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The Death Penalty – What’s Your View?

By Mum's the Word on June 7, 2013 in Opinion, Personal, Politics

Capital punishment was abolished in the United Kingdom in part because of the case of Timothy Evans, an innocent man who was hanged in 1950.

There’s been a lot of talk about the death penalty floating about in the last few months, due to some horrible world events being beamed at us through the news. The Boston Bombers, the Woolwich murderers, the start of the April Jones murder trial. I’ve seen a lot of slogans and pictures on Facebook that suggest that the perpetrators of these heinous crimes should be put to death (which is a moot point in all but the case of the Boston Bombers, because although Massachusetts isn’t a death penalty state, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is being charged for Federal crimes which carry the death penalty regardless of where they are committed) but I wonder if the people calling for death and baying for more blood have really thought it through?

Firstly, could you say without a shadow of a doubt, that you could be the person to administer the lethal injection, flip the switch on an electric chair or gas chamber? Sure, you don’t have to, you aren’t the executioner, but surely if you call for death you should have the courage of your convictions? Could you look a human being in the eye with 100% certainty of their guilt and send them to their grave? I’m not sure I could.

Secondly, I struggle massively with the thought of how flawed our legal system can be. I have huge respect for police officers who enforce our laws and criminal lawyers who do their best to secure convictions, but there have been cases of innocent men and women being incarcerated. Imagine if we’d excuted Barry George, the man wrongly convicted of killing Jill Dando, who spent SEVEN years in prison before evidence proved him innocent? And what about Timothy Evans, a man whose wrongful hanging was the very reason that Capital Punishment was abolished in the UK?

Another thing that bothers me is this; I firmly believe that execution is still based on religious doctrine, the concept that a person will meet their judgement in the afterlife and spend eternity burning in hell. This is simply not an idea I subscribe to, so from my point of view, killing a criminal is releasing them from life and therefore the consequences of their actions.

I’m not saying that the system of incarceration is perfect; it puts a huge strain on governments, the rate of recidivism is ridiculously high with most crimes and, if the media is anything to go by, prison is less of a punishment these days with gyms, libraries and access to video games. But I’m not sure that I agree with the death penalty either.

From a very personal place, a real hot button for me is the issue of paedophilia. I recall a few years ago watching a Louis Theroux documentary based in a maximum security prison in the USA which contained some of the most dangerous sex offenders in the country and they were running a programme of rehabilitation which claimed to be able to ‘cure’ people of paedophilia and used voluntary castration as a means of removing urges. I firmly, strongly, wholly believe that there is NOTHING that can be done to cure a paedophile, so if these people are to remain a persistent danger to children, what’s the point of allowing them to remain on the planet? But, again, could you be the one to flick the switch?

I’d be curious to hear your opinions on this; it’s one of those subjects that I go back and forth on and never seem to come to any sort of conclusion about and I don’t know if I ever will, but I’d love to know where you stand on the issue.

Comments { 9 }

30 Things To Do Before I’m 30

By Mum's the Word on June 4, 2013 in Personal

It occurred to me the other day that with my birthday coming up in two weeks, I’m going to be entering the final year of my twenties.

*cough* *hack*

Sorry, those words stuck in my throat a little bit, as I typed.

But seriously, I’m careering headlong into my thirties and while I’m not overly worried about the ageing process or about having a 3 in front of my age instead of a 2, there are things that I would have liked to have done or achieved before I hit the bit 3-0.

So, I’m compiling a list of things that I want to do in the next year – some are big, others are little, but all of them are things which mean something to me. Also, in the name of reader interaction and to make this even more fun, I’m leaving a space at the end for you guys to fill. There’s not a prize for the winner as such, but I’m going to whittle down the suggestions to my top 6 and then put it to a vote over on the Mum’s the Word Facebook page. Suggestions can be crazy~~-ish~~, but do bear in mind that they need to be things that are within reach (i.e. not ridonkulously expensive) as well as SAFE (I’m not chucking myself out of a plane, for instance) and can be achieved within a year.

