I’ve heard that often from people who believe that a spell check is enough to render their writing faultless.
Firstly, the spell check only catches spelling mistakes (hence the name). It doesn’t catch grammatical errors or the misuse of words, both of which are very, very common.
Secondly, it doesn’t catch inconsistencies in content or the too frequent use of a particular word or phrase.
Lastly, it doesn’t tell you if your language is fluent and the text easy to read and understand.
I’m saying this as a person who’s guilty of all these mistakes in her own writing and who, therefore, only very rarely submit text (except from this blog) to a customer or client, newspaper or the like before somebody else has been through it with the red pen at the ready. When my husband looks at my English writing I’m always grumpy at his many suggestions for improvement, but the fact is that the outcome is usually a better text.
In a Danish paper I’ve just read a critique of the Danish publishing houses that resonates deeply in me. Ask any of my Danish friends and you’ll see the whites of their eyes when they tell you how I complain about Danish translators, proof readers and most of all, publishers. Very often translations are sub-standard and you’re constantly reminded that this is a translation, the book was not written in Danish. A good translation is not like that - it is invisible, only the reviewer of the book and possibly its author will pay attention to the fact that here’s actually a job very well done. The same goes for a proof-reader. You don’t read page after page thinking, Oh, how nice, no spelling errors!
The invisible editor is a slightly different matter. Often you find that the book could well have done with some mercy-cuttings of text or some clarification of muddled sentences, etc. Also, fact-checking can be a good idea - and so much easier now than back when it involved getting out of your chair and down to the library. The good translation and faultless text is ultimately the responsibility of the editor. Nevertheless, it often seems like modern Danish editors pick writers and books and then they seem to leave both author, translator and proof-reader (if there is one) to their own devices while they rush off to Frankfurt or wherever to discover the next Stieg Larsson.
Once I left the music business it was always my dream to become editor at a respected publishing house. As in my days as a music A&R person (A&R = Artist and Repertoire), I’ve always been convinced that my talent lies more in spotting, nurturing and refining other people’s talents than in cultivating my own - if there is any. But I’ve always been told that to become editor at a Danish publishing house you need to have at least a Master Degree in Danish, literature, art history or the like. And, as you all know, I don’t. Not least because I “know” that most editors at publishing houses have substantial academic credentials and that getting the job is allegedly a competition between literary giants, it makes me angry and irritable seeing all these books being published, seemingly without a proper editor behind them.
In the music business we did come across musicians/artists who were so incredibly multi-talented that they could do just about everything themselves. Write wonderful music, beautiful lyrics, make fantastic musical arrangements, play almost all the instruments and finally produce the album faultlessly. But they were a small, small minority. The majority of artists have one or two areas in which they are talented and need help with the rest. There’s no shame in that! Most of us have even less talent or none at all. And almost all of us need help to “kill our Darlings” as they say in Hollywood, just before the film’s most adorable scene ends on the cutting room floor because it disturbs the rhythm - or something.
Most - but not all - books I read in English are entirely without spelling mistakes and editorial blunders. There seems to be real work going on in the leading publishing houses over there. Here however, I only rarely read a book without a number of errors, some worse than others. Why is that? I refuse to believe that Danish publishers are pressed harder than their British counterparts. Go to any bookshop and ask yourself if we weren’t better served with fewer books, chosen with more diligence and edited likewise?
How is it in Sweden and Norway I wonder, and what do you think? Am I reading the wrong books?
By the way, I read Weekend Avisen (a weekly newspaper akin to, er, nothing really, but level of writing very high) and in the latest issue I read a faultless translation of the McChrystal interview from the Rolling Stone and a number of articles without spelling mistakes or other immediately evident blunders. They only have a week to do the job, so why are they so much better at it than many publishing houses?
Yes, that’s me. While I love to learn and recently went to a real educational institution and got a real degree, Bachelor of Science, I’m also very lazy. So studying at uni is not my preferred way to acquire new knowledge. And as much as I love to read and also do read non-fiction every other time I pick up a book, my preferred way of acquiring new knowledge is by listening to podcasts. I know I’ve mentioned this a number of times before, but I have the feeling I’m not really getting through to you. Do you realise what FANTABULOUS stuff you can download and listen to FOR FREE out there?
