Clam Bake

I was in the hairdresser's on Saturdaymorning getting my roots to resemble the natural colour of the rest of my hair (why is it that a "natural look" costs so much and only lasts about 4 weeks or combed the right way 5) There was a lady there who was obviously quite confused, she had left her house with only her purse, leaving her house keys and handbag at home on the kitchen table. The hairdresser was great with her and soon worked out how to sort out getting her home and leaving her with her dignity. I thought I recognised the lady's face and I did recognise the look in her eyes which is a feature of people dealing with the early stages of Dementia.

Her daughter arrived to collect her in a flurry of the salmon pink raincoat that is the uniform of those who embrace middle age with gusto. I didn't for a minute recognise her but then I did, she was the girl at school who had it all; well I least I thought she had it all. She was very, very pretty and with long blonde hair and the whitest of white ankle socks; I wondered if she had a brand new pair for every day, nobody could get their socks that white, they positively glowed as did she. She had it all in my book, slim, long blonde hair, peaches and cream skin and clever to boot. She also had the best looking boy in the school who I lusted after from a distance - they were an item from they were 14 and were still an item 36 years later.

She was like Sandy out of Grease before John revolting gave her a crash course in rocker chick couture and she was still like Sandy out of Grease except that Sandy's blonde flip was now a sensible silver bob and her drindl was replaced by a navy pleated skirt just hovering above the knee with "candle glow" tights and navy court shoes. In truth, her poor old mum, albeit a bit doo lally, was more fashionably dressed in a nice linen skirt and matching blouse. Ok, I currently resembled a crack house christmas tree and was only a year or so younger, there was a lot more separating us, she seemed to have added the trappings of 20 or so years before she had lived the 20 odd years. I don't try to dress like a 20 something but I don't feel the need to join the the blessed legion of polyester just yet. My hair is best described as the explosion in the mattress factory look - my colleagues get jumpy if I wear it flat - according to my managers they think the flat hair means I am going to deliver bad news.

Seems the girl who had it all is now the silver, sensible-shod primary carer for the mother who managed to get her ankle socks to glow and the fat kid with the lank hair, spots and national health glasses who was lucky to have a pair of socks at all, hasn't sucumbed to the salmon pink raincoat, and while she doesn't forget her roots, she does ensure that they remain true to her ends.

Fangs for the Memories

Today I want to talk about phobias, not generally but mine. I am conscious of the fact that bloggus interruptus may occur as my phobia, well one of them may prevent me from going on with this - as in I may have to distract myself by whatever means I can which may include leaving the house.

I will start with the minor irritations as opposed to the big kahuna - these I can deal with without coming out in a cold sweat or feeling that sensation of cotton wool in my chest.

Anyway, cigarette ends is one - I am not on any anti puffers podium nor do I mind people smoking its the end product I can't stand. I am unable to lift fag ends without wearing rubber gloves or wrapping news paper round my hands. Its the smell that gets me and makes me chunder. I think it may be something to do with my parental unit being from the war generation where non-filter fags were partially smoked extinguished and then re-lit later I never liked that smell.

Moving swiftly on, I am not struck on winged instruments, that is birds. I don't mind them wandering around as long as they don't flap and wander around me that is. Last time I went to the local park it was bucketing with rain and the swans and geese and ducks were hungry and I had brought a couple of loaves of bread and was standing chucking big bits into the water when they got me in a pincer movement, I was circled by a pulsating pavlova of white wings and shrill squawking as they competed with each other for my bags of bread. Well, I ran screaming back to the safety of my car with every man, woman, child and their dogs laughing at the sight of this crazed banshee creature sliding over the swan shit in the pouring rain.

Of course, I have been building up to the main event the jaws of my dilemma the molars of my mortification, and the root cause of my problem - FALSE TEETH there I said it. I am now focusing very intently on what I am typing as opposed to the mental images that are skipping across my conscious like little dental plates of tiller girls doing a steradent frothed can-can in my mind.

As a child I didn't like it when my elderly great aunt, she of the white hair, white powdery complexion topped off with blood red lips that made her look like a ghostly geisha, used to think it was funny to let her top set slip down and act out the giant from Jack and the beanstalk...fee..fi..fo..fum..

