to manage the garden and he'd just have to take a back seat. Besides, he usually approved of what I did, once he saw it.
            So when Ali arrived yesterday to make a start, I felt both delighted and also slightly daring, making quite a big change to the landscape on my own account. We laid out the hose to get the right shape, then she dug a beautiful line all along it, cutting out the lawn into neat squares and using them to build up the soil along the fence, where it sloped away.

I was amazed how much she managed to achieve. By mid-afternoon I had a whole new layout and it looked so much better. Instead of just being dotted around, all the plants were contained in a lovely curving ribbon of garden that looked as if it was meant to be there. Later she and David will bring the mulch, and once we've spread it I can think about what else I could plant in the gaps - only knowing my limits, everything will have to be as sturdy and undemanding as possible. Maybe some kind of daisy...and definitely a lemon tree. It feels like my garden now.

Downer

2011-04-07T20:57:00.003+12:00

I've been back for a week, and until tonight I thought I was managing really well. I embarked on a comprehensive reorganisation of the upstairs, working out how to change my workspace, bedroom and spare room so they would work better for me, and in the process sort, clear and get rid of the accumulated caches of Stuff - photos, papers, sewing, clothes, cards, saved wrapping paper - lurking conveniently out of sght up here. (I've always known that the best thing about having an upstairs is that you can so easily stow messy stuff away out of visitors' sight.)
             Moving furniture around was the easiest and most entertaining part, even though some of the moves didn't work and had to be undone (and I'll need to get strong helpers for the final shift, bringing Harvey's desk upstairs). Today I finally got round to the hardest part, the actual stuff sorting.
             And of course there were the cards, and the photos - the last few years back before Harvey became ill, that I'd never got around to putting neatly away in albums, but had just bundled together when we moved. Christmases at Farm Road and in Auckland, Waiheke holidays, even some spare, faded copies of our 25-year-old wedding photos. Good, I thought, maybe I can get some restored versions done of these.
              I suppose it was inevitable that after all that revisiting of the vanished past, I crashed at dinner time and felt really miserable sitting at the table, eating unexciting leftovers and watching crappy TV for the company, and for fending off the awful quiet of a house with no one else in it. I know this bad patch won't last, but when you'e in it that's not much consolation.

PS: And then, of course, by the time I'd written this post and realised it was time to do one for Something Else to Eat and written that too, I felt better. And today (Friday) in came the warm comments from Deborah and Julie - thank you, you're wonderful.

Back from the Catlins

2011-03-31T23:07:00.001+13:00

The Catlins is an astonishing place. It was much, much more engaging than I had expected. I thought it was a formidable land of wind-battered, difficult terrain, hard to explore for a city wimp like me. What I found was something much friendlier and more accessible: as well as stunning rocky shores pounded by great waves (we had only one day of this), we spent our time exploring lovely meandering estuaries and bays and doing short walks through bush and rainforest to thundering waterfalls and tranquil lakes.

Plus, of course, the wildlife. Jenn, my companion and guide, stood in the bush and whistled to bellbirds, brown creepers and fantails. We saw only one yellow-eyed penguin (they're moulting now, they sit on land and can't go out to sea until they've replaced their feathers), but the sealions swam, challenged each other and dragged themselves up into the dunes right in front of us. (I took this with the zoom - we were a very safe distance away.)

I soon felt entirely at ease, and I realised after a few days that this was the first proper leisurely, low-key New Zealand holiday, not staying in someone's home, that I'd had for about three years. It was exactly the kind of holiday Harvey and I had really enjoyed, though we'd never done it often enough. I was so lucky to be able to go with Jenn - she grew up on a farm not far away, and knew the whole area really well, so we managed to see everything without ever feeling rushed or pressured. Working out holidays can be a dilemma when you're on your own, but this was a brilliant solution.

Running away again

2011-03-17T13:00:00.002+13:00

I'm going away again, this time to the Catlins - it's my neighbour's home territory, and she's showing me around. I find that I really like going to new places I've never been to before, either on my own or with Harvey. So no posts for another fortnight.
My next thing to look forward to is that in late autumn, my friend Ali is coming to supervise the makeover of the garden along the fence to her design. We're putting a whole new mulched bed around all the isolated shrubs and roses to help retain water and make it look much more garden-y. Meanwhile I did manage to enjoy my pots of flowers this week - the zinnias are still going and the portulaca has obligingly flowered in time. (I've discovered that slugs don't eat portulaca - very handy.) Marjorie will enjoy them while she looks after the house.

Dorothy's last day

2011-03-14T21:59:00.002+13:00

This morning I took Dorothy to the vet for the last time. She had been going steadily downhill since December, and though he gave her vitamin and steroid injections a few weeks ago, hoping they would perk her up for a little longer, they had no effect. By the time I got back from my trip to Auckland, it was clear that her kidneys had stopped working and she was barely surviving. Though it was the fourth time we've ended a beloved cat's life, it was the first time I've had to go through with it on my own. Still, I'm glad Harvey escaped the sadness of saying goodbye to her.
            She was the only cat we've had who grew really attached to me, but only after Harvey became too frail to feed her or have her on his lap.  Every night she would sit on me after I went to bed and require a thorough petting before she would settle down to let me read, with my book propped against her.
            We got her and her brother as very small kittens over seventeen years ago. As Harvey explained in This Piece of Earth, we called them William and Dorothy after the Wordsworth brother and sister, because we'd recently been to the Lake District. Their names suited them perfectly. William had a strong sense of self-importance and miaowed a great deal, demanding our attention and service. Dorothy, with her pretty Victorian cat-face and her immaculate little white fichu front and paws, bustled quietly about, purred a lot but seldom spoke (when she did, she had a strange, rather grating cry), and loved being outside, preferably with Harvey. Here's part of a poem he wrote about her, when we were living in Farm Road:

      Our foolish cat patiently
      watched me cut liver into
      catsized pieces, then as
      I dropped it to her dish
      sprinted out the open back
      door to sit mewing at the
      closed front door waiting
      for me to let her in. Cats
      rightly enter with style.

And she exited, if not with style, then at least with dignity, love and respect.

Something old, something new

2011-03-13T22:06:00.002+13:00

This is my nephew James and his wife Jaymie at their wedding on 5 March. I took heaps of photos, but I thought this was the best one - I wish I could have shown it to Harvey. I was so touched to see that they signed their marriage certificate with the fountain pen we gave James for his twenty-first.
It was very strange returning to an empty house, but I did feel I was coming home. I just have to get used to the fact that it's now my home. I notice that I still say "we" and "our" all the time.

Christchurch

2011-02-27T22:31:00.003+13:00

I'd been thinking about a particular group of people in Christchurch - those who have recently lost their partner and now suddenly have to cope with the aftermath of the earthquake on top of that.
           I was talking to an out-of-town friend today and mentioned this. "I know one", she said. Her Christchurch friend lost her husband three weeks ago.
           Then there are all the people who have just lost their partners in the quake itself, or even worse, don't know where they are or what's happened to them.
           Anything I try to write to express my sympathy comes out sounding trite and banal, but I am so very, very sad for you all and I hope you have loving people around you to help you through this.

There will be no new posts on Elsewoman for a couple of weeks. My lovely housesitter will be here taking care of Dorothy, who is going steadily downhill - well, she is 85 in human years.

A mixed bag

2011-02-20T22:27:00.004+13:00

Well, it's been a very mixed weekend. The previous few days, after Jonathan and Eric left on Wednesday morning, turned out to be very busy. I also found out that in her Tuesday afternoon web review Ele Ludeman, who had previously discussed my food blog and Harvey's blog on National Radio, had talked to Noelle McCarthy about his death, the Last Post I put up on his blog, and the new focus for Elsewoman. They said lovely things, so thank you both very much.
            A while ago, a friend who has lived on her own for a long time gave me one very useful piece of advice - she said to always make sure I had something booked in for the weekend. Otherwise it does seem to stretch out like an endless desert to be got through. I thought I'd done well this time - I was well aware that it was my first weekend on my own for some weeks.
           Saturday worked out fine - it was gorgeous still weather, so I replanted all my salad pots and reorganised my gardening stuff, then settled down to get some paid editorial work done before I needed to start cooking for the first of the guests I've asked to dinner this week (to find out how it went, see Something Else to Eat).

Sunday wasn't great. I'd planned to take myself into Te Papa, as they had two interesting free things on - a lecture about how Western artists reacted to "primitive" art from the start of the 19th century, related to some of the paintings in the "European Masters" exhibition; and a screening of short 1950s fairy-tale films by Lotte Reiniger. There's a good account of her life and work here. She created amazing animated films using intricate hand-cut black paper silhouettes.
          The lecture was good and the films were brilliant - I'd read about them years ago and had always wanted to see them. But there was hardly anyone else there. It was sad they hadn't been better advertised, especially to parents and children, because many children would have absolutely loved them.
           So then I came out, walked along the waterfront in the sun, caught the bus home - and realised that I hadn't spoken to anyone all day and was feeling very low indeed. I managed to stop myself going into a complete downward spiral by calling Lesley down the road and asking if I could come over for a pre-dinner drink (she'd been away and I hadn't seen her for a while). Five minutes later I was round there with a nice cold bottle of pinot gris. Her and Paul's warm company was exactly what I needed, and I was able to come home, eat my dinner quite happily accompanied by "Grand Designs", and go and do some work. I've learnt another useful lesson: it's not enough just to have things to do - a generous measure of human contact is essential. And at the moment, anyway, I need to make sure I have it on both Saturday and Sunday.

Valentine

2011-02-13T22:27:00.001+13:00

Today is the 13th of February. The supposedly unlucky 13 was always lucky for Harvey and me. His birthday was the 13th and our beloved villa was No. 13. But the only special thing about today's date is that it precedes Valentine's Day tomorrow.
We never made a big fuss about it, but we did always find each other a soppy or silly card (sometimes one of each). One of my favourites from Harvey said, "On a scale of 1 (lentil soup) to 10 (hot fudge sundae) - you are an 11." Or the one that asked wistfully, "Shall I tell you my most secret, fond and optimistic dream? Maybe one day you'll love me as much as chocolate." Whereas I, when I wasn't being soppy, tended more to the bizarre, like the one with a ferocious looking woman calling out to her husband, "What's the matter, Harvey? Cat got your tongue?" while he hides round the corner clutching the cat lovingly to his face and saying, "Oh my God, she knows about us!"
This is of course all simply a feeble attempt to feel better by remembering how lucky I've been to be able to give, and get, Valentine's Day cards like these for thirty years, instead of feeling unutterably sorry for myself because I won't be getting or giving any tomorrow.

Fine

2011-01-29T23:14:00.019+13:00

As soon as I got up on Friday, I could see it was going to be a beautiful day, and that made everything so much easier.
In the morning we celebrated Harvey's life at Old St Paul's with over 200 people. We had planned it very carefully as "An Anthology of Harvey McQueen", with a dear friend as a superb master of ceremonies, and six other speakers covering his work as an educator, an anthologist, a memoir writer and a poet, followed by my son, and Harvey's closest friend, and me.

Each of us read something from Harvey's own work, but the first piece I read was written by one of the students he taught in his first job at Morrinsville College in the early 1960s - a girl called Janet, who grew up to be the poet Jan Kemp.

'It is February 1962 and I’m sitting in the third form at Morrinsville College, the girls in our summer green and white check uniforms and the boys in grey shorts & shirts with sandals. We are all about thirteen. The door opens wide and in comes Mr McQueen, our new Social studies teacher carrying his teacher’s leather briefcase which he plonks lightly on the desk and looks round at us smiling. You wouldn’t say his smile is a wide open simple one; he’s got an enticing sort of smile, a smile that challenges you to find something out.

