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In which I think about PE at school and try not to succumb to the trauma

So, the Olympics is all over bar the politics, and it’s time to get back to normal telly. The nation is sharing a communal “just back from holidays” feeling where our two week refusal to tear ourselves away from the tv and do laundry or buy sensible food is coming back to haunt us. Mundanity is back with force.

The Olympics haven’t just provided a distraction from normality for us little people though. Our lovely politicians have also had a nice break from boring stuff like the economy and how we used to have a health service. All of a sudden all a politician wanting a picture in the papers needs to do is pop on a Team GB baseball cap and make a pronouncement on how bad we are at teaching PE in school. We are into a period of political PE inflation.

David Cameron kicked off be announcing that what we needed was a more competitive ethos in school sport, a cultural change, no less.  It was quickly pointed out that the current government had actually cut the previous requirement that children do at least two hours of PE per week, but Cameron was quick with his response. The requirement had been cut in recognition of the fact that some schools were not teaching Proper Sport. Some children were doing things like Indian Dance, on which Cameron commented, “Now, I’ve got nothing against Indian dancing classes but that’s not really sport.” This from the Prime Minister of a country that won two golds and a bronze in Horsey Ballet. Now I’m not criticizing the Horsey Ballet – so far as I’m concerned any day when a horsey pirouettes to songs from the Lion King on my telly is a good day – however, we probably can’t afford to be too draconian about the question of what counts as Proper Sport.

Since then we’ve had a kind of sport in schools inflation. Boris Johnson, I think,  managed to win the prize for the most pro-PE politician, when he announced that two hours per week was insufficient and children should be doing two hours of school sport per day. It’s not instantly clear where the rest of the business of education fits into this timetable, but then we’re all going to be athletes and shot putters don’t need to be able to count or read, do they? Of course, that was Boris, so it’s not entirely clear that two hours per day is what he meant. It’s perfectly possible that the data being transmitted from the Mother Ship simply became corrupted and mangled the distinction between hours, days and weeks.

All of the above somehow misses the point. Actually there are two points and it misses both of them. Firstly, we’ve done quite well at these Olympics. This presents an opportunity to get more people enthused about sport. It doesn’t obviously suggest that everything we’re doing at present in the teaching of sport is wrong. Secondly, it fails to ask what the point of PE in school is. Is it to breed new generations of elite athletes or is it to encourage an exercise habit and promote health? There’s no reason that it can’t be both, but if it’s only about elite competitive sport, that screws over the fat kids, the slow kids, the unco-ordinated kids who get turned off exercise for life and grow up into fatter slower less co-ordinated adults. I went to schools with a strong emphasis on competitive sport, and I was terrible at it. I was a podgy child. I’m not a natural catcher or thrower or jumper or runner, so I went through PE in school being not good enough. My favourite PE lessons were those where the teacher abandoned any pretense of involving the whole group and let the fat girls “field deep” (a schooldays euphemism for “sit on the grass and make daisy chains.”) I was probably twenty-seven before I worked up the courage to even enter a gym or go to an exercise class – and imagine my delight when I discovered that plenty of forms of exercise are not competitive. No-one loses. Why was I not told about this earlier?

So, if you’re a politician who likes to pop on your Team GB polo shirt and wander around the Olympic Park like you actually helped in some way (you know who you are), probably the best bet would be to actually talk to some elite athletes about what they need to reproduce these levels of success, and then, maybe, get on with doing that. It’ll probably be very boring and to do with funding and coaching programmes and not very much to do with primary school PE at all. Then, you can leave the primary schools to concentrate on getting children excited about sport and exercise and, if they enjoy it and it gets kids moving, why not a bit of  Indian Dance?

In which I think about the overall quite-goodness of humanity

In a fashion quite unlike myself I actually had a plan for what I was going to blog about this week. It’s my birthday today – it’s only 8.15am and I’ve already opened all my presents and started browsing Amazon for things to spend my vouchers on. I do like a birthday. They’re like Christmas but without all the tiresome Giving to interupt the important Receiving. Anyway, I was going to blog all about birthdays and aging and stuff like that.

However, I then became distracted by the wonder that is the Olympics, so I thought I’d blog a bit more about that, having already blogged a wee bit about it here. The Olympics have been brilliant. Ok, so my “Grenada to top the medal table” plan hasn’t quite panned out (so far – there’s totally still time), but Team GB are doing sterling work and I’ve disovered an unexpected passion for canoe slalom, ten thousand metre running and the pommel horse. Turns out us Britishers give good pommel. I also quite like volleyball, rowing and trampolining, although it amazes me that the trampolinists manage to get through their routines without shouting “Wheeeeeeee!” on the flippy bits.