So here’s my list so far (all fairly self-explanatory, but do ask if you need clarification!):

1. Start writing my novel (and hopefully finish it)

2. Perform stand up in front of an audience

3. Lose weight and get fit

4. Learn to play the Ukulele

5. Start my degree again and decide once and for all what I want to be when I grow up

6. Redesign this blog

7. Go on the London Eye

8. Visit Anfield to watch a match and take a tour of the ground

9. See Foo Fighters in concert again

10. Go for one proper big night out like we did in the days before parenthood

11. Take Sausage on holiday

12. Do a burlesque photo shoot (once number 3 has been achieved)

13. Join a netball team

14. Start sewing again and improve skills

15. Learn to crochet

16. Move house

17. Take Sausage to Bestival

18. Take part in a (peaceful) protest

19. Have something I’ve written published in a magazine or newspaper

20. Work out my ‘style’ (I’m useless at dressing myself and tend to look like a vagrant most of the time)

21. Go somewhere that requires the wearing of a hat or fascinator

22. Reverse or lessen my type 2 diabetes (maybe not entirely achievable, but it COULD happen with lifestyle changes)

23. Start to learn a language

24. Get a LOT better at taking photos

25. Get the three tattoos that I have planned

26. Eat at a restaurant with Michelin stars (preferably Le Gavroche as I’m a little bit bonkers about Michel Roux Jr. Hero-worship, much?!)

27. Overcome my fear of the sea

28. Go to the opera

29. Ride a horse

30.

So, leave a comment with your suggestion below for number 30 and we’ll go from there! This is by no means a comprehensive bucket list, just things that I’d like to do in the next year. The final list would be WAY longer and far more ambitious than this!

Comments { 7 }

The Pitfalls of Having an Intelligent Child

By Mum's the Word on May 27, 2013 in Family, Humour, Parenting, Personal

Sausage is a very intelligent kid. She’s one of, if not the, youngest in her class and she reads at the top level with kids who are a full year older. Her teacher is constantly regaling us with stories of “amazing” things she’s come out with in class, like the time they were discussing The North Pole and the things you’d find there. The other kids were saying things like snow, ice etc. Sausage sat thinking for a while then shoved her hand confidently up before offering “Arctic Orcas!”. As most of my readers probably know, we’re big on Natural History lessons in this house, so that was a fairly normal thing for her to come out with by our standards, but apparently she’s not an average 4-year-old!

Now, for the most part, having a bright kid is fantastic. She has a thirst for knowledge that Husband and I love to quench and we spend a lot of family time learning together. However, at times, it can be a challenge. Here are just a few of the ways in which she keeps me on my toes.

Smart-Assery

With Sausage’s level of intelligence comes a concurrent level of confidence that, at times, can be a little maddening. Often, she’ll ask me a question only to reply to my answer with “I KNOW!” and I’ve lost count of the amount of times in her life that I’ve said the phrase “Well if you already know, why did you ask me?!”

She’s also been known to reply to my accusations of smart-assery with “Er, no Mummy, I think you’re a smarty-pants!”, the response to which is usually my head spontaneously exploding. Don’t get me wrong, she’s never naughty or obnoxious, she’s just genuinely that confident of her own brain, which is good…I guess!

She’s also started questioning my reasoning on things. She’ll often counter my answers to requests with “Why?” and on more than one occasion I’ve done that thing that I said I’d never do…”BECAUSE I SAID SO!”. Sometimes, there just is no other answer.

Spelling Test

In the past, Husband and I could do that thing where if we didn’t want Sausage to know what we’re talking about, we could spell things out. We knew it wouldn’t last forever as she’d learn to spell eventually, but we didn’t expect her to become so exceptionally good at it at such a young age. As a result, we now speak Pig-Latin when we’re being deceptive, but I’ve seen her looking at us and working out what we’re saying when we do that too, so I guarantee it won’t be long before she’s EAKING-SPAY right back at us…

Stimulation

Most kids, aged four, are probably happy to do one thing at a time. Sausage, however, needs a certain level of mental stimulation to stop her from being bored, which means that, and I’m not exaggerating here, she’s often doing three things at once. At this very moment, she’s watching TV, writing in her pad and playing a game on her Nexus 7. All of that is fine, I’m happy for her to entertain herself in whatever way she wants, but sometimes it can be exhausting trying to keep up with her!

