Liz Fraser, 6^th November 2009.

So I’m walking past Fopp – the independent music store that also sells fantastically cheap but not shit at all books and DVDs, in case you are unfortunate enough not to have such an establishment where you live – and I suddenly think, ‘what I am doing, walking past this independent music store that also sells fantastically cheap but not shit at all books and DVDs? It’s Autumn. It’s the time for slowing down, for snuggling under a duvet and reading and watching all the books and films you’ve been saving up all summer, while listening to some new soul-enriching music. Go in, woman, go in and stock up for the dark evenings to come!’

            So in I go. Into the pulsing Emporium of wintery leisure-time joy. Ten minutes later I am paying, and the sexy, eye-liner-heavy chick behind the counter stops mid-scan, and glances up at me. She wants a proper look at who, just who, puts into their basket The Gossip, Kasabian, Katy Perry, Bach cello Suites, The Essential Alan Coren (an impulse buy, I confess), and DVDs including The Constant Gardener, The Machinist, Michael McIntyre….and Bod and The Flumps.

            There’s a pause, and in a moment of desperation I mumble ‘For my kids…’ pointing at Bod and The Flumps, but more truthfully meaning the Katy Perry. She seems satisfied and pops them all in a bag.

            Now then, dear reader, I have a request: if you should ever happen upon a DVD copy of Bod or the Flumps in a shop, car boot sale or bin, I urge you to get one. No, get two. Because whether or not you grew up with them, whether or not you recall perching on a beige sofa back in 1978 waiting with baited breath for the announcer to say ‘And now it’s time for our See-Saw programmes for younger viewers’ (yay!!) they are a round window into a lost time – a time when Time itself operated on a completely different level.

            A time when Things. Went. Slow. Ly.

            And it’s a time we’d do well to pay a visit to every now and again.
It’s almost a cliché to say ‘we live in a fast age’, but oh boy, do we ever?! Most of us operate at an average speed set somewhere between hyper and supersonic for most of the day, and there is rarely a gap of more than three minutes within that crazy day where nothing – and I mean nothing – requires our brains to carry on multi-tasking and zipping about like mercury. For example, it is not uncommon at all for me to be researching a feature while speaking to my agent on the land line and receiving several texts on my mobile, all at the same time. Meanwhile three emails come in that need replies within the next minute, someone makes a comment on my Facebook status update that just begs a pithy response, and the moment I hang up with my agent, my mobile rings. While taking that call I unload the dishwasher and put away yesterday’s laundry, before running downstairs to stop tonight’s dinner from burning on the stove and put six batteries into the charger. And all this before 10am, and after the school run.

            In the space of five minutes, in other words, I can do more than someone twenty years ago would have got done in a day. And I am one of millions and millions living like this – in fact, compared with many I’m pretty much a lazy bum.

Where all this doing, doing, doing concerns me, is the effect it is having on our children. As those of you who’ve read any of my books will know (and if you haven’t, where have you been??!) I am a passionate believer in the importance of doing NOTHING. Of quiet, stillness, empty space and mental PAUSE.

            In A Spoonful of Sugar I wrote about the increasing problem of ‘pond-skater minds’, and how zipping about from fact to fact online, skim-reading, texting, cut-and-pasting, channel-hopping and choosing from menus offered in a computer-based system rather than using the mind to come up with its own solutions and ideas, is having a detrimental effect on kids, who can no longer think for themselves or concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds. (pages 211 – 214, if you have a copy…)

And now it seems that there’s more scientific evidence to back me up. Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has been studying so-called ‘mind-wandering’, ie when your brain zips off the task at had to think about something else for a while. He and his colleagues have identified two types: when you’re aware that your mind has wandered, and when you’re not. This latter type is known as ‘zoning out’, and, according to his research and that of others, this ‘zoning out’, while having some down-sides such as not remembering what you’re supposed to be reading (you with me here? Not zoned out yet?) can also be beneficial. In an fMRI study (you know, the ones you’ve seen on the telly where regions of the brain that are active show up in different colours on the screen. It’s very groovy) Schooler and his colleagues found that two very important control systems in the brain are more active during zoning out. He proposes that when we don’t realise our minds are wandering, we may be able to think most deeply about the big picture.