It got worse over the years and actually made me switch careers in my early days from nursing to social work nursing = potential to have to deal with false teeth, removing them, washing them and refitting them like a bloody bricklayer shuggling them to get them to fit in the gummy cavity wall lining.

I can't even watch The Simpsons when Granpa's falsers are on the move like into Santa's Little Helper's mouth I have to turn away. And if there is a You've Been Framed type programme on the giggle box I keep a cushion handy to cover my face.

I am not dental phobic and have no problem going to the dentist and injections, drills and pain don't bother me but they know to move all sightings of plates and bridges out of my line of sight.

Its not really even the teeth bit that gets me, its the pinky, shiny, plastic pretend gums, attached to them like a set of mouth based maracas with a smattering of chattering.

This is not meant to offend people who have dentures, despite me making light of it, its as real to me as say a fear of spiders is to another person.

Now off for some retail therapy.

Nostrildamus

Snoring - we all do it and it doesn't bother us because if we are snoring, we tend to be asleep at the time.

I have, of course, been known to wake myself up with the volume and ferocity of a rogue snore, the noise and the impact on the nasal passages serving to make one's cheeks wobble with the force resembling the thrust of a drag racer. Those isolated incidents aside, I have generally been on the receiving end of the snoring of others. Last night, I was in the snore zone, that is on the down wind of the sinus-charged, lip quivering, blunderbuss that is SO's nose in full on snore.

Ok, he has the propensity to offer a few mellow drones from his not unimpressive durante, especially if he and Stella (Artois) have got cosy of an evening in front of the giggle-box, but on such occasions a swift shove to the rib-cage and a request (ahem) to lie on his side as opposed to his normal flat on his back sleeping position, generally has the desired effect. Depending on just how asleep he is and of course, just how awake I am, it may take one or two additional suggestions from me before his snore trap-door shuts and normal slumber resumes.

Last night I was introduced to the full range of his snoring repetoire a veritable banquet of bellows, a smorgasbord of sound and a gazpacho of gurgles - all at soundbarrier breaking decibels. All my poking, prodding and pleading fell on deaf ears, which is understandble given the noise coming from his snout it was unlikely he could hear himself let alone my pleas for snore ease.

I even tried a spot of cognitive behavioural therapy - pavlov's bog - "darling you need to go to the bathroom don't you, why don't you go now before "we" settle back to sleep" (coupled with a gentle pressure to the P-Zone) all to no avail, he slept and I nearly wept.

I couldn't understand why my usual tactics to deal with his before dawn chorus hadn't worked. It was only when his call of the wild was interspersed with coughs and sneezes did I realise that his snoreplay was foreplay to the main event - a horrible head cold and sinusitus. But that was after he decided to sleep on the settee which in my carnaptious lack of sleep mood was sofa so good.

Hopefully, the decongestants and vapour rubs will help to calm his nasal noise and throaty throttle. But if we have a repeat performance tonight, my tolerance levels will have improved as his night music now includes a sick-note. zzzzzzz......zzzzz

R

Murder Moth Foul

They just make the top ten in my list of phobias and I can cope with small ones but last night there were three in the bathroom that all had small engines. I didn't notice them until I sat down and they didn't move, at first.

I blame SO (my significant other) he not only left the bathroom light on like a bloody lighthouse beacon, he also left the bathroom window open thus affording the winged instruments open passage to their own laser light show, in this case the brace of spotlights.

I wasn't terribly comfortable knowing they were there but I didn't reach the blood curdling yell stage until the biggest one who I swear looked at me with beady eyes and fangs, took of from his position on the tiled wall by the bath. All I could do was close my eyes and cover my face. Of course I felt the batter of his wings against my hair and let out a scream worthy of the hapless victim in a horror romp. SO having managed to extract himself from the telly, bounced up the stairs full of concern. "What's wrong?" he proffered, "I'll tell you what's delete the expletive wrong!, get those delete the expletive, winged delete the expletive out of here now!" replied I.