Play Time

She’s very much into that girly thing at the moment of role-playing. She’ll say “Mummy, do you want to play with me?” and then bestow me with an elaborate script of things I have to say in response to what she’s going to say. And if I don’t do it right the first time, often she’ll stop and we’ll have to start all over again, complete with grand entrances on Micro Scooters and all sorts. I love that she has such a vivid imagination but it’s not always that easy to stay on top of the web of character and plot development that she weaves and I fear I’m a massive disappointment to her.

Emotions and Comprehension

Sausage is a sensitive soul and up to a point, we were able to shield her from some of the harsher realities of life. The thing is, as she gets older, it’s harder to keep things from her. We don’t always know right away when something has seeped into her big brain but sometimes, she’ll seem overly sad or emotional and it will turn out that something has upset her like a news report or something she’s heard a snippet of and she’ll have spent however long trying to process it. Emotional development isn’t always in-line with intellectual development and it can be heartbreaking to see her brain grasping a concept which she’s too young to know how to react to.

So, do you have a intelligent kid who runs rings around you too? Or am I the only one who’s being totally bested by a four-year old?!

Comments { 12 }

More! Magazine – The End of an Era

By Mum's the Word on April 23, 2013 in Happiness, Parenting, Personal

This afternoon, I heard the news that More! magazine is ceasing publication after reader numbers have dwindled to an all-time low, and I have to say, I was a little bit saddened. As a teen, More! was about as edgy as it got when it came to reading material and my friends and I spent many a bus journey giggling at ‘Position of the Fortnight’ or reading in horror about peoples embarrassing experiences, usually involving a boy they fancied.

My Mum hated me reading More!, she saw the candid accounts of teenage sexuality as over-exposure for my young mind and often told me that I wasn’t allowed to buy it. I did, of course, and hid it in my locker at school or buried at the bottom of a school bag. Now that I’m a mother, I straddle the fence on the appropriateness of it for a 13-year-old, however I also think that there’s a huge amount of positivity to it too.

More! was the closest thing that we ever had to a ‘lad’s mag’, meaning that instead of wide-eyed patronisation, or flat-out saccharine coated ignorance, it addressed the issue of teenage girls being sexual creatures. Regardless of how much we’d like to deny it once we become parents, teenage girls are hormone-fuelled randy beasts in the same way that their male counterparts are and More! taught us that that’s not something to be ashamed of. To my mind, it empowered girls to have a say in sex, not just think that they had to lay back and think of England, but be an active and conscious participant. The problem pages taught us about thrush and STDs and contraception and hair in unwanted places and didn’t make us feel stupid for asking.

Magazines like More! are often held up as contributing towards the over-sexualisation of children, but I refute that and would argue that giving girls an honest education (over and above the sterile account they are fed in Sex-Ed classes) about the realities of sex is contributing to giving them confidence and agency over their own bodies. Perhaps giving them the confidence to say NO when it really matters, or to speak up when something that’s supposed to be fun and pleasurable is actually uncomfortable and upsetting. What More! did best was instill a sense of humour and light-heartedness into subjects which can be tricky for young girls to navigate, which was invaluable to us at the time.

So, it’s with sadness that I say a fond farewell to More! magazine. I can only hope that there’s something out there to help girls and young women in the same way that More! helped us.

Comments { 6 }

The Lonely Toothbrush

By Mum's the Word on March 6, 2013 in Mental Health, Personal

If you read this blog with any kind of regularity, you’ve probably noticed by now that I’m a little bit…unusual? Between my magpie obsession, my lack of direction and wanting to wipe my brain like a hard drive, it’s fair to say that I err on the side of the slightly eccentric. However, I realised something about myself today that we can add to the ever-growing list of unusual pathological behaviors; I have an unusual aversion to loneliness.

Now, I appreciate than an aversion to loneliness in and of itself isn’t that unusual. As humans, we’re programmed to believe in safety in numbers and there’s been absolutely masses of research into the psychology and anthropology behind loneliness - according to Wikipedia “Loneliness has also been described as social pain — a psychological mechanism meant to alert an individual of isolation and motivate him/her to seek social connections”. Loneliness and our feeling about it are central to The Human Condition. But see, this is the thing – for me, it’s not just about humans…

Don’t get me wrong, I have a special pain in my heart and stomach that kicks in when I think about how many old people there are in the world who’ve been left on their own and feel a deep sense of loneliness, that’s all there. But this morning, whilst in the shower, I became deeply disturbed by the living arrangement of our toothbrushes. We have two glasses, mounted above the bathroom sink in which our dental care accouterments live. Today, mine and Husband’s brushes were in one glass with the toothpastes and Sausage’s was by itself in the other.