Yesterday, I got a letter from our television supplier TDC. It was a “special offer” of an extra television package at 148 DKR per month. That’s around 17£. For this exorbitant amount of money I would get - what exactly? 10 or so cr*p channels offering nothing but US television series reruns, again-again showings of action films, “talent” shows and of course heaps of reality shows. No BBC, nothing even remotely interesting to neither me nor junior.
But right here on my computer I find hours, days, months if not years of free (and completely legal, I should say) entertainment. I can watch, read and listen. And learn. And that’s what I love most. I really wish I’d loved learning as much when I was younger. I could have become a polymath by now!
I subscribe to a number of podcasts, but unfortunately I never seem to have time enough to listen to all of them. Maybe if I had to do a lot of long haul flights? My favourite subject is clearly history, which seems to lend itself so perfectly to the podcast format. I subscribe to Melvyn Bragg’s hour-long discussions with scholars on historic persons or episodes. Always interesting and very well made. And to the Danish Alle Tiders Historie (A History of All Times). But my all time favourite is a collaboration between British Museum and British Radio 4, A History of the World in a 100 Objects. It consists of one hundred 15-minute podcasts covering all of human history. It is the brainchild of the absolutely fantastic and admirable director of the
Neil MacGregor (picture from The Guardian)
British Museum, Neil MacGregor. He must be one of the world’s most inspirational museum directors and he actually narrates most of this fantastic series himself. I love how his favourite expressions slowly emerge as you hear more and more of the programmes. If you start listening, wait for the first time he says “the business end of (…)”. It makes me giggle.
Did you know that the first depiction of a couple making love dates back 11,000 years? (Take that, creationists). Well, I sure didn’t. Or that an intricate, glittering gold cape was dug out of the ground in North Wales in 1833? Or how much you can read out of the Egyptian Pharaoh Den’s sandal label?
I also subscribe to podcasts about medicine, sociology, psychology and technology. My favourite technology programme is actually the Danish Harddisken, which is very versatile and reminds me more of the magazine Wired than of any other podcasts. And that’s a compliment. Wired is the only magazine I read after I’ve had to give up on Vanity Fair for two reasons. One, that I simply don’t seem to have time enough to read it, and two, that I’ve found it more and more about showbiz and less about political and cultural matters. My only, but serious, objection to Harddisken (as it is to Wired) is the lack of women involved in making and presenting the programme. I find it very, very hard to believe that there are really so few women out there with anything interesting or important to contribute. I tend to believe that it’s habit and laziness that bring (the same) men to the microphones again and again.
If you have a phone that supports it you can also watch video podcasts or you can watch them on your computer. I don’t watch many video podcasts, but when I do it’s invariably from TED. The last one I’ve enjoyed was this one about mistaken beliefs - seeing patterns that aren’t there.
Better known as Denmark. Denmark is the kind of country where one of the most publicised points in the new Plan to Save the Country from Economic Ruin is to cut child allowances for families with many children. As any idiot in this country knows, a Family with Many Children is a Brown or a Black family. To further alienate brown and black families, interpretation in hospitals and social services has now been cut to an absolute minimum. And, last but not least, Denmark’s development aid has also been cut.
I’m thinking that I have a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People in the original Danish translation. I could send it to the party leader of the Danish People’s Party (yes, that’s their name, directly translated. Yukk) in the hope she would understand that making friends is much better than getting enemies and alienating people. Or maybe not.
People ask me “What’s great about being back in Denmark?” and “What do you miss about the UK?”. Ah, well… I could say the weather:
But I would be lying. The weather hasn’t been better in the UK than here.
I could say the lovely people. That would be true for both coming back and leaving. I missed my friends a lot more than I’d thought I would - always imagining that we’d talk on FB, on the phone, on Skype and send lots of e-mails. This, however, hasn’t happened. Well, it has, with a few, but with the majority I’ve more or less lost contact except when I came to Copenhagen on visits. All rather strange in these modern times!
The lovely crowd of twitter-friends that I’m leaving behind will be much missed, as quite a few of them grew into so much more than “just” twitter-friends. Some of them are actually coming to visit me over the summer and I’m sooo thrilled! However, given the nature of how I met them, we’re in frequent contact - via FB, Skype and Twitter. I can’t say how much that pleases me!
