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Category Archives: Personal

It’s over

For the moment anyway. Yes. I’ve handed in my PhD thesis. I can’t quite believe it: my hands and knees are shaking. Now I’ve just got to hope that the examiners have mercy on it. I put a special part in my acknowledgements for my two co-bloggers and for the regular commenters on this blog [...]

Election Reflection

Well, finally it’s election day. I have to say that even though the campaign only lasted 6 weeks, I was heartily sick of it by the end. As I said in my post on the worm, I think the immediate attention on focus groups, opinion polls and knee-jerk reactions produces bad policy. It’s not policy [...]

Facebook and friendship

In some ways, Facebook is very good for friendship. Via Facebook, I’ve managed to get back in contact with various childhood and school friends, which has been lovely. I am the kind of person who takes friendships seriously. I’m still friends with three people from Primary School, for goodness sakes, let alone numerous people from [...]

Computer says “no”

Work and pensions minister Chris Grayling is conducting an urgent review into a new medical test for incapacity benefit after fresh figures showed only 6% of those tested were deemed to be totally incapable of working. The figures, covering all new claims from October 2008 to the end of November 2009, show 39% are being [...]

What Katy Did

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax– Of cabbages–and kings– And why the sea is boiling hot– And whether pigs have wings.” (Lewis Carroll, The Walrus and the Carpenter) Well, I doubt that it’s much of a secret. I know that many of my fellow bloggers [...]

We regret to inform you that the disabled will be mugged by their government (twice)

This is going to be a longer and much sharper post than I had originally intended. What first came to mind was an open letter to the new Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, pointing out a simple £50 million cost saving to the welfare bill, but then yesterday the new coalition government handed [...]

Comfort books

A couple of times lately I’ve had to explain to people how I have certain “comfort books” which I read in times of trial. If I’m really upset or stressed, and I think I won’t be able to sleep because I’m so het up, I get out a comfort book. A comfort book is one [...]

The power of Yang

Until I was about 5 years old, most of my best friends were boys. I preferred boys because they were more direct – if they had a problem with you, they told you about it – there was none of that emotional politicking and passive-aggressive stuff that some girls seem to enjoy. If a boy [...]

ANZAC Day Redux

It seems to be de riguer for a certain type of journalist to write stuff on ANZAC Day saying that it’s a jingoistic load of crap celebrated by right-wing lunatics. Now, there’s certainly an element of society which seems to see ANZAC Day as a “glorious tradition”, and that tries to harness it to an [...]

Only a ginger…

I’ve mentioned before that I used to have that kind of hair I think of as “Scots colour”, which is a mix of red, brown and blonde. My husband has reddish-brown hair too. When I fell pregnant with my daughter, suddenly all the red in my hair vanished. I knew exactly to whom it had [...]