This is what you or I might call the old ‘stop thinking about it and it’ll come to you’ theory. Well, perhaps it has a scientific basis after all. John Kounios of Drexel University and his colleagues have done brain scans that capture that Eureka moment when people suddenly figure out how to solve a word puzzle. Many of the regions that become active during those creative flashes belong to the same control systems mentioned above.

Pretty cool and fascinating, huh?

So what of Bod? Well, I sat my guinea pigs down together last week, and pressed play. They waited. Nothing for a second or two. They look bored. Aha! Hang on – here comes Bod. He’s doing something. He’s walking towards the viewer. This is good. We have action. But oh dear, he’s still walking towards us, and it’s been at least two seconds. Probably more like three or even four. Why is he still walking? We’ve seen that. Now we want to see something else. Phew, here comes Aunt Flo to save the day, top-knot in place. Now something’s going to happen! But no – she is just walking too, this time to the left and with a very silly walk indeed.  On she goes, walking and walking. One second, two seconds, three seconds. Five seconds? Of walking? Are they kidding?

            Now, my kids watch much, much less television than most (probably an hour or two a week on average, and there’s no channel-hopping going on. Meany, meany mummy) and they have a pretty impressive concentration span. But this was too much even for them. This was a whole other level of slowness altogether. This was like watching through treacle. This was almost painfully slow.

            It’s serious food for thought, and munch on it we must. These slowly-does-it programmes are what we watched as kids, because this – and Pigeon Street, Fingermouse, Playschool, Mr Ben and co – was all there was! It didn’t seem slow to us. It was a story, on television, and things moved and talked, and it was magical. We loved it! And then off we went in our Bakelite glasses and hand-me-down dungarees to build a rocket out of toilet rolls. Ahhh, the ‘70s.  
When I compare this with the flick, flick, flick of the screen watching most kids’ TV today, where shots are generally no longer than one second and there’s a rainbow of bright colours in every scene and zappy music to boot, I just get tired. It’s fun to watch it, but it literally tires me out. It’s not a rest – it’s an assault on all my senses. And why should kids be all that different?

We went to Scotland at half term. After a truly hideous and unhealthily stressful year, I took time to walk for several hours a day in the mountains. Just me, the air, and the rhythmic trudge , trudge, trudge of my feet. During those hours of walking and walking, something very strange happened: all the fug in my head cleared. Ideas came to me that had been illusive for months, despite my trying and trying to reach them. Problems sorted themselves out and the mess of a million thoughts and confusions crystallised into order, and clarity. I came back with the best book idea I’ve had for a long time, and a brain that felt like it’d had a good old rest.

            We need to make very sure that our children, who are in the most inventive, creative, imagination-rich stages of their lives, have as much opportunity to think freely, to switch OFF and to let their minds roam as possible. There’s plenty of time to be knotted and busy and manic and FAST when they’re grown up and juggling all that life throws at them. But for now they need not only mental stimulation, but also mental QUIET.

            Switch it off. Put it away, and let them STOP for a while. It’ll do them a lot of good.

Liz Fraser, 5^th November 2009.

This being Bonfire Night, I’m going to talk about….parents’ evening. Of course.

            Well, not of course, but our daughter’s first parents’ evening at Secondary school is tonight, begging much hand-waving and the obvious question ‘Who organises a parents’ evening for the 5^th of November??’ I guess they forgot to remember, remember it. Consequently we are going to sit there earnestly discussing our child’s participation in DT and geography to the background accompaniment of screamers, Oooooh and Aaaaaahs. It’s diary planning gone mad if you ask me – please laugh at that. I’m being sarcastic – and I’m going to bring along a sparkler or two, to make my point…

Parents’ evenings in our house are little more than a jolly chat with a teacher or two, and home we go. This is quite simply because our kids are all – and I blush as I write this but it’s true – inexcusably clever and doing very bloody well indeed at school, without having to try very hard. Annoying, I know, but what can you do? We are very fortunate in this. For many mums and dads out there, I imagine the moment when you come face to face with the awfulness of your child’s academic progress this term, or discover that he’s been posting pieces of Pepperami into the school’s only French horn – again – must be little short of wince-inducing.