And we do. We learn about the Romans in Britain and Hadrian’s Wall. We learn about the ancient Greeks and draw maps to locate places like Ephesus and Troy. We learn about Cretan Minoan culture and that you can dig up the past. Things not often talked about in Morrinsville, though someone might sometimes find a Maori adze in a paddock. At playtime I’m going to sit next to Jim Hopa, who’s so handsome and quiet and brown. My girlfriend Jill has arranged it all. I can’t wait, so when Mr McQueen asks me a question and I’m not listening, he says “I expected you’d be paying attention, Janet!” and I’m called to order in no uncertain way. He sees everything. He has wavy hair, a heart-shaped face and I think he looks as slender as an ironing board. He wears a greenish jacket and a tie, and brown trousers and shoes. His voice is interesting, deeper than you’d think it would be.

Years later I meet him again in Wellington at a writers’ gathering. He’s hardly changed at all. “You know, you helped show us the world” I say, as a sort of thank-you, and he smiles his friendly, quizzical smile and nods. “Good!” he says. “I’m really glad if I did." '

___________________________________________________

The last piece I read was from This Piece of Earth. Much of this book reminds me of things we did that I'd completely forgotten, but I remember this particular February evening perfectly.

'The last morning of the month starts off drizzly, but the sun soon burns off the mist and the day turns hot and humid. In the evening we walk round to help friends celebrate selling their house. When we get home it’s after ten, but the hall gauge shows 27 degrees. We open the doors and sit outside with one last drink. The nicotiana, alyssum and variegated flax glow in the reflected light. Overhead are stars, always part of my childhood but rarely noticed in the city.
For about ten minutes the air remains absolutely still. Moths flutter silently around the lawn and flowers. Then with a gentle stirring of air, the mildest of breezes arrives, and the pittosporum leaves begin to move. It’s time to go in.'

___________________________________________________

In the afternoon the six of us - Harvey's brother and sister-in-law, his friend, my son and his partner, and me - walk down to the Karori cemetery. The kind, dignified man from Lychgate carefully places the eight-sided wooden box in the ground beneath the deep red Ingrid Bergman roses, and we each say what we want to say, to and for Harvey, and we cry. Then we walk back home.

Four weeks...

2011-01-24T22:06:00.001+13:00

...and two days. Incredibly busy for much of the time, with all the things that have to be done - the legalities, of course (more on this later), getting ready for my son and his friend arriving, and organising the public memorial service. In other words, not exactly normal life, whatever that means.
          But I'm now sleeping more or less normally, which is a huge help. I was racing to get as much as possible done before Jonathan and Eric arrived last Wednesday, and I'm really pleased I did that, it's given me time to enjoy having them here, though I won't really relax until after Friday is over. Then we'll have two weeks to go on picnics and explore Wellington properly.
           They fill the house with welcome human sounds, and it's lovely having cups of tea made for me and the dishes done - it's been close on three years since Harvey was able to do those things. I don't miss the work involved in looking after him, or the worry. I just miss him - especially his voice.
            Perhaps having the company of the "boys" - I can't help calling them that, though they're actually in their mid-forties (I was a child bride!) - will make it worse later when they've gone. But that's just too bad, I need them here now, not least because they give me something new to think about and respond to.
             Meanwhile the cat is showing signs of improvement - glossier fur, good appetite - so maybe she'll be around a while longer than I thought. The week before last, I saw a white tiger cub in the window of the toyshop over the road and had to go in and buy it, crying all over the counter. Harvey loved tigers. Now Dorothy likes to sit near it on the bed.

Since Harvey died

2011-01-16T22:55:00.002+13:00

This is my first Elsewoman post since Harvey died in the early hours of Christmas Day. From now on I'm going to put my feminist posts mainly on The Hand Mirror and use Elsewoman to write about the experience of learning to live on my own for the first time in 65 years.
           The most difficult thing is exactly what I expected - not having anyone at home to talk to about what's going on in your life each day, and tell you about theirs. So I'm hoping that writing here will to some extent serve as a way of doing that. After all, what I'm now having to deal with is something that many people go through, as some of their comments on our blogs have already shown. Eating on my own is really hard too, but I'll write about that on my food blog.
             Given Harvey's situation, I'd already had to work out how to manage parts of my life without his company. He wasn't able to climb the stairs, so I had the two upper rooms and bathroom to myself. So that was a help - at least I was used to sleeping solo. He'd stopped going out, too, except to the doctor and the hospital, so I'd built up my own social life. It was really sad not even being able to go out together even just for coffee or to visit friends. Still, he'd become expert at managing his Fatso DVD list, and usually managed to get a movie we'd both enjoy for Saturday nights. I'd make a nice dinner and we'd settle down to watch.
                 Now I need to ask people round to watch with me, or go out. The weird thing is that the DVDs Harvey ordered have kept coming - he had three here when he died, so when I sent them back unwatched, three more appeared. (Soon I must cancel his subscription - I won't have time to do it justice, he used to get through about 15 a month.) He had obviously set out to get ones I'd like for the holidays - there were two movies related to France, and a documentary on modern art.
                  So this Saturday Pam and Geoff came round for fish and chips and we saw "Paris When It Sizzles", made in 1964, with William Holden and Audrey Hepburn (Harvey adored her). It turned out to be an astonishingly post-modern, satiric take on Hollywood conventions, with Holden as a blocked scriptwriter whose fragments of ideas came to life on the screen, only to get stuck and have to be reworked, sending up every movie cliche in the process. Noel Coward appeared (and helped write it), and Tony Curtis had a brilliant cameo as a dim "method actor". I enjoyed it, but Harvey would have loved it, and I would have been so pleased about that.
                    Then I spent today sorting out his room. My son and his friend arrive on Wednesday, and I'll need papers for the lawyer this week (the office has been closed until now), so it had to be done. It wasn't as bad as I'd imagined it might be, perhaps because it had a real purpose apart from just tidying everything away. But it still all feels quite surreal - how can I be doing this?

More on the "unfortunate experiment"

2010-12-20T16:44:00.005+13:00

The second 2010 issue (Volume 24, Issue 2) of the Women's Studies Journal is now available. It's free online here. (Click on "Current Issue".)

This issue focuses on the "unfortunate experiment", the Cartwright Inquiry and cervical cancer.
Contents include:

Anne Else, "The 'unfortunate experiment' and the Cartwright Inquiry, twenty years on: why getting it right matters"
Phillida Bunkle, "Patient centred ethics, the Cartwright Inquiry and feminism: Identifying the central fallacy in Linda Bryder, A History of the ‘Unfortunate Experiment’ at National Women’s Hospital"
Christy Parker, One for the girls?: Cervical cancer prevention and the introduction of the HPV vaccine in Aotearoa New Zealand"
Rhonda Shaw and Christine Donovan, "Cultural safety: Nurses’ accounts of negotiating the order of things"

There's also an editorial by Sue Jackson and Ann Weatherall, articles on autism and on older women managing their resources, and reviews of new books on sex work and on Amy Bock.

[Cross-posted to The Hand Mirror]

Human rights - how we're doing

2010-12-11T23:07:00.001+13:00

Friday 10 December was International Human Rights Day. The Human Rights Commission chose it to launch their new report on how New Zealand is doing on human rights. But so far the media have paid it scant attention - the Dom-Post had a small report on page 13 this morning. Which was odd, because at least half of the other items in the paper were related in some way to human rights issues.
               The summary report highlights thirty priority areas (from over a hundred identified by the research and public consultation process) where "further action is essential over the next five years to strengthen human rights protections and better ensure the dignity, equality and security of everyone in New Zealand".
                Three of these priorities are particularly relevant - and poignant - at this time of year: increasing the supply and diversity of social housing, reducing child poverty through a coordinated and integrated approach, and reviewing and addressing the adequacy of core benefit rates.
                The Welfare Working Group is right about one thing - life on a benefit is pretty grim. But that's mainly because benefit rates are so low. It's a neatly circular argument - drive benefits down to less than adequate leevls for even the most basic living costs, then stand back, point to the resulting misery, and say "See? Being on a benefit is bad for you."
                 Until the Human Rights Commission's report is heeded, Christmas will bring nothing but heartache for beneficiary parents and children, as well as a growing number of employed parents. Foodbanks all over the country are reporting a big surge in requests for help.
                  In Whangarei the Salvation Army gave out 3746 parcels in 2009. But by the end October 2010, 5961 parcels had been given out - and that doesn't cover the Christmas increase. The Auckland City Mission usually gives out 350 food parcels a month, but over the Christmas holidays it goes up to 2000. "It’s always busier at Christmas," says City Missioner Diane Robertson. "There’s no access to school food programmes and parents have to juggle work commitments with caring for children at home for the holidays. The pressure on families is enormous."
                   To donate food in Auckland, phone (09) 303 9200 or go to http://www.aucklandcitymission.org.nz/   In Wellington you can help through the Downtown Community Ministry, Compassion House, Lukes Lane, phone (04) 384 7699, or email office@dcm.org.nz Many supermarkets collect food too.
                   And read the Commission's report - then ask the government what they're going to do about it.

The Bad Sex Award

2010-11-30T23:17:00.000+13:00

Thanks to the indefatigable Beattie's Book Blog, we have been alerted to this year's Bad Sex Award, which celebrates "crude or outlandish sexual passages in modern literature".

The winner is Irish author Rowan Somerville, for his second novel, The Shape of Her. The judges said they were particularly taken with Somerville’s sentence: “Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.”

Somerville narrowly beat Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair's former spin doctor. The judges said Campbell drew their attention with this remarkable passage from his second novel, in which a character imagines that "the walls were going to fall down as we stroked and screamed our way through hours of pleasure to the union for which my whole life had been a preparation".

Seventeen

2010-11-28T13:11:00.001+13:00

We all understand the tragedy of others through our own experience. For me, the ones I thought about most at Pike River were Joseph Dunbar and his mother, Pip Timms.
       Joseph had turned seventeen the day before and Friday the 19th was his first day in the job. He was meant to start on the following Monday, but his mother said he was so excited after an on-site tour that his boss let him start on Friday. He began planning to work at the mine since they’d moved to the nearby Greymouth area from Christchurch.
      “He wanted to do this for a very long time...He set himself a goal, and achieving that goal meant everything to him. It meant he was going to travel with the company, take him different places. He was absolutely stoked. He was excited, he was ecstatic.”
        Dear Pip, I know what it's like and I am so very sorry, for you and for all the other mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, partners and children.

Mangled English of the week

2010-11-22T23:01:00.000+13:00

This week's Mangled English award goes to an unlikely candidate - Scoop. Usually the online news site sets a very good example of how not to mangle the English language, but this week it slipped up not once, but several times, in a single intro sentence:

"In an event whose anachronistic styling were suggestive of a possible Back To The Futre IV, the new Milky Bar Kid, Hinetaapora Short, met the media on Friday in front to the Wellington waterfront's shiny blobs."

A garden is a lovesome thing

2010-11-16T23:06:00.001+13:00

I've just had a brilliantly restorative break in Tauranga, seeing my birth mother and going to the garden festival with my friend Julie, who organised everything and drove me and some of her other friends around all weekend. She did the whole four days, I just did two and a half, but it was glorious. I'm only a very spasmodic and inept gardener - unlike Harvey and Julie, I don't have the true gardening gene. I'm one of those people Kipling was being scornful about when he wrote, in The Glory of the Garden:

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made

By singing:--"Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade.