I then became more specifically distracted by Oscar Pistorius. Wow. I mean just Wow. Oscar Pistorius is amazing. Oscar Pistorius is a double-amputee who runs under 46 seconds for 400m. He’s also had to go through a lengthy legal battle to challenge the IAAF’s initial decision that his running blades gave him an unfair advantage over able bodied athletes. There are still big portions of newspaper space filled with chuntering columns about whether Pistorius gains athletic advantage from having no legs below the knee, generally concluded with a vague “Where will it all end?” vibe.  These articles are silly. Where it clearly won’t end is with able-bodied athletes having their legs voluntarily chopped off so they can run on prosthetics. Assuming you survived the operation, which would be by no means guaranteed, the months/years of physio, the attendant muscle wastage, the re-learning how to walk on prosthetics, let alone run, would be more likely to end, rather than enhance, any athletics career you might have had. So lets just accept Oscar for what he is – an actual real-life (not out of a movie) inspirational person.

And then I got further distracted by this. NASA have successfully landed the Curiosity rover on Mars. Now putting aside the fact that the XKCD comic about the previous Mars rover is the saddest thing I’ve ever ever seen (apart perhaps from the musical montage prologue bit in Up), this is amazing news. The Curiosity rover weighs a tonne and it’s just landed on a planet that is at least 53 million km away from Earth. And we did that. Obviously I mean we – humanity, not we – me and my mates. Sadly our mission to Mars broke down at the planning stage, when we ran out of napkins to draw on and spent the remaining budget on drinking more wine instead.

Humanity though is amazing. When we’re not killing each other and breaking the planet, we’re really rather incredible. We can learn to run when we have no legs. We can overcome great odds to follow our dreams, like Saudi Arabian athletes Sarah Attar and Wojdan Shaherkani. We can send massive great hunks of stuff to other planets. We’re quite inpsiring when you stop to think about our positives. So, that’s what I’m inviting you to do today? Think about the positives. What inspires you? What makes you go weirdly smiley and teary-eyed all at the same time? Please do sharing in the comments, and, if you feel so inspired, please feel free to do following/subscribing too.

In which I think about not wanting children

I don’t want to have children. I’ve never really wanted to have children. Most of my life I’ve been told that this will change, that not wishing to procreate was a phase I would get past, and that, fundamentally, long-term resistance to bringing additional tiny people into the world would be a bit weird.

There were generally agreed to be two key triggers that would send me back onto the right-thinking path. Those were “when you hit your thirties” – this being the age at which the tick of a woman’s biological clock is expected to become overwhelming, and “when you’re friends have children.” Well, I’m 35 next week (eeeek – more on that next Monday) and I can’t move for small people in my social circle, but the urge still hasn’t kicked in.

I don’t dislike children. I have a six-year old nephew and an eight-week old niece and they’re both marvellous fun. Well the six-year old is marvellous fun. The eight-week old is still really at the sleep-feed-poo stage, but she’s super super cute and cuddlesome, and I still can’t imagine wanting one of my own.

What’s struck my lately, much more than in the past, is that this feeling actually is a bit weird. Most (not quite all, but a heavy majority) of my friends who weren’t that fussed about kids when they were younger, did grow out of that phase, and reach a point in life where babies seemed desirable. Either that or a lot of my friends are terrible with birth control and good at putting  positive spin on the outcome.

And it’s not just that the great miscellaneous blame-for-everything “society” that we live in pressures us to have babies. It’s much more basic than that. We basically exist to reproduce. Our fundamental biological driver is to pass on our genes. Not wanting to do that would suggest that I’ve somehow managed to break evolution.  Er…. oops.

Not that I’m going to override my lack of procreational urge. The planet has plenty of people. A few less probably wouldn’t do us any great harm, and might bring big environmental benefits.