By itself.

All alone.

So I moved it.

I rearranged everything so that all three of our toothbrushes were in one glass, together, so that no one toothbrush got lonely. It moved me to significant enough sadness that I had to take action.

And now I sit and think about it, I do it with other things too. If I’m making beans or spaghetti on toast, I dutifully bang the bottom of the tin until every last bean or hoop falls from the tin. Not because I’m tight or greedy, simply because if that bean or hoop goes into the bin in a can by itself, it might get lonely. I genuinely have anxiety about lonely legumes.

I realise I’m probably really asking you to plumb the depths of your tolerance to sympathise with me here; the majority of you nice, sane people are probably wondering where the nearest loony bin is that I can be flung into, but I do wonder where this feeling comes from. As much as I’d never crave loneliness, I’m perfectly happy in my own company. I quite enjoy my drive to work, along the seafront, listening to BBC Radio 2, singing if I feel like it. At lunchtime, I try to get away from my desk if I can and have 5 minutes to myself. It’s not like I can’t stand to be alone.

Why do I rate the beans and hoops and toothbrushes more highly than myself, when it comes to company?

Answers on a postcard, dear readers…

Comments { 5 }

The Truth About Sleep

By Mum's the Word on January 9, 2013 in Personal, Sponsored Posts

Sleep is a hot topic in the Mum’s the Word household. Husband is an insomniac and Sausage displays some remarkably zzz-averse traits at times too. I, on the other hand, am like a hibernating bear and am always in search of that extra nap here and there!

That’s why I found this infographic from Ibis so interesting.

I’m definitely a ‘free fall’…! I was surprised to see that so many of us get more than 9 hours a night and even more surprised to see that almonds can help us to get a good nights sleep.

Do any of the results surprise you too? Are you more soldier that starfish? What’s your magic number for hours per night?

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Mum’s the Word – A Retrospective (Pt. One)

By Mum's the Word on January 1, 2013 in Blogging, Humour, Life, Personal

It seems weird looking at the calendar in the bottom corner of my screen and seeing 01/01/2013. This year will be my 29th birthday, Husband’s 34th birthday, Sausage’s 5th birthday, 7 years since we adopted Chuck, my 7th wedding anniversary, my baby sister’s 21st, my baby brother’s 14th….and so on and so on! I remember the days that my brother and sister were born SO vividly and it’s hard to believe that they were that long ago, let alone the fact that I have to get my head around the fact that I’ll have a 5-year-old!

So, before I look forward to the exciting year ahead, I thought I’d do a ‘Mum’s the Word Retrospective’, a look back at the posts that I’m most proud of from the last 12 months. Yes, it’s self-indulgent, but it’s MY blog, so ner! *blows raspberry*

JANUARY

At the beginning of January, I was saying goodbye to Bob Holness who was a childhood favourite of mine and his passing sparked some fond memories. In this post, I was waxing lyrical about my new iPhone 4. I’m not sure I’d be so effusive now!

This time last year, I was still reeling from the passing of my stepmum, who’d lost her battle with cancer just 10 weeks before. Here I talk about how certain Buddhist teachings had helped me with my grief.

In this post, I share some of the harsh realities of adulthood that I’ve picked up on along the way, but it’s not as grim as it sounds, don’t worry!

FEBRUARY

In this Silent Sunday post, I proudly display the partially erupted wisdom tooth I had removed, despite some people thinking that it was a weird picture of a nose!

This was my first attempt at short fiction. I tried to make a linky out of it but didn’t get much interest, but I was still quite proud of my efforts. Here, I discuss the stress of being a working Mum and how hard it is to relax at times. Finally for Feb, I overheard a conversation in Waitrose which literally tickled me pink.

MARCH

March began with me musing over what I wanted to be when I grew up. Turns out, I still haven’t…Sausage kept us amused with some surprisingly subversive humour for a then-3-year-old.

