Cheers, Owen!
Phew. I have just enjoyed the most rewarding shower, a lovely long, hot and strong affair. The Garden Party – which has been causing Abi and I great stress over the past week with a particularly hairy ‘we have no barbecue?’ few days towards the end – came off without a hitch. Despite a weather forecast of showers the rain held off, albeit threatening us with drops once or twice before deciding to be generous and give us sun. Many thanks are in order too: to Abi, obviously, to Owen, who did a fantastic job as head chef behind the barbecue despite not even being a historian, to Oliver and Joe who gave us loads of time rather than standing back and watching us struggle, to Sophie for her (wifely) moral support, to Tom, Felix and Richard for lending us their expertise gleamed last year – and, in Richard’s case, mixing our Pimm’s! – and to GCSU and the porters for everything. And to everyone who came, too! Hurray!
And everything turns out alright
Sorry about the poor quality photos, but they’re better than nothing and – as Owen put it – we wanted something to prove that it happened. Event management is hard though. I don’t know how my mother – or Nic – does it 
In fact, it wasn’t until it was all over that I suddenly remembered that it was Doctor Who tonight! So now Abi, Oliver and I have our evening’s entertainment all planned out too 
yay!
At this exact moment in time I feel slightly off: not, you may argue, the best time to be writing a blog. I think I blame GG for unwittingly fostering my current mini-addiction to Motorcycle Emptiness, but there’s also the weird realisation that as this term draws to a close that’s a whole year of uni over and done with. A whole year! Where on earth did all that time go? My final essay is a bit of a strange one, too – though quite fun at the same time – full of high-concept ‘history’ on ‘everyday life’. If people had been publishing blogs consistently across the twentieth century it would be a lot easier to write, that’s for sure.
I do look forward to the Caius History Society garden party on Saturday, largely because Abi and I are in charge of organising it and it’ll be a relief to see it through. We felt like real Apprentice candidates in Sainsbury’s the other day buying up supplies, half-expecting to see Nick or Margaret in the corner muttering sarcastically about some huge and costly mistake we were making. However, I do want to stress that at this point our (fully accounted) costs are coming in squarely on budget! So even if it is a disaster, it shouldn’t be an expensive disaster
Ooh – y’know what, blogging actually does improve my mood and I feel significantly better than ‘slightly off’ now. Isn’t that reassuring? It’s a rollercoaster emotional ride, this blog. Ooh and I’m suddenly reminded of one of the odd little moments of my day which deserve eternal preservation. As I was walking along this afternoon, in my own little music-enhanced world, I noticed some unexpected eye contact was occurring with a woman who – at a guess – would be in her mid 50s. And she was talking to me, too? Hmm, this could be important – what if she was seeking shelter from the Vashta Nerada in the sunlight? – so I paused whatever I was listening to and asked what was up. “Oh, I just noticed that that man riding his bicycle” – and she points to indicate said bicycle speeding into the distance – “had a rather impressive white beard. So I shouted it to him as he rode past.”
Now, I would love to say that I responded with some sort of quick witted response, or even something vaguely audible at all. Like “I suppose he’ll be hair today and gone tomorrow!” – although on reflection that rather implies that the man with the impressive white beard was also fast approaching death, so perhaps not. But you get the idea. Instead, I just stood there smiling in a look of utter confusion, unable to quite process the fact that a stranger was talking to me on the street without demanding my phone. She seemed to sense this, and kindly added “I’ve been outspoken all my life you see, so I’m not going to stop now.” Well, good on her! And indeed I managed to squeeze out “I think that’s a great way to live!” or something, before the awkward silence re-emerged and I waited through just enough seconds of yet more awkward smiling before I could politely walk on. But thank you, outspoken woman. You’re a fine example to us all.
I hold, in my hands, an exam paper. My exam paper. OK, so it isn’t really in my hands because I need my hands to type, and OK so it’s my coursework exam paper which I don’t actually hand until under after Christmas, but still! Unlike A-Levels they’ve actually taken the candidate number business seriously and used it instead of a name, rather than Britain’s exam boards awarding bodies who still get you to sign scripts. There are eleven questions and seven themes for me to make up my own question from, out of which I need to select one before my first and last supervision and thus teaching for this exam. Super. But it’s a false choice – a bit like school choice – because it just raises the anxiety level. What if I pick the wrong question? What if I spent the rest of the year staring at the blindingly obvious question I should have chosen instead? Oh, stress! But not really stress, because real stress is an actual exam in an actual exam hall which first year historians are magically exempt from.
Today (well, yesterday) was a rather productive day, with another essay completed and supervised. On race and immigration, which invites questions like ‘are people just hysterically anti-immigrant, or are they also really racist too?’ – although I must stress that this wasn’t actually my question. But it would be if I was setting it. But even more – more! – productive than doing this was making the amazing discovery of the difference between homogeneous and homogenous. Go on – without looking it up – I bet you don’t know? But I’ll remember this for the rest of my life now!
