life right now...

fireworks 6
Originally uploaded by f2point4

... feels a bit like this for me.

I am still surrounded by a personal kind of darkness that even with the best (and painful) effort will take some time to dissipate.

However, after losing love's companionship for a while, it soon exploded right back into my life, stopped me in my tracks and has since had me staring in wonderment and disbelief at my good fortune and drinking in its glow and sparkle with the thirsty eyes of a woman who'd lost her sight and miraculously got it back...

my favourite season...

pure gold
Originally uploaded by f2point4

... after summer is autumn. ;-)

I love them all, really, and each of them has its charms and its place, but there is nothing quite like the rich colours leaves turn in the autumn, set against a bright blue sky. It's just one of those things that put a smile on my face, no matter how miserable my day may have been until then...

outsider...

beer and pizza
Originally uploaded by f2point4

I have always liked looking into lit windows in the dark. Not in a peeping-Tom kind of way, more like a glimpse in passing of someone else's story.

These days with it being dark at 5pm, there isn't much that entices me to go out once the sun is down. But when I do have to leave my cosy home, I like to travel on the top deck of a bus sight-seeing fragments of London life. There are the empty offices with jackets still hanging on backs of chairs, homes with tv screens flickering through half-drawn curtains, and abandoned-looking mannequins in empty but fully lit high street shops. Enough to feed the imagination until arriving at my destination...

equality...

dolls' house
Originally uploaded by f2point4

Earlier this week I picked up a copy of Stylist, one of those freebies they hand out at tube stations. In it I found a surprisingly interesting article under the title 'Should women be fast-tracked to top jobs?' (pages 33-34 in the online copy), quoting Norway's apparently successful quota legislation from 2002, requiring listed company boards to consist to 40% of women.

I had a discussion about this with my significant other that nearly ended in an argument. He insists women should be treated as equals, not singled out for special treatment. I absolutely agree with him but unfortunately, women ARE being singled out currently as generally not suitable for the highest-powered jobs. Apparently, in the UK 62% of the FTSE 250 companies don't have a single woman on the board. Surely, that is nowhere near representative of the share of women in the population at large.

Although I personally see a prescribed quota as the least elegant and most easily abused instrument to redress an imbalance, if that imbalance simply won't adjust itself, it may have to be done by prescription until a higher share of women (replace with ethnic minorities, disabled, older employees - in fact, any under-represented group in any sphere of society) has become a more accepted status quo.

I agree that due to the fact that women have children, they are more likely the parent who is willing to give up a career to raise them, and thus there will never be the same percentage of women in high-flying jobs as their share of the poplulation of working age. However, this is a convenient excuse for people who use this argument to prove that the under-representation of women in career jobs is self-inflicted.

My opinion is that if after having the children women had the choice of leaving them in affordable and well-equipped creches and kindergartens open all day, preferably one provided by their employer in the same building that they work in, with qualified staff; if men got paternity leave and pay on par with women (another form of discrimination), then at least mothers would really have the choice between going back to work and staying at home. Currently, the choice usually simply isn't there.

But let's not forget that it is not only mothers who find their careers come to an early halt. I have read or heard often enough of women who have to watch their male colleagues being promoted despite having less experience and lesser qualifications than themselves. Maybe a ruthless jolt like a legally prescribed quota is exactly what's needed to break those ingrained patterns of by-passing women when a promotion comes up.

After all, Norway now has the highest percentage of women as board members in the world with 44.2% (higher than the legally required quota), and the Norwegian economy has not collapsed...

10:10 campaign...

collage
Originally uploaded by f2point4

This is an email I received yesterday from my MP, Sarah Teather (Lib Dem), after the vote on the 10:10 motion in Parliament:

"I know you are interested in climate change issues so I thought I would update you on the debate in the House of Commons today. I have just come back to my office after voting for the Government to sign up to the 10:10 campaign.

The motion, put forward by the Liberal Democrats, required the Government to commit to making sure all public bodies reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% by 2010. You can find the text for our motion here.

I voted for the motion, but sadly the Labour Government marched its backbenchers through the voting lobbies to defeat it. I am very frustrated that the Government are not willing to provide leadership in this area in the run up to the Copenhagen conference.

