That bloody woman...

It's very difficult to talk about Katie Hopkins, primarily known for resigning from The Apprentice and engaging in al fresco sex with married fellas, without resorting to schoolyard jibes about her appearance and kicking all the furniture and pets within reach, while simultaneously frothing at the mouth and spitting obscenities.

Well that's the effect she has on me.

Her latest zinger is claiming that Kelly Brook is "a chubster" and that any working woman "can be a size 8" just like her, and that they should just "eat less and move about more".

So far, so simplistic.

I'm not tall, but even at under 6 stone 13lbs/97lbs at one point in my life, I was never a size 8. What I'd like to know, what would she recommend doing in my case, as I am blessed with a sturdy frame? Is someone going to come out with an all new bone-slimming diet? Should I grate myself on a full length sanding block to get my body down to achieve the necessary proportions? Or can I narrow my shoulders and ribcage purely by force of will?

Yet again, we see this lining up of slimness being passed off as virtue, or "if only they can exhibit the same amount of will power as me, then they will be perfect". Virtue is being kind to people, virtue is not the ability to get into a dress size. If the world is full of tactless TV trolls like Katie, I'm moving to Mars.

Talk about going full circle.

Crown Court Sentencings to be Televised

Every now and then, I get a creeping feeling that in 2010, I awoke one May morning into a grim political dystopia, probably muttering the entirely futile words "Look what you've done now..." and "I didn't vote for the bastards, it's your own fault".

Oh wait, oh dear, that did actually happen.

So despite driving 500,000 to such depths of poverty through benefits changes, under-employment or unemployment that they have to rely on food banks to survive, making it easier to sack the people who are, by their labour, underpinning your economy, doesn't appear to be enough.  Where A girl called Jack is faced with the challenge of raising a child on £10 a week.  Of course, all the while the 1% scoff the gourmet burgers, trouser their healthy bonuses/expenses and have a right old chuckle about how many people they've put out of work this week. (Apologies - Link to the Daily Mail).

We are in the tail is wagging the dog territory here. The government are meant to be serving us, sensibly and fairly, and to a certain extent, protecting the populace from their baser instincts. Besides if you fancy baying at the TV, we already have Jeremy Kyle so if you feel the urge to berate people with chaotic lives with an intriguingly loose moral framework, Bob's your uncle. Though if you prefer your vowels rounder and your suits better cut, you can always catch Boris on Question Time or HIGNFY - Or there'll be something on somewhere about Alan Clarke - Shaky grasps on certain social and moral subjects R' Us apparently.

I'm probably being terribly naive here, but I thought the mark of a civilised society was supposed to be that despite the level of your despair and desolation, if you committed a crime, you were treated soberly and respectfully by the justice system and not exposed to the indignities of public sentencing and public punishments. You know, like we used to do, and it was apparently terribly barbaric and unfair?

That is all this is, the government state that it appeals to the need to see justice done, but if anything, it appeals more for our desire for collective revenge. Our baser instincts. While all the time, our rights are eroded when we're distracted by a pantomime of justice.

Showing sentencing on television isn't constructive or likely to build trust in the justice system, it's public flogging or throwing rotten tomatoes at someone in the town square.

Golly, I end up talking about boobs quite often, don't I?

One of those "Mate, you are clearly having a giraffe" moments...

I read this...

Now Angelina Jolie is a bit of a divisive figure for some people, but not for me. She is an incredible advocate for victims of sexual violence in Africa for the UN and truly does use her fame to the benefit of the disenfranchised. She also seems pretty determined to dance to the beat of her own drum.

I like that in a person.

Her openness about her decision to have a double mastectomy is brilliant. My ghast is also truly flabbered that she worked through all this without a word to anybody.

What irks me are comments like this one...

love to Angelina, but if the cure to breast cancer is that woman have to get their breasts removed before they get cancer, we are in trouble

Where do I start?

An individual woman with a "highly-unlikely-to-not-be-life-threatening" gene mutation decides to have a radical procedure that will (unless she's hit by a bus mid op...) improve her life expectancy. The writers' assumption with this statement is that we're all going to start cutting our norks off willy-nilly because we're frightened of getting cancer. An 87% risk of developing breast cancer is a pretty compelling  reason to have a mastectomy.