But I am certainly very good at appreciating other people's efforts, and the Bay of Plenty gardens are as beautiful as they come. Here are a few photos.

And another thank you...

2010-11-07T21:16:00.002+13:00

This time to Emma Woods, the mother of Nayan Woods (see "Thank you", 27 October, which was about Nayan's father). She took Michael Laws to task for his vengeful (even-more-stupid-than-usual) comments about the young driver who killed Nayan not getting a jail sentence - and gently but firmly pointed out that earlier media reports, too, were far too glib and inaccurate.
And she did it at some length, in one of the most gracious, thoughtful, temperate, considered pieces of writing ever to appear in the Sunday Star-Times ("Family's amazing grace honours son's memory"). It made me cry, but it also gave me great hope for this country's future, because it has people like Emma Woods and her husband not only in it, but speaking out in public, despite their own immense grief and pain, to state what they believe in and stand up for it. There could be no more fitting way to honour their son.

Mangled English of the week

2010-11-06T22:14:00.000+13:00

U.S novelist Toni Morrison smiles after being awarded of the Legion of Honor by French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand. (ABC News, courtesy of Beattie's Book Blog)

Outrageously Fortunate

2010-11-06T17:34:00.001+13:00

So the last episode of Outrageous Fortune is screening on Tuesday. I'll have to watch - though I must admit, after being glued to the first two seasons (brilliant writing and acting) I sort of lost interest after that - it all got a bit same-old - and have only watched the odd episode. It all just got a bit too depressing. And of course once Cheryl was locked away it definitely suffered.
           Seeing the photo line-up of all the characters in today's Dom-Post, I couldn't help thinking that they all looked ridiculously good considering what the plot has put them through. Even Grandpa. He never really had dementia, he can still plan a heist and get his rocks off and just plain get around like he always did. Ageing gives you wrinkles but not much else.
        In a real life line-up, those pretty or at the very least intact faces and bodies would be exceedingly rare. The ravages of alcohol, drugs, trauma and violence would be all too clear, with a fair proportion of permanent injuries and disabilities, brain damage, scars of various kinds... depression, anxiety, and aggression might not be so easy to spot at a glance but they'd be there all the same. Not nearly so nice to look at.
        Yes, yes, I know it's just a TV programme, and it's meant to be entertaining, and I'm not channelling George W. Bush or Patricia Bartlett or the very unfortunately named and thankfully defunct Committee On Moral Education. I enjoyed it too - especially Loretta. And Antony Starr's double Van/Jethro act was brilliant.
        But I think it's been a good home-grown example - and all the more effective for that - of something we could usefully think about, all the same. And that's the pervasive message, very powerfully countering the mayhem we see in the news every day, that you can do what you like when you like to and with whomever you like and you will still stay young, fit and gorgeous. Or at least unimpaired in any obvious way. Sure, Aurora died and Cheryl is in prison, but generally speaking there will be No Lasting Consequences. Especially to your looks and your sex-life.

Made in Dagenham

2010-10-29T23:44:00.002+13:00

Today I saw Made in Dagenham, a film about the 1968 strike by 187 car-seat women machinists at the Ford plant outside London, which led ultimately to the British government passing the equal pay law. I've just been trawling through the British reviews. All of them by men, they range from condescending to sneering, with lots of nudge-nudge references to that hoary British sit-com, The Rag Trade, as well as to director Nigel Cole's previous hit, Calendar Girls.

I think you should see Made in Dagenham, and take your daughters and grand-daughters. First, it captures brilliantly the pervasive, blatant, smug, completely taken-for-granted sexism underpinning those far from distant days. The two things the men who ran the unions and the companies could agree on was the male right to be paid more than women, and be fully serviced by women at home.

The women working at Ford were probably better paid than most women factory hands, but they still earned less than the men and worked in a leaky, run-down, hot building (so hot, according to the film, they commonly took their tops off and worked in their bras). The strike began when Ford reclassified their work as unskilled, meaning, of course, less pay (though the actual details of their hours, rates, etc are far too tedious to be covered on film).

Despite union leaders' attempts to get them to back off and behave, they instead upped the ante, demanding equal pay with men. The women won the support of the union members, the Labour Government's Barbara Castle met the strike leaders, and after a partial victory for these women, two years later Britain passed a law bringing in equal pay - though still, of course, only for "equal work".

All this has been turned into a great story which will have huge popular appeal. The script, by Billy Ivory, never once made me cringe - except maybe when Barbara and Rita swap clothes chat just before their big moment with the press. It shows what the women are up against, at home as well as at work. Their uncomprehending menfolk are staunch unionists until it comes to being laid off when the lack of car-seats brings the plant to a standstill - and then having to get their own dinners and mind their own kids, because their wives are off demonstrating and negotiating.

The film has understandably collapsed the group of women who led the strike into one, the young, attractive Rita O'Grady, played by Sally Hawkins (who starred in Ken Loach's Happy-Go-Lucky). There has to be, I suppose, one heroine, even though that wasn't how it happened.

One other thing brought home to me how much liberty most historical films take. At the end, as the credits roll, there are side-clips of the actual women involved talking about the strike - they must have been interviewed by the makers, I wish we could have a documentary as well. There's also archival news footage of them in 1968, with Barbara Castle.

The factory women look absolutely nothing like the mini-skirted, mostly young, often busty and peroxided, swinging sixties women in the film. They're a bunch of extremely respectable-looking, often middle-aged women with perms and neat cardies. They reminded me more of the women in Mike Leigh's Vera Drake. Now there was one film that really did manage to look like the times it was recreating on screen, and very grim it was too.

Still, it's much better to have this film than none, and I'm sure it will draw far bigger audiences than Vera Drake, precisely because it's a lot more entertaining to watch. Unlike most of the overseas reviewers, Charlie Gates of The Press, Christchurch, understands what it's doing:

"When was the last time you saw a film with a strong female protagonist? A proper film that wasn’t about shopping, getting a man, climbing the corporate ladder or all three. Made in Dagenham is one of these rarities and it is a pleasure to watch...Made in Dagenham is full of warmth, humanity, humour and genuine drama...It keeps a perfect balance between the intimate and the turbulent sweep of history."

Even more unusual, Gates actually checked out how true-to-life the film was. "My partner's Nan, Flo Patston, lived near the Dagenham plant during the strike and her husband, Johnny, worked at the plant in the 1960s. I knew Flo had already seen the film, so I called her in England to see what she thought. She said it was a 'brilliant film' and gave it 'four stars and more'."

And Flo also said all the strong language the women go in for was perfectly genuine: "That’s what you heard on the factory floor. That’s how working class people spoke."

Four stars to you, too, Charlie, for your fine review. Go and see this film for yourself.

Thank you

2010-10-27T21:25:00.000+13:00

It was heartwarming to read the comments on my last post about Patrick, and also to hear from other friends who've contacted me about it. Homepaddock, I'm so sorry you too belong to this "club no one wants to join" - exactly.

Tonight the news featured the father of the young child killed by a young man's poor driving. I'm putting it that way because of course he never meant to swerve onto the pavement, he wasn't going particularly fast, and he immediately did everything he could to help. He was so devastated that he had tried to commit suicide.

The father didn't want him to go to prison, and said everything he could to support him. Such a change from the "lock 'em up and throw away the key" stance, which would have been perfectly understandable in the circumstances.

I read recently (sorry, I can't recall where) that two-thirds of those in prison are in for less than a year. This means they have no access to most of the programmes on offer. What on earth is the point, then? Especially as those we (the respectable ones, that is) lock up are highly likely to be illiterate and/or deaf and/or abused and/or mentally ill and/or addicted. Whereas the smooth white collar ones rarely go to prison, even though it can reasonably be argued that they have had infinitely more chances in life and have still chosen to rip people off, so they actually deserve more severe punishment.

So I'd like to say thank you to that bereaved father, too, for showing such courage, generosity and kindness, and wanting the young man to be all he could be, since the little boy couldn't.

Patrick

2010-10-22T16:16:00.000+13:00

Today it's 23 years since my younger son, Patrick, died in an accident in Sydney. He was eighteen and a half. I'm writing this post today for every parent who has lost a child, and particularly for those whose child was, like Patrick, just on the verge of adulthood. How would his life have turned out? Would he have been happy? Would he have had children? I think he would have been a good father - he could see and understand how people were feeling. But all that is lost now, to him and also to us. Haere atu, e tama, haere ki te huinga o te kahurangi, haere, haere, haere.

Wolf Hall

2010-10-18T23:21:00.004+13:00

I've finally managed to start reading Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (winner of the Man Booker prize in 2009). I am overcome by admiration of her power as a writer. Historical novels are very difficult to do successfully. Usually they fall into the trap of letting the research show; just a little too much detail, on pretty much anything - furniture, clothing, food - is enough to give the game away. But not here. Her style seems astonishingly plain and direct, yet is full of complexity - very like her central figure (as she imagines him), Thomas Cromwell, as he skilfully negotiates the shifting, deadly tides of Henry VIII's court while the king tries to rid himself of Katharine and marry Anne. None of the film or TV sagas based on that perennially fascinating era can hold a candle to this brilliant book. But it does, of course, demand commitment and concentration of a kind that may be threatened by the very different reading environment of the internet. I don't want to live in a world where books like this are no longer written, or scarcely read. Still, right now they continue to be acclaimed.

Bill Clinton and I

2010-10-13T23:00:00.000+13:00

Bill Clinton and I are alike in one curious respect. We both have an annoying condition called rosacea. The name gives an idea of what it is - reddening of the skin on your face. It's also known by the appallingly inelegant, insensitive name of "muzzle rash". I bet the medical man who thought that one up didn't have it himself, and I doubt that his wife had it either.
There's no cure, but you can treat it very effectively with a gel called Rosex. I'm mentioning this because it's quite a common condition in middle age, and I've had friends with it whose doctors hadn't told them about Rosex, so they were really pleased to find out about it. I think you need a prescription, but I'm not sure. In any case it's one of the things that isn't subsidised, unfortunately, so you have to pay for it yourself. But it does make a big difference.

Good news/bad news

2010-10-07T22:10:00.002+13:00

The good news is that so many young women (well, younger than me) are standing up for a woman's right to choose. This photo of the pro-choice demo outside Parliament on Tuesday appeared in the Dominion Post on Wednesday with good pro-choice quotes.

The bad news is that these women are still having to protest a 30-year-old law which does not give women the right to choose, was ludicrous when it first appeared and is even more ludicrous now.

For an excellent round-up of recent reports and comment on the current court hearings, including the Dom-Post, go here. And Boganette has a brilliant post replying to a friend who asked her how she could be "pro-abortion".

Hand Mirror Post - should this woman have gone to prison?

2010-10-02T23:00:00.000+13:00

Over on The Hand Mirror I've posted about the case of the mother who let her child drown in the bath, and was this week sentenced to prison. It's been troubling me all week. Have a look and let me know what you think.

It's not just us - the death of English

2010-09-23T23:45:00.000+12:00

For some time my morning reading of the Dom-Post has been punctuated by yells of anguish and shrieks of disbelief. What terrible calamity or new political idiocy is provoking these noisy outbursts? None. I'm reacting to the extraordinary abuse of the English language I see in its pages every day (and hear on TV).
Now I learn, via the invaluable Beattie's Book Blog, that this plague has spread throughout the US press. In the Washington Post, Gene Weingarten mourns the death of English. To his all too familiar examples, found in papers large and small all over the country - alot, mispronounciation, eeking out a living, prostrate cancer, between you and I - I can add many, many more: less people/games/cars, Porirua being "more dear" than Wellington in terms of house prices, endless mismatchings of plural subjects with singular verbs and vice versa, the use of "of" to replace a wide range of prepositions (confused of, bored of, concerned of)... Tragic. I know that's the word many people would use to describe the fact that I even notice such things, let alone care about them. But that is their problem.

