Nature’s alarms and Mr Mum

Ok so maybe my post yesterday re the battle with Ms Nature was premature. At 2am this morning I shifted in bed and woke to a spike of sharp pain and a crunching sound! I consulted my encyclopedic knowledge of medicine for an appropriate course of action. So if you happened to be passing my apartment at 2am I trust that explains why I was doing dumbell curls.

This morning involved another good soak in warm water to get some movement back. This technique is great but not brilliantly suited to cold days when the temperature change can be quite unpleasant to say the least. But I’m no quitter so whilst I may have declared victory a little early it was only the timing that was incorrect and not the outcome.

Over the weekend I was struck by another aspect of the ‘defeminisation’ off women. The big butch, chain smoking women with children seem to have taken over the ‘father figure’ role and abandoned the mother one. This is not a critique of size or appearance, there is something more in the general demeanour of these women. They are easily observed at one of their frequent meeting places: the cafe or Iceland on welfare day and the pound shop three days later.

These people move in packs like a terrorist cell and can be quite intimidating. But the really scary thing is the affect that they will have on their offspring. The sons will grow up thinking that women fight like men and can take a punch. These will not be boys that grow up caring for their mother, there will be no fragile old ladies to visit with grandchildren.

Then there is the daughters, brought up with a wrestler as a role model. These girls will learn from a young age that it is better to learn to slug it out than to waste your time learning to construct an eloquent repose. They will attend the first school disco looking like they put their makeup on with a magic marker, having asked mum for advice.

Remember that I just point out this stuff, look around you this week and you will soon spot your own examples.

How you say what perhaps you can’t

I had cause this weekend to telephone my cell phone company since they had failed, once again, to sort my account. A delightful person sorted my problem and, amongst many apologies, applied appropriate credit. Then I received the questionnaire sms and things went wrong. Of course I wanted to praise the excellent service of the operator but I didn’t want that to be read as praise of the company itself. The message was clear that they wanted me to rate the service that I had received, but which one?

Obviously I was not impressed with a company that has failed on 3 consecutive months but if I said that would it reflect on the call centre operative who had been so efficient. On the other hand if I gave glowing praise I know that somewhere that would have been taken as a mark of corporate success. Faced with such a dilemma I did what anyone would do, I gave up and deleted the message.

This is one of the problems with electronic media, it is simplified to the point that perspective is lost. Can anyone truly convey emotion in text, I doubt it. But we can all wax lyrical in typed words, almost over enabled. I wonder how many relationships have commenced, or extended, because of the anonymity of sms. From a positive perspective it enables the tongue tied, the shy and the nervous to reach new heights. On the negative side how many glowing romantic messages have been sent furtively from the arms of another?

Honourable mention today to the middle aged woman at Shenfield. Apparently as you get older you either forget how to cover love bites or are just too proud to still get them. My money is on the later, sharp business suit and neatly styled hair but she was rocking the love bites like a teenager. A great example of ‘you’re only as old as you act’ and cheered up my Monday.

A further mention to the South African woman in front of me for taking security seriously. She seemed to have left a key for her builder but was not going to say this out aloud on a public train. The telephone conversation took several calls due to signal loss and amounted to a coded treasure hunt. Now most of you have realised that the travelling public could do nothing with this information since we were all on the same train and none of us knew where she lived. This did not put her off describing how under the doormat was a note that told him which flower pot “numbered from the left but only you know that” he had to target.

Having completed the treasure hunt he would find “what he needed”. Top respect for never once mentioning the key. Of course I am presuming that she was not an international drug dealer or spy, perhaps that is my mistake. . .