Skip to main content

Pride and Prejudice

Because it's Pride Month - and Love is Love.

Back in 2020, I  blogged about being made redundant from a place where I'd enjoyed working. I quickly landed a similar job, and have worked there since as a part-time Activity Co-ordinator.

Anyway, out of the blue my old job was offered back to me, and without hesitation I have accepted. It's still part-time, which suits me fine, and at a higher rate of pay, and I'll be working with a much more socially active group of people than I am currently. So, to keep the story short, I'm looking forward to starting my new (old) job on Monday 27th.

Mum turned 93 this month, and I was finally able to visit her. I'd not seen her since before the Covid-19 pandemic began, as I wasn't the designated visitor, and then each time I had planned to visit either her care home or the home where I work had a Covid outbreak which meant I couldn't go. Countless other people have been in similar positions, of course, unable to visit relatives due to governmental decrees - those same decrees which the government themselves have flaunted repeatedly.

Mum is as well as can be expected for a 93 year-old who is living with dementia. She was snoozing in front of the TV in one of the lounges when I arrived, and she didn't recognise me at first. Once she'd had chance to wake up properly and I told her who I was, she managed quite well. Her mind is focussed on long-past events but this is typical, as recent and short-term memories are destroyed by the causes of the dementia. So we talked about her marching, as a girl, in Knutsford's May Day parades, and her first jobs, and being a registered childminder, and how she'd had a go at hosting Tupperware parties to earn a bit more money, and how she'd volunteered with the Civil Defence and Red Cross, and how she had jived and jitterbugged with American GI's at Burtonwood Airfield, and so on... Old, old family stories, but rich with memories for her.

Richard and I have been watching some 1970's TV series, such as Man About the House, George and Mildred and On The Busses. These were the staples of family entertainment when we were children, and they can still make us laugh now, to an extent. These shows clearly highlight how social attitudes have changed. The level of chauvinism and predatory sexual pestering in On The Busses is stunning, and the misogyny fired at the character of Olive is nothing short of ugly. There is a light smattering of homophobic jokes, too. 

This material was considered entirely acceptable at the time. When bigotry and hatred, in all their multitudinous forms, is regularly served up as "just a bit of fun" then this becomes normalised, and what is held to be normal is the convention of its day - just as these shows are of their day, their era. 

Thank goodness attitudes, in the Western world at least, have improved. A person only needs to check the horrendous statistics for domestic violence to see that things need to improve a whole lot more, though.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Cure for Aging?

"All that we profess to do is but this, - to find out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventatives to the effort of time.  This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood.  In our order we hold most noble -, first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body.  But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret which I will only hint to thee at present, by which heat or calorific, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can be made its perpectual renovator...." Zanoni, book IV, chapter II, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first published in 1842. Oroboros keyring - Spooky Cute Designs The idea of being able to achieve an immortal life is probably as old as human life itself.  Folklore and myt...
15 comments
Read more

Remembering Richie Tattoo Artist's Studio

Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool. The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum. Yesterday, my sister Evelyn, Richard and myself stood outside Richard's old tattoo studio and looked up at the few remaining signs, whose paint has now mostly flacked away to reveal bare wood. On the studio's window are stick-on letters which read, "Art", where once it boldly announced his presence as the city's only "Tattoo Artist".  I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the letteri...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dear Diary...

Do you keep a diary? Why did you start it, and, if you started one then stopped, why was that? What sort of things do (or did) you write about? I ask as, as a long-time diarist myself, there is an interesting piece in The Guardian today which talks about one woman's diary habit, which she began at the age of fourteen. I started a diary around that age too, but destroyed it after my mother accused me of using cocaine.  A stern scene followed, with both parents perched ram-rod straight in their armchairs, while I was subjected to a heated inquisition. Where had I bought it, and who from? Didn't I know such things led to death and doom? I struggled to decipher their bewildering accusations, until Mum blurted out, "I read it in your diary!" To find my diary, Mum would first have had to rummage through my dressing table, obviously when I wasn't around to protest. Her intrusion on my privacy was assumed by both parents to be acceptable, and now, with this handwritten c...
Post a Comment
Read more