Thanks for the congratulations, guys. Guys?

2010-09-19T23:05:00.000+12:00

It was women's suffrage day today, marking the 117th anniversary of New Zealand women winning the vote and this country becoming the first nation state in the world where women could vote on an equal footing with men. But somehow the media failed to notice... You'd think someone might have gone to see how the Christchurch memorial to the suffragists had fared in the earthquake - maybe that did happen in Christchurch? Or maybe not. There was a TV news item about women in Afghanistan voting, but no segue there either. Anywhere else you would think this achievement merited some kind of official recognition, akin to Labour Day. But no. Oh, wait - I've just found a government press release, put out on 14 September...

When I searched the Te Ara online encyclopaedia site for "women's suffrage", and then tried every related term I could think of, the main entry failed to come up (though I'm sure it's there, somewhere). For some insights into what happened at the 100th anniversary, in 1993, have a look here.

Designer and other whores

2010-09-13T22:59:00.001+12:00

In the Dominion Post's new "Your Weekend" tabloid lift-out on Satrday (11 September) there was an article about Fashion Week (which "turns 10 this month"). It quoted Petra Bagust saying (twice - once in the text and once in the caption) that she was a "self-confessed "designer whore'".
            Call me hopelessly old-fashioned and out of touch, but I was taken aback by this phrase. I hadn't seen it before. Apparently (so the Urban Designer site tells me) it means "a person who only cares for/wears designer labels".
             Sure enough, a quick search revealed that Ms Bagust had said much the same thing last year: "I'm a friend of New Zealand designers or a designer whore, depending on how you look at it, but I like to think of myself a friend."
             Why did I find this expression so startling? I'm not sure. To me a whore is someone who sells sex for money. It's also a term of abuse used by men - and sometimes other women - to put down women they disapprove of.
              I can see that it might be a good idea to reclaim this term (much as Mary Daly wanted us to reclaim words such as "crone") and thereby take away its power to condemn some women. Is that what's going on here? Somehow it doesn't feel like it. Instead it feels as if this is yet another example of attractive young women doing their utmost to prove they're so up with the play that they don't care what they call themselves (or wear on their T-shirts), as long as they give the impression that they're at the furthest possible remove from being a prude. And that's not exactly progress - is it? What do you think?

Aftershocks

2010-09-09T22:00:00.003+12:00

Our niece Jenny is an engineering geologist (it gives me enormous pleasure to write that - in my day the number of women doing engineering was zero). She grew up in the South Island high country, then on a farm near Methven, and went to university in Christchurch. She's now working in London, having to watch news of the earthquake and its aftermath from afar. Today she did what she could by sending a graph of the aftershocks that a mate had put together for her. It shows them clearly tapering off. Harvey's blog today over on stoatspring is about the earthquake too.

Changing tack

2010-09-05T22:26:00.001+12:00

There is, as yet, absolutely no shortage of topics for a feminist to write about. But thanks to the success of The Hand Mirror, the joint feminist blog I contribute to, I've been thinking lately that I might change tack on Elsewoman. What I'm thinking is that every time I post on The Hand Mirror, I'll either cross-post or put up an alert on Elsewoman (because I know there are quite a lot of people who look at this but aren't familiar with THM). I'd also like to use Elsewoman to write about my own writing, because I'm feeling the lack of anywhere to do that, and about other people's writing, as well as anything else I want to think out loud about that isn't going to work for THM. So I'll try that, and see how we go - I can always change again, that's the beauty of blogs, nothing is set in stone.

The state of NZ women: telling the truth

2010-09-01T22:23:00.002+12:00

The Ministry of Women's Affairs has just put out for consultation its draft report to the UN Committee on the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

If you belong to an organisation which has an interest in the status of women in New Zealand, you should comment on this draft. If your organisation has not received a draft for comment, please contact:
Judy Edwards Edwards@mwa.govt.nz or Nicole Benkert Benkert@mwa.govt.nz.
Comments are due by 8 September.

It's extremely important that the government puts out an accurate report reflecting the true state of women in New Zealand and what has and has not been done over the last four years, in terms of what the Committee asked the government to do after the 2006 report. You can se what this was in the Committee's Concluding Comments, here.

What the Welfare Working Group report really says

2010-08-21T16:11:00.000+12:00

I've been away in Australia for most of this week. But before I went, I wrote a "Letter from Elsewhere" for Scoop about the report of the Welfare Working Group. Did you know, for example, that the report takes care to quote New Zealand's largest provider of casual labour criticising the minimum wage, the absence of youth rates and the personal grievance procedures? Or that it repeats the statistic about 170,000 people of working age being on a benefit for five years or more no less than six times? Despite also noting, in passing, that New Zealand already has the highest rate of workforce participation in the OECD? You can read the whole piece here.

On not protecting children

2010-08-08T17:27:00.003+12:00

The reports on the appalling abuse of children at Waimokoia School made me feel sick. This didn't happen in the far-off, unenlightened past, it was all so relatively recent. The school had opened only in 1980, and stayed open until last year.
          This school was set up to deal with children as young as nine who were considered too difficult for ordinary schools to handle. Yet according to the report in the Sunday Star-Times, it had "employed people with little or no formal training, Many were hired from word of mouth or had inter-family connections to other staff."
          Graeme McCardle, the man just found guilty on 15 charges, had previously worked at two other homes for troubled children. He worked at Waimokoia for six years. It wasn't clear whether he had any formal training at all for this work. A female staff member testified at his trial about his indecent approaches to her.
           And he wasn't the only one. Another teacher at the school has since been struck off by the Teachers Council and jailed on multiple charges of indecent assault. Another staff member died before his trial could be completed, and one other was recently acquitted on 11 charges.
            The first complaint about McCardle was made in 1996, but nothing was done until a second complainant spoke up over ten years later. The school was closed last year.
             One of the worst things about this whole dreadful history is that it just isn't very surprising. There have been too many such revelations. As soon as you put children in an institution where they are completely under the control of those in charge, they become vulnerable to abuse of some kind - physical, sexual, psychological. The more cut off they are from their families (who may have already abused them at home), the more likely they are to suffer.
              As we all know, families can treat their kids really, really badly. They can even kill them. But taking the kids away completely seems to increase the risk of harm, not lower it. And when the victims do start speaking out, they still have huge difficulty being believed. Only when the number of complaints grows to a point where it can't be ignored does anything happen.
              As a society, we seem to be just as incapable of finding effective ways of protecting children from abuse as we are of protecting them from poverty.

A movie about adoption, sort of

2010-07-23T23:56:00.002+12:00

Yesterday I saw "I'm glad my mother is alive" ("Je suis heureux que ma mère soit vivante") , a much-praised French film which centres on the aftermath of an adoption, and is apparently based on a real case. It starts with 12-year-old Thomas, on holiday with his family, askig his father if his mother - that is, his birth mother - was pretty. The story unfolds in a series of flashbacks: four-year-old Thomas's young and not very bright mother Julie, doing her not very good best, goes off to work of some unspecified kind at night, leaving him in charge of his toddler brother. They're found by the authorities and taken into care. Then adoption is suggested, and the mother agrees. But on her last visit, she can't bring herself to explain to them that they're getting new parents. Later we see Thomas with a story and photos headed "Ma Mere", but that's the only hint we get that there may have been some attempt to help him understand his past. At 12 he gets furious when his schoolmates tease him about the adoption and his mother, attacks his brother for telling them, and says awful things to his father about not being able to have kids. His parents don't seem to have the faintest clue about why he's acting like this; they just get mad and pack him off to boarding school. He runs away, manages to persuade a social worker to give him his mother's new married name and address, and turns up on her doorstep. Now married and pregnant, she doesn't recognise him. Devastated, he leaves, hating her. At 18 he's working as a mechanic and living with his adoptive mother and brother - his father has had a complete mental breakdown - and he decides to see Julie again. On her own now, with a little boy, she's willing to have him around, and he's useful with the boy. What follows is an extremely moving and convincing portrait of a confused young man who finds himself attracted to his mother (who is, after all, only 17 years older than him), wants to look after his little half-brother, and gets driven out of his mind by love-hate feelings he can't understand. One day he stabs her and thinks he's killed her. But as the title suggests, he hasn't, and there is a resolution of sorts at the end.

The adoptive parents seem to have had absolutely no warning or advice on what might happen and how to deal with it - hence their incomprehension, anger and ineptitude. Yes, I know it's a fictional story, but sadly, it's probably broadly accurate all the same. The older a child is when the adoption takes place - Thomas was five - the more likely it is that very serious issues will arise later. At least in this case the children shared their new parents' ethnicity, country and language.

Genetic sexual attraction between opposite-sex children and parents, or siblings, who meet each other again as sexually mature adults is a well-known phenomenon. Usually, as in the film, it's not acted on, but the feelings involved must be incredibly confusing and distressing.

What interests me here is the lack of understanding of these adoption issues shown by much of the publicity and responses. Thomas's reactions to his situation as he grows up seem to be viewed as really weird and extreme, and also as basically all Julie's fault for "abandoning" him.

In my view, the film handles all the complex currents involved with immense accuracy, skill and sensitivity, thanks to both the direction (Claude Miller and his son Nathan) and the stunning performances of both child and adult actors. The stabbing comes as a terrible shock, and was the only part I found hard to credit - but I assume it did happen in the real-life situation this is based on (I haven't been able to find out).

COMMENTS: Update: the deleted comments were Chinese spam. I'm now moderating all comments and this problem seems to have disappeared.

Seeing and looking on a sunny afternoon

2010-07-15T19:31:00.004+12:00

It's been an absolutely gorgeous day in Wellington. I had to go into town this afternoon and finished with time to spare, so I went down to the waterfront. The harbour was calm enough to reflect the few white fluffy clouds -an astonishing rarity for Wellingtonians. I walked round to the coffee shop at the bottom of the Herd St building where you can sit looking out at the sea and the boats - on a good day it's the best spot in town - and had a magnificent mochaccino, large, hot, strong and cheap.

Then I made a bad mistake. If there's print around I read it, so I picked up a fashion mag, the Australian Madison, and started leafing through it. It had a photo shoot featuring one of the thinnest, scrawniest, most appallingly anorexic models I've ever seen. I got out a pen and wrote "Anorexia rules" up the length of her white satin trousers. I should have just sat there, enjoyed my coffee and gazed at the harbour instead.

I had time to walk round to Te Papa to see "Paperskin: the art of tapa cloth", drawn from the collections of the Queensland Art Gallery, the Queensland Museum, Te Papa, and a private collector. It's magnificent, and it's free - please go if you can.

But while you're there, please keep in mind one thing that goes almost unremarked and definitely unexplored in the exhibition as it's presented to the public: these amazing designs and beautiful textiles were mainly made by women, often working in highly organised groups. Here and there the makers are mentioned, in connection with particular pieces, but that's all.

There's a video of a cloth being made by women in the Eyelights gallery, which has more pieces on display, including some contemporary ones (a wonderful wedding dress, for example) that do have their maker's names attached. But generally there seems to be no real attempt to explore the highly gendered making of these beautiful creations.

