Strong Females

A few days ago I read a post on Rachel's blog entitled Today's Philosophy Class.  When I read it it made be think of the way I was brought up and the role feminism played or didn't play in my life.

I should explain that I and my brother were brought up in a family of very strong females. My mother and my maternal grandmother both played a significant role in our upbringing. My paternal grandparents were dead long before I was born but the females in my father's family were also very strong: my father had been brought up by one sister and another lived in Scotland and owned an inn. She had a head for business and turned the stables into a hall used for community get togethers and weddings etc. 

My brother and I were brought up to understand that women and men had different roles in that men could not have children but that the opportunities that men and women should have in life should be equal. Seeing the examples of the women so close to me as a child I just always assumed that to be the norm.

My first experience of a working environment was a hospital where men were usually doctors but all the 'bosses' in my world were female from Sisters to The Matron. After a spell as a trainee accountant in an all-male environment I made my career in local government starting in the Town Clerk's Department (the legal and administrative department) of Liverpool Corporation. It was certainly true that historically females had been shorthand typists and clerks but by the time I arrived there were women making their way up the administrative and legal ladders as well. There were many women professionals in other departments too and a female chief officer (so far as I can recall she was the only one out of 26!). In the professions, even then, women and men were paid the same rate for the same job in local government and all salaries were transparent and public.  

Liverpool also had a reputation for strong female politicians with people like Bessie Braddock (and some might argue that one Bessie Braddock was more formidable that the other 139 councillors and aldermen put together).

Of course by then I was well aware that females had an uphill struggle in a predominantly male world of government and business but my attitudes had already been established.

My brother's two daughters (I only had sons) are also clever, strong and successful women and it makes me wonder how much they owe to genetics and how much they owe to the attitudes with which they were surrounded as youngsters. 

Post Office Discrimination

Notice anything about this screenshot of the Post Office website? I'll give you a clue. I, and thousands more, do not live on the UK mainland.

I use a lot of postage stamps.

I've never counted but my brother and I between us probably use several hundred first class stamps just sending missives to each other. We use WhatsApp and emails but we both like writing letters and sending cards.

Then there are my friends overseas who don't use computers and those to whom I like sending cards anyway. I certainly use several dozen overseas stamps a month.

I love sending cards (I print my own photo cards). I love writing letters! It's as simple as that.

I've never ordered stamps on line because I prefer to support my local post offices however CJ pointed out that there were really interesting stamps to be had directly from the Post Office on line. So I sussed out some interesting ones and then came the bad news. I can't have them delivered to the Isle of Lewis.

Given that the cost of postage for the order would be exactly the same for Lewis as anywhere else in the UK this totally defeats me. There will be a letter going to my MP on this one.

PS Why is there an apostrophe after 'address' in the information box?

Emergencies

Island life has it's good and it's bad points as does rural life anywhere. There was an article on the news this evening informing us that an ambulance could take over 20 minutes to get to some rural communities. What they really meant was rural communities in England because outside of some major cities in Scotland there is little or no data.

The article on the BBC website says:

The most critically injured patients in rural areas are at risk due to the time it takes the ambulance service to reach them, a BBC investigation has found.

Some rural communities wait more than 20 minutes on average for 999 crews or trained members of the community to get to immediately life-threatening cases like cardiac arrests and stab victims.

A response should come in six to eight minutes, depending on where you live.

The accompanying map:

I think that once can be fairly certain in saying that in many rural areas in Scotland, 20 minutes would not even be achievable by an air ambulance. That's just a reality of rural life.

Dialects

In his post on 2 March entitled Pinpointing, Yorkshire Pudding drew attention to a survey which claimed to determine where one was brought up (in the British Isles or the USA) from the words one uses and how one pronounces them - one's dialect. It pinpointed YP perfectly.

I was intrigued. I was born and brought up in Liverpool. There is an old joke about Liverpool back in my youth before any people from the Indian sub-continent lived there (they all lived in the mill towns of central Lancashire).  The joke was that if you were a Liverpudlian you were Liverpool Irish, Liverpool Welsh, Liverpool Scottish, Liverpool West Indian, Liverpool Chinese (Liverpool has the oldest ethnic Chinese community in Europe) or Liverpool Jewish. It was rumoured that there were Liverpool English but no-one had ever met one.

After I left home I lived in Cheshire until I came to the Isle of Lewis in the far north west of Scotland 44 years ago. Since then I have usually been taken for someone from the South of England. If you are a Northerner there are few greater insults. Well that's not quite true, as a Lancastrian it's a greater insult to call me a Yorkshireman. 

However I went to a small private prep school and was subjected to elocution by a French lady teacher. My parents didn't have particularly Liverpool accents. Neither do I. I do, however, use many Liverpool words from my childhood.

When I took the first part of the quiz it came up with the following results:

After my full quiz with the additional questions it came up with a slightly more refined result.

 The one thing it definitely shows is that I have no dialectic link to the South of England.

There's a British version of the quiz. Go here. And there's also an American version. Go here.