So why am I telling you this? Well, partly because it’s Monday and my new found blogging commitment requires that I tel you something, but mainly because of something two different women said to me recently, when I told them I’d never wanted kids. Both said that I was the first person they’d ever heard admit that openly. Now, obviously it’s perfectly possible that I am entirely unique and therefore unquestionably special and important and deserving of a tiara, but, sad though I am not to get a tiara, I don’t think that can possibly be the case. So that’s why I’m telling the internet about my weird anti-biological resistance to perpetuating my genes. It’s because it can’t just be me, can it? Please feel welcome to offer reassurances that I’m not a total one-off or to suggest pretty tiara options in the comments. Do you want kids? Did you always want them? Is it different for boys? Do they make tiaras for boys? Other questions like that…

In which I, for reasons which will be made clear, get behind Grenada for Olympic glory

So it is nearly time to stop grumbling about the expense, and the traffic disruption, and the inability of multinational companies to recruit security guards, and get on with some actual sport. I am genuinely excited about the Olympics. The Olympics is, I think, my favourite delivery format for sport, and this is from a woman who has a fully considered opinion on Andy Murray’s best chance of winning a grand slam (would have thought US, but maybe Wimbledon after all), and on the relative merits of a range of England strikers (Wayne Rooney – increasingly overrated).

The Olympics has a sense of the village fete sports day that you don’t get with those other big sporting events. You’ve got your Usain Bolt, but you’ve also got your modern pentathletes, archers, mountain bikers, and table tennisificators. And it’s that mix of different events that makes the Olympics so utterly brilliant.

This year I shall be mainly cheering for Team Grenada. Of course. Because of how I am Grenadan. Which, actually, I’m not. No. The reason for cheering for Team Grenada is entirely financial. My nephew’s school are running a fund-raising Olympic raffle, in which “winning” ticket holders are allocated an Olympic nation. Prizes are given to the ticket holders whos countries achieve the most Gold, Silver, or Bronze medals. I got Grenada. Hurrah! Go Grenada! Go Grenada!

In order to best support my newly adopted nation, I’ve had a little look at their previous Olympic performances. It turns out that Grenada didn’t actually win any medals in Beijing, or in Athens, or in Sydney, or, indeed, at any of the Olymipcs they’ve competed at since their first Games in 1984. I’m not daunted by this fact though. Sure. I may have to be a little bit realistic. Probably we’re going to be competing for the prize for Most Bronze medals rather than Most Golds but I still think that’s totally doable.

The team with the most bronze medals in Beijing was the USA, who took home 36 bronze medals. Admittedly, the Grenadan team this year consists of just ten athletes, but I’m not letting that dissaude me from the potential glory ahead. And that, right there, is the brilliance of sport. Being a armchair sport addict is, in the end, all about hope. It’s about maintaining the belief that this year will be different in the face of all evidence to the contrary. It’s about knowing that it’s not over until the fat lady blows the whistle or the referee sings (or something like that), and then, even when it is over, regrouping and coming back and doing it all again. Hope is what makes watching sport so seductive, and is why I remain entirely confident of scooping raffle glory. I’ll be there. Bum on sofa. Olympic themed nibbles on lap. TV and laptop fired up to facilitate multi-event viewing, and Grenada will bring home those medals for me. Probably. Go Team Grenada!

So there you go – week one of my promise to blog every Monday, and I’m totally doing it. Hurrah! As ever, please do commenting and following and all that stuff. Are you excited about the Olympics? Do you fall over with boredom when Match of the Day comes on the telly? Are you a unusually big fan of Grenada?  I warmly encourage you to tell us about any, or all, of the above (or about anything else that is flitting through your mind) down there in the comments.

In which I think about what I learnt at the RNA conference

This weekend was the annual RNA Conference, an event at which romantic novellists get together, talk about writing, the state of the industry and generally maintain a communal level of fabulousness not normally seen outside of a glitter factory.

There are lots of posts all over the internet about the conference – the main RNA blog will gives you a taster (and more pictures of shoes than most shoe shop websites), but I wanted to share a few specific things that I learnt this year.

 

1. I must blog more regularly.

The first session on Saturday morning was led by Talli Roland and was all about social media. For most of this session I was quite smug. I tweet. You can’t really move for me on facebook. I blog, and then Talli dropped a reality bomb into my self-satisfied bubble. “You have to blog regularly,” she said.

Ah. Yeah. About that. I have been deeply blog-flakey of late. So my new resolution is this. I will blog every week. Every Monday in fact. It would be really truly lovely to see you here. You could do commenting, and then I would do replying and we would be one big happy blogging, chatting family. 

 

2. Things feel a little bit more positive than last year.

At last year’s conference the overriding vibe from the publishing types in attendance seemed downbeat. I couldn’t escape the feeling that ebooks, self-publishing and the recession were scaring traditional publishers, but no-one had worked out how to respond. There was a sense that if publishers just carried on as if nothing had changed, the world might go back to normal. It had an air of Neville Chamberlain in 1938 about it. The vibe around submissions was downbeat too. The tone was very much, “Our list is full. You could submit, but we’re not really looking for that type of thing…”

This year things were different. Maybe it was just the different personnel in attendance but the vibe was definitely more positive. Publishers were talking about actively looking to acquire new titles. Chatting to authors who’d had one-to-ones with editors, the numbers being encouraged to submit manuscripts seemed higher. And publishers talked openly in their sessions about self-publishing and why they believe that traditional publishing is a better option. Heads were out of the sand and looking forward. None of which is to suggest that getting published in 2012 is easy, or even significantly easier than in 2011, but, to my ears at least, the tone felt more encouraging to try.