By this stage I had gathered up a significant wodge of bog roll and was using it to stifle my screams. SO had become the caped crusader complete with shoe box and magazine and was able to capture the largest of the beasts and release it out the bathroom window. I hurriedly made my escape to the bedroom only returning to complete my bed time ablutions when I assumed the coast was clear. The coast might have been clear but the bathroom wasn't; as I was leaning over the wash basin a winged terror rose from behind a tube of facial scrub like a harrier jump jet the buzz of its wings sending a trickle of fear running down my spine. I realised later that the buzz may have been from my toothbrush. I made my escape to the darkness of my bedroom and yelled down to captain comatose that he better get up the stairs pronto and get rid of mothman otherwise my prophecy was that he would be sleeping on the sofa - SO not mothman.

I realise my fear is wholly irrational and that those poor wee creatures would not harm me but the blattering of their wings creates a chaos theory in my head and no amount of cognitive behavioural therapy is going to shift it.

As I said to SO if spiders had wings then he would perhaps understand how I feel. Of course if moths came equipped with false teeth, I would be dead if I had the wit to stiffen ...gibber.

It's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it

No more money for nothing or unemployment cheques for free. The new Work Programme will replace the current back to work schemes and provide a coherent package of support for people out of work, regardless of the barriers they face or the benefits they claim, or so they say. Unemployed people have rights as citizens they are not the cause of the financial crisis but an easy target to blame - whilst not exactly placing economically inactive people including those on incapacity benefit into a sin bin there is a definite 'moral' undertone - a bit of "priggy banking" going on and a pushing of helping people into work (what work?) and sanctioning those ( i.e. reducing benefits) who don't respond to this help.

We could applaud DC/NC for hot wiring the radical changes to the UK welfare system but that accolade has to rest very firmly with the Brown-Blair bunch and not forgetting Boy David Freud who jumped ship from Tony to Tory (was there ever really a difference?) faster than you can write the word “conditionality”.

But before we call in the Freud squad to deal with the 29% of the working age population who are economically inactive/workless here in Northern Ireland, we need to consider just what the implications of carrot and kick welfare reform Let's take a quick meander through the welfare reforms championed by new labour, the third way and the road to conditionality starring No Hope, Sting Crossly and Definitely No More - we can call it a conditionality health check, or better still a government conditionality warning label ... you are responsible for your inactivity and continuing this will ultimately damage your wealth…. and as for your health well it's not illness at all its merely a bio-pyscho-social condition that requires a number of robust motivational efforts to get you back to work – we'll call it the "carrot and kick" model if you don't like the carrot we'll kick you where it hurts.

Let's look at the redefining of what constitutes incapacity and the associated introduction of the all work test replaced by personal capability assessments and a number of active welfare models. the driver for this is based on the model developed in the US by "Income protection organisations" insurance companies to you and I who sell Vocational Rehabilitation and tailored return to work programmes.

Long term unemployment, economic inactivity and worklessness is everybody's business and for some it's very big business indeed.

The corporate services director of one such Income Protection company with the ear of government noted in 2003 about Pathways to Work

"Although we can say that we are 90 per cent of the way there in policy terms, the real challenge is delivery - in particular the role of the intermediary. We believe that it is absolutely vital that all employment brokers are properly incentivised to move disabled people along the journey into work and that there are enough of them to do the job. The next step therefore is for private sector to work alongside government to achieve delivery, focus and capacity building within the system."

This is echoed by Freud

"The Department (for Work and Pensions)should develop a funding approach which will allow it to direct spending towards such groups, who have complex and demanding problems, in a more individualised way. Such programmes should be outsourced into the private and voluntary sector, giving them the incentive to improve performance".

This "buy one get one free" incentivising of welfare may well fare well for those who put profit before people and indeed Freud himself noted that there was no conclusive evidence to suggest that the private sector out-performed the public sector on current programmes, there were he noted, clear potential gains from contesting services, bringing in innovation with a different skill set, and from the potential to engage with groups who are often beyond the reach of the welfare state.

For those organisations like my own the value proposition that drives us to support people on incapacity benefit and other so called inactive benefits to re-enter or enter sustainable employment is that we know the wider impact of economic inactivity is much more for each individual than the effect they feel in their pocket what we don't do is view people as unit costs and revenue streams and profit margins or base our service on quick wins, or as I heard it described recently "picking the "low hanging fruit" that is doing the least with the easiest to work with. I am not at all convinced by the contention that creaming leaves more resources available to work with the hardest to help.

We and our colleague organisations who have successfully supported hundreds of people back to work, the only incentive needed for them to engage with us is the strength of the relationship of trust that supports, encourages and enables them develop their confidence about work and builds their capacity to make sustainable employment an achievable goal.