            But off to parent’s evenings we shall go tonight, because they are important, for several reasons. They’re a chance to actually meet the people who pass on some knowledge to your kids and, you hope, inspire them to want to learn and better themselves. If you discover that the chemistry teacher is about as inspiring as a wart, suddenly your child’s utter indifference to the order of the Noble gasses in the Periodic Table might seem more understandable. If the geography teacher turns out to have knock-out BO, you can forgive your child for dragging his feet all the way to school on Double-Geo-BO Tuesdays.

            Another useful thing about parents’ evenings is that you can raise issues about your child’s teaching that are worrying you, or bugging you. And I have one issue that is really bugging me right now. (Actually I have hundreds, which is why I’m such a miserable, moany old bag, but one at a time, eh…)

            What’s getting my goat today, is this: the ever-increasing over-praising of children. Not just praising  where it’s due, or where they seem to need a little sunshiny boost in the form of a ‘well done!’ Praise is vital to encourage children and increase their self-confidence. Praise is good.

No, I’m talking about a blinding saturation of words of wonderfulness, a torrent of ‘bigging up’, an avalanche of ticks and top marks and teeny weeny achievements that apparently merit a big fat gold star.
I get about ten emails a week from my daughters teachers, containing what are known as Good Behaviour Reports. Most of these reports read as follows:

“A positive attitude to learning displayed. Level 1 occurrence, dealt with by class teacher. Action Taken: Verbal Comment.”
To you and me, this translates as: “your kid put their hand up, answered a question, and I, the teacher, said ‘yes, well done Emily, that’s right.’”

Do I really need an email to tell me this astonishing exchange has occurred?

 Now then, quite apart from the fact that completing and sending all these hundreds of emails is presumably taking up a huge amount of the teachers’ valuable time, not to mention clogging up my Inbox, the main reason I have such an issue with this is neatly illustrated by our friends from Spinal Tap: when you’re already up at level ten where can you go from there? Where?

The only place is up to eleven. Many people seem to operate at level eleven: they talk about giving it 150%. 150%? I only work at about 80% most of the time. If I ever go as far as even a paltry 100% there’s going to be an explosion of some kind, causing Global mayhem. And with all these people putting in 110%, 150% and sometimes even an inelegant 200%, I feel like a right slacker, I can tell you.

And where praising kids is concerned, just what is eleven? When a child is constantly praised and applauded and rewarded with Good Behaviour reports for answering a question in class, what on earth is going to happen when she actually does something really good? How do we get ‘that extra push over the cliff?’ Will they roll out the red carpet? Hire a brass band to play a suitably congratulatory fanfare perhaps? Send her to Disneyland for the weekend?

            When every correct answer is a cause for so much praise, how can you make a child feel any real sense of achievement? And there’s the problem: this constant trickle of pats on the head produces the exact opposite of what it’s meant to achieve. It doesn’t make kids feel good and want to try harder, because hey, they’re already doing perfectly well as it is. They, like, totally showed enthusiasm for learning and contributed in a postive way, yeah? Gold star, baby!

            This mass devaluation of success is made all the worse by the fact that kids see right through it. When I asked my daughter how she feels to get all these slips saying how good she’s been in class, she just replied: “Oh, everyone gets them. They don’t really mean anything.” Great. It also means that there’s a generation of kids out there who are growing up thinking they are really something special, when, frankly, they are little more than average and could do with a (figurative) kick up the backside to try harder. Nowt wrong with that. I kick myself up the backside on a weekly, if not daily basis. It hurts, but it sure makes me try harder.

            Just as exam results are now all but meaningless – where once As were for those who were outstandingly good, now an A simply means you’re not completely stupid and you’ve made a bit of an effort to revise, and you can join the other 80% of the class who got one and won’t get into University either – so praise is little more than a token gesture; a tick in the teacher’s box, to say he’s done his job and filled out the Good Report slips for the week.  