I could say that I desperately miss British telly, radio and media and that would be absolutely true! If it weren’t for the brilliant phenomenon of podcasts (have I mentioned this before? Oh, I have? Really?), I think I would despair at the loss of R4, which has given me endless hours of pleasurable learning. Now I listen to DR’s (Danish public broadcaster) P1 which is not at all bad, but has recently been very severely hit by the government’s race for privatisation. You know how experience shows that privatisation leads to much better public service, entertainment, train services, hospitals, etc. You don’t know? Well, in all honestly, I can’t say I’ve noticed it either. But right wing governments seem to have this as a mantra. The small matter of missing data/research to support the claim is brushed under the ideological carpet.
On a lighter note, all the series that are my guilty pleasures, 24, Lost, The Good Wife, etc., are months behind here, so I’m not missing anything (and avoided Twitter when season finals were on). Which is good since I’ve had almost no time to watch telly in the month that I’ve been back.
Luck has had it that I’ve hit the ground running here as far as work is concerned. That has been a bit surprising, but surprising in such a nice way…
Phones 4U has done a survey on the attractiveness of men, judged by the mobile or smartphone they own. Not too surprisingly women find men with Iphones to be the most attractive. You know, they have enough money to buy one and hopefully use some of the arty applications rather than sports- and porn applications…
Iphones in the family (bar one who wasn't present...)
Read about this survey here in MacWorld. I scrolled and scrolled to find the bit about the reverse situation. How does a man think a woman’s phone adds or detracts to her attractiveness? But will you believe it? There’s not a word about that.
Now, does that mean that men don’t care what phone a woman uses as long as her other, eh, attributes, are attractive to him, or does it mean that Phones 4U simply didn’t think to reverse the question? Which leads to another question: Does that mean that far more men than women own Iphones? I know you should be careful when judging from your own circles and I am. But still, at least half of the Iphone owners I know are women.
If you don’t have an Iphone and don’t have any plans to buy one, you’ll loathe this post. So I suggest you don’t read it. If you still read it, you know, just to allow yourself to get annoyed, then consider this:
“Yes it was a shocking thing to say, and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their lives without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it.
And if they open it and read it, they don’t have to like it. And if you read it and dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me. You can complain about it. You can write to the publishers, to the papers, You can write your own book. You can do all those things.
But there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, sold, or bought, or read. And that’s all I have to say on that subject.”
This quote is by the brave and wonderful Philip Pullman, in reply to a person who chastised him for criticising the Christian faith in his new book. It’s about much more important things than whether you can be worked up about other people loving their Iphones, but it really does apply everywhere. Thank you to Richard Whitelock for opening up his new blog with this lovely quote. It was brought to my attention by @rhodri, who never replies to tweets, but who often tweets good stuff.
The Iphone apps are what makes your phone truly yours. Look at a person’s apps and you’ll know a lot about them. Thanks to Twitter I only rarely “hunt” for apps, they sort of present themselves when people tweet ecstatically about them. My other sources are the tech blogs and Wired Magazine. And people, of course. When you get together with other Iphone-lovers, they’ll tell you if they’ve found a new app that they love.
I have two Twitter apps, Tweetdeck and Tweetie (they can do slightly different things) and the Facebook and LinkedIn apps. I think I tweet as much from my phone as I do from my computer. Typically because tweeting is something you sneak in between other things you do and when I’m at the computer I’m usually supposed to be working… Facebook and LinkedIn mostly on the computer I think, but wouldn’t be without either on the phone.
I have a shopping list app which I’ve taken to more than I thought I would. I never write a pen-and-paper shopping list anymore. I’ve had to personalise it a lot to accommodate for this family’s apparently special shopping needs and deleted lots of items that I never ever buy, but now it works just great. Great advantage is that I always have it with me, both when I remember something that I want to add to it and when I go shopping. A similar type of app is a to-do-list app, which I’ve only just got. Usually, I find that to-do-list “systems” never work for me, but this one could. It’s still “on trial”. Many good features.
An app that has really and truly improved my life is the sleepcycle app. I first heard of this technology years ago and have coveted it ever since. Your sleep is monitored (originally by a bracelet) and, having set a time where you have to be up, it will wake you at the best possible time before that, which is when your sleep is lightest. It is brilliant! Has also shown me how my sleep pattern changes drastically from day to day and goes a long way in explaining why I sometimes feel dazed even if I have slept 7+ hours and at other times totally perky after <6 hours.