Let’s be clear about it, long term unemployment, economic inactivity and worklessness blights communities and lives and it results in children brought up in poverty becoming adults living in poverty. All of us working to support people back to work have a duty and responsibility to do all we can to help them to achieve sustainable employment, economic self sufficiency and a route out of poverty. This should not mean people who have been enabled to stay on ‘silo’ benefits for years and as a result losing skills and confidence for and about work should be seen as the problem or punished by the solution.

We need to work together through for example Neighbourhood Renewal partnerships – where there is clear understanding of local need and the drive and determination to articulate that need fairly and to respond to that need through an enabling process linked to labour market realisms - not a regime that punishes people doubly - one for becoming ill and two for failing to get well soon enough. Either that or perhaps the poor house should open for business again.

Older but not wizened

I have been wondering a bit about getting older – well not getting older but looking and feeling and “acting” older.

I was driving home the other Saturday after the lunch date with my youngest son that didn’t happen because he had been up most of the night at his mate’s house and hadn’t heard my 11.30am call and for some reason I started to think about never really seeing my own mum as old but seeing a very big difference between her at 54 than how I now view myself. I didn’t inherit my mum’s beautiful bone structure or her stunning deep cornflower blue eyes and dark brown hair; I think it jumped a generation because my daughter is very like my mum when she was young. My looks come from my dad’s side of the family including the lantern jaw.

My mum always got her hair permed and would have also got “tips” (highlights/streaks/frosting) which in the 1960s/1970s in small town Northern Ireland was very “daring” but I never, ever remember her having a pair of jeans and she never even wore trousers until she was in her late fifties and even then they were for the winter weather and not for “going out” in. However, when I was a small child my mum had style and I remember her clothes and thinking she was like a film star with her hats and suits. She was pin thin until her sixties and always dressed well even to go the shops. I was 20 when my mum was 53 and my daughter is 29 and today, there is very little difference in the things she and I like and very probably my taste in clothes is a bit more outlandish than my daughter’s whereas my mum very definitely wore clothes I wouldn’t have worn at 20.

Maybe it’s just the change in the time – my mum was the war generation and she and most of her peers didn’t work after having their families; there were of course exceptions but when I think back to primary school, I can’t think of any of my friends’ mums working. Whereas I went back to work with my youngest son was 6 and nowadays working mums pop them out in the morning and return to work in the afternoon (well not really but things have changed again and there is this expectation on new mums to be able to juggle everything and still be perfect).

I keep on wondering when I am going to get into the older person groove and if the 10 years between my younger husband and I will start to create issues. Children together for us didn’t happen even with lots of practice and right now I couldn’t contemplate the idea of having children at primary school; I had my 3 by the time I was 27 and while I absolutely adore my granddaughter and love spending time with her, I am not sure I would have the patience or the stamina to run about after small children full time. Still, I do wonder what would have happened if we had been parents together.

At 54 I don’t have many wrinkles and even my laughter lines are faint. I remember when I was at university one of my fellow students had lines across her forehead like she had just been tilled by a horse drawn plough – including the imprint of the horseshoe between her eyebrows. She was 10 years younger than me but her face was very lined even at 22. I have never smoked and I don’t have those lines etched through my top lip which results in lipstick bleeding like little trails of magma and while I am casual about cleansing, moisturising and toning, apart from my red cheeks, I don’t have too many problems with my skin; as I type this I am wondering if my jutting jaw-line has actually prevented the “side jowl slide” which causes women of my age to reach for the temporary solution of Haemorrhoid cream (slavered on by models long before Botox became de rigueur)the porcelain doll effect of Botox or even the longer-term tautness achieved by the cut and slice of the cosmetic surgeon’s scalpel.

I did worry that losing a bit of ballast would see my fuller face flesh sag and give me the Shar Pei look – I needn’t have worried, the face weight slid off not just down.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for my underarm awnings which have all the appeal of scored squid but with none of the bounce back effect. Thus, I am confined to sleeves, shrugs and shawls with upper arms that have all the appeal of part-cooked bread- a small price to pay for being able to drop 6 jeans sizes and squeeze my booty into an airline economy seat. Worth the dough I suppose. I am ashamed to admit that I stand in front of the bathroom mirror with my arms outstretched like the angel of the north and examine them with the bingo wings out of camera and see these lovely sculpted and toned svelte branches before allowing the tenderised tripe to blot my fantasy landscape.

