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 This is the second in a series of informative podcasts for parents. This is an interview with Alice Hoyle, who is an expert in PSHE (Personal and Social Health Education). She has been talking to kids about sex and sexually transmitted infections for years, and claims that nothing embarrasses her in this respect any more! Alice has some tips on how to handle your own worries as a parent talking to your child about sex.
Amongst other things she talks about some of the misconceptions surrounding children and sex, and gives some tips on how to reduce the embarrassment factor when talking to children about sex and sexuality.
Podcast 2.1 Sex Education in UK Schools
Podcast 2.2 When and how to talk to kids about sex
Podcast 2.3 Why talk to your child about sex
Podcast 2.4 STIs on the rise in the UK
Podcast 2.5 Helping your child make good decisions about sex
If you have any comments on this podcast or would like to hear any more, please let me know.
I was going to sum this up in a few paragraphs, but I thought this would be more succinct:
This morning I paid off the last of a lingering and pernicious credit card bill and was delighted to see my current account, savings account and tax account all healthily in the black. I’ve also made significant steps towards paying back my professional trainee loan in recent months and have taken the hitherto unthinkable steps of taking out a pension and enquiring about getting a mortgage.
Why is any of this tedious detail worth blogging about? It isn’t, in and of itself. But, after working for a company that didn’t pay my salary for several months in 2008, and the unpleasant money problems that ensued, it feels like a substantial victory to be back on my feet and making progress financially. Although I’ve never been well off it wasn’t until I encountered that unscrupulous employer that I understood the very strong link between financial stability and mental health/happiness. Unless you are this girl, I imagine that having no money and no certainty about your income can only be a stressful and depressing experience.
That said, I did live in a similar way to Katherine Hibbert last winter. After I walked away from the job that didn’t pay I had no choice but to move out of my lovely two-bedroomed flat in the Hampshire countryside and take the cheapest room I could find in a tiny underheated flat in Edinburgh, living with a friend who puts Scrooge to shame with his miserly ways. I was returning to Edinburgh with my tail well and truly between my legs, having left barely five months earlier to start a new life with a well paid job, lovely flat and excellent prospects. I was angry, skint and embarrassed, and can’t have been much fun to be around.
However, once I’d accepted my situation and managed to claw back the freelance clients I’d said goodbye to at the beginning of the year, I began to take some interest in my new straitened circumstances. My flatmate had been what is known as a ‘freegan’ for some years, and I enthusiastically adopted this practice as a means of eliminating my food bills. A freegan is someone who eats food discarded by others, usually large supermarket chains. We would head out around 2 or 3 in the morning and drive out to one of the Marks and Spencers’ stores at the edge of the city. After checking for security guards we’d park the car and head over to the bins. Often these were filled with rotting bread, flowers and other inedible items, but there would generally be one that was filled with food that had either gone past its sell by date that day or was still just in date. Once we’d hit the jackpot, flatmate would climb into the bin, root about and chuck selected items at me to put into a sack. We’d take away as much as we could safely store in our fridge and freezer and then drive home, where we’d unload our goods and spend several hours sorting, cleaning, storing and then eating a celebratory meal. (M & S are good enough not to lock their bins, but they have a bizarre habit of spraying blue dye over the packets of food, which meant we often arrived home ‘blue handed’).
I felt a slight embarrassment about what I was doing, mostly because I knew my mother wouldn’t like it. But the savings I made, the improved quality of the food I ate, plus the general fun I had doing it, completely changed my attitude to scavenging, and made me see some advantages to living on a reduced income. Additionally, instead of living on my own in a flat that was much too big for me I was staying with lots of people – young, fun, foreign, enjoying their lives and making do with not much except each other. Although I was miserable and bitter about my experience I had companionship and laughter in my life. I stayed in that flat for five months, by which time I’d rebuilt my business and accumulated enough savings to allow me to take time off work to study for my exams and have a vacation for the first time in six years. I found the thin walls, constant noise and appalling levels of cleanliness in the flat quite trying, but being surrounded by young happy people who weren’t constantly moaning about money, work and mortgages was a better cure for me than a handout from a rich relative would have been.
I enjoy making money and buying things with the money I have earned, but I suspect I only do so because I am painfully aware of what it takes to make any money in the first place. Life shouldn’t be unbearably hard but nor should it be too easy. If I hadn’t nearly lost everything two years ago the current healthy state of my finances wouldn’t be giving me so much joy now.