However, I want to assure you that I will keep fighting on this issue. Climate change is something anyone who is committed to social justice should feel passionately about. If we don’t take action now it will have a devastating impact on the poorest people in the world and the consequences are terrifying. You can read what I have said previously in the House of Commons on this here.

I want to thank you for your support on climate change and for continuing to contact me to encourage me to go further! MPs need to hear from the public on this issue. Let’s keep campaigning to make sure that eventually the Government listen.

Best wishes,

Sarah

PS. I have also personally signed up to the 10:10 campaign, and hope if you haven’t already done so, that you will think about doing the same.



Sarah Teather MP
Liberal Democrat MP for Brent East
Shadow Minister for Housing"

when is it too late...

deep breath
Originally uploaded by f2point4

... to start over again?

Today I was in a rather pensive and mildly depressed mood. Looking back, my life seems to consist of several failed attempts at one or the other thing. I know we need life lessons to do better the next time but when you consistently fail or seem to fail in one particular area, it gets harder to take every time. Until we get to the point where we wonder whether it is really still worth even trying.

Don't worry, I'll be fine in the morning. I guess...

time flies...

autumn
Originally uploaded by f2point4

... and it seems to be getting faster every year.

It doesn't help to have had another summer that never was, just a lingering spring teasing with warmer days just around the corner until a look at the calender confirms the sneaking suspicion that it's just not going to happen this year, either.

So away go the summer clothes, unpacked many months ago with the highest hopes yet quite a few of them unworn, and out come the woollies just in time for Halloween little more than two weeks away.

I have always liked autumn, some years it's even been my favourite season. Let's see what I will harvest this year...

P.S.: This picture was taken last week Friday, one of the three days a week that Borough market is open. I'll HAVE to go back there, next time with a real camera!

points of reference...

Astro office
Originally uploaded by f2point4

When I started writing this post, I had been back from Cuba for three weeks, the same time that I spent there. It seemed much longer ago, though, and what's more, it felt like it was a completely different world. Looking at my pictures from there, many of the things I have seen appear ever so slightly surreal now, although I know I was there, and they seemed perfectly normal then. This is not an unknown sensation when coming back from holidays. However, I am experiencing something similar in my London life, too. My sense of time isn't working too well, I find it difficult to place events in the recent past. Talking about it with a friend, an idea occurred to me: it's all about points of reference. When they change, we get lost a little – although not necessarily in a bad way, not at all.

Let me explain: I define myself relative to my environment. Everybody does. I once read somewhere about a volunteer spending a few days in a completely white room with only the most essential things in it, all of them white, and no natural light. The person wrote about beginning to lose his or her sense of reality and of self in the course of the experiment simply because there was nothing to refer to. No distinction between day and night, no contrast in shapes, colours, smells, temperature – things we probably don't realise we need to determine who we are until we get put in solitary confinement.

An easy example from everyday life is moving house. In a new place you need to learn about everything from scratch: your neighbours, where the shops are, how long you need to get to work and so on.

The same works for our perception of time. Following a well established routine every day makes it fairly easy to re-construct an event in the past by pin-pointing where it fits in with that routine – or if it was something out of the ordinary, by how it broke with the routine. When this routine is gone, the grid by which we map our lives has (temporarily) disappeared. We begin to set new points of reference, pick new occurrences to provide the before and after watersheds dividing our lives into neat sections.

This is happening to me right now, and it is something that took me by surprise but that I admittedly quite enjoy. Time has become more elastic, and something that really happened a week ago, may seem like months ago because so much else that is new has happened since then, and at the same time it may feel like yesterday. All of this has made me more aware of my life, and thus feel more alive, as the days are not only passing by, each one looking and feeling pretty much like the one before.

This lead me to wonder whether it might not be a good idea to re-set points of reference every once in a while just for fun, not out of necessity, just to shake things up a bit, to keep life interesting, to make sure a routine remains an aid for organising daily life and doesn't turn into a monster that hems us in and steals precious life time by keeping us in a rut.

keep appreciating beauty...

evening walk
Originally uploaded by f2point4

At the beginning of this week I had a welcome little brush with my own past. I was sent to Scotland to interpret at a conference that I used to work at for a few years in the 90ies when I was still relatively new in the interpreting world.

Back then I liked this particular assignment for two reasons: one was the amazing countryside surrounding us, even distracting me from work with the spectacular view we had from our interpreting booth through the window right next to it.