Exploring further after I got home, I found the on-line catalogue for the exhibition. (If you can't go you can look at the barkcloth here - the pieces are superbly photographed.) The various essays in it say some very interesting things which there is barely a hint of in the exhibition itself.

The Preface by Nicholas Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and Professor of Historical Anthropology, Cambridge University, makes the point that barkcloth has only recently been seriously studied, and explains why: it was made by women, and it was seen as merely decorative. In other words, he is saying that part of the point of this ground-breaking exhibition is its recognition of a neglected art form created mainly (and in many Pacific cultures, solely) by women. All the more reason, surely, to bring this out in the exhibition itself.

The essay by Maud Page, Curator, Contemporary Pacific Art at the Queensland Art Gallery, gave me part of what I was looking for too. Copyright rules forbid me from quoting it here, so I've simply linked to it. She writes about how groups of women in Papua New Guinea see their work, what it means to them, and the freedom different makers have to interpret the same landscape differently. She quotes Australian writer Drusilla Modjeska, who spent time with these artists: "When a woman comes into her vai hero (wisdom), it is not simply that she has learned the iconography, but that she lives it so fully that it forms, and informs, her relationship with the cloth."* And she discusses how groups of women far from home, for example Tongan women in Sydney, lacking traditional materials, feel compelled to get together in order to carry on making a form of cloth with whatever is to hand.

There seemed to be enough room on the walls of the large Visa Gallery to have got across some of these insights. Without them, the makers seem to be largely invisible.

*Drusilla Modjeska, ‘This place, our art’, in Omie: The Barkcloth Art of Omie, [exhibition catalogue], Annandale Galleries, Sydney, 2006, p.16.

PS: DOES ANYONE KNOW WHY ALL 3 COMMENTS TO THIS POST HAVE ONLY LITTLE BLANK SQUARES? CHINESE OR OTHER NON-ROMAN CHARACTERS SHOW UP THIS WAY, BUT THEY CAN'T ALL BE IN CHINESE, SURELY!

Talking sense about Andy Haden

2010-07-12T23:59:00.000+12:00

I should be writing about Andy Haden's stated views on women, sportsmen, sex and rape, and the various reactions to them. But I started reading some comments, e.g. on the Herald site, and became so depressed by the initial flood of mindless idiots praising Haden for "speaking his mind" and "telling it like it is" that I just couldn't find the right words. So instead I'd like to point you to some other excellent posts discussing this issue.

Russell Brown dissects not only Haden's comments, but McCully's reactions to them.

Steph at LadyNews takes apart Kerre Woodham's column taking pretty much the same stance as Haden; earlier posts look at what Haden said, what Charlotte Dawson said, what Key said... isn't it a shame that we can never get this level of media attention for the issue of rape itself?

As always, The Hand Mirror tells it like it is, gets a lot of Herald-type idiots coming out of the woodwork to comment, and deals with them.

And this Herald report contains some extremely sensible comments from Louise Nicholas.

Thirsting for fame

2010-07-06T21:00:00.000+12:00

The 2010 Bulwer-Lytton competition for the worst possible opening sentence for a novel has been won by this impressive entry, sent in by Seattle novelist Molly Ringle:

"For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

You can read every category winner - Western, romance, science fiction, and so on - here.

The Mad Men strike again - don't fall for it

2010-07-01T13:50:00.000+12:00

As a child of the 1950s, I was fascinated by advertising. My favourites were the ones using cartoon strips. Who could forget the gripping, full-page Horlicks cartoon story? The worried wife confiding in her best friend about her husband's lack of energy. The kind friend diagnosing the problem as Night Starvation. The solution: a mug of Horlicks at bedtime. The result: a reinvigorated husband, no longer suffering from Night Starvation, and a very happy wife.

But in those days I read the story for its own sake. I was only seven, so I didn't have a husband and I wasn't responsible for feeding anyone. What I liked was the pictures: when I grew up I wanted to be a commercial illustrator.

Advertising has come a long way since then. The brilliant TV series Mad Men captures the beginnings of today's incredible sophistication and subterfuge. You've probably seen, for example, ads for Dove "beauty" products on our TV screens, based around the notion of "real women". But in the US, Dove's marketeers have gone much, much further. They've created the "Dove Movement for Self-Esteem", whose website declares:

"Dove is committed to building positive self-esteem and inspiring all women and girls to reach their full potential- but we need your help. We're building a movement in which women everywhere have the tools to take action and inspire each other and the girls in their lives. It could be as simple as sending a word of encouragement to a girl in your life or supporting self-esteem education in your town. From mentoring the next generation to celebrating real beauty in ourselves and others, we can open a world of possibilities for women and girls everywhere. Will you join us?"

You're invited to sign up on-line and deliver a message: "What advice would you give to your 13 year old self? We'll collect these messages and deliver them to girls to build self-esteem in the next generation." But this message is optional. What they really want is your details so that they can "keep you updated about the Dove Movement actions, as well as product samples or special offers from Dove". You can opt out, but they'll still have your details and you won't hear about the Movement.

But wait, there's more. A brilliant post by Claire on Non-Profity.com points out that Dove’s owner is Unilever, which markets a wide range of “beauty” brands in ways which run completely counter to any notion of female self-esteem. She includes video clips of ads for Unilever skin-whitening creams, weight-loss products and hair products which prey shamelessly on women's and girls' insecurities about their appearance, and one of the notorious “Axe” male deodorant ads showing hordes of extremely scantily clad women (they make the "Tui girls" look positively Puritan) pounding after a man using this stuff (running makes their breasts leap about), with the punchline "Use more, get more".

Real beauty? Real women? Building self-esteem? It's not a movement, it's an ad campaign.

Women's movement protests? No, we just imagined it

2010-06-20T22:50:00.002+12:00

Unlike TVNZ, Prime is doing its best to give us something approaching a watchable, meaningful history of the first 50 years of TV in NZ. Last night it “did” protest, from the first tiny anti-nuclear movement events to the religious right’s objection to legislation on civil unions.

All the great waves of protest were there, from Vietnam to homosexual rights. Except one. You wouldn’t know that there had ever been a single women’s liberation protest event in this country, let alone a major movement creating headlines for a couple of decades.

No mass pro-choice or anti-choice protests. No beauty contest protests or Reclaim the Night marches. No street theatre. The very first public women’s movement event here to appear on TV was the Anzac Day protest in Albert Park, Auckland, to highlight women as victims of war. But no – none of it happened, apparently. Nor was a single women’s liberation veteran interviewed – though there are cerainly plenty of them around.

Of course, that movement wasn’t about really significant things, like shooting wars, or bombs, or rugby, or race. Or even male sexuality. It was simply about the profoundly unequal conditions in which half the population lived, and the women who wanted to change that. The protesters included girlfriends, wives, daughters, sisters, even mothers, of the men (save for a few independent pioneers like Merata Mita) who made the news and the TV programmes.

The protesting women may have made headlines at the time, but even if all those protests did happen, they just didn’t count, eh. Didn’t matter. There was no need to take any notice of them or the movement they sprang from for something major like a survey of TV coverage of protest over the last 50 years. Not when there were all those other really important protest movements to deal with.

World Cup - It's not just a ball that gets kicked

2010-06-16T23:18:00.000+12:00

When the telly is showing All White Winston Reid's last-minute goal against Slovakia for the 326th time, even though it didn't even win the match for NZ, it would be a good idea to have a look at this post about the marked increase in domestic violence during the World Cup. Here's part of it:

"England's Home Office has warned that during the 2006 World Cup, domestic violence increased by 25% on game days and 30% when England was eliminated from the competition. The problem is troubling enough that the Association of Chief Police Officers, with the hopes of discouraging incidents, has created a video showing a drunk man hitting his wife after England has presumably lost a game. The ACPO has also been using a blood-stained soccer jersey labeled "Strikeher" to encourage women to report attacks.

Meanwhile, a professor at the University of Royal Holloway London is urging women to have a plan in place in case their partner becomes violent during the World Cup. She tells women to let their children sleep somewhere else, to know where their car keys are, to have the cell phone ready to call police."

This is probably not a news item coming soon to a screen near you. But the organisers of the Rugby World Cup should take note and work out how they plan to "discourage incidents" here too. I suppose it would be seen as outrageous to urge that a portion of all ticket sales be given to Women's Refuge.

Helping sole mothers find a husband

2010-06-11T11:18:00.003+12:00

I'm watching the current "welfare" talkfests with little hope that they will point to any genuinely sensible, realistic, effective changes which will actually help people. Today the Dom-Post reported a fascinating Dutch innovation that I'm quite sure won't be followed here - though maybe it should be.

Three Dutch councils are offering single unemployed Dutch women (it doesn't say whether they have children) a fashion and beauty grant and free membership of a dating agency, "to get them off the dole by finding a solvent husband" - or a job. The councils think that "finding love" will help to get people - men are eligible too, though obviously they think it will apply mainly to women - off benefits by "improving confidence, ambition and motivation". But after adverse publicity, the scheme's been put on hold.

In fact these councils are onto something. Every in-depth piece of research into DPB recipients shows that the main way to get off it is through repartnering. In other words, for women trying to raise kids on their own, the vast majority of them after a "separation" (as it's so neutrally called), it's much harder to find a sustainable job than it is to find a new man with a man's wage. Of course that "new man" often used to be attached to another woman with kids, who may well now be on the DPB herself, but that's life.

So now that sole mothers are being classed as virtually no different from any other unemployed person, the idea of helping them find a new male partner who will be able to support them is just plain common sense. It's a lot more realistic than expecting the right number of manageable, well-enough-paid jobs to appear out of nowhere in response to the kinds of blunt-instrument changes being talked about now, like cutting the DPB when the youngest child turns five.

And of course, if the new relationship breaks down, I guess the state would be perfectly within its rights to bill its "client" for the cost of her makeover. It can deduct this weekly from her new DPB.

A found poem about women and poverty

2010-05-28T12:32:00.000+12:00

The new British government has put out a State of the Nation Report: Poverty, Worklessness and Welfare Dependency in the UK. Their statistics are not very different from ours. While it's a bit better than similar reports from our own governments, because it recognises the complexity of 'multiple disadvantage', it still fails completely to display any real understanding of what it's reporting on. Three things stand out.

First, there has been a massive rise in inequality and poverty over the last few decades. The bottom third of people on the wealth distribution range own just 3% of the wealth.

Secondly, as usual, there is a complete absence of any discussion about changes in the UK labour market and in the global economy over the last 30 years. All the emphasis is on 'people not working' and the enormous cost of keeping them and their children alive (though certainly not healthy and well) in the absence of work. One particularly nasty graph compares the cost of 'working-age benefits' to the amounts spent on schools, defence, justice, climate change...

Thirdly, it is clearly women and children who bear the brunt of poverty and "disadvantage". Here's a 'found poem' I put together, drawn from the report.

One in ten married parents and
one in three parents cohabiting at birth
separate before the child is five years old
Women are 40% more likely
to enter poverty if they divorce

Most at risk of multiple disadvantage:
lone parents, a young mother, a black mother
working-age women without dependent children
manual, sick and disabled, never married
aged 80 years and over, living alone

At the heart of this fight
against poverty must be work
I will work to deliver
radical reforms to the welfare system

The material used in this
publication is constituted from
50% post consumer waste
and 50% virgin fibre

[Corss-posted to The Hand Mirror]

Is this what you voted for?