Tomorrow (well, today) is Natasha’s 16th birthday 
which, as ever, follows hot on the heals of mum’s birthday – double woos, yays and houplas! The experience has made me realise that birthday cards take on a whole new meaning if you’re actually sending them from somewhere other than the same house, and you can cram in letters and news and requests for money and stuff. Although I must stress that requesting money wasn’t actually what I did. But it would be if I was desperate.
And finally: it took him a little under a month, but Boris Johnson has finally put a great clunking foot wrong by scrapping half-price bus travel for those on income support. Well done, Boris, you’ve managed to double the fares of the very poor in a single stroke. I’m seriously starting to regret voting for him… although I must stress that, of course, I most certainly did not.
When New Labour came to power in 1997, they had a handy slogan for their educational policies: ‘standards, not structures’. It was more important, they argued, to focus on raising standards inside schools rather than muck about with the overall structure of the education system itself: convenient, too, because it avoided having to make any troublesome decisions over grammar schools. As policies go it had the unusual honour of being publically disavowed rather than quietly dropped, and the government soon set about upon a noble quest to make the already rather contorted structure of the nation’s schools that little bit more unfathomable by the year. The rest, as they say, is history.
Well, I thought I’d attempt to rescue the phrase from oblivion, because it occurred to me that whilst it was a wretched failure for education it does happen to perfectly describe how we should look at another contemporary debate surrounding the upbringing of children: the role of the family.
What makes a good parent? There’s clearly no perfect answer, and the truth is that a good parent is one who manages to improvise with both luck and skill. But I’m fairly confident that most people would agree that a good parent is one who loves, who disciplines, who teaches, guides and provides support when things go wrong. A good parent strikes the right balance between taking care of a child and letting them go, establishes trust, respect and – one would hope – a lifelong bond.
All pretty uncontroversial stuff. What still appears to be more controversial with some people is the fact that the precise structure of the family in which this happens matters about as much as the layout of the family’s garden shed. Sure, a heterosexual mother and father might be the most commonly occurring pattern, but does that make a single parent, gay couple or foster family any worse for being rarer? Of course not. The standard of parenting is the one and only important thing, and – humans being as they are – that’s something which will always vary across all types of families.
This is why it was such good news that MPs successfully defeated an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill this week which would have retained the discriminatory ‘need for a father’ wording used to restrict the use of IVF by single women and lesbian couples. It’s another legal step – as with civil partnerships – which quite clearly manoeuvres the law firmly out of arbitrating which family structures are preferred over others: an arena in which it quite simply does not belong.
There were, unexpectedly, some pretty odd arguments against the move. Some claimed that it was aimed at eliminating the role of fathers altogether, which is about as silly as saying that the government should legislate against only children to preserve the role of siblings. If there is a father, than that father will have a role; if there is no father in anything other than a strictly biological sense – as is the case with a lesbian couple – then there is no role for a father. It’s as simple as that. Others insisted that the clause simply ensured that a lesbian couple would consider the need to have some sort of male role model. Whilst I would agree that male role models are generally a good thing to have, it is frankly bizarre to expect such a thing to be enshrined in legislation: why not legislate that any single mother has to provide male role models, too? Who would enforce this, the Office for Male Role Models? Let’s just go the whole hog and have an Office for Good Parenting complete with twice-yearly inspections and the ability to levy fines against any parent found ignorant of the procedures of the naughty step. It is genuinely insulting to potential lesbian parents to single them out for legal lessons on how to bring up their children, as if this is something which wouldn’t be considered before embarking on the not exactly trivial procedure of IVF.
But a few voices distinguished themselves in the desperation of searching for a respectable concern. Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith was insistent that fathers filled the valuable role of showing their daughters that it was possible to have a loving relationship with men which didn’t involve sex. Presumably having two lesbian mothers wasn’t considered a similar indication that sex with men wasn’t an insurmountable fact of life. This was nothing, mind you, compared to Iris Robinson of the DUP, who opined on the horror of a child “going into the parents’ bedroom and finding two women making love or two men making love”.
It takes a pretty blinkered form of homophobia to forget that the standard of ‘not having sex in front of your child’ is one which really should be common to all parents, regardless of family structure.
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(…and what the silver linings are.)
1. My essay was poorly written which never really got to grips with the question, and I ran out of time on it.
But at least this gives me lots of left-over material for supervision tomorrow!
2. The Government abandoned the mooted handover of bits of the Southern rail franchise to TfL.
But it gives me more ammunition to hate Boris Johnson?
3. A guy from Newcastle thinks that the working classes are just naturally stupid and university admissions aren’t an issue.
But he’s wrong.
4. The Themes and Sources examination paper reminds me that I’ve got coursework over the summer.
But the questions don’t look too bad…
5. My cheese feast pizza disappeared from the fridge at precisely the moment that I was starving with hunger.
There is no bright side to this.
Bad Things Update – I totally forgot about finding out about how The Apprentice ends before I had a chance to see it! And ends badly. And now I can add forgetting to put this on the list on the list, too
Helen on It’s (waiting) time.: “Fabulous news, congratulations to you both! X” Jun 8, 21:51
