Mrs Happy

Just because it’s good to remind myself sometimes, here are some ordinary everyday things that make me happy:

Walking up a hill/through the woods/on a beach/away from it all

Cooking for my family

Weather. Pretty much any weather except sideways sleet.

Singing harmonies

Wearing flipflops

Big waves

Soft snow

Catching up with old friends and realising they haven’t changed in 20 years

When my kids voluntarily hold my hands in public

The smell of gorse blossoms and pine trees

Having a good man around the house

Picking vegetables from my garden

Meeting people who are genuinely but not obnoxiously eccentric

The first sip of coffee in the morning

Quietness

Music most people think of as weird hillbilly shit

A pile of muddy boots by the door

Never having watched a full episode of the X Factor or I’m a Celebrity…

Having a house full of kids who are playing happily without anything involving electronics or batteries

Finding a funky bit of clothing in a charity shop, and it fits

Watching a good game of rugby

Splattering through mud on my bike and getting some on my face

My neighbour’s cat, Felix, who purrs whenever I pick him up

That little rush of excitement at the start of a movie you really want to see

A bath before bed

Driving my little Skoda on a country road

Seeing a really cool bird, like an owl or a dipper

Book shops

Feeling really knackered after a good run/swim/hike

Reading something I’ve written and liking it

A group hug with Claire, Eileen, Elaine, Sylvia and Karine

Leaving work at the end of the day

Looking back over my long list, and realising there are a lot more things I could still put on there.

5 Reasons for Marching

30 November 2011. The largest single day of industrial action the United Kingdom has seen since the 1970s. I was on strike, as were school and nursery, so the kids and I went into Edinburgh to take part in the march to the Parliament at Holyrood.

The government has suggested this strike is the work of militants and old-school class warriors- and of course there were some of those there, along with the new-school class warriors of the Occupy movement– but they were very much in the minority as we made our way down the Royal Mile. The people in the streets of Edinburgh were head teachers, who have never voted to strike before in the history of their union, university lecturers, nurses, care workers, museum workers, court staff, local government workers and managers alike. I’m guessing at least 65% of us were women. Some very well paid, some very low, most probably about average.

The lack of informed discussion in the media and in the chambers of government is frustrating. The ease with which public sector workers have been demonised for the failings of bankers and politicians of all parties–is infuriating. The failure of the chattering classes to demand a more intelligent debate is typical.

So all we can do is try to articulate our own reasons for lining up behind the union banner. These are mine.

1) Pensions. The issue at the heart of the dispute but possibly only the last of many  straws. The argument is that if you live longer, you should expect to work longer. Well, okay…provided you are healthy. A great many people are not, at 67. And what if you’re not fit enough to do your job? You leave work (because it’s pretty bloody hard to find alternative employment in your 60s, ask anyone who has tried it) and go onto benefits? Public spending goes up instead of down. And the move to the career-average earning from the final salary scheme…God help you if you’ve chosen to work part time for even a relatively short chunk of your career to be an active rather than an absent parent.

2) These pension cuts will affect women more severely, and in far greater numbers, than they will men. This is a reversal of the Equal Pay movement by the back door.

3) Public sector pensions are still better than private sector ones. Well…yes, at the moment. Folks in the private sector have it rough these days as well. (Some of them. The bankers still have it pretty good.) So what? I don’t want the people who are teaching my children, patrolling my streets or looking after me in hospital to be so demoralised, angry and worried about poverty that they can’t do their jobs well.

4) We public sector workers are taxpayers too. In some parts of this country, we amount to the MAJORITY of the working, tax-paying population. If you push us into poverty- either through pay caps in a time of of ever-rising inflation, job cuts or pension cuts, you cut your tax income. Which leads us on to…

5. The Paradox of Thrift. Cutting too hard too fast at a time of high inflation and high unemployment is very likely to increase public debt over both the short and longer term, rather than reduce it. Even the IMF says so.

These were just a few of the things going through my head as I waved my Unison flag today, and as I read some of the more reactionary newspaper commentary and Facebook posts afterwards. I’ve been reading a lot of economics articles and research these days- intellectually, I am reassured that there is evidence to back up what I believe in my core to be correct. It felt correct to be part of that torrent of bodies flowing down the ancient Old Town street. It feels correct that Jamie and Susanna now understand what a strike is, what it’s like to march and sing and raise their voices, what a union is (or at least should be) and what a picket line is. For their sakes, I hope they never have to stand on one for more than a single day.

Quiet complicity

I stirred up some hornets at work today.