(See also "Why do women have preventative surgery?" - I'm looking at you, HuffPo).

The wimmins are not a homogenous mass, solely defined by hair colour, "hotness" and breast size. Please get this into your pathetic noggin.

There is nothing whimsical about making the decision to have a double mastectomy.  The BRCA gene test was only made more widely available in the last 7 or 8 years, and this discovery offers a real life line to families whose mothers, sisters, daughters, grandmothers and aunts have died at far too young an age, or lived under the threat of a early painful death. Good treatments for diseases don't exactly fall fully formed from the sky. I once knew someone who had a full mastectomy and reconstruction aged 21, after being diagnosed with breast cancer. I think she'd rather have been on the lash, don't you?

I mean, what can be more selfish that not wanting your family (and children if you have them) to see you dying slowly and far too soon? And not living in fear that one day you're going to find a lump when you're idly showering? Having to tell your kid that, you're very sick, or that you are going to die?

Personally, I'd take the op. The ladies aren't having the boobies cut off to upset you, capiche?

*Previous breasty ruminations can found here...

Duffed no more: The problem with raw (ish) census data and the mookswho write about it....

I made the error of stumbling across this rather judgemental pile of shite earlier and had to share:

Census reveals that fewer women are staying at home to raise children.

Official figures show that there are now 300,000 fewer mothers at home that previously estimated.
Experts said that those who decide to sacrifice their career in order to look after their children at home are now considered in the minority.
According to returns in the 2011 census, there are almost 1.6 million women who do not work because they are looking after their home and family.
This is about 298,000 fewer than estimates previously, the Office for National Statistics said.

Well, whoopy-chuffing-do. I would like to say that I'm not dissing Stay-at-home parents here, and if I'm honest, I'd have liked to have gone back to work later...those of you who get to stay home with your kids, you're doing a grand and frequently hard job and I salute you....however as a parent with a ("career") job, I find the underlying assumption that I'm gadding about pursuing a career for entirely my own ends at the expense of my kid rather galling.

1. I love the fact that this study starts with a rather wrong estimate regarding how many women were actually at home looking after their kids, which clearly meant sweet Fanny Adams and wasn't actually based on any kind of cogent facts. 300,000, even in a population of 60+ million is still a hefty margin of error, given the demographic profile..woman, child bearing age etc.
2. "Those who decide to sacrifice their career....". Last time I looked, it wasn't 1954, and sometimes people (i.e. women - because the last time I looked, we were people too - or did I just miss a meeting?) may have worked very hard to achieve something and don't see the benefit in just kicking it all in when they pup. 
3. Positive financially responsible female role models and all that - if I had a daughter, I'd prefer it if she didn't think getting duffed by a Premiership footballer was a reasonable way to make a living.
4. Also having a kid doesn't automatically make you Joan of Arc...sacrifice?...*really*?
5. As we're in the middle of/end of/wherever point in the whole-time-space continuum of the worst recession since the Great Depression, strangely enough some people/couples would prefer to spread the risk, especially in light of the fact that the Coalition have just cut the 90 day waiting period for large scale redundancies by half.........Um, making the people who are propping up the economy easier to sack, that'll help. So....reducing the help they receive while in work, *and* cutting them off at the knees when they do lose their jobs is frankly a right bag of old wank. In order for women (or men ffs) to spend more time at home with the kids, there needs to be the resources to do it....and to use a food based metaphor, if the familial eggs aren't going to get scrambled, it's best that they aren't all in one basket.
6. Houses - we like to live in them and they cost a bomb.
7. Bloody Nora, why am I still having to have this conversation? Necessity is the mother of invention...and graft, unfortunately.

Honestly, do these people think we live in a perfumed floral 50's cloud where Daddy has a job for life that'll support everyone? Balancing work and families has been the reality for women for centuries...just deal with it. It'll make life easier for everyone.

So...Mr Rhyming Slang...and your tragically ill-informed mates

The case of Savita Halappanavar has highlighted why I will never, ever stop banging on about this. Since becoming a parent, I've become actually more pro-choice than I was before. I didn't actually believe that was possible.