 

3. Everyone needs a good day every now and then

Trying to get published is hard. Writing a novel is hard (I mean, not like brain surgery hard or training 10 hours a day to be an olympic gymnast hard, but in its own way, still tricky). Editing a novel is hard. Getting an agent is hard. Editing again with someone else’s input is harder. There are points along the road where it’s easy to think that it’s never going to happen. It’s easy to see other writers signing deals and posting pics of their cover art on facebook, and wonder if that’s ever going to be you.

At times like that you need A Good Day. A Good Day might just be a day you get an tweet from someone who likes your blog. It might be a day when you write a really good chapter and read it back and think, yeah, that’s actually ok. It might be a day when someone else tells you you’re writing is ok. Saturday was A Good Day for three reasons.

Firstly, I explained the concept behind my novel to a publisher, who responded that she loved the idea. Now that doesn’t mean she’ll love the novel. She might hate the way I’ve dealt with the idea. She might read the opening chapter and think it’s not funny enough. She might think it’s too funny and the jokes distract from the plot. She might just get something else that’s similiar that she loves ever so slightly more on her desk on the same day. But she loved the idea. That alone is worth a tiny happy dance.

Secondly, I won the Elizabeth Goudge Award. This prize is awarded for the RNA’s own story competition which is open to any members attending the conference. This year I won. I have a little trophy, which at some point in the next 12 months, will be engraved with my name. I’ll be alongside some fab writers. That’s worth quite a big happy dance.

Thirdly, in slightly drunken conversation with a gaggle of published writers, someone acknowledged that one of the most frustrating stages in the journey towards publication is the bit where people are reading your work and saying “I really like it, but…” That, they agreed, was the stage just before, “I really like it, and…” Maybe, for me, the “I really like it, but…” stage will last for years and years and several more “not quite there yet” novels, but the next stage, the “I really like it, and…”, doesn’t feel so completely unachieveable. It’s still an IF rather than a WHEN, but it’s a doable IF. Altogether now, Massive Happy Dance!

 

So that’s just three of the things I learnt. There were lots of others. “Celebrate often” was a big message from Miranda Dickinson’s talk, which I seem to have taken on board particularly well. Just look at all those happy dances. In summary, conference was brilliant. The RNA is brilliant. And you’re all brilliant too, so if you fancy joining me here every Monday for super regular blogging, please follow or subscribe. It’ll give me yet another cause for happy dancing.

In which I share a very little story what I wrote

I don’t usually blog stories or poems, but just for variety (and because it’s far too silly to try to actually sell) here is a little storyette what I wrote. It’s called “Bored”.

The sky hangs dark and menacing above the horizon. Rain beats mercilessly onto the cold barren land. A light shines from a single dwelling-place, defiant against winter’s icy hand.

Inside two men survey their labours, waiting for the coming of the hour.

The older man speaks. “Come forward, young apprentice, and behold.”

“Behold what?”

“Do it properly. We agreed.”

A sigh. “Behold what, oh glorious and worthy master?”

“Behold the power in this land writ large.” He holds aloft a manuscript covered in mystic runes. “Above us,” he declaims, “only the Great Ones. Below us, the minion classes quake in their fear.”

The young one takes the manuscript and reads in wonder. “Then it is finished?”

“It is.”

Silence.

“Why are maintenance-”

A sharp look from the wiser older man quashes his tongue. He tries again. “Why are those who tend…” he shrugs, ”…those who tend this mighty ground on which we stand shown green?”

“Because, my youthful friend, green is the colour of hope. Green is the colour of life. Green is the colour that was prophesied.”

The younger man pauses. “Can we stop doing this now, Dave?”

The older man scratches his armpit and gazes out across the Rotherside and Armley Business Development Centre carpark. “’Spose.”

His colleague puts down the manuscript and spins on his seat. “It’s good that you finished the Org Chart.”

A sigh. “It’s ok. You wanna do corridor chair races?”

The young one nods. “Why are Maintenance in green?”

Another sigh. “I quite like green.”