Secondly, I was still caught up in the illusion that once people – i.e. clients, agencies and colleagues – realised what a competent interpreter I was and word got around, I would get more jobs like this nearly by default.

Returning in 2009 after more than ten years, I know that nothing could be further from the truth. As probably in many other professions, it is not the best who get the most work, it's the best at self-marketing or the bargain basement suppliers. This may partly be due to the fact that interpreters in the UK get booked nearly exclusively through agencies, and very few agencies employ anyone who knows even remotely what interpreting involves, so the quality of the interpreters is not even secondary as nearly no agency project manager can judge it.

Fortunately, my illusions about my glamorous career as an interpreter were shattered so long ago that I am no longer excessively bitter about the fact that my hard work is not really appreciated but that I get booked on the basis of how many months I give the agency to pay me before I start sending reminders and such things.

Fortunately, though, the first reason for liking the job was still there, and undiminished. The weather was absolutely beautiful (as opposed to the two previous years, when apparently it rained on both days of the event) and the view of Loch Lomond was as breath-taking as ever.

It was very enjoyable and comforting to see that some things in life do endure, and will survive us and our petty little complaints, and that I haven't lost the ability to appreciate them.

appearances...

make-up for the show 1
Originally uploaded by f2point4

In Cuba, more precisely in Trinidad, I got to know a young woman who invited me to spend an afternoon with her family during a fun fair in Casilda, the harbour of Trinidad. At her house I was amongst others introduced to her mother. It turned out she was 2 years my senior, although the gap looked more like at least 15 years. Truth be told, I felt quite a bit embarrassed and sorry for her as this fact was relayed to the whole assembly.

Admittedly, I am as flattered as any other woman when people guess my age as at least 5 years younger than I really am. However, as I get older and notice undeniable signs of it in the mirror, I'm beginning to wonder how much of this is mere flattery. Sometimes I even feel mildly offended. After all, it's not just about looks, it's also about life-experience. No matter how lined or smooth my skin is, that I've been around for a while and seen a thing or two should be part of my perceived persona, and if someone thinks I'm in my late 20ies, they are a) obviously lying or b) completely oblivious to the maybe not necessarily visual signs of the more mature person in front of them.

I quite often heard significant others in my life accusing women in general - and me in particular - of being vain. They usually wouldn't accept, though, that it is largely men who put their women under pressure to look good. I've heard many guys say they don't like make-up and surgically enhanced bodies, yet they will turn their heads for exactly that type of female in public, even while their own woman walks by their side. What is she to make of this?

Beauty pageants are a particularly good example of the desire to be the prettiest chica plástica just for the sake of it. Anyone who has ever listened to the cringe-worthy aspirations voiced by contestants about wanting to make the world a better place by looking beautiful for a year knows what I'm talking about. But it goes further than that. During the Miss England 2009 pageant, one of the contestants voted for herself on her mobile phone about 1300 times to bump up her public votes result, and then had a go at the winner of the competition who got only 9 votes from the public. So beauty, it seems, isn't even the point any more. It's all political, manipulated, bought, and paid for.

So why bother? Why don't we stop spending hundreds of Pounds on anti-ageing lotions and use those funds to enrich our lives by travelling, for example, and helping one or the other of those less fortunate than ourselves whom we may meet on our way? Those are character-forming activities that will show in a very attractive kindness shining in someone's eyes, a more relaxed attitude, and the tendency to smile more and feel better about oneself, to name just a few.

I think there is probably a balance to be struck here, as with most things in life. This balance will be a very personal choice. In my case it means that I WILL keep spending money on creams and lotions because I like to look after myself in general, and in particular I enjoy my little rituals of applying them, their scent, and how my skin feels afterwards, but you won't find me at the Creme de la Mer counter. I WILL keep spending money on make-up as I like to subtly enhance the things I like about my face but I will never try to paint on a face that I haven't got. I will most certainly not do peels, laser treatments, liposuction, lifts and what not as I truly think that I can - and should - do a lot through good nutrition and exercise to stay fit and healthy - and as a consequence to look as good as I possibly can - and I also believe that this money would be much better invested in a party with friends, a photography workshop, or a visit to my family.

But as I said, it's a balance everyone has to find for themselves...