The body confident

I am sitting on the side of a pool in France, watching my children play in the water and wondering how long and how often I have been merely an observer of a life rather than one who participates.

I love watching my beautiful daughter stride around the pool with her long,long legs and hate it when she says she won't wear her tankini because it shows her belly. I hate looking at Max's wobbly belly and knowing that is my fault for not making him have a more active lifestyle.

I'm watching French, Dutch and German mothers in the pool with their offspring and am hearing them repeat, almost word for word the same things I say to my children.  "Ca ce n'est pas gentil" "Bien, jolie!" "schnell !" Then there are the mostly British mothers, like me, sitting on the sidelines, rolling our 3/4 trousers up past pasty knees, slipping our cardigans onto the floor for a moment.

But all these women in the pool look fabulous. Better than me, I think. Or maybe not. Do they look so good because they take part and do the exercise and don't waste time caring what anyone else thinks about -and now I look closer, I can see them- the stretch marks and broken veins and tan lines, and not wearing underwired bikinis or even shaving every bit of body hair.

If I hadn't been so self conscious about what I now realise was my flat stomach and toned thighs, perhaps I wouldn't have become the two stone over-weight blob fish I am now. And if I don't strip off and get in that pool I won't get any browner or lose any of that belly that has resumed the approximate size and quality it had immediately after my fourth pregnancy.

Maybe next year, knowing I have to get undressed, I will behave better throughout the year. Otherwise I'll be waiting until I'm 65, the see when most women feel body confident.  Of course by that time,my daughter will believe that sitting on the sidelines is an option. I need to take responsibility.

Oh. "Is this OK?" the French woman asks me, moving the chairs. Despite the fact I am pretty fluent in French and German everyone speaks tome in English. Is it the fat?  Is it the pink hair? No, just the fact that I am watching from the edge while everyone else takes part. There is definitely a metaphor here....

XS ive

There is a new perfume advert on tv.  I don't know why. It isn't Christmas. Perhaps it's for those people who go on holiday and think they need to spend all their money on over priced aftershave on the way home.

I think this may be the most ridiculously sexist advert for fragrance I have ever seen.  Until the next one obviously.  The fragrance is Pure XS by Paco Rabanne, which as far as I can remember, actually smells quite nice, but I won't be buying it for my husband any time soon.

You can watch it here, should you wish to.

Ok. So this is partly an indication of my age, but the boy in the advert looks very young to me.  He is far too clean shaven, far too hairless, I really am not a fan of this massive over grooming trend at the moment, I like my men to be a bit hairy, but perhaps I should be encouraging the equality of difficulty.

Anyway, this pretty little boy is going to have a bath in a very nice bathroom, or is it a library? There are books all round the walls and it turns out that some naughty little minxes have just placed a bath in the middle of a posh room with a two way mirror to spy on any passing boy who fancies having a bath.

The oversexed young vixens are getting very overheated, hiding in the book cases and in the cupboards as they spy on the boy who starts to get undressed. They are terribly excited by his smooth, smooth tanned and perfectly sculpted chest, in fact he is pretty excited by it himself and keeps touching it as he poses in the two way mirror - unknowingly watched by a dozen or so attractive women, who have literally nothing better to do than wait in the cupboard for unsuspecting boys to come along and have baths.

He seems to forget that he wants a bath, or rather, starts to think like the teenager he actually is, and realises that it is much quicker to just spray a load of scent over the smell rather than really have a wash.  So after stroking a couple of brass taps, which spurt water in a way which suggests that the girls might need to employ a passing plumber to come and fix the waterworks at some point, he unfastens his trousers and gives a cheeky squirt.  At which point, all the girls faint or fall over in rapturous ecstasy.

All this time the Habanera from Bizet's Carmen is playing in the background.  I am no expert in opera, but everything I remember about Carmen suggests to me a strong female role model - teasing and manipulating a male audience at this point - "If I love you, then beware!"  Perhaps I am missing the point. Should I be celebrating the objectification and voyeuristic treatment of the male body?  I don't think so.  He seems a little too aware of his audience and he is not being observed by one woman but several. When he removes his trousers he seems to be controlling a whole brood of women with whatever is under there.

I may once again be showing my age, but I seem to be seeing many more genitals on tv at the moment - it may be my choice of Amazon over Netflix, but I haven't yet seen a show that has justified any use of genitals, I just can't quite see the point.  I have never yet seen a group of young women lose control of their dignity over the sight of any man's penis. And that includes the women at work the other week googling a particular Love Island contestant (?), competitor (?) and discussing his size, girth or length I don't remember. They passed round a phone screen, zoomed in on the poor man's organ, reducing him to a single attribute and passed interested comments, but no one fainted, or declared it a beauty.

What is this advertisement trying to say? And who is going to buy the fragrance or the image on the basis of this?  A young woman, who wants her man to appeal to a large group of other women?  A young over-groomed man who buys his own eau de toilette?  And what is the image being sold? That men are sex objects too? That the best we can hope for is that pretty young men's bodies are exploited as much as young women's bodies and that is the kind of equality we have achieved in advertising?