In which I start off all Venetian and then become distracted by daytime television

Ahoy there! The blog plan for today was to tell you all about my lovely holiday last week, but since making that plan I’ve become quite disastrously distracted by what I suspect may be the worst television programme ever made.

I’m going to try to stay on topic for at least a couple of paragraphs though. So I’ve been to Venice. I went there with darling husband, senior sibling, her hubbie and my favourite nephew. And these are the things that I learnt:

1. Holidays with six-year olds are knackering

Now I appreciate that many of you will have actual children of your own who live in your house and are knackering all the time. Well I don’t, so this was news to me. This particular six-year old, although charming in all respects, does not appear to have been fitted with any sort of activity level control. He runs with two settings: asleep and not asleep (aka totally manic).

I, unfortunately, am quite a sedentary animal, used to sitting still on my rapidly-expanding writer’s bottom, so can only really maintain manic for about seven and a half minutes at a time. Probably, when I am Queen of the World, I shall decree that all children be fitted with some sort of wakefulness dimmer switch, so that the grown-ups can just turn them down to “sitting quietly” when they’ve had enough running about for one day. I am confident that there are absolutely no practical or ethical issues with that plan at all.

I was at this point going to include a pic of aforementioned nephew, but everytime I try to upload it my browser crashes, so you’ll just have to take my word for the fact that he exists, is blond, curly and quite unfeasibly cute.

2. People who don’t like Venice are just wrong.

There are many complex issues in the world. Questions like “why did Germolene stop being pink?” are tricky and deserving of lengthy debate. The question of whether Venice is brilliant is not complicated. It is, without question, one of the best places on earth. It has no cars, which makes it a bit like Center Parcs (which the self-same nephew reliably informs me actually is the best place on earth). It has incredible architechture, amazing art and is bountiful in its provision of gelato.

Some people have told me the Venice smells funny. They are wrong. I’ve been there twice. It smells fine. Other people complain that it’s full of tourists. Well, in places, yes. But it’s wrong to be snobby about touristy places – if lots of people want to go somewhere, that’s just as likely to be a sign that the somewhere is amazing, as it is that the people are fools. And secondly, you just need to walk for 5 minutes beyond St Mark’s Square and it’s actually not that busy at all, or, if you’re too lazy to walk, hop on a boat over to San Giorgio or Salute and get away from the crowds that way.

Venice is brilliant. If you haven’t been, go. If you’ve been and didn’t like it, then go back and do it properly. If you’ve been and loved it, share your highlights down in the comments.

And then I came home, where my attention was rapidly taken up by a “reality” tv wonder which I had not come across before. It’s not actually a new programme – it went out in America in 2010, but I’m in Britain and I don’t have Sky, so forgive me for being a little behind.

Ladies and Gentleman, I present to you the wonder that is BridalPlasty. On BridalPlasty twelve brides compete to win the “perfect” celebrity-style wedding, including winning items off their plastic surgery wishlist. As is the norm with tv reality, each week the brides complete challenges, and the challenge winner gets a prize. On this show that prize is an medically unnecessary major surgery! Whoop-de-doo! Only if they win the show will they get their full surgery wish list, and then they can have their perfect wedding, assuming of course that their thigh skin hasn’t been left too tight to permit walking down the aisle.

Now, the obvious next paragraph would be a big ol’ rant about tv reinforcing the idea that there’s just one form of perfect beauty and that only by conforming to that precisely can any woman expect a man to look twice at her. Probably that rant would come with a side order of “who decides what’s perfect anyway?” and possibly a dipping source of “actually they all look fine to start with.” And all of those would be good points, but you are intelligent readers, so I’m assuming you can fill in the details on all of those rant elements.

I could also wonder why none of these women and none of their fiances appear to be particularly concerned about the risks of major surgery. Surely, when your girlfriend tells you she’s going to enter a competition to win a perfect wedding, with a small associated risk of death on an operating table, most husbands-to-be would have something to add to the discussion. Wouldn’t they?

Anyway, I’m going to jump straight to: Where are the bridegrooms in this process? How come they’re deemed pretty enough to have a perfect wedding without being cut and bandaged and remodelled? How come a groom can have a bit of a big nose, or a hint of a beer gut, or wonky teeth and be considered characterful, whereas brides need to be ironed and stapled until they all look like the same stepford blank canvas?

