Go For It Gone - about bloody time
As I was doing the washing up tonight, listening to Radio 4 as is my wont, I was delighted to hear that I was listening to the last ever Go For It, Radio 4's unbearably smug children's programme. I know I'm not their target audience, and neither, it seems am I typical of their actual audience, being approximately 15 years too young, but really, it was dire. Patronising, irritating, insulting to the intelligence of children, and did I manage to convey, really really wound me up? I was a captive audience, as I'm nearly always washing up at 7.15ish, and if I don't listen to talk radio my thoughts get really depressing and gerbil-in-wheel, because I'm tired at that time of day. Whatever replaces it can only be better, in my book / on my radio.
Relatedly, one of the mundane but marked contrasts between my pre and post children lives is how timetabled large swathes of my life now are. I really am nearly always washing up at 7.15pm, except on those days when I'm too tired and leave it to the next day or have done it earlier in the day. Every ordinary day has one firm(ish) fixed point - the children's bedtimes - and a whole set of things have to happen before those at the right times to make everything work. The same is true for mornings when anyone is going to work or PB is going to nursery, although the sequence has fewer components. Obviously this isn't the only way you can do having children, but it's where we seem to have ended up, somewhat to my surprise. I always imagined I would be a terribly go-with-the-flow kind of mother (and that was a gendered imagining, I realise, not 'kind of parent') but that's not at all how it's turned out. It's one of the reasons maternity leave makes me feel quite claustrophobic - I don't mind having a boring and predictable routine if other bits of my life are interesting and I've got plenty to think about while I'm working through the sequence. But the lack-of-sleep that constitutes my experiences of maternity leave mean that I'm short on internal resources, and so more dependent on external stimuli, like Radio 4
Still on Radio 4 - have you ever noticed how almost every segment of From Out Own Correspondent makes use of the same narrative device where they start off with a vignette, scene or character sketch, move on to the main point of the article, then apply it back to the original person or scenario in the last sentence? Now I've started noticing it, it winds me up for being predictable, which considerably detracts from its otherwise excellent soporific powers.
And that was what I was doing above, except that adding these two paras has messed it up.
Relatedly, one of the mundane but marked contrasts between my pre and post children lives is how timetabled large swathes of my life now are. I really am nearly always washing up at 7.15pm, except on those days when I'm too tired and leave it to the next day or have done it earlier in the day. Every ordinary day has one firm(ish) fixed point - the children's bedtimes - and a whole set of things have to happen before those at the right times to make everything work. The same is true for mornings when anyone is going to work or PB is going to nursery, although the sequence has fewer components. Obviously this isn't the only way you can do having children, but it's where we seem to have ended up, somewhat to my surprise. I always imagined I would be a terribly go-with-the-flow kind of mother (and that was a gendered imagining, I realise, not 'kind of parent') but that's not at all how it's turned out. It's one of the reasons maternity leave makes me feel quite claustrophobic - I don't mind having a boring and predictable routine if other bits of my life are interesting and I've got plenty to think about while I'm working through the sequence. But the lack-of-sleep that constitutes my experiences of maternity leave mean that I'm short on internal resources, and so more dependent on external stimuli, like Radio 4
Still on Radio 4 - have you ever noticed how almost every segment of From Out Own Correspondent makes use of the same narrative device where they start off with a vignette, scene or character sketch, move on to the main point of the article, then apply it back to the original person or scenario in the last sentence? Now I've started noticing it, it winds me up for being predictable, which considerably detracts from its otherwise excellent soporific powers.
And that was what I was doing above, except that adding these two paras has messed it up.