            I do praise my kids, far, far more than I was praised myself. But I try to keep it down at level 7 or so for everyday words of encouragement, to allow myself plenty of room to push it up to 8, 9, or even 10 if they’ve done exceptionally well at something. As Fatboy Slim said, ‘I want to praise you like I should.’ Like I should. Not obsessively, and completely out of all proportion, like I totally should not.
Who knows, one day we might even have a Level 11 day. But when it comes, I want my kids to know that they deserve it, and feel that tingling, wonderful, ‘I did it!’ rush, called a true sense of achievement.

Liz Fraser, 4th November 2009

So Fiona Phillips is going back to work, one year after leaving GMTV. The reason she left in the first place? To spend more time with her kids. The reason for her return to work? She doesn’t like being a full time mum.

            Pause for thought…

            Now then ladies and gents, before we get our bitchy claws out and join what seems so be a national past-time, Fiona-bashing, (well, on the Daily Mail comment pages anyway) perhaps this story is worth a little more consideration. Sure, Ms Phillips didn’t exactly win over many hearts when she a) sold her ‘I want to spend time with my family’ story to the Mail  (kerching!) and then b) sold her ‘I want to go back to work’ story to the same paper (kerching! again), not to mention c) getting exactly what she asked for and then saying she didn’t want it after all – always a crowd-pleaser, that –  but if we take time to think about it, her experience is one that thousands of mothers can relate to. Well, kind of – just, you know, without the massive pay cheques, the gruelling daily 3am starts and the make-up department. But apart from all that, it’s a simple case of that humungous debate of modern times:

Should mothers work or not?   (I’m leaving fathers out of this for now, as that’s a whole other topic, for another day.)

            For far too many, this isn’t a debate at all. They have to work, to pay the bills. But for those who have the choice, and who could get by perfectly well living on their partner’s salary alone, it’s a decision that many find very difficult to make. The issue is now ‘I want to work’, rather than ‘I have to work’, and as soon as you throw ‘want’ into the equation, you’re in trouble.

            This is primarily due to that most delightful female characteristic, guilt. Women, as of course you know because you’re a clever sort, have two X chromosomes. Men, by contrast, have an X, and a Y. (If you’re a recent divorcee, this is an X and a WHY??) Lurking on that second female X chromosome is the sneaky, pesky guilt gene. (It’s next to the ones for PMT, odd moments of inexplicable stupidity and lust for George Clooney, in case you can’t find it…) This guilt gene renders us almost incapable of doing anything without feeling bad about it, while spending half our lives trying to please others and doing what we think they would think is ‘Right’. It also leaves us almost incapable of knowing what we actually want. (I once tried to write a list of things that I liked and wanted, and managed a grand total of three things – one of which was flowers. Flowers?? Wtf?! I don’t even like flowers all that much – before throwing the list away in case anyone found it and thought I was silly. Which, in itself, was fantastically silly, and neatly illustrates the point.) Incidentally, it should be very obvious that just as not all women like chocolate or having ice cubes rubbed on their midriffs, so not all women possess this guilt gene, and they swan about doing exactly as they please and sod the lot of you, especially their hard-done-by husbands. We do not like these women, so we’ll ignore them here.

             The guilt gene, where present, is thrown into overdrive in working mothers.

            We are the ones who give birth (lucky us, hey?) and there is an unsaid rule decreeing that we should therefore love being with our kids 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and want for nothing else. Yes, even when they bicker with each other, refuse to wear a coat in January and make paper aeroplanes out of your favourite book. Because we’re mothers, we should love all this and be happy to do the shopping and the cooking and the cleaning and basically spending all day, every day, playing mum with a permanent, happy smile of maternal bliss across our chirpy little faces. Not to be deliriously happy about this state of affairs, is akin to not having a womb.