It’s been a while from I meandered aimlessly like this and I have realised that I need balance – no I am not suggesting I want my inner thighs to hang round my knees flapping in the breeze but it is appreciating that stopping to smile about the daftness of it all is as important as being driven and serious.

Know what? I wouldn’t change any of me; well maybe just a teeny weeny nip and tuck here and there wouldn’t hurt balance and all that.

Rage Against the Washing Machine

I have come to the conclusion that the more clothes one has the more one has to wash. Thinking back to my childhood and remembering my mum scrubbing my dad's detachable collars with Sunlight soap (he later detached himself from the family unit circa 1966 and for years I felt like detaching his head from his shoulders but that is another story for another time) and standing out in the back yard feeding stuff through the mangle the drips going into a bucket underneath. I also remember playing ships in the big Monarch Laundry box which sat at the top of the stairs along the landing the laundry box was for sheets and pillowcases the big stuff that went to the laundry once every 2 weeks but when empty it was my own little ship for sailing the seven seas of wry.

I remember the lid it had a big lion on it Monarch - king of the jungle. I also remember years later working with women who had worked in the laundries and their tales of the sights and smells of what they had to load out of those boxes into the huge boilers - not for the squeamish. Of course my memories are all about the ship and the wonderful starched, pressed and folded bedlinen that the box held on return and of course the little pressed on laundry tag in pink or blue with a number that made sure we didn't end up with anyone else's sheets on our beds.

Even though we had a wonderful garden full of fruit bushes and vegetables and a big long washing line, thinking back it would have been impossible for my mum to have washed sheets by hand and got them out on the line. We came up in the world when she got a Baby Burco Boiler - a galvanised contraption that did what it said on the tin and boiled up gallons of soapy water in which our clothes were put in and agitated by my agitated mother with a stick which became bleached white from years of being dipped into the bubbling cauldron. Whites first - no such thing in those days of having separate washes for whites and coloureds; the soapy water was used until it became a thick grey froth. This was the waste not want not generation that and the fact that my mum needed muscles like Charles Atlas to drag the water filled contraption to the back door to empty it - still it was a step up from boiling stuff on the gas cooker and washing in the now ever so trendy Belfast sink.

You know, I used to think we were poor until I realised that some folks didn't have indoor WC's or a bath in their houses. What suprised me more was when twenty years later I was visiting people in homes that still had no inside toilet, bath and in many cases no running hot water - just a gas geyser over an old brown sink - this started my long relationship with social housing when I began working in some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Belfast where the awful conditions that people lived in were often compounded by being burnt out of their previous homes and handing over "key money" to unscrupulous private landlords for substandard housing. It was wonderful to see old women who had struggled to raise their families in cold and harsh conditions moving in to new warm and comfortable homes but it was also sad to see so many of them dying often within months of the move many from chest and heart conditions from a lifetime of making do.

Anyway, after my dad and his detatchable collars flew our coop (I was 10 and never knew until years later that this collar stud had taken off with a much younger woman and had swiftly moved to drip dry and trousers without turnips - she certainly suckered him dry as she was pregnant at the time with her other lover's child and had needed a quick getaway from her husband an army cook with a red hot temper) things got better before they got worse; this was 1966 in NI and to be left, abandoned was not the norm and there was no distinction between the sinned against and the sinners in fatherless houses.

Still my Aunt she of the white hair and white powdered face and blood red lipstick (like a Geisha without the side activities) took pity and bought my mum a Hoover single tub with a mangle on top - we had arrived and this little magic box served us very well until we branched out to a Servis twin tub - yes it was second hand and yes the drum shuddered and it danced across the floor but it could do the sheets and pillowcases and spin dry them at 600 rpm that little rubber disc being all important in ensuring that the sheets didn't jump out like a KKK convention all over the kitchen floor. Progress? I am not sure as it was extra washing and drying and ironing and of course the ship was returned to the laundry and I sailed no more on the landing. Anyway, I was comfort eating by that time and my stern end was getting to big for the boat and I was all washed up.

Now back to my own beautiful launderette. :o)p