2010-05-20T23:22:00.002+12:00

If you voted for National because you wanted tax cuts, you might be pleased with today's Budget - depending on what your income is. But you may be less pleased when the consequences take effect. You need to trawl carefully through the fine print, or pay heed to some of the more astute commentators, to understand what's really going on. A few pertinent points to add to the one I made in my last post about the shonky argument that big tax cuts at the top are necesary to draw skilled professionals back to NZ:

1. The Budget does in fact reduce the tax take - and therefore, of course, restricts the amount available for essential services such as health and education, in the face of an ageing population and growing healthcare needs resulting, for example, from child poverty and our obesogenic environment. Russell Brown points out that the cost of the tax cuts "will be $1.085b in the next four years". But the "magic money" argument is that "tax cuts will spur economic growth, and therefore the economy will grow faster, and so it'll be revenue positive by 2013/14."

2. This really is a winner take all Budget. Idiot Savant does the numbers. The tax cuts come to $3740 million. The 45% (yes, that's right - almost half) of NZers with incomes up to $20,000 get just $320m of this. The 31% earning between $20K and $50K get another $807m. The 12% earning 50K - $70K get another $987m. The rest goes to the 12% earning more than that. The top 2%, those earning over $150,000, "pocket $430 million, about 11.5% of the total. This is almost exactly the amount the government has to borrow to fund this package. The people of New Zealand will be saddled with further debt to pay for the greed of the few at the top."

3. The government has made various attempts to hide the full extent of their generosity to the best-off and their incredible meanness to the worst-off. Russell Brown skewers the ludicrous claim that "Two-thirds of the tax cut goes into reducing the bottom two brackets." Well, yes - but this just means that the best-off benefit from ALL the tax cuts. "Even very high income earners have a "first $14,000" of income" - and so on through all the brackets until the top one, which gets a whole 5% lopped off. "Which is why it's stupid to talk about low brackets, and you'd only do it if you were deliberately trying to mislead."

4. If you're well-off and avoid paying the top tax rate, you will be handsomely rewarded by a tax cut which lowers your tax to the rate you were already managing to keep it down to. And then you could well be further rewarded by another big cut to the company tax rate (to 28%), so you can probably work out new ways to avoid tax. But if you're on a really low wage, the hike to GST - which you can't avoid, because you spend all your money on the stuff you really need - will mean you end up, at best, no worse off. But hey, don't be jealous! Just remember what Gordon Campbell calls the PM's "breath-taking" justification: because the rich spend more, they'll be paying more GST than you.

No, Prime Minister - Key talks nonsense on top tax rate

2010-05-17T23:26:00.002+12:00

Today, ahead of the Budget, John Key told reporters that cuts to the top rate of personal income tax will be part of a deliberate effort to encourage high-earning, skilled New Zealanders to stay in the country.

"Challenged in his weekly post-Cabinet press conference on the fairness of cutting top personal tax rates, Key said New Zealand could not ignore that it had lost more of its skilled people offshore than any other country in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – a proxy for the developed world.
Those people included doctors, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, as well as lawyers, accountants, and other skilled professionals.
“We need those people in our economy,” said Key. “Part of what you are going to see on Thursday is a deliberate attempt to get people to stay here and contribute to the economy.”

Skilled people are leaving NZ. We need these people. We are lowering the top tax rate. Therefore skilled people will stay in NZ.

Apparently not one of the well-informed reporters present challenged the completely shonky logic of this statement, so I'll have to do it for them.

Top tax rates in Australia are 40% over $80,000 and 45% over $180,000. In Britain they are 40% over 37,400 pounds and 50% over 150,000 pounds. In France the top rate is 50% and in Germany it's 45%. These rates do not include any mandatory social insurance contributions.

So it's quite clearly not a low top tax rate that is attracting skilled professionals overseas. Nor is it very likely that a low top tax rate will keep them in NZ. It's rather more likely that this latest boost to inequality and the increased social ills that come with it will push them away.

Mother's Day - yeah, right

2010-05-09T22:49:00.002+12:00

With my son in China and Harvey out of action, I had no illusory expectations about Mother's Day. For various completely different reasons, I was feeling a bit down by the time I set off, mid-afternoon, for a walk to the supermarket. I imagined being the target of pitying looks: "Poor thing, shopping alone, no one to do things for her today..." I should have known that was rubbish. The shop was full of mothers with one, two or three young chidlren in tow, trying to get the shopping done. They can't all have had partners doing shift work. On the local tennis court, four men were playing doubles.
            Anyway, I bought myself two pink treats - smoked salmon and tinned guavas - and soon after I got home our lovely neighbour Jenn rang and said she was bringing some flowers over for me. So I invited her and Barry for a glass of wine, and we ate the smoked salmon with it, and I felt much better.

Among the sudden rash of Mother's Day items in the media, a few stood out. First, David Hill's very moving tribute to his mother in the Listener - all the more poignant because she worked in a tobacco factory (which gave its bonuses in cigarettes), and died of emphysema at 52.
             Then there was the report of a survey showing that women and men have completely different perceptions of how much each of them do around the house. Men think they carry responsibility for 4.7 chores a week compared with women's 5.4. But women reckon they do 9.3 chores a week and men do 2.7. Most mothers feel undervalued and say they carry the bulk of household tasks such as laundry, cleaning, vacuuming, shopping, cookng the evening meal and looking after sick children.
          The other story that really got to me was about one of the five mothers featured in the Sunday Magazine. (Doesn't seem to be on-line so I can't give the link.) This 22-year-old "housebound mum", with a three-year-old and an eight-month-old, sounded exactly the same as the flat, ground-down young mothers interviewed by Jane Ritchie in the 1960s:
          "I spend every minute of the day with these kids and I would love to get away...but you're a mother. That's your job. You don't get holidays, you don't get sick days, you don't get overtime, and you don't get any pay...[my partner] has just had a fantastic guys' weekend away. Not that I'd want to stop him doing that, but why can't I do that?...Yes, I'm happy and I wouldn't trade any of my kids for the world but in the process I've given up everything that used to make me me. I have a problem finding out what I actually enjoy now."
       I know there has been real change over the last forty years for lots of couples, and there are plenty of genuine parenting partnerships out there. But there are also plenty where nothing's changed, and that's awful.

Saunders vs Saunders - either way, Bennett has badly messed up

2010-05-07T00:00:00.002+12:00

The incredible saga of Saunders vs Saunders would be hilarious if it didn't throw Paula Bennett's competence to be in charge of a major portfolio profoundly affecting thousands of lives into such severe doubt.

Gordon Campbell was the first commentator to blow the whistle publicly on exactly who Bennett had appointed to advise on welfare reform. Peter Saunders was until recently based at the far right Australian think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies (it can be described as a kind of synthesis of the Business Roundtable and the Maxim Institute). His publications over the last ten years, almost all published by the CIS, include The Government Giveth, and the Government Taketh Away (2007), Taxploitation: The case for income tax reform (2006), and Australia's Welfare Habit - and how to kick it (2004). He is also the author of apocalyptic science fiction, and has supported the notion that class is strongly correlated with intelligence.

However, responding to questions in the House about this surprising appointment, Bennett defended it by saying, “Peter Saunders is one of many advisers. He has something to offer the group as far as international knowledge is concerned. Members can read his book, Welfare to Work in Practice, which he wrote in Australia. I do not agree with everything he said; I do not agree with everything that a number of the advisers to the group said. But we are open to listening to those views from the Welfare Working Group.”

But as a comment by "Lesley" on Campbell's piece first noted, there are two men involved in welfare research called Peter Saunders: "I saw them both presenting at the same conference about ten years [ago] – consequently the last time welfare beneficaries were in the firing line of national ministers of the crown. One presented a well argued paper based on empirical research; the other simply raved – a startling nonsensical performance made even more compelling by the spectacle of what appeared to be a foaming mouth! One Peter Saunders was a well respected Sydney policy academic; the other working for a so-called ´think tank’…"

The raving, foaming one is the one Bennett appointed. As Green MP Catherine Delahunty told the House, the book Bennett mentioned was written by the other one. This other Peter Saunders is a professor at the University of New South Wales with a track record in welfare and poverty research which would have fitted him superbly for the role allocated to his namesake. As well as Welfare to Work in Practice, his publications over the last ten years include The Ends and Means of Welfare, Coping with Economic and Social Change in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2002); The Poverty Wars, Reconnecting Research with Reality; and (with James Walter) Ideas and Influence, Social Science and Public Policy in Australia (both published by UNSW Press in 2005). Currently an Australian Professorial Fellow working on the concepts and measurement of poverty and inequality, and on deprivation and social exclusion in Australia, he was elected President of the Foundation for International Studies on Social Security (FISS) in June 2009.

The press release put out by the government to set matters straight has to be seen to be believed. It reads:

We got the right man

Welfare Working Group member Professor Peter Saunders was chosen as an expert in his field to participate in the Group’s examination of the welfare system says Social Development Minister Paula Bennett. However, he is not the only Peter Saunders in existence. Question time in the House today saw the matter arise, with a question mark over whether the right Peter Saunders was appointed to the Group. “I can assure you, we got the right man,” says Ms Bennett.

To set the record straight about any confusion there may be over which Peter Saunders has been appointed, it may help to clarify the following. There are two men called Professor Peter Saunders. Both studied in England, both were based in Sydney Australia at the same time and both have continued to lecture on social policy and welfare and both have written a number of books on the subject.

“This clearly creates potential for mistaken identity,” says Ms Bennett.

Indeed. The mind, as they say, boggles.

There seem to be only three possible explanations for Bennett's confusion in the House.

(1) She did indeed appoint the wrong Peter Saunders as an adviser: she meant to appoint the respected academic, who was perhaps recommended by her Ministry, and would have been a completely appropriate choice, as his full list of recent publications shows. Possibly she was shown his book, and thought he had some interesting ideas. But by mistake - her own or her staff's - the invitation went to the CIS one. And no one noticed until it was too late. If this is the case, the Minister is not fit to hold her portfolio.

(2) By some difficult to imagine process, discussion of who to appoint led to an invitation being deliberately sent to the CIS Peter Saunders. (Did Rodney Hide have a hand in this decision? How else might the minister have been led to conclude that this person was an appropriate choice?) But if she did indeed intend to appoint this man, as the press release claims, she then somehow came across the book by the other one, the university professor, and made the mistake of thinking that it was written by her choice, the CIS man. (Was she perhaps deliberately given the book by the same people who recommended the CIS Saunders, and told it was by him?) If so, she is not fit to hold her portfolio.

(3) She was simply completely confused all along and never knew, until caught out, that there were two Peter Saunderses. She read one, but appointed the other, thinking they were the same person. As another blog comment said, in the House she was "passing off sane and respected research as the product of a biased ex-academic who now works [actually, did work - he's now freelancing in Britain] for a conservative think tank and writes vaguely racist fiction in his spare time." If so, she is not fit to hold her portfolio.
(See Lyndon Hood's satire for Scoop on Saunders vs Saunders at http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1005/S00042.htm )

This woman didn't have to die

2010-04-29T11:59:00.003+12:00

You may well already know about this news story in the New Zealand Herald on 27 April. (It's already on The Hand Mirror.) But just in case you don't, I am discussing it here, because I want you to know about it. It does not seem to have been picked up by any TV news programme.

It concerns a woman who was sexually abused as a child, and whose counsellor sought assistance from ACC, on the woman's behalf, for the cost of counselling.

"Counselling Services Centre manager Emma Castle said the mother-of-three's claim for counselling for sexual abuse she had suffered as a child was rejected by ACC two months ago on the grounds that she had not suffered 'a significant mental injury'."