The ASA is planning to "crack down" on sexist advertising and adverts that perpetuate sexist stereotypes.  I am not sure that this is what they had in mind, but I don't intend to give a company that suggests women need to fall at the feet of a man who unzips his fly any of my spare euros this summer.

The real cost of 1%

Why are so many teachers upset about not getting a pay rise? Or getting a pay rise of 1%?  After all according to Philip Hammond, we still get a good deal more than anyone in the private sector.  And we have it easy remember, with all our holidays.

I am not a maths teacher.  So it is possible, that I am just too unqualified and unprepared for real life that I cannot work out the figures.  My council tax has gone up by 4%.  My wages will go up by 1%.  If my average class size goes up by 1 pupil, it goes up by 4%.  But my wages go up by 1%.

But still, shut up, I am sure many would say. It is a pay rise after all, it's not like anyone is cutting your pay. It may not be the 1.4% that MPs awarded themselves, following the 10% rise the year before, but still.

However, it is not quite as simple as that.  This is anecdotal, in other words, it is my experience, however my experience is based on my own life and the careers of other teachers I support.

I have lost pay over the last few years. Me and many others. Schools are finding increasingly inventive ways to refuse pay progression for teachers, so it doesn't matter how hard they work, how many hoops they jump through, at the end of the year they are refused pay progression. We appeal, it's lots of work, but we do it.  Generally it is pretty clear that that governing body cannot afford the pay rise, so they refuse it.  They'll give other reasons, they'll play games with the targets, but in the end, they say no.  And that's it. There is nothing else the member of staff or me as their union representative can do.  There is no further appeal.  So the teacher leaves.  Why would they want to stay? They may even leave teaching.

Or if you're a head of department, suddenly the job may become impossible, especially if you are part time and there is no one employed to do the other share of your job.  It is made very clear to you that you will not get pay progression, you may even end up on capability. So you decide to ask to give up your responsibility.  The school will welcome that.  They don't have to pay you any extra money, and they can get some new enthusiastic young thing to do your responsibility for free. They'll tell them it's good experience.  So you lose your responsibility - that extra money.

You can't top up the wages by topping up your hours because you agreed to reduce your timetable a while ago, because it was too hard to be full time and keep up with the marking and still have a life, or take the children swimming or ...sleep.

So that 1% pay rise does not compensate for the responsibility points you have lost, or the day's wages you have lost in reducing your hours.  When you agreed that, you thought you could take up some tutoring on that "free" day. Or stack shelves in Tesco.  But the lessons of your 4 days have been distributed over 5 days, so you don't actually have a free day.  If you're lucky, you get to come in an hour later on a Tuesday, or leave an hour earlier on a Thursday.  It doesn't help because nursery fees are the same for a part day or a whole day, and the primary school finishes 15 minutes earlier than your school so you can't get back in time to pick up your children, so you still have to pay for after school care even though you only need it for 15 minutes.

On the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, the transport secretary Chris Grayling said that the excessive cost of the HS2 rail project was completely different to finding extra money for public services.  He said that was a long term project.  I hope he still feels the same when the HS2 is used to transport children to the 2 super free schools in the country where they are taught in classes of 80 due to the lack of teachers. Almost 4 in 10 teachers quit within the first year according to an article featured in the Guardian in 2015.  I don't think the pay is attracting teachers - nor is the attitude it indicates.

During my brief foray into teaching in an independent school, the head was worried about the lack of appeal for teachers in the state sector and wondering what their school had to offer.  Teachers are not put off by the pay and conditions in the independent sector, they feel a powerful desire to give back to the community they live in and a real urge to educate children and give them the best start in life.

So that 1% does not tell the whole story as I watch teachers young and old move on to other jobs, reduce their hours in the hope of paying their mortgages and leave education because they care more about their mental health than their money.  I need to work harder to stop it from happening, but I don't think I have another 10% in me.

When life gives you strawberries

I rescued what may well be the last of this year's strawberries. Extreme heat and some sort of crawly things are finishing them off.  By the end of day three the children are complaining. "What's for pudding?" Max asks at 7:30 in the morning.  I tried to counter the obsessing about food by posting a monthly menu on the fridge, but it didn't occur to me to detail puddings.
"Strawberries." I hazard. It is half way through the month and there is no more money, so eating from the meagre front garden is a way of providing them with vitamins.
"Oh, not again." he sighs as he finds them secreted in his lunch box as well.

I honestly never remember complaining about the surfeit of strawberries in my life.  When we get in, I ask Pip and Rex to pick the fruit from the front garden, but after 35 seconds it is too warm and they both slink into the house to sit in darkened rooms with screens.  They're also really rubbish and I discover a good 2 tubs full.  It's like finding tiny red treasure.  But many of them are really little now, and very red, so they need to be picked.  Pip ignores any of the small strawberries and sees them as a sacrifice she must donate to slugs, snails and any other night spirits.

I freeze a tub for cake later in the year, leave some in the fridge, then sift through for the little ones, the slightly squishy ones, the ones that I managed to decapitate in the picking, the weird seedy ones and the cleft ones.  The ones the children might turn their noses up at.  And I make them into jam.

