Not life-changing but...

I've gone part-time and am now working three days a week.

Well, after health scares last year and earlier this year, plus some niggling work issues, I sort of thought 'What's the point in going through all this if I'm still just plugging away working full-time'. So, after a fraught weekend considering a rival job offer, I accepted my current employer's offer of job-share - the current employer was offering 3 full days Monday to Wednesday, which makes things much tidier and means a nice long four day weekend. I like spending more days at home than I do at work :0). Not that I'm doing anything exciting on my days off - painting doors, pottering in the garden, doing the cleaning, looking at the weather forecast and working out which day will be the best to put the washing out, that sort of uber-feministy stuff ;0). But it does mean that we shouldn't have to spend all of our weekends doing the chores and we can get out of the house occasionally. Although I am beginning to wonder whether working three days a week is interfering a bit too much with my sofa time, we'll see...

Anyway, whilst I was pondering all this The Staves 'Teeth White' was being played incessantly on the radio and I was surprised that a group of children (when seen from the vantage point of nearly 50!) could capture the essence of mid-life crisis quite so well as they do. Now I'm not claiming that the record influenced my decision unduly, but it did strike a chord.

And, in my small way, I do now feel like I'm 'sticking it to the man' as our colonial cousins would say.



There's another version of it here on a really rather brilliant set with 'Black and White'. Or am I just biased/jealous 'cos it's in a pub and they're drinking pints of proper beer?

National Poetry Day

One of my current favourites is 'The Place Where We Are Right' by Yehuda Amichai

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plough.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

It's written out in English and Hebrew here.

[Of course, the place where I am right is a high green sunlit upland from which I can look down on lesser mortals, but we won't go there... :0)]