Today I went with my dad and my brother to my grandmother’s cottage to pick over what was left and identify any things I might like to take for myself. My grandmother is not dead, but she has reached an age (99) where living on your own in a 400-year-old stone cottage in the middle of nowhere is not an especially good idea if you’re planning on reaching your centenary. After one fire and one flood my poor harassed father finally put his foot down and insisted she go somewhere warm, clean and safe with round-the-clock medical supervision.
This all happened back in August, and I hadn’t been inside her house since then – had been avoiding it, in fact. My relationship with my grandmother is not good. I don’t much like her and judging by comments made at our last meeting the feeling is mutual. I try not to take it personally. She doesn’t seem to like anyone. In fact, famously, she once told my father that she much preferred things to people. Oh yes, the acquisition of things has played a big part in my grandmother’s life – antique furniture especially. As a child I used to earn extra pocket money by visiting her fortnightly and polishing the many old wooden chairs, desks, tables and chests of drawers in her house, a task that could take several hours depending on how diligent I was feeling. Although the pieces in her house were quite beautiful I took very great care never to covet any of them. Early on I took an intense dislike to what I saw as her inhumane placing of things above people. God knows as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to understand it better. People are infinitely unreliable. They let one down most awfully. Pieces of furniture, on the other hand, well they don’t turn their back on you in a crisis. All they require is an occasional coat of beeswax, and a good rub down. The best pieces even increase in value as time goes on. Who wouldn’t prefer a beautiful old bureau over a gambling husband, an over-talkative servant, an unmarried granddaughter with a bizarre career in some new-fangled technology you can’t understand so feel compelled to reject?
If I sound a touch bitter it is because I am. And so it was in a highly disgruntled mood that I traipsed along to her house this afternoon. When we unlocked the door and went in I found a place both oddly familiar and quite unrecognisable. The rooms had once been worthy of a spread in an upmarket interiors magazine, but the flood had ruined one end of the house and the rest was in considerable disarray. Damaged furniture had been removed, other pieces distributed to various family members and named beneficiaries. Some had gone with Grandmother to her new home. Amusingly, her collection of ornamental owls, which I have never wanted but which she has nevertheless seen fit to bequeath to me, were all arranged on a counter top, mocking me with their wise old eyes. There are forty or fifty of the darned things and I have no idea what to do with them.
My initial response was to reject the lot of it. I am feeling especially angry with my grandmother at the moment, and everything she has touched seems imbued with her particularly potent form of negativity (I have one of her teapots at home in London – again unasked for – and just the sight of it can bring a crease to my brow.) However, it doesn’t do to allow mere objects to assume such power. Better to treat them casually, even mockingly, to drive some of the evil away. In the end I settled on some lamps that would actually have some use for me, and an old table that is the only thing I know of that relates to my grandfather in any way (she relegated it to the greenhouse rather than keep it indoors).
In what was her bedroom, we found some traces of the old interior walls of the cottage, as it was when my brother and I lived there as little children. My grandmother’s presence in that house was so strong that I often forgot that I had spent the first eleven years of my life playing happily under its heather thatch. We stood there, reminding ourselves of where the old rayburn used to be, how the door to the bathroom was positioned, where my old hand painting of a monster had adorned the wall for years. It felt like an exorcism for me – to reclaim this house where I had spent many happy years from the memory of my grandmother and the pretty but miserable museum she made of it.
In the time she lived there whole trees grew up and cast a shadow over the house. My dad has cut many of them down now, and the place feels like it can breathe again. I shall feel happier still when someone new moves in there, hopefully filling the place with cheap and cheerful IKEA sofas and kitchen units, and chairs they have opportunistically plucked out of a skip.
Meanwhile I shall do my best not to be troubled by my lamps and teapot, and to think of something amusing and inappropriate to do with my collection of ornamental owls.
I don’t much enjoy visiting my family at Christmas. Nothing to do with them; I’m happy to visit at other times, when we can sit outside in the lovely garden, or go out and about and gossip over scones at some seaside cafe. But at Christmas everything grinds to a halt and often, as is the case this year, the snow piles up around and hems us in to our already very isolated home, increasing the sense of vulnerability that one inevitably experiences in a house one mile up a dirt track with no neighbours within walking distance and a big dark forest on one side.