Here’s the bottom line: faces are supposed to show expressions; lips are supposed to be able to smile and laugh and shout and whistle; boobs are supposed to be squishy and jiggly; years are supposed to add wrinkles; bodies are supposed to change over time, not under a knife. We’re not all supposed to look the same. There isn’t supposed to be a template of perfect beauty that you can buy off the shelf. Love the body evolution gave you, and (and this is important) don’t go marrying anyone who doesn’t love it, in all its wonderful imperfection, too.

That is all. Ciao (cos I’ve been to Italy, see) x

In which I am curiously lacking in views on the Beecroft Report

Hello lovely blog readers. Long time no see. How have you been?

Time, laziness and a lack of righteous anger have kept me from you over recent weeks. Happily the news last week was filled with the wonder the is the Beecroft Report on employment law, and so I am able to return to you with something to muse upon/rant about and blogging normality may be resumed.

For those of you not familiar with the tome, the Beecroft Report is a report into UK Employment Law written by one Adrian Beecroft and recommending a set of changes to the law which the report claims respond to the current situation where “employment law and regulation impedes the search for efficiency and competitiveness.” Efficiency and competetiveness are obviously the guiding aims of any right thinking individual, so impeding them is, very clearly, A Bad Thing.

Shall we take a look at some key points in more detail? I think we shall. Shall we number those points? You better believe we will. Before we do that I just want to make one thing painstakingly clear. It is, and always has been, entirely legal for an employer to dismiss an employee because they are bad at their job. The legal term is “dismissal for reason of capability” and it’s allowed. It always has been allowed. No-one, to my knowledge, has ever suggested that it should not be allowed. Remember that point – it’s going to be important later.

1. Unfair Dismissal

The Beecroft Report says: “The ability to dismiss an employee who is not performing is an essential element in managing any business.” With this in mind Beecroft recommends the introduction of “no fault” compensated dismissal, whereby an employer can dismiss a person without giving a reason, if they provide monetary compensation. Now, I don’t know if anyone’s ever mentioned this to you, but it’s already perfectly legal to dismiss a person for being lousy at their job.

If the employee is fine and dandy at their job, I don’t quite understand why an employer would want to pay them to go away, and if they’re terrible at the job, then why would you pay for the privilege of sacking them, when you can sack them for free at the moment.

The change Beecroft is trying to introduce here is create a situation where an employee can be dismissed, given no reason for the dismissal, and have no legal recourse. There’s another thought I’d like you to hold onto…

2. Employment Tribunals

Beecroft lays out his perception of the Employment Tribunal system like this: “Employers in general deeply dislike employment tribunals, a feeling shared by most employees. They are expensive, time consuming and personally stressful.” I’m going to skim over the grossly unevidenced assertion in the opening sentence, assume that I missed the memo where they checked what we all thought about Employment Tribunals, and move onto the specifics in sentence 2.

Employment Tribunals are expensive – to whom? The government is very clear that claimants do not need expensive legal advice to navigate the process. If they did, then presumably legal aid for employment cases would have been retained in the recent Legal Aid Reform Bill. It wasn’t. Submitting an application is free. There’s the cost of travelling to the hearing, and the cost of photocopying submissions and evidence. Compared with most legal processes, from a claimant and respondent’s point of view it’s relatively inexpensive. Having cited the cost of the tribunal process as a problem, Beecroft goes onto recommend introducing fees for claimants. One can only imagine that he’d forgotten how expensive he thought it was when he wrote that bit.

Employment Tribunals are time consuming – well yes, although how time consuming depends on the complexity of the claim. Suing or being sued over any other contractual dispute would also be time-consuming. Strangely, that fact doesn’t appear to lead us to conclude that the wider civil courts are probably a bit of a dodgy idea.

Employment Tribunals are personally stressful – well, potentially. Whether they’re more or less stressful than being fired for no reason and with no legal recourse, is open to debate.

In addition to introducing fees for claimants, Beecroft also supports other BIS plans to attempt to reduce the number of claims that make it as far as tribunal. Do you get the impression that he wants to discourage people from making Employment Tribunal claims? If you do, then that would be a fair impression. But is it needed? If only statistics were available detailing the current workload of the tribunal system. Happily (well happily for nerds like me) they are. You can read them for yourselves, if you are so minded, here.

