Independant thinking, group action

Hurrah for pay day! How is it that a woman who earns a decent whack is always so broke?! Anyway, from famine we enter feast time… for a week or two anyway!

Today is notable for reasons other than financial; I have roast beef sandwiches for lunch, I have an osteopath appointment later and I have to phone my mum. The latter being the one thing I’m really not looking forward to. My mum can be incredibly rude on the phone, and not since her illness either, she’s always been a bit like it. And I’m afraid I snapped on Monday and hung up on her. The words mountain and molehill spring to mind but it was the principle of the thing. I’m not the world’s best daughter but I do try and at 32 years old I feel I should be spoken to with a little more respect. I’m quite sure she could say the same thing about me sometimes so pot and kettle also trip off the tongue… families, eh?

I read the Independent two days ago (I’m a Guardian girl but flexible to other news, with the exception of the Mail and the Express papers. Two papers I loathe.), and read two reports that made me very sad. The first was that the Taliban are attacking schools and school teachers (and sometimes children) in Afghanistan because education, especially the education of girls, is considered unnecessary and ‘Western’. The second story was that Pakistan still prosecutes rape under Sharia law – roughly speaking ‘religious’ law. A woman who is raped has to provide four male witnesses for the rapist to be prosecuted. If she cannot do this she may well end up being tried for adultery. Pakistan’s president had promised to repeal this and have rape dealt with as part of the normal judicial process. He failed and consequently has failed millions of women. Conservative estimates suggest a woman is raped every 2 hrs and a woman is gang raped every 8 hrs in Pakistan. And before we feel too smug about our own situation: two women are killed each week in this country through domestic violence and an estimated 1 in 4 women are raped and sexually assaulted. Misogyny and the brutalisation of women and children is a very real problem and it is not confined to religion or geography or class, in fact it rarely has anything to do with those factors. It’s about attitudes and perceptions that see women as chattel, 2nd class, weak, not worthy of respect. Maybe some of that “fair whack” I get paid needs to make its way to Amnesty and Women’s Aid this month…

Puts your mum being rude to you in perspective, don’t you think?