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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.

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