The Iphone also functions as a portable reference library, which is incredibly practical when you have a memory like a sieve and a child that asks at least 25 questions a day, some of which rather tricky. I have the lovely Wikipedia and Wikitap apps (for discussion of the use of Wikipedia, look here), Dictionary, Ordbogen (Danish - English), RedDelicious (all my bookmarks readily available), Iformulas and Reader (all my RSS feeds imported from Netvibes).
As most people I also have a number of news apps from my favourite news sources and also some aggregated news. Almost every paper and online news source have their own app, so it can be tailored very specifically to your needs and wants.
Then there are a number of practical apps that you can’t really claim to “need”, but which are all very handy. I have the Flickr app so I can upload pictures from my phone directly to Flickr with comments, tags and everything. I use that a lot. I’m very pleased with the Flixster app, which shows me what’s on in my local cinemas and with the Urbanspoon app, which guides me to restaurants in London while I’m there. I’ve used that more than once and been very pleased with it. Also I have a few recipe generators for when I’m completely out of ideas. Some funny dishes have come to the table thanks to YumYum, BigOven, among others.
A handful of apps cater to my intellectual and artistic needs, among them Stanza, which lets me read classics for free as well as a number of high quality magazines. I re-read The Great Gatsby on a flight to Copenhagen not long ago, that was very pleasant! Another app in that vein is the new app from the National Gallery, called LoveArt. Take a look at it, it’s really fabulous!
To entertain my son when we’re in the car, on a train or he’s bored in a restaurant I have a whole page of games. Very handy indeed!
Knowing how it upsets quite a few of my male readers I just can’t help myself. It’s Ada Lovelace day today, so we’re celebrating women who have excelled in technology.
I’ve chosen not to celebrate any woman in particular but instead to muse over why so many women still shy away from technology.
Ada Lovelace embraced technology although it hadn’t even been invented when she was around. She was guided by her curiosity combined with a brilliant brain and the financial circumstances to allow it.
I think that there’s a number of reasons why women don’t tend to embrace technology the way men do.
*disclaimer*
Please note that I use GENERALISATIONS in this post. I KNOW that not all men embrace technology or are good at it, I KNOW that there are women who excel in hardcore programming, etc. etc. But I’m sure you’ll agree that MORE women than men shy away from technology and that MORE men than women enjoy discussing Megabits of this and Gigabytes of that.
*end of disclaimer*
One of these reasons is the rather dull and unsurprising that technology has always been a male thing ever since the invention of the first technologies when women were still mostly “housewives” and dumbed down by themselves, their mothers, their fathers, their teachers, their brothers, their husbands and society in general. When computers started to be household items, everything to do with them was communicated in a special language, almost exclusive to people who worked with computers and completely unintelligible to anybody outside. But most men had to either pretend to understand or buy some copies of PC World and get an understanding quickly if they didn’t want to be out of the loop.
For women it was enough to learn the weird code language that was WordPerfect. Learning that was not at all considered a computer skill and nobody ever told any secretary that she could take her advanced WordPerfect coding skills and transfer them to other forms of computer coding - that the principles were the same even if the codes were different. So a large group of people - women - who could have become programmers and learned HTML as easy as one-two-three was completely lost. Because when Apple came with their What You See Is What You Get word processing technology and Microsoft came right at their heels and delivered Word to the world, everybody forgot all about WordPerfect and the skillset required to work it.
The language surrounding computers and other daily life technologies has certainly become a lot more accessible with the acceptance and knowledge that the target group has exploded and now includes everybody. But techno speak is still rife and you do need to learn some basics if you want to purchase some new technology and actually know what you’re buying. It’s also very helpful to know basic computer lingo when you make the inevitable call to the dreaded call centre for help. But I still think it would be really helpful if the ad said: This phone has 8GB memory. That equals x number of songs or x podcasts or x movie length films. I mean, who cares whether it’s 8 or 16GB? What you care about is whether there’s room for your entire Itunes library.