Yesterday I finally forced myself to go for a walk at 4pm, when it was already pretty dark. The moonlight reflecting off the endless carpet of white snow meant I could see where I was going, and for the first time in over a decade I wandered down a particular farm track towards the main road (I say wandered, but actually I stomped, as the snow has formed a thick, hard top crust that resists for a while before one can break through to the more pliable powder beneath.) I stood and stared out over the fields until the cold forced me to head back. On the way home I saw the shadowy figure of a tall man on the road ahead. I assumed it was my brother, out on a head-clearing walk of his own. But when I got home he was safely ensconced by the fire, and I shivered a little, wondering who the man had been, walking past our house (which is pretty much at the end of a dead end lane) without a companion or a dog. Much as I like my solitude, I’m looking forward to getting back to London, where, statistically more dangerous though I know it to be, at least I can feel the cushioning safety of numbers.
I have been following this blog for some time now and it is one of the few I try never to miss. Told with gut-wrenching honesty, Lucky Jimm’s story is at times pathetic, but almost invariably sheds some light on the situations that dog us all as human beings. I cannot recommend this blog enough.
As an antidote, perhaps, Katie Sokoler’s blog is a burst of life-affirming colour and joy. There is no sadness here – just beauty and fun. Again, I can’t recommend this blog enough.
For my own part I have been struggling with the experiment I started some months ago, where I attempted to bring my online presence into one space. I have found that knowing potential clients are reading my blog prevents me from writing anything particularly personal, which is a shame, as I got a lot of very positive feedback earlier in the year when I was writing more open posts. Looking through my blogroll on Google Reader recently has been a rather dispiriting experience. Very few people seem to be blogging in an honest or experimental way these days and a lot of the old blogs I used to follow have dried up, died or become very work-related.
I’m thinking that now Belle de Jour has been outed and is apparently still allowed to make a living as a scientist, perhaps the rest of us might take heart and be a little less afraid to blog about our thoughts, our problems, the minutiae of our daily lives, rather than the minutiae of our working weeks. I’m going to try and be a little braver in my blogging from now on.
P.S. If I’m missing out on any really good blogs, please do let me know.
This is my first attempt at a Podcast, which I did for a client who is setting up a website for parents looking for useful and entertaining content related to their kids. For this Podcast I interviewed Martha Lawton, of Lawton Training and Consultancy, an expert in getting people out of debt and into good financial habits.
I’m very interested in any feedback – from experienced Podcasters and from any interested parties. The next one is on Sex Education, but I haven’t started editing it yet, so any feedback will be much appreciated. (I used nothing fancier than the inbuilt mic in my MacBook, plus some of the voice enhancing plug ins in Garageband, which explain the watery sound in the background. I’m quite pleased with the result considering it required no investment in hardware!)
Podcast 1.1 Child Trust Fund
Podcast 1.2 Introducing kids to money
Podcast 1.3 How to handle pocket money
Podcast 1.4 Teaching older children financial independence
Podcast 1.5 Further information on finance
It’s been an ambition of mine to host an occasional evening chat-based radio station for, oh, at least ten years now. Looking around, I see that technology has now just about made this possible, so I’m feeling the urge to do something about it, especially as quite a few folks on Twitter seems to be doing it quite well (@johncmayer and @enterbelladonna spring to mind).
So now I’m going to cast about to see if anyone has any advice/suggestions, and to see if anyone would be up for joining me. I envisage the format as being very casual – maybe just a two-hour show once a month initially, with 2-3 people sitting in a darkened room quaffing a lot of vino and talking amongst themselves, as well as interacting with the audience on the phone and over Twitter. Chat would be loosely based around one or two topics, or around a question that could be crowd-sourced. The idea is not to draw a large audience, but to entertain friends and interested parties. There seems to be a nicely diverse community of folk on Twitter who could get involved. Perhaps the location and hosts could change each time, depending on access to microphones, small soundproofed rooms, etc. It’s an experiment, basically.
So now I’m asking for advice. Has anyone done this before? What kind of set up is needed? My investigations so far point to Shoutcast as being a good service for hosting small radio stations. Any other recommendations? And does anyone have a small room where we could meet up and try this out? I’m willing to fork out for a couple of microphones, but can’t afford anything too fancy. Anyone fancy being a radio pundit for an evening? Add your thoughts in the comments box or DM me. All input much appreciated.
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