But as several people, including me, pointed out when the rules were changed last year, the main aim of counselling is to prevent such injury occurring as a consequence of the abuse. If only those who are deemed to already have such an injury can get counselling - for a strictly limited number of sessions - then there is no hope of achieving this aim, and helping the abuse survivor regain health becomes much more difficult.

The experts feared the dire consequences of this change. On 9 December last year, the Association of Counsellors stated that it was "worried suicide rates may rise among sexual abuse victims refused ACC-funded counselling because of cutbacks" and said that anonymous details released of 54 cases showed "longer delays and more rejections since new rules, known as the Sensitive Claims Pathway, took effect in October."

In any case, it's hard to understand why this particular claim was turned down, since the woman in question seems to have already suffered "signifcant mental injury" - she had "had suicidal ideation and was self-harming". The counsellor who submitted the claim "made it very clear that sexual abuse was the reason".

But as Emma Castle pointed out, "It took them six months to make that decision. Four days after receiving notification that the ACC claim was denied, the client passed away."

Shortly before this report appeared, it emerged that ACC had approved just 32 claims for assistance with counselling because of sexual abuse in the first two months of this year, compared with 472 for the same period last year. At the time, counsellors asked what was happening to the presumably large number of people being turned down.

This case provides one shockingly clear answer to that question.

Footbinding for the 21st century?

2010-04-20T16:08:00.001+12:00

This month I read a novel about the life of Chinese women in the era when footbinding was the norm for women above all but the lowest social levels.* The more effectively mothers mutilated their daughters' feet, and the more perfectly they were deformed, the higher their value would be on the marriage market. One in ten girls died as a result of this practice.

I'd just finished shuddering over this, and wondering how on earth it had ever become so entrenched, when I came across an article about its 21st century equivalent in the Sunday Star-Times:

"Women forking out for a killer pair of high heels are also paying for the ultimate accessory - Botox to make their legs look better in stilettos. An Auckland cosmetic physician has found a demand for his calf-thinning services, in which he uses large amounts of Botox to sculpt women's legs and make calf muscles appear less bulky."

This "physician", who charges between $2000 and $7000 (depending on how thin your legs are to start with) says the procedure is "far safer than surgery to achieve the same result, a practice common in Asian countries. Surgery involves removal of the muscle through an incision in the crease behind the knee or, alternatively, destroying the nerve."

"What happens is that they chop the peroneal nerve [running from the knee to the foot] and this can cause permanent foot drop." As it happens, my husband has foot drop, the result of a degenerative muscle condition. It makes walking extremely difficult.

So let me get this straight. First you get the "killer" high heels - which can occasionally kill their wearers, but usually just cripple them over time. Then you deliberately use either surgery or drugs to make your legs look better in these ludicrous shoes, by reducing your leg muscles - and stopping them building up to make you stronger (so it's "strictly for the non-sporty"). Oh, and you need regular injections every nine months to "maintain the new shape".

A 25-year-old who got the Botox did it because she used to do a lot of running and had big muscles in her legs. She believes it has "given her more confidence" and "can't wait" to wear high heels.

The whole article reads like a promo for this "procedure". The accompanying photo could have come straight out of an advertising brochure.Susan Pepperell, the reporter, apparently did not ask for any other medical opinions on it.

I guess it's only a matter of time before teenage girls start asking for it for Christmas. At least it won't be their mothers forcing them to stop running and start Botoxing? Will it?

*Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See.

Sticking it to sole parents

2010-03-31T23:27:00.001+13:00

I've just had my say on Paula Bennett's latest set of sticks to beat sole parents with - have a look at my latest Letter from Elsewhere on Scoop. But to get a real feel for what's happening, have a look at the manual for MSD staff who have to administer the new rules. See if you can make sense of them. Then see if you think you could make them work fairly.

There seems to be very little emphasis on (a) helping sole parents actually find suitable jobs or (b) finding out what's actually going on in their lives that might lead to them failing their work test - and losing half their benefit. Knowing what precarious circumstances many sole parents live in, I can all too easily imagine you being judged guilty because you've had to find somewhere new to live, or your child has had an accident, or your car has broken down completely and there's no public transport...

Paula Bennett makes great play with the fact that she's been a sole parent. Yet she seems to have absolutely no idea of the real-life situations people at the bottom of the heap have to grapple with every day.

As for John Key - oh no, wait. His mother was a widow. So even if he was a child again now, she would come into the one category of sole parent who doesn't have to face the new Work Test.

Losing your partner by death is a tragedy. But having seen the many ways in which women (and a few men) can suddenly find themselves a sole parent, I simply do not understand why this distinction is still being made.

What is there about being deserted by your partner, or being beaten up and having to run away from your partner (and your home), that automatically makes you completely unable to act sensibly and responsibly (as I have no doubt John Key's mother did) and decide for yourself when you and your child/ren are ready and able to add paid work to your existing workload of parenting alone? (If you can find any, that is.)

Losing it with Peter Singer

2010-03-12T14:48:00.002+13:00

Some days, everything goes wrong. I was getting ready to go to some Writers and Readers sessions when I discovered my wallet wasn't in my bag. Frantic searching failed to unearth it. So I had to borrow the EFTPOS card for Harvey's account to get some bus money from the machine up the road. When I tried to get the cash, it said "Your card has expired, we have retained it." Rushed back home and found Harvey did have a replacement card, he just hadn't got around to cutting up the old one. The new one worked, so I got money.

Then I realised I would need to call Harvey during the day, but my mobile phone had almost no cash left on it, and I couldn't use my own credit card to top it up because I'd just cancelled it, hadn't I. Yet another borrowing, this time of Harvey's Visa, followed by a long session on the phone as I (a) mucked up the business of putting the card number in for the automatic top-up, (b) did it all again and got the number right, only to have the autovoice tell me, at the very end, that the automated top-up system had failed and I was being put through to an operator instead, and (c) spent another ten minutes attempting to complete the process with someone in, I think, the Philippines, who kept getting the card number wrong (but never once asked me for the card-holder's name, which was lucky, as it saved me explaining that this man with the completely different surname was my husband). I lost it only at the very end when, while waiting for the top-up to finally go through, he started telling me how I could do it online instead (thereby, presumably, doing him out of a job, but I didn't like to mention that).

Making it down to Writers and Readers at last, I got through two sessions (Margo Lanagan with Eirlys Hunter, fantastic, and Bill Manhire with Steve Braunias, both impressive and heartwarming) before I tried to phone Harvey to tell him the wallet wasn't at the Embassy. But my phone told me there was a text, so I thought I'd better try to read it. Don't laugh, but I've never received a text before, let alone sent one. "I'm so sorry you've had such a bad morning, Anne", it said. "I have"

and then it stopped. I stared at the phone for a while before I figured out that maybe I could read the rest if I used the downward scroll button. It worked, and the next page said "found your wallet in the car." It was from my lovely niece Jenny, who is staying with us, and when she couldn't raise me on the phone (of course I had dutifully turned it off for the sessions) she decided it was high time I learnt to read texts. She was right, and she made my day.

So then I went to hear Peter Singer, who thinks it's wrong to kill and eat chickens regardless of how well they are treated (actually the said chickens would not, of course, exist at all if they weren't destined to be food, though he didn't discuss that), but probably not wrong to end the lives of severely intellectually disabled people, whose life (unlike the life of chickens) he apparently cannot imagine himself into, any more than he can imagine himself into the life of a cabbage (which he is therefore happy to eat). Does that mean it would be okay to eat severely intellectually disabled people? Probably not, eh.

What I Did On My Holiday

2010-02-25T22:11:00.002+13:00

I've just managed to have my summer holiday, by dint of being able to get Harvey's caregiver in to stay, and tacking one night with friends and two nights at Mt Maunganui on to a trip to Tauranga and a night with my sister Ruth for my birth mother's 90th birthday.

Mary looked wonderful - my sister Ann bought her a terrific new outfit, a very nice soft long-sleeved top in a beige and blue patterned crinkly material, and a longish skirt, also crinkly, in a lovely soft teal blue. It was all very easy to wear, but also smart and up-to-date. She wanted sparkly earrings and silver shoes, and Ann got her those too. She had two parties, a family one at the old homestead on Sunday, and a rest home/friends/Anglican Women one at the rest home on Monday (her church, Holy Trinity, sent a huge bouquet of flowers), and she enjoyed it all very much. I was able to be there for both parties, and she knew me and was pleased to see me, so that was all good.

And then I swanned off to the Mount. No car, I didn't need one - that was the whole point. I'd booked a small apartment - Absolute Beachfront - on the ground floor, but they upgraded me to a big one on the third floor! Fantastic. The best thing was the beautifully shady balcony - I sat out there for breakfast, lunch and dinner (the takeaway Turkish round the corner, eaten out there with a sensible mini-bottle of red, was infinitely better and cheaper than the mediocre offerings at the cafe next door). But the first night I went out to dinner with Beth. We started and ended with bubbly on the balcony, and we had an Italian waiter who looked exactly like a faun.

Because it was a grey morning on Tuesday, I even walked round the Mount, very slowly - not because I couldn't walk faster, but because I wanted to make it last. It's one of the loveliest little coastal walks in the land. I thought about my husband, and the son I still have, and the son I haven't had since he was 18. I sat on the seats commemorating Ashley, who died at 19, and Chris, who died at 18, and thought about their parents too. Then on Wednesday I came home and picked up where I had left off. But it was good, and I might well do it again.

On making the rich richer by making the poor poorer

2010-02-11T22:50:00.002+13:00

Apparently all the rich have to do to have their taxes reduced is to assiduously devise ways to avoid paying. The Labour government introduced a modest increase in the top tax rate. Now the National government proposes to remove it - because so many wealthy people are managing to avoid it. This is like removing speed cameras because more people have radar detectors, or repealing the equal pay laws because so many employers are managing to flout them.

Any quaint notion that those who earn more should pay more tax is fast vanishing. Meanwhile the offsetting introduction of higher GST represents not only a further shift away from income tax to consumption tax; it also means that those who have no choice but to spend all or almost all of their low income will have their tax burden increased.

Here's what John Kenneth Galbraith said about cutting taxes on the rich (in The Culture of Contentment):

"The only effective design for diminishing the income inequality inherent in capitalism is the progressive income tax. Nothing in the age of contentment has contributed so strongly to income inequality as the reduction of taxes on the rich; nothing…so contributes to social tranquillity as some screams of anguish from the very affluent. That taxes should now be used to reduce the inequality is, however, clearly outside the realm of comfortable thought." (p.179)

CROSSOVER: My recent post at The Hand Mirror on last Sunday's SST Sunday Mag article based around the grievances of those without kids against those with has stirred up 23 comments, and counting.

The final farewell to a great New Zealander

2010-02-09T23:08:00.001+13:00

Today brought the final farewell to Sonja Davies. On a perfectly calm sea, in brilliant sunshine, her ashes were laid to rest at the deepest point of Wellington Harbour, and bread and roses were spread over the water.

Our lives shall not be sweated
From birth until life closes
Hearts starve as well as bodies
Give us bread but give us roses

Haere atu ki te po Sonja
Haere, haere, haere

Sorry, wrong movie

2010-01-31T21:08:00.000+13:00

I've just had a weird experience. I read that Maori TV was screening a movie called "Avalon", by Barry Levinson, and that it was about an immigrant family adjusting to life in New York. Here's how the New York Times review by Janet Maslin starts:

"In the fond overflowing family album that is Barry Levinson's ''Avalon,'' the prevailing symbol of both unity and discord is a Thanksgiving turkey. Or a ''toikey,'' as the participants put it, since the Krichinskys are an immigrant Jewish family in Baltimore and their every bantering, nit-picking conversation carries hints of the Old World."