So when I talk to other women about technology and they get defensive about learning a bit of computer lingo I challenge them. Every time we enter a new chapter of our lives, we learn the language belonging to this particular subgroup without giving it much thought. You start studying law and after a year or so you’ve adopted a whole new set of words which you use effortlessly, inside and outside university. When you start cooking you learn the difference between tsp and tbsp and after the first mistake you know what “separate the eggs” means. When you first get pregnant (or your girl does) you learn a whole new set of words and phrases and suddenly know exactly what is considered a “normal” birth weight and what isn’t whereas previously you wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if somebody had told you that their baby weighed 12 kilos at birth.
I therefore challenge women to sit down and learn the basics about computers, so they can understand enough to make sane purchases, avoid viruses, guide their children and do what they want to do on their computers and smartphones. Whining that it’s “too complicated” just doesn’t cut any slack with me.
And now for the second reason why I think women are lagging behind when it comes to technology. I think they lack curiosity. Or rather, they lack the inclination to pursue their curiosity. And I think that’s with us from childhood. The further we go back in time the less women are likely to have been encouraged to act on their curiosity as children. And if you go to a toy store or a book store’s children’s department you’ll see how that’s still so very much the case. I should underline that this is a lot worse here in the UK than it is in Denmark. Can’t speak for the rest of the world. The wonderful Science Museum here in the UK has developed the most amazing series of exploratory toys and, happily, they’re on sale all over the world. However, in many a toy store or department store these toys are displayed in the boys’ section and not in the girls’. And where, unfortunately, it’s a general trend that children’s toys today don’t encourage them to think “out of the box” (Now, who is responsible for ruining that phrase? come here and I’ll spank you!) as much as previous generations’ toys, it’s much more true for girls’ toys. If you don’t believe me, go take a look. And don’t tell me that I can just avoid them. I only have boys. But then, I’m not talking about me. Keeping in mind the size of the toy departments and the amount of money spent on advertising toys every year, there CLEARLY are people who buy it, right!
I blame the mothers, particularly the ones who ought to know better, for giving in to this. Just heard this morning that some girls at son’s school were invited to a birthday party with a “Makeover” theme. That makes me want to be sick in somebody’s designer handbag.
In the teetering stack of books next to my bed is a book called Curious? by the psychologist Todd Kashdan (@toddkashdan on Twitter). I haven’t read it yet, but I bought it based on his op-eds in The Huffington Post and an article in the Guardian. I’m very curious myself and have often been told that I’m too curious for my own good. Imagine how pleased I was to read that curiosity is actually good for you and leads to much more “life satisfaction” if such a thing can be quantified. The curious are seldom bored, there’s always an avenue to explore. So what I know now, in the midst of the huge sea of things I don’t know, is that at least I’m not going to die of boredom.
***
So, what I meant to say on Ada Lovelace day, was this: Yes, ladies, there’s a historic precedence for women to not be curious and to be cr*p at technology. But that’s all it is. There are no excuses anymore. And if you can’t be bothered for yourself, then do it for your children. They deserve that you make the effort to understand the world they live in.
As regular readers will know I read and think (and subsequently write) a great deal about happiness. Quite often I’ve discussed the word happiness with people and tend to agree that the word itself stands in the way of our experience of it. Happiness has become synonymous with big white weddings, having beautiful perfect babies, going on marvelous vacations with your larger-than-life family. Which then leads to people saying that they don’t need happiness, they’ll just settle back and accept some sort of equilibrium and satisfaction with being un-unhappy…
However, I maintain that the above mentioned Big Occasions are not what constitutes happiness and want to reclaim the word. What I really mean with the word is more the contentedness from the title, but there are two downsides to that word. One is the word in itself - it’s a dreadful word, just look at it! The other is that if you say you’re content you’re almost also saying that you are happy where you are and don’t want to change anything.
That’s not how I see happiness. I consider myself an above-average happy person. It’s not that I’m ♫ Always Looking at the Bright Side of Life ♫ and turning the blind eye to the darker side, but I do try to because I find many people’s dwelling on even minor miseries really irksome and I don’t want to moan whinge moan like they do. If you follow me on Twitter you’ll know that I do whinge occasionally, but I try to keep it at a minimum and also try to be constructive about it. Our family’s life situation at present is cr*p with too many uncertainties for anybody’s liking. What I’m trying to do is to find the balance between realizing the seriousness of the situation and dealing with it accordingly and sitting back and feeling sorry for myself. I certainly allow myself to feel self pity over finding myself in this situation, but on the other hand, I like to think back and see how often something surprisingly good has come of situations not unlike this one. I believe in luck, but I also believe that you - to a large extent - can create your own luck by “paving the way for it”, so to speak.