Between April 2010 and Mar 2011 383400 claimants made an application to the Employment Tribunal. That was a slight fall on the numbers the year before, but still well up on the 266500 claims in 2008-9. Although actually it wasn’t, because to look at things clearly you really need to discount a big hunk of repeat claims that originate from an specific set of problems to do with Working Time Regulations in the airline industry and are resubmitted every quarter. Putting aside that whole hornet’s nest, we see that the claims year on year look something like this:

2008-9 – 242500

2009-10 297600

2010-11 268300

Not such a big variance from 2008-9 to 2010-11 after all. So if claims aren’t significantly rising, why the need to discourage claims? It comes down to a really fundamental question about how employment relationships should work. Should employers have freedom to do essentially what they please, on the basis that it’s their money and their business at the end of the day? Or should we view an employment relationship like any other contract – a binding agreement between two equal parties, wherein if the financially weaker party feels mistreated there is redress under the law? That’s the fundamental question, and that’s what we should be talking about, rather than getting caught up in a set of rhetoric about how not being able to sack people is stopping the economy from growing.

So, how should work work? Does he (or she) who pays the piper simply call the tune, or should employees have strong protection under the law? Does employment regulation stifle entrepreneurism? Feel welcome to let me know what you think in the comments. It’s probably a topic I’ll come back to, not least, because we’ve not had time to discuss Beecroft’s thoughts on equal pay yet. They’re a whole blog post on their own. Watch this space.

In which I offer contemplative musings (and a leaflet-based points system) on how to vote

So this Thursday is election day in locations across the UK. I appreciate how some of you might have missed this exciting news nugget by doing things like living in other countries. However, here in the UK, we are in the grip of election fever. I’m sorry. That’s not right. It turns out I’m in the grip of  fever, but I’ve got antibiotics so I’ll probably be fine in a couple of days.

The local elections have, however, pretty much failed to raise an eyebrow, let alone a fever. The possible exception to this is in our esteemed capital, where they’ve managed to boil the whole business of local elections down to a simple act of trying to remember whether it’s the balding whingey one or the blond bonkers one’s turn this year.

Here, in the hotly contested political battleground of St Suburbans ward in Normal Town, we don’t have those easily identifiable political personalities to pick between. We also don’t have very much sense of what each political party stands for in local terms. A nice Labour leaflet about how the Tories are cutting tax for higher earners is all very well, but I’m not entirely clear how my choice of local ward Councillor is going to change that.

The obvious response to this problem is apathy. And I’m not going to spend too long arguing against that. I’ve never bought the notion that voting should be compulsory. That would just mean that a whole load of people who don’t know and don’t care get rounded up and shoved into polling booths. Frankly, if you’re not fussed enough to put an X on a sheet of paper without compulsion, I’m really not that bothered about you not getting your say.

However, I do think voting is important. People fought wars, threw themselves under racehorses and drafted lengthy parliamentary amendments for my right to vote, so, personally, I’m fairly commited to exercising that right.

Local elections are a conundrum though – if only someone provided a handy set of suggestions for how to select who to vote for. If only that existed in blog form, preferably in some sort of numbered list.

Well here you go. To follow this guide you will need to start by collecting all the random election leaflets off your doormat (or retrieving them from the recycling). We will be adopting a leaflet-based points system. This means that, in my case, I can disregard the Lib Dem and Green candidates straight away as they haven’t even managed to send me a leaflet. Tough break for them, but sometimes you do have to be ruthless about these things.

 

1. Candidates should be rewarded for detail

Detail is good. Detail is what makes the difference between an intention and a policy. Any sentence that starts “We would support…” or “We would like to see better…” should be viewed with suspicion. These sentences merely suggest a willingness to go along with someone else who could be bothered to do something about whatever the issue at hand might be. They don’t suggest definite actions. Look for the detail. They gain points for that.

At my house the Tory is doing surprisingly well – perhaps because he’s the sitting councillor he has more facts and figures about what he’s up to that most of the others. There’s an independent also scoring well. Labour and UKIP are poor so far.

 

2. Look for local policies

There is a tendency to view local elections as a mid-term referendum on the sitting government. This means that parties are tempted to pack their election literature with guff about national policy. Unless it’s a policy that can meaningfully be changed at a local election that’s all just leaflet space filler. Ignore it. If it pleases you, you can even put big red lines through all the stuff that local councillors have no influence over. So that’s everything to do with Income Tax, defence, the NHS, our membership of the EU and university tuition fees, gone. I should warn you, you might not have much leaflet left.

On my count – Tory and Independent are still in the lead. Labour have made a bit of a comeback. UKIP definitely trailing.

3. Be wary of lunacy

There is a certain sort of person who stands in local elections. Of course, I mean civic minded, hard working, community spirited people. There is then another sort of person who stands in local elections. The loon. With care you can spot them. I suggest starting with the punctuation and layout of the leaflet. Excessive use of exclamation marks, randomly placed capitalisation, a willingness to pop quotation marks around almost any word or phrase – all these are symptomatic of an overly excitable mind, and also of a person without a friend prepared to proofread their election leaflet. That’s the first sign.