Great, I thought, I'll watch that. I don't watch many movies on TV because I can't stand the ads, but this one looked good and wasn't something I'd easily stumble across for rent.

But when I switched on, it turned out to be something completely different - a weird science fiction epic. So I looked it up on line, and found that as well as the 1990 Levinson film, another "Avalon" was made in 2001:

"Avalon marks longtime anime director Mamoru Oshii's (Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor) first venture into the world of live action films, bringing a other-worldly vision to what might have been pedestrian fare in the hands of most other directors. For all of its high-concept theories about what is real and what is simulation, Avalon actually scores more points as a unique visual experience much more so than as a richly detailed story."

Oh dear. Did Maori TV think it was getting Levinson, and Oshii was supplied by mistake? Never mind - it's sent me back to the keyboard instead, which is a Good Thing.

The business of milk

2010-01-29T22:11:00.000+13:00

Last year I was lucky enough to see Sally Burton's magnificent exhibition, "White Gold: The Business of Milk" at Nelson's Suter Gallery, where she pays homage to the M.P.U.’s (Milk Production Units) commonly known as cows - or as she calls them, the "working women of our most important industry". You can read about it and see images from it here and here.

I thought about Sally's cows yesterday when I heard that the government has called in current resource consent applications concerning proposals to keep 18,000 cows inside, in cubicles, for eight months of the year, and 12 hours a day for the other four months, in the Mackenzie Basin. There has been a huge surge of opposition to these proposals (see, for example, my last Letter from Elsewhere and other items on Scoop). As well as the massive environmental impact, this method involves treating cows as nothing but MPUs - merely milk-producing machines. It doesn't matter how we deal with them, as long as they stay healthy enough to keep on producing.

But cows kept inside in cubicles is not, of course, the image that our dairy industry has wanted the world to see. So if such proposals - and there are bound to be more - are allowed to proceed, they are likely to have a huge impact on the New Zealand "brand".

As this whole affair has proceeded, it's become clear that each aspect of such proposals is dealt with quite separately - and some aren't dealt with at all. This enables the big companies behind these schemes to amass all the consents they need, piece by piece, without the total impact and the wider implications ever being examined.

This time, though, the outcry has been too great to ignore, and Nick Smith has done the right thing. Now let's hope the commissioners get it right too, and stop these proposals going any further.

A Very Good Day

2009-12-30T19:47:00.000+13:00

Despite my previous carry-on about Christmas, I did in fact enjoy it very much. We spent it as we almost always do, with each other and family (by phone) in the morning, and very dear friends in the afternoon and evening, plus my son phoning from China and a call to my birth mother. Bill and Donna were so kind and helpful that I never felt overwhelmed and all the food worked out well.

I have to make a list the day before with times set out, to make sure I don't forget things, especially after I've had a few glasses of wine. One year I completely forgot that the pudding has to be steamed for at least another two hours on Christmas Day, and we ended up eating it at 10 o'clock at night. Harvey was not amused - he loves his pudding (though he doesn't care much about Christmas cake, and I never make one).

I use the Rich Christmas Pudding recipe from an old edition of the Edmonds Cookery Book (it doesn't appear in the newer ones). The proper time to eat it is straight after the Queen's Message (watched, I must admit, in a somewhat irreverent spirit - we still have the book of Royal photos to which we used to add scurrilous new captions every year, until there was no room left).

It's always the last course in a long slow dinner which this year began at 2 pm with a sort of deconstructed 1950s version of antipasta, using my mother's little coloured plastic sword toothpicks, and moved gently on through beef fillet and salads, cheese, light fruit dessert, and little goodies (mainly for the benefit of droppers-in, of whom we had two this year, though one had already had two meals and understandably didn't want to eat anything else at all).

The pudding had its sprig of holly in the top, picked from the shrubbery by the church up the road during the Afternoon Holly Walk - a much more sedate version of what used to be known as the Drunken Holly Expedition. It was successfully flamed and came with home-made brandy sauce (not, this year, the incredibly alcoholic version I sometimes accidentally produced in the past, when I misjudged the brandy slosh required). And it tasted pretty good, though I did think it was slightly drier than usual, maybe because I didn't make it early enough, or steamed it a bit too long... That's one of the most interesting, if often dismaying, things about cooking - you can never guarantee exactly how things are going to turn out, there are too many variables.

But it didn't matter. The main thing was that everyone had a Very Good Day.

For Harvey's take on our Christmas, see http://stoatspring.blogspot.com

The Invisible Mother Christmas

2009-12-21T21:24:00.000+13:00

As a PS to my last post, in Your Weekend magazine for 19 December, Mike Crean wrote a nostalgic piece about "The Roast of Christmas Past". He recalled the drama of his dad killing the chook or the sheep for their Christmas dinner, and went on to describe the meals they ate.

All good stuff, and I enjoyed it. But I couldn't help noticing that the huge amount of work his mother did to produce it all was completely invisible. She got mentioned only once, near the end, but not in connection with making the dinner itself. That was all described as though invisible hands had created it.

I know he most likely never noticed at the time, because, unlike the killing dramas, what his mother did for Christmas was probably pretty much what she always did, only more so. But I would have thought that, looking back, he might have made some comment about how much effort she put in to produce that magnificent feast every year?

Bah, humbug

2009-12-13T21:27:00.000+13:00

I haven't sent a single Christmas card yet. I have the cards, and the stamps. I even have at least six cards from other people. Every single one of them has been sent by a woman, in most cases on behalf of not only herself, but the other members of her family.

Why do women have to produce Christmas - the thinking, shopping, wrapping, writing, posting, cooking? On top of all the other regular routine, none of which goes away or, in most cases, even diminishes in the lead-up to Christmas? I can understand them doing it for their children, but why should they do it for everyone else? Especially since so much of it does nothing except keep the tills ringing - oh, and destroy a bit more of the planet to produce all that stuff? Next year maybe we could all just go on Christmas strike.

Great work, guys

2009-11-26T19:44:00.000+13:00

It was fantastic to see the story in this morning's Dom-Post about the men running through town at lunchtime yesterday - White Ribbon Day - on behalf of the campaign against domestic violence. For the first time, significant numbers of men seem to be taking on this issue and seeing it as their responsibility to do everything they can to stop other men beating up women. And ultimately that's the only way things will change.

Taking pets to work is NOT work-life balance!

2009-11-19T22:40:00.000+13:00

I'm really happy for the staff at CWA New Media in Wellington. The Dom-Post says they get to take their pets to work on Thursdays. Fine - though I'm not sure I'd be thrilled to have a blue-tongued skink wandering around the office in search of cuddles...

But here comes the catch:
"Their bosses say it's a way for modern workplaces to address work/life balance, by bringing people's favourite part of home into the office."

Well, no, not exactly. "Work/life balance" is a stupid phrase, but what it's supposed to mean is being able to fit together your paid work and all the other stuff you need to do without becoming totally stressed out. For most of the women I know, it's more about "paid work/unpaid work balance".

What we call "full-time work" means the amount of paid work someone [being very gender-neutral here] can do when they have someone else at home to do all that other stuff. It wasn't ever meant to be done by the people who DO all that other stuff.

But now all these people, usually known as women, have moved en masse into paid work, and even into full-time jobs. What to do? Introduce work/life balance. We mustn't go too far, of course. Pets at work, maybe. Kids at work - definitely not.

But wait, there's more. In a new book of essays just out from Victoria University Press, Rethinking Women and Politics, Tania Domett looks at the reality of this great new idea. The news isn't good: those who make use of such policies are generally seen as not really committed to their work.

These policies, she says, are a "band-aid" remedy for what is fundamentally an issue of gender injustice. While they do "facilitate women's dual roles and allow them at least limited access to the labour market", they also mask and perpetuate existing gender inequalities.

She quotes Philippa Hall of the [now dismantled] Pay and Employment Equity Unit: "Women have got to get more money and men have to get more time. Men have to work less [for pay] and women have to get paid more for things to change."

Sorry, but it's not about the pets.

Declaration of interest: I have an essay in Rethinking Women and Politics.

Julie and Julia/Elizabeth and me

2009-11-14T21:02:00.000+13:00

I've just been to see "Julie and Julia" and I loved it. Meryl Streep is magnificent. Not ever having seen Julia Child's TV programmes, I've never paid much attention to her - not that I noticed, anyway. In fact I did buy the two volume Penguin edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking about thirty years ago, without particularly observing that Julia was one of the authors, as her name meant nothing to me then. I use it, too, from time to time. Well, Volume I, that is. I don't think I've ever gone so far as to tackle anything from Volume II, Advanced.

There are a clutch of easy recipes I make quite often, such as the leek (or watercress) and potato soup, or the mayonnaise. I occasionally make the hollandaise instead, but I quail at the quantity of butter it contains. The oil in the mayonnaise seems healthier, though given the quantity I eat once I've made it, it's probably not. I make it with a processor (I haven't got a blender, but the processor works fine). Julia, Simone and Louisette (though according to the film, she didn't contribute much) point out that the amount of butter the yolks will absorb if you use a liquidizer - 4 ounces (115 grams) - is only half as much as if you make it by hand! I love the way the difference is discussed:

"It is extremely easy and almost foolproof to make in an electric liquidizer, and we give the recipe on page 100. But we feel it is of great importance that you learn how to make hollandaise by hand, for part of every good cook's general knowledge is a thorough familiarity with the vagaries of egg yolk under all conditions..."

"If you are used to hand-made hollandaise, you may find the liquidizer variety lacks something in quality; this is perhaps due to complete homogenization. But as the technique is well within the capabilities of an eight-year-old child, it has much to recommend it."

Indeed. Julia spent a long time converting all the measurements to imperial - here, now, of course, it would be better if they were metric. Maybe newer editions give both. I should look for one - the print in the Penguin, beautifully set though it is in Monotype Bembo, is getting a bit small.

Every so often I tackle another classic recipe properly. This year I've made the boeuf bourguignon that figures prominently in the movie, as well as the blanquette de veau a l'ancienne ( a slow cooker is excellent for poaching the veal). One Christmas I started well ahead of time and worked my way through the recipe for duck a l'orange. It's always worth it.

Valuable though this precise masterpiece is, it doesn't get the same response from me as Elizabeth David's collected works, and I use them much more often. I also love her two collections of articles (and some recipes), An Omelette and a Glass of Wine and Is There a Nutmeg in the House?

It was Elizabeth who said "Authenticity is the only true luxury", and she's right. In these books she often protested (very wittily) against nasty commercial imitations of, e.g., mayonnaise.

If she could come back, she'd be appalled at the way the industrial food manufacturers bandy about the names of honest dishes. They know this will appeal to people who've heard of them and maybe eaten them in a restaurant. And unlike champagne, these names aren't protected, because no one owns them. So they stick them all over concoctions that bear about as much relation to the real thing as those old bottles of Camp Coffee and Chicory did to carefully roasted beans.

A while ago I was looking for fine cracked wheat in the supermarket to make tabbouleh, the extremely simple and very good Middle Eastern salad made with lots of fresh parsley and lemon juice. You can get it at Mediterranean Foods in Newtown, Wellington, but I was short of time. The supermarket used to have it, very cheaply, in the large help-yourself bin section, but that must have been too unprofitable and is long gone. All I could find was horrible and incredibly expensive boxes of what claimed to be "Instant Tabbouleh".

The makers of all this rubbish should be locked up and force fed on it until they promise never to besmirch the real thing again.