In a more serious post, I talked about how you tackled the subject of mortality with your little ones, which provoked some interesting comments. I rounded the month off with a satirical post about things that, at 27, I’d realised I was too old to do. This is a personal fave for 2012.

APRIL

The beginning of April saw Husband and I changing our strongly anti-Barbie stance, me doing some serious Sausage related trumpet-blowing, attempting to talk about the dangers of Melanoma and celebrating my move to being self-hosted with a post about being reborn.

MAY

At the beginning of May, I wrote about my Nan and Grandad, which is still one of my favourite posts ever. I also mused about what it would be like if our brains were like a computer harddrive and posted a Silent Sunday featuring a very personal subject for me.

This month also featured part one and two of my Cybher run-down.

This post about parental choices was one of my favourite posts because of the debate it sparked in the comments. I still stand by my original thoughts, which were brought into sharp focus later in the year with the horrible events in the news. I often wonder how people’s opinions will differ now.

JUNE

The beginning of June saw me thinking about the parental instinct to protect and why it’s lacking in some people. Here’s another favourite Silent Sunday, featuring a house-guest we had with us for a while. This photo was one of the things to spark the idea for Closer to Nature, a linky that I started later in the year.

I was having a pretty bad time of things in June and this post is me trying to make sense of my thoughts and feelings, the prevailing being that of loneliness. Later in the month, I also discuss euthanizing a beloved pet and when is the right time to say ‘enough is enough’.

A bit of a bleak finish to the first half of the year, but I’m amazed to see how much I wrote in that time. I hope you enjoy reading through and come back for part two!

Happy New Year from Mum’s the Word.

Comments { 2 }

The Gallery – The 80′s

By Mum's the Word on November 15, 2012 in Personal, Photos, The Gallery

I’ve not joined in with The Gallery for ages, mostly because I’m so rubbish at blogging that I only find out the theme once the linky is almost closed, but as a child of the Eighties, I felt it was my duty to show you some photos and generally give myself the chance to show off just how damn CUTE I was as a child. So here goes…

Me, looking cute in a bouncy chair:

Me, looking cute (but grainy) sitting in a cardboard box with a dog…(yeah, I don’t know either…):

Me again, pulling some fairly obnoxious faces in a photo booth, but still looking cute:

And finally, the pièce de résistance - The cutest photo EVER TAKEN of me:

(I’m even in a caravan – how 80′s is that?!)

If you want to see some fabulously 80′s-tastic hair and fashion, head over to Sticky Fingers where everyone else has linked up.

Comments { 4 }

Mumsnet, a Hospital Visit and A Community-Sized Hug

By Mum's the Word on November 13, 2012 in Anger, Friendship, Personal, Rant

This has been a funny old week in the Parent Blogging community. Saturday saw one of the years biggest blogging conferences, put on by Mumsnet, and for a while everyone was abuzz with chatter of what went on at the conference. Then, on Sunday, the Daily Mail printed an article by She Who Shall Not Be Named, a woman who apparently has no desire to endear herself to anyone, condemning us all as mindless drones who live only to serve their Husbands (who are obviously the only breadwinners in the house) and while away the time (which let’s face it, we have TONS of because parenting and looking after kids is such a doddle) with cupcake baking and crocheting.

I’m not even going to justify her pathetic jabs with any sort of specific rebuttal to the claims she’s made about us as a whole because I have another theory. This woman is well-documented as saying that she doesn’t have any friends and struggles with interpersonal relationships. I think her comments come from a sense of teeth-grindingly intense jealousy. When she attended BlogFest on Saturday, she will have seen hundreds of women, all from different places, all with different lives, different interests, with different amounts of money, different levels of education, coming together to spend time in a huge sisterhood. That’s gotta sting when you’re a friendless crone, right?

I came to this conclusion yesterday night. If you’ve read my previous post you’ll know that I spent a large chunk of yesterday in hospital. I came home and plugged my phone in (fucking iPhone battery, mutter mutter) to find texts, emails, wall posts, messages and group posts from no less than a dozen bloggers who I’ve come to know over the past two years. Offers of help, offers of ears to bend if I needed to. One of them even tried ringing the hospital I’d gone to, to see if they could find anything out, so worried they’d been at my unusual radio silence.