My employer, like so many now in the public sector, is bringing in a new system for assessing the performance of staff. For better or worse, annual incremental pay rises will now be linked to performance. This morning I had my first look at the bit of paper which will form the basis of employees’ annual appraisal, and there in hard black print, are the following words:

If no increment is being awarded please select the reason below: Minimum time not met – Maternity  leave 

I sat there blinking at this for a moment, then popped my head up above the computer screen and said, “Hey guys, have you read this?  This can’t be right.”

“Rebecca,” my colleague asked me with a sly grin, “do you have something to tell us?”

“No, I most certainly do not. I am not pregnant and have no plans to be ever again.” I felt my voice rising and cheeks flushing. “That’s not the point.”

The point is that to deny someone the chance of a pay increase because they have taken the maternity leave to which they have a right is, in my mind, quite certainly illegal under UK Equalities legislation. There is no reference to paternity leave or any other type of family leave which might be taken by either a mother or a father. Only maternity leave. Only leave taken by women.

“I’m raising a complaint about this.”

And my colleagues’ heads disappeared quickly behind their own computers, eager perhaps to dissociate themselves from the rebel in the corner.  ”Ooh,” said one, like she was trying not to laugh, “good luck with that.”

To give my employer the benefit of the doubt, this is a careless oversight rather than a blatantly discriminatory move against women. I certainly hope so, anyway. And I hope they are willing to rewrite this without any kind of protracted argument. But all day I’ve been riding a wave of indignation, partly at the words on the form but also at the failure of some of my colleagues– my FEMALE colleagues–to display the same anger that had so overwhelmed me. Why didn’t their jaws hit the desk the way mine did?

And I can’t help but think that it’s because we have become so afraid, as employees and as a society, to speak up against the injustices that are done to us by those in power that we pretend we don’t see them. We are going to wake up one day soon and find that all the things our grandmothers and grandfathers fought and sometimes died for are gone. Things like equality and fair pay and workers’ rights. We don’t speak up because we’ve swallowed a myth. The myth is that you can always achieve more. You can always improve. With right attitude and the right gadgets you can always please more people with less money, less time, less medicine, less service, more more more for less less less. You can split yourself into ever tinier bits so that you can do right by your boss, your customers, your children, your partner, your 1,752 Facebook friends, your dog, your cat, and last but of course not least yourself, all at the same time. You can have continuous economic growth without some fundamentals eventually drying up and breaking down. Over the last day or so, I’ve heard a lot of people saying that Steve Jobs made the world a better place. Without denying the genius of the man and his inventions- one of which I am now typing on- I have to wonder: did he really? Is the world really a better place because you can take all your work home with you on your iPhone?

To be quiet in the face of overt injustice is to be complicit in it, so goes the saying. A voice in my head tells me I shouldn’t publish this particular blog. I could get hauled over the coals for this. Another, stronger voice, which sounds curiously like that of my dear late grandmother Lucy- who never learned to bite her tongue-tells me I have to.

Lucy

So speaking of turtles and the things that hold you up… My grandmother Lucy died last week. She had a certain force about her, something commanding and elemental, like gravity. Something that let you know that she was the centre of her own particular universe. I am just a little fragment thrown out there into space. My orbit takes me far away sometimes, but never so far as to be beyond her reach.

Sometimes, I have to admit, her glare was too bright for me. Her opinions, unfiltered as they mostly always were, could burn and her wisdom was best absorbed in small doses. She taught me that a grandmother’s love can be critical, as she corrected my pronunciation (she so preferred rounded East Coast vowels to my flat western tones), my use of cutlery or the way I brushed my hair. She taught me that you can’t hide anything from your family- most memorably by unearthing an illicit bottle of vodka in the process of cleaning out my closet when I was in high school (I should have known better- she always cleaned out my closet when she visited).

She taught me how to find my contrary streak…after all, I think I inherited it from her. She taught me a lot of other things too…fundamental rules for life. Commandments without the God part. You can’t argue with them, because they are as truthful as the sun. Here are some:

•                Christmas presents are more gratifying after breakfast….after the dishes have been washed, dried, put away…and then one at a time, so that that unwrapping becomes a gruelling, day-long ritual which does justice to the money and effort expended in buying them and wrapping them in the first place.

•                Spices should be stored in alphabetical order.

•                A Dustbuster is a household essential.

•                Never, NEVER cross a picket line.

•                A woman’s handbag should always contain chewing gum, a little notepad and pen, and a perfumed handkerchief.

•                To play Scrabble- but not well enough to beat her.

•                That it is almost impossible to like someone whose political views are very different to your own.

•                That you should always make sure your floors are clean before going away on a trip.