So....Mr Rhyming Slang....

Yes, that's you, Mr.Hunt, oh and you, Dorries, you fame-chasing-right-wing-press-baiting-blogger-harassing-half-wit, now hopefully up to your nipples in rats, spiders, centipedes and soap stars who are approaching the brick wall of the end of their careers like a stampeding bull on whizz. Oh, and you too, Cameron, Romney, Ryan, Bachman and Palin.

I hope you're feeling suitably scared by my teeny blog with a teeny audience.

Right, hat in the ring.

The stuff that goes on the wombs and love tunnels of the world (and that corner of the world that you exercise a degree of influence over) has *nothing* to do with you.

If you're going to take a role like "Secretary of State for Health", a tiny bit of medical knowledge is generally useful. Also, as a very recent parent (I'm looking at YOU, Mr Hunt), one would hope that a tiny bit of attention *might* have been paid to little things like when certain scans occurred on ye-olde-up-the-duff time line that tell you whether or not your kid is likely to, oh, live....and stuff.

What these halfwits don't seem to realise is that, if they erode the rights as they currently exist, they run the risk of ending up killing a woman because the fading heartbeat of the baby she's losing is more important. That is what happened here, all because some people believe that Sky Dad says no. They also seem to have convincingly ignored that by doing this, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that this could bite them on the arse, personally.

I like that fact that our fine and admirable medical profession in the UK (especially obstetrics and gynaecology because they are the ones I've had more to do with recently) are focused on trying to ensure the best outcomes for everybody. Delaying life saving treatment (because that's what Savita would have really been getting because that miscarriage could not have been prevented) cost a woman her life.

Not good enough, not acceptable, please let birth and pregnancy be dealt with appropriately...and political types.....shhhhh, before you make more of a fool of yourselves.

Duffed no more - Trying to be good...

When pregnant, I realised something awful.  Women are using a very big stick to beat ourselves with (in addition to The Daily Mail doing it for us) in our constant desire to be seen to be "good" when it's all total bollocks. This isn't news, so why the hell do I feel compelled to say it again?

I, for one, didn't sign up for that crap. I also wish I could have believed (I did in my brain, but not really in my gut for quite a while) my friends who said "Trust your own judgement, it's probably pretty sound." about the whole parenting mularky so let's tell the Moaning Minnies and Judgy Joans to do one. I was a child of the 70's and I turned out ok etc etc etc.....obsessive parenting and feeling guilty gets you nowhere and at the end of the day, "good" also doesn't actually mean "perfect".

I declare today (and tomorrow and the day after) to be the time that we try, for a whole 10 minutes at least per day, to not feel fking guilty about something we're doing that *might* tenuously, possibly affect your baby and their development and/or future emotional well-being.

Be loving, be kind, talk, sing about as well as the sad deluded people on X factor,  dance like someone is electrocuting your feet, read to them a bit, remember that cbeebies/formula/playpens are not the work of Satan, say no to everybody once in a while and look after yourself and be kind - to yourself. Happy parents are good parents as a rule - and the chances are that you probably are great at it, and you're a beautiful person. Shut the voices out and tell every negative Nelly to foxtrot oscar for a while - go on, you know you'll enjoy it. x

P.S. everyone benefits...bugger...I'm being positive..."tsk *eye roll*...children"...

Duffed - Paranoia

One of the problems with being the kind of person that likes to keep themselves well informed, is that becomes apparent that when it comes to pregnancy, childbirth and parenting, there is such a thing as being *too* well informed. I know anecdotally, that just about everyone I know has had a wobble where they have thought that something they've done might cause a problem, and that they are/will be a craptacular parent as a result. While the support that you can get from certain on-line and NHS resources can be brilliant and there's a lot of good useful information out there, there's also a lot of opinion masquerading as advice that serves no useful purpose apart from making you feel bad and pissing on your chips. The disparity between the opinions of the midwives on the ward was quite startling so once the rest of the world wades in, it's fair to say that there'll be a period when you won't know whether you're Arthur or Martha.

Filtering this tripe (when you're knackered) is an onerous task...so it's hardly a surprise that quite a lot of new mothers have a wee bout of paranoia...