Watch me, on my knees, removing all the weeds and obstacles on luck’s path!
Yesterday I watched a new speech on TED. It’s with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, the “behavioural economist” about the substantial difference between the “remembering self” and the “experiencing self”. It goes a long way to describe how we perceive our past and why we often make such bad decisions based on that. I’m glad I saw it before the major decisions awaiting us ahead!
I’ve been reading some Danish blogs’n’stuff lately since I was in Denmark and was alerted to a friend’s new blog and reminded of an old favourite. If you don’t read Danish, don’t click these two links.
This woman writes about pink technology and how it’s a total turnoff for most women. So true, so true. I cannot think of anything more dreadful than a pink mobile phone with little sparkly thingies dangling from it.
She has also written an e-book about women and technology and divides us into Electronistas, Electroneutrals and Electronots. Well, as no surprise to any of my readers, I’m an Electronista. Trouble is, however, that I’m in reality far too old to be an Electronista, they are supposed to be younger than 35! Apparently, when you weren’t born into the tech age, you can’t be a true geek?
I’m the geekiest woman I know, maybe save one. In our home I do all things that have to do with technology, including opening envelopes from LoveFilm… I’m unafraid of technology but make no attempt to understand how it works and get annoyed when a tech product tries to tell me what to do and to prevent me from doing things it thinks I shouldn’t be doing (Windows) and when products are totally un-intuitive like my husband’s work Blackberry. When you’re used to an Iphone and prior to that to Nokia, the Blackberry seems devoid of logic. My Iphone is my best baby and I break out in cold sweat by the thought of losing it. It’s already a dinosaur, 1st generation, no 3G, 2 years old. But I adore it and use it for any thinkable and probably also some unthinkable purposes (no, you twat, not THAT unthinkable!!!).
My other best baby is my new Macbook Pro. I’m supposed to be able to make do with something much smaller and less powerful and that’s probably true. But my last MacBaby was exactly the same as this one and we had a loving relationship for 3+ years. So why change horses? (By the way, it still works and young son now uses it).
On my previous computer I had Microsoft Office installed. On this one I’ve avoided it so far, using the excellent Apple office package IWork and, mostly, Google Documents.
As you’ve guessed, because you’re so clever, I love all things Mac. I really can’t help it. When the Iphone first came out I tried to not like it, I tried to brush it off as yummy-tech for the Really Smart People. But I couldn’t. The thing about the Iphone has been that I have loved it more and more the longer I’ve owned it. There’s no grass that’s greener on the other side. Of course I’m now eying the IPad. I’m quite sure that I don’t want the first version. Mostly because I would like it as an E-Reader and it doesn’t have its bookstore ready for Europe yet. But also because I’d like to have Flash (rumour has it that the next version will sidestep Flash and use HTML 5. I honestly don’t know what that means, so I’ll just wait and see). And apparently you can’t use a USB stick on it but need Apple’s own special memory thingummies - I’m not sure I like that. But knowing Apple, all these things will be resolved in one of the next versions. That’s what happened with the Iphone; all the little things that irritated at first have been mended since. In the meantime, another rumour has it that Amazon will start giving away Kindles to all their Prime customers. Now THAT would be nice. Because I’m drowning in books and would very much like to stop buying pulped trees and start downloading.
Back to the pink. I so don’t understand why women will sink themselves and particularly their daughters into the Pink Pit. When I go shopping, both on the Interwebby (thanks Lulu) and IRL (in real life) I’m appalled at the amount of pink and glittery stuff offered to women and their daughters. It’s not that I can’t abide pink at all, I have a pink scarf somewhere and I used to have a pink t-shirt. In my bathroom I even have a line-up of pink coloured perfume bottles… What’s probably even more appalling is that it’s not just pink and glittery on the outside, very often it’s pink and glittery on the inside as well - understood in the sense that it speaks to women and girls as if they were morons and 2nd rate people.
As you may or may not have noticed, it was recently Valentine’s Day. Pink was everywhere. Where there was no pink was on Wired Magazine’s advice on how to win a geeky girl’s heart. Great advice, I would very much like to be at the receiving end of that kind of treatment and to some extent I am, thanks to my Dear Husband. But what so totally puzzles me is why this wouldn’t be a treat for any woman? Why does she have to be geeky (and why are there almost exclusively ads for men in Wired)?