Further evidence can be gleaned from the obligatory “About the candidate” section on the leaflet. Writing these must be hell – it’s like a personal ad designed to appeal to all ages, genders and proclivities. However, any mention of a self-consiously zany hobby should cause concern.

Don’t want to be cruel, but, from my leaflet selection, I think UKIP are definitely out of the running at this point. Sorry.

4. Oh yeah, and do you actually agree with any of the policies?

Some commentators would suggest you consider this first, but I find that thinning the leaflet pile on the criteria above makes this stage much more manageable. For me, I’m guessing this is where the Tory is going to lose ground.

 

So by my own system the candidate who wins my vote is an independent socialist called Peter. That’s a turn-up for the books. Without this, clearly deeply well thought out, process I’d probably have voted Labour or even for the leaflet-less Lib Dem, but the system doesn’t lie. Maybe Labour and Lib Dem will learn from this for next time.

So that’s me mused out for the day. Please do subscribe in one way or another if you like my occasional ramblings, and do join in the chat. How do you pick who to vote for, if you vote at all? Was it unfair of me to disregard the Green, when leaflet production really isn’t very green at all? Any improvements and amendments to The System will be considered.

In which I offer musings on what it means to “finish” writing a book

My first ever attempt at writing a novel is nearing completion. And let me be clear, by “completion” I don’t actually mean “completion” in the sense that any sane and normal person would understand it.

The non-writers amongst you will probably be open to two potential definitions of when a book is complete. It could be when the writer has typed their way all the way from “Once upon a time…” to “happily ever after” and stepped away from the keyboard. It could also be when the book gets handed over to a publisher and winds up in actual bookshops. Well, I’m not at either of those stages. The first passed some months (years?) ago, and the second may never happen at all.

So what have I been messing about at for the last two years, since I completed my first draft of this novel? Well, various things. There have been periods of having to leave the house and earn some actual money. Although he is astonishingly supportive of my whole penniless writer thing, much beloved husband does also remain fond of more mundane stuff, like eating and paying the mortgage.

There have also been periods of watching my life inexorably ebb away through the medium of my twitter and facebook news feeds. There has been a brain-mushing amount of watching old episodes of Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model on youtube, and falling ever so slightly in love with both Heidi and Tyra. Turns out my ideal woman is a German version of Tyra Banks. Who knew?

There have been periods of sitting staring at my novel-in-progress on the screen and rocking gently before flicking back over to youtube where it’s safe. But mainly there has been editing and rewriting and editing again, because starting at “Once upon a time..” and typing through to “happily ever after” doesn’t get you a book. It gets you a draft, and within that draft there will be plot holes that you could drive a truck through. I mean, YOU could drive a truck through them. I couldn’t obviously. I have driving-terror. The draft will also include characters who change their personality for no reason partway through, and, in my case, one character who changed their name for no reason partway through. That first draft was like a route map for the whole – it was only after I’d written it, that I could really start navigating through the novel.

There have been periods of very bravely allowing other people to read bits of my work for feedback, occasionally leading to periods of weeping and periods of defensiveness (usually followed by a much longer period of acceptance). Feedback on work in progress is interesting. The main thing I’ve learnt is that it’s wise to be careful who you ask. The best writers aren’t always the best critiquers. Twitter and facebook are brilliant for chatting to other writers, but the best feedback can come from intelligent readers outside of the little “writer bubble” we sometimes occupy. (Although I have had top feedback from some v talented writers – Huzzah for Holly Magill,  Lisa Bodenham-Mason and the RNA New Writers Scheme.)

I am now very nearly done with the editing and rewriting. I’ve (I think) beaten my insubordinate opening chapter into submission. There’s one more chapter to rewrite and then a few bits and bobs of line edits and then, and then… Well, and then, it’s time to send baby out into the world. I’ve made my list of potential agents, and prioritised within that list. I’ve identified publishers who accept unagented submissions. It’s pretty much all over bar the posting.

And after that, I start back at “Once upon a time…” and do it all over again, with a whole new set of problems and anxieties trying to get in the way. I “finished” one novel, but was it a fluke? Can I do it again? The rejections for novel no. 1 will be flowing by then too, trying to distract me with their depressing hints at my inate lack of ability. And that’s not even the worst thing – the worst thing is that I’ve now watched ALL the episodes of Top Model on youtube, even Canada’s Next Top Model. Can I write at all without a Top Model based word count incentive? I’ll let you know…