It's beautiful, the smell of jam brings me back to my childhood and my mum still makes much better strawberry jam than I do.  I remember small dabs setting on plates and there was always a small pyrex dish left over- the portion that didn't fit neatly into all the jars that would be stored for the rest of the year that we could have straight away, a bit too hot, the occasional semi-complete strawberry sitting in the pink nectar; the perfect sweetness and stickiness.  I've pimped my recipe - though not today - with cucumber and mint from the garden and a bit of Pimms. It's my version of the champagne jam I was bought at Christmas from Fortnum and Mason.  I like Pimms more.

And so this week I will make strawberry tarts, after my mum's recipe again, shortbread cases with a spoon of jam, a dab of cream and half a strawberry wedged on top.  For breakfast I will have homemade yogurt with homemade jam and home grown strawberries.  All made from the rejects, the too small, the ugly strawberries in my garden, that would otherwise have been contributed to the journey of life acting out in my 5x4 plot. 

There's something here, another message that I am trying to draw from this. I'm not sure what it is though, but the potential for allegory was too good to miss.

It might be something to do with examination marking I have completed every year for GCSE, drawing out every possible mark for the weaker students, taking twice as long to mark the shorter answers than the longer ones, making the effort to pick out as much credit as I possibly can, looking beneath the leaves for the flashes of red in the undergrowth, the sparks of interpretation and understanding beneath the confusion of poor handwriting and grammar.

Perhaps it's the story of Max, again, having almost completed a year of secondary school and sinking beneath the leaves of normality. He could be the funny-looking strawberry, the one that everyone ignores for the better, bigger, brasher strawberries, but he is as sweet as any other child.

Maybe I could have made this an an allegory for the General Election and the significance of voting.  Look at May's slim majority, and the small number of votes that were needed in some constituencies to topple or to preserve an MP.  The teeny tiny strawberry could be the vote that was needed to make a difference, on our own we don't feel important, but together we make good jam, and the jam lasts longer than the fresh strawberry promises that rot quickly if you're not careful.

Do I have a point? Details matter, effort matters. All of us can skim the surface and not engage with the deeper issues, pretend it does not concern us, but every element is significant.  6 months ago I was writing about the  year of the snowflake, and the fact that many snowflakes make an avalanche.  Now it's strawberries.  Be more strawberry. Be sweet.

This is my cat.

This is my cat.
Her name is Poppy.
She is very old.
She is getting quite annoying and constantly pesters me to give her attention, but I still love her.
My cat does not have opposable thumbs, a fact that I believe she regularly regrets.
My cat is also not on the electoral roll. Partially to do with the fact that she does not have opposable thumbs, but mostly to do with the fact that she is a cat.  She is also not 18 until next year.
However, my cat thinks that her "daddy" (oh when did I start calling myself the parent of a domestic pet?) is the best thing since ... crab sticks?  I don't really know how long her memory is. She would definitely have put a cross in the box next to his name in the elections yesterday.

In fact so did about 500 other people.  I think that is pretty good. Not good enough to actually win the seat away from the Conservatives, but enough to give my husband a shock that he may accidentally get elected.  But 500 people.  About 4% of the electorate in our area.  I am pretty sure I could name most of them. I am so grateful to my husband for standing and really grateful to those who voted for him, but I think I've dealt with a further 1% of voters complaining to me about Parish Council matters in the last week.  I hope they all voted to make a difference.

So it makes me a bit sad to read on other friends' timelines today about the various reasons for not using their vote today.  Apparently we don't listen, we're only in it for ourselves.  Pretty much all of them had opposable thumbs.

One of my friends didn't vote because they're all the same and Teresa May is decisive.  If you didn't care at least vote for my husband. I can vouch for him. At least vote for the person in the village that you know has the same concerns as you might because his children are the same age as yours and he cares about education.  If you don't care, at least trust me because you know I really care.

I can assure those people and anyone else that there is nothing in it for me to sit for three hours in a meeting every couple of weeks, trying to make progress against a sea of red tape and feeling that your hands are tied.  I do it to try and make sure the view of a significant group is represented, that might otherwise be missing and when people tell me what they think I convey that to the rest of the meeting.

I try to explain what we can do stuff about - eg bins and playing fields and stuff we can't do so much about - eg crime and parking.  But often the stuff we can't do much about, everyone can do stuff about, like phoning the police, which seems to be last on people's mind after posting their cctv footage on social media and naming and shaming the teens, ensuring that the chance of a prosecution is reduced.

My cat shame-facedly takes responsibility for her own behaviour, she runs away from me pretty rapidly when she's crept through the cat flap with a baby mouse.  She tells me when there is a problem, such as her bowl being half full.  And my cat would have voted if she could have, the polls stayed open long enough to cover her committed sleeping regime.  Next time I think I'm going to be stroppier with those I encounter and insist on them trying to vote.  I'm going to pester people, they'll probably forgive me. The cat gets away with it.

Be like my cat. Vote if you can. And sleep lots.