Friendship is something that a lot of us take for granted and although I’m not lucky enough to have all of these ladies living just around the corner from me, although I can’t pop round for a coffee if I have five minutes to spare, although I’ve never met a lot of them on a face to face basis, I know I have a community of women who are rooting for me. If I need a shoulder to cry on or a place to ask for a cheer of ‘good luck!’ before an interview, they’re there. I’ve seen my community do amazing things, help others out when they’re in genuine need and have nowhere else to turn and it’s a very nice feeling to know that they’d have my back if I needed them.

And that, as far as I’m concerned, is why the lonely She Who Shall Not Be Named has taken such umbridge. Jealousy, pure and simple. If only she’d been a bit nicer, she may have made some friends too.

Thanks everyone. You know who you are.

Comments { 8 }

Paranorman – Why We Loved ‘THAT’ Joke

By Mum's the Word on November 4, 2012 in Education, Family, Parenting, Personal, Politics

Last Monday, despite Sausage being poorly, we all went to the cinema. We’d had the tickets booked for a while and it was meant to be the first of a list of activities we had planned for Half Term. As it turned out, poor Sausage was too ill for anything else all week, but that’s a different post. The film we’d booked to see was Paranorman. We’d seen a trailer for it when we went to see Ice Age 4 and we all thought it looked great so we were excited to finally see it.

The film didn’t disappoint, the animation was brilliant, the storyline mixed humour, sadness, dark undertones and even sneaked a moral message in there about acceptance, appearances and people who are ‘different’. The characters were likeable and it was one of those films that adults could enjoy just as much as the kids. In short, it was a proper fun family film.

One of the sub-plots of the film revolved around Norman’s sister trying to get the attention of another character in the film, Mitch, a hulking great jock who seems oblivious to her advances. She’s a pretty girl (in the way that animated plasticine can be pretty) and you wonder why Mitch is so resilient to her feminine wiles. I assumed he was either too stupid or too into his muscles/sports/van to notice. Then, right at the end, they chuck in a moment of brilliance.

Courtney finally plucks up the courage to ask Mitch out for a date, to which he replies “Sure. My boyfriend loves chick flicks.”

This makes Mitch the first openly gay character in an animated family film. I found a quote from the scriptwriter who said this:

“I wanted it from the start, absolutely. It seemed like the best bookend to that whole tolerance thing and to do it as a joke, a kind of throwaway thing, but something that has NEVER been done before. I think we’re telling a story about intolerance, so you have to be brave about it.”

As far as I can gather, there’s been a lot of backlash about this from parents who think they’ve been tricked into taking their kids to see a film which is forcing some sort of gay agenda onto their children, but quite honestly, this is exactly how we should be approaching the subject. I’ve seen quotes from people saying that they don’t want to have to explain homosexuality to their kids, but hey, guess what, a fucking cartoon just did your job for you, BE GRATEFUL.

As the old clichéd but true phrase goes, kids are like sponges, if we start normalizing things and referring to them in the nonplussed way they have in this film, it will just become a part of consciousness, rather than a big issue. Did you have to explain to your kids why men and women love each other? I doubt it, and if they see references to gay and lesbian couples they won’t question that either, it’ll just be part of ‘The Way Things Are’. And, if you’re one of those people who think that having gay characters in cartoons will turn your kids gay? Please. Go and get sterilised.

It’s not just brilliant that they’ve managed to slip in into the film, it’s that a throwaway comment which took up two seconds of a 90 minute film has challenged people’s perceptions. Mitch is a big, tough, sporty guy, the stereotypical Mr. America. He’s not a flouncing fairy, or struggling to come to terms with his sexuality, he’s not an acerbic bitch, he’s not the smart, cosmopolitan lawyer, or any of the other ‘types’ of gay guys that the media throws at us. He’s just a guy and he’s open and confident about the fact that he fancies other guys. Which, essentially, is what homosexuality is, right?

I think it’s brilliant that we’re finally starting to see some sort of acceptance in the mainstream media. Between this and Marvel Comics writing the first gay wedding into ‘Astonishing X-Men’, these are the strides we need to be making which will improve things for future generations. I want Sausage to grow up into a world where tolerance is not something that’s debated and argued over, but something that’s a foundation of society and if gay cartoon characters is the way to start, then I doff my cap to Laika.