In spite of the fact that I have two sons and a horde of nephews and only one niece, I’ve joined a network here in England called Pink Stinks. Go there and read about it. And, especially if you have daughters, do join!
Of the many, many brilliant speeches I’ve seen/listened to on TED, this is the one that has touched me the most. JK Rowling, I bow to your wisdom! This speech is perfect in an oratorical sense, I’m sure Cicero is nodding approvingly from the podium in the sky. It is wise, it is funny, it is profound, it is sweet and it is poignant. Although a big fan of the Harry Potter books, not only as entertainment for children but as literature in their own right, I had no idea that their author was such a warm and compassionate person.
Please take time out to listen to this speech. And please, when you’ve heard the first 5-10 minutes, don’t think you’ve heard it all, because you HAVEN’T! If she has touched the hearts of just 5-10 of the privileged young Harvard graduates she was speaking to, then a lot of good will come of it!
The first many times I heard this, I quietly wondered to myself, What do they mean? Earl Grey or Darjeeling? Slowly it dawned on me that tea (look it up, it’s a hot drink FFS) in this country often (but not always!) means the evening meal. But no, no, not as in dinner. Dinner is something grown-ups have. No, tea is for children. Something they have in the late afternoon instead of dinner. And dad is not there and mum doesn’t eat tea, erh. (Apologies to the lovely househusbands I know, but you know you’re in the minority).
There, now it’s clear isn’t it? Tea is an afternoon meal for children. This is where some of the world’s least interesting and innovative cooking takes place, molding young peoples taste buds for the future. I cannot tell you how that upsets me! I’ve been in many British homes and seen tea being cooked. What I’ve seen is pasta, mash, peas, carrots (yes, boiled), sausages, fish fingers, chips, lasagne, beans on toast and eh, what else? Rice perhaps?
I’m not saying that my darling young son eats everything I set in front of him, far from it. And he’s had plain pasta with Parmesan and butter and some cucumber slices on the side more times than I care to remember. But, he sits with us at the table, he sees and smells what I cook and he’s made to taste everything we eat, if not every time then at least once in a while.
I realise that the evening meal causes problems for some families. Dad comes home late, children need to go to bed early. But this is not the case in all families and not in weekends? And in families with bigger children, surely they can have an afternoon snack, have homework done etc., so have evening meal when dad comes home? I fear that it’s not always the time that’s the issue, but parents who give in to tradition or give up the fight to make children eat a varied and interesting diet. I mean, nobody forces mums to put a packet of crisps in a child’s lunch pack, or what?
My oldest son was as picky as the next child when he was younger, but I pushed on and pressured him to try stuff and if he didn’t eat all the stuff I cooked, he certainly saw it and smelled it. Today I can only think of a handful of foodstuffs that he doesn’t eat and he eagerly tries new stuff all the time. I know a few young persons of his age (21) in this country. Suffice to say that they are not exactly courageous when it comes to trying out different food stuffs.
Also, how does this strange habit encourage “real” family life? When do these families sit down and talk about things? Obviously, most days it’s just the usual, “What did you do in school?” “Nothing much” conversation that goes on, but without dinner time I don’t know when the three of us could discuss important political issues and moral dilemmas? It’s fine that children talk with dad in the car on the way to football and with mum in the car to school, but it’s important for children to experience the dialogue between mum and dad. Also when it’s not rosy. This way they can also experience that one day there’s disagreement, but the next day mum and dad are in unison on something very important!
OK people, rant over. Voice your disagreement, but please argue your case. I’ll sit down with a cup of tea now, you know, the fluid hot stuff off of tea leaves?
An app that has really and truly improved my life is the 
how it works and get annoyed when a tech product tries to tell me what to do and to prevent me from doing things it thinks I shouldn’t be doing (Windows) and when products are totally un-intuitive like my husband’s work Blackberry. When you’re used to an Iphone and prior to that to Nokia, the Blackberry seems devoid of logic. My Iphone is my best baby and I break out in cold sweat by the thought of losing it. It’s already a dinosaur, 1st generation, no 3G, 2 years old. But I adore it and use it for any thinkable and probably also some unthinkable purposes (no, you twat, not THAT unthinkable!!!).
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