Lucy– Lux–the star at the centre of our little world, she casts a very bright light which will shine for a long time. My orbit will always be shaped by her force. Every time I find myself sweeping the floor while the family waits impatiently in the car for me, and every time I correct Jamie when he says “I done it” instead of “I did it”, and when I walk out on strike, as we most likely will this winter in protest against the public spending cuts in the UK, I will think of her and smile and know she has made me what I am.

Walking to the top

On Saturday we walked up Turnhouse Hill from Flotterstone in the Pentland Hills, with son Jamie (9) and daughter Susanna (4). Turnhouse is the first of the hills that rises steeply above Glencorse Reservoir, an easy escape into the wind-blasted wilds just a few miles from the centre of Edinburgh. This is one of the things I love best about Scotland: the way the hills brood just outside our little cities like grumbly old dragons.

For the seasoned hillwalker, Turnhouse is nothing much- a steepish ascent of around 1000 feet from the carpark at Flotterstone- but it’s a big daunting mountain for little legs. The kids had managed halfway up on a bitter New Year day at the start of the year, moaning their way through the wind to a little stand of gnarled trees that marks the top of the most difficult part of the climb. So, with confidence brought about by better weather and the benefit of nine months’ growth, we set out to beat our previous mark and reach the top. When we reached the trees, we sat on the damp, spongy moss under their branches and had some water and fruit. Then we pressed onwards. They had climbed largely without complaint until this point, but as we faced another sharp incline beyond the stand of trees, the moaning started in earnest.

I know the feeling. A wall of mud, stone, heather and slippy grass rises up in front of your face, and you look up with the almost heartbreaking realisation that the level patch you have reached isn’t the summit, or anywhere close to it. Your legs start to shake. This is not the kind of climb I would have managed as a four year old, or even likely as a nine year old- though for one reason and another my parents never challenged me to try. A little guilt hovered in the back of my mind; maybe this was too hard for them. Maybe it was unfair of us to push them so hard just to satisfy our own selfish need to reach a peak.

But there I was, driving them both from behind, issuing words of encouragement like Mama Drill Instructor. Place your feet carefully, keep your legs moving, slow and steady. Try not to look up. Just think how proud you’ll be. If you make it all the way, you can play video games to your hearts’ content when you get home. That kind of thing. And the occasional Stop, look at that view. We looked back at the precipitous path we’d just climbed, and out over the little county of Midlothian, almost able to identify our house in a greyish row at the top of the Esk Valley, five or six miles away. Then beyond, to the east and the shadowed Firth of Forth, and the Moorfoot Hills to the south. Then climbing on, one foot at a time, not looking up.

And then the top came. The best part of any hillwalk, for me, is the point where the path levels out and you can see the summit cairn there, just a few easy metres in front of you. The incessant wind whips around you from all directions and you might almost spread your arms and fly away. Susanna jumped up and down and Jamie gave a “Woo hoo!” into the wind. We placed our stones onto the cairn, and started down the other side. One little Scottish hill conquered by brave little Scottish legs. So many more to come. I can’t wait.

On the Back of a Turtle

 One of my favourite anthropologists, Clifford Geertz, once wrote:

There is an Indian story–at least I heard it as an Indian story –about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? “Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.”

Right now I can’t help but think that the turtles are getting restless. After all, who could blame them? The load on their backs gets heavier and thornier by the minute.  And so I have to wonder: what happens if they decide to pack it in completely and swim off into space. The poor old elephant won’t stand a chance. Neither will we.

I have almost completely stopped watching the news. Like my grandmother Lucy, I am prone to fits of depression over global events I can’t control. These days of natural disasters and nuclear meltdowns, financial crises, wars and fuel prices could easily send me running for the Prozac. I have to ration my intake of news to ten minutes a day, or a bit of radio time driving home from work.  But it’s enough.

The thing that strikes me is that we treat all of these events as separate things- but really they’re all part of the same old stack of turtles, each one precariously balanced on the back of the other.  Take any single reptile out, the whole caboodle threatens to come crashing down.

So what do we do about these turtles, then? For me, it’s about trying to find the balance in my own life here on this wobbly old pile. It’s about lifestyles. I have more or less rejected the ambition and material aspirations I had when I was much younger, and set my sights on more modest goals: to cook good meals and sit down with my family for tea most nights, to raise happy children, to find time for creativity, to be able to laugh a little- or better, a lot-each day.  Last week I planted vegetables and decided to move my savings from a certain bank (much in the news of late for its role in the global financial meltdown) to my credit union. Both things felt good. I heard the turtles give a little sigh of relief.