A slight attack of linkspam
I was rather impressed at Sheila Kitzinger's 'all more complicated' message re childbirth and interventions:
When I introduced birth plans to this country in the early 1980s, I thought it was very important that we think ahead to all the things that might happen in childbirth, because when we embark on birth, it's a bit like planning a picnic in the English weather - you cannot know if it will pour with rain - and it's ridiculous to embark on it without thinking: "What if? What would be my priorities?"
....
Stoical is an unfortunate approach to birth. Imagine making love and feeling you have to put on a performance. This is how birth is sometimes treated, as if you have to show that you can do it; exhibit what you've learned in antenatal classes. This is hardly conducive to having an experience that is personal and intimate. Birth has become very goal-oriented.
Oh, bless.
Also, Deborah Orr on '"cleavage-sparing" mastectomies':
odd and dangerous priorities... nurtured by a culture that all too often portrays women as being significant largely because they come attached to breasts.
and also, on the whole, here, about reporting rape. Though I am a bit worried with that one over the possibility of a new kind of blaming the victim if women don't report. (Also, seriously, are there people who claim that there was a time, in the recent rather than the distant past, 'when the sexual abuse of children was less frowned upon than it is today'. I really don't think so.)
Carina Burton's parents used to get on well but now, in their 80s, they constantly bicker and snipe at each other, though we do in fact learn that:
They were never lovebirds....
Both my parents worked hard. They had their own business. They worked well together. But it all started to fall apart when two key things happened: they retired and the last of their children left home.
How uncommon is this, really? Way back in the 70s I seem to recall plaints about how hard it was when husbands retired and were around underfoot all day. If people have been living their life within a particular framework and its day to day pressures maybe it diverts them from wondering whether they want to be with the person they're with.
I've already heard some rather positive things about Deborah Cohen's new book on the Victorian family: Kathryn Hughes on the important difference between privacy and secrecy. Though I think some of that discussion about adoption needs to be nuanced with looking at the Thane and Evans book on single motherhood in C20th UK - among other things, it allowed unmarried mothers to adopt their own offspring, which actually put them in a better legal position. Hughes doesn't mention, but maybe Cohen does, those women who went off and came back with 'niece' or 'nephew' whom they were altruistically fostering (cf Kipling, 'The Gardener').
A first novel holds a special place in an author's heart - sometimes it is the only book they will write, sometimes the best. Occasionally, the writer would prefer to forget it altogether
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