            The second problem, related to the first, is social pressure. ‘Oh, you’re going back to work? So soon?’ (Read: you are abandoning your child and should burn in Hell for all Eternity.) versus ‘Oh, you don’t work?’ At all?’ (read: so while your hard-working husband is slaving away in boardrooms, you sit about in Starbucks reading Grazia all day.) The first, incidentally, is by far the most prevalent. Going back to work within a year of having a baby is tantamount to infanticide in the UK.

            Social pressure is a biggie, because in this country we like nothing better than personal criticism. If a woman gains three pounds, she’s a fatso. If she loses them, she’s a bag of bones and has an eating disorder. If she dresses badly she’s a slob. If she dresses well she’s a spoilt Yummy Mummy. If she stays at home she’s a lazy sponger, and if she goes to work she’s a selfish, bad mother who should have her ovaries spanked.

See, it’s tricky.

What seems to be so rarely mentioned – like, ever – is that mothers are also people. People with brains (what? Brains, you say?! Yes, brains) and interests and ambition and drive. If you take someone like this and ask her to sit at home all day singing The Wheels on the Bus for five years, followed by a further 10 years playing cleaner, cook, taxi, peace-keeper, gardener and general dogsbody, until the kids leave home and she sits at the bottom of the stairs wondering who on earth she IS any more, she will, quite frankly, go insane.

The grass is always greener, of course, and I’m not kidding myself for one second that I’d want to sit in an office 14 hours a day with the enormous pressure of bringing home the bacon hanging over my head like a guillotine. That sounds Hellish. But doing absolutely nada but look after others and sit about waiting for the kids to come home from school, when your whole being is crying out for some stimulation, success and a challenge greater than ‘how many pair of pants can I fold in an hour?’ is pretty soul-destroying.

I guess the upshot is, everyone is different, and we should stop criticising parents for working, and criticising them for not working. What suits one doesn’t suit another, and you don’t know what suits you until you’ve tried it. As Ms Phillips has just learned.

Oh, and also, it’s none of our sodding business. So long as the kids are happy, and well-cared for and loved and living in a home where there’s warmth and security and a happy parent or two, that should be all that matters. We should be free to make our own decisions about working or not.

As an irritatingly wise friend of mine put it to me recently when I asked for his opinion about something I’d written, ‘Why are you so dependent on the opinions of others?’ My answer, defensively, was that I’m not. But of course that’s only half the truth. To a certain extent we all are – it’s kind of how people work. We like to know that somebody agrees with us. That somebody out there is supporting us. Why do you think those irritating ‘thumbs up’ and ‘Like’ signs on FB are so popular? Like little children, we all like a supportive wink, a ‘you go for it, baby!’ from time to time. It’s comforting, confidence-building and reassuring. And there ain’t nothing wrong with wanting a little of that.

I hope Fiona has a very happy, successful return to work, whenever and however she chooses to do it. But whatever she decides, I hope it’s what she wants, and I certainly shan’t be criticising her for it.

At about 9pm on the night before Halloween I receive a call from BBC Five Live. Would I be available to come on the show in the morning?
Sure, I say. What’s the story?
Well, it’s about Halloween.
Good. Very topical. Go on.
Well, says the researcher, clearly warming up for something jaw-droppingly irritating and preparing himself for my subsequent outburst, the World Cancer Research Fund people are advising parents to shun sweets and chocolate at Halloween, and instead to give their kids – wait for it now, it’s good….. – celery claws, ghost toast and Frankenstein fingers made of carrot sticks instead. So, what do I think about that?

            What do I think? What do I think??! People. Good, kind, celery-eating people. What I think is this: please, oh pretty please, can we all stop being such complete ninnies?? Can we all stop pretending that kids are really really stupid and can’t see past a piece of healthy food cunningly disguised as something groovy? In short, can we please, please please, get a sense of realism, normality and sense back into parenting? That’s pretty much what I think, mate.

Needless to say, they got me on the programme.

Of course, the underlying point made by World Cancer Research Fund is a very important one: eating plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables is extremely important for our general health, and has been shown to reduce our chances of getting cancer. So it’s a no-brainer really: eat fruit and veg we all shall. And shovel as much as we can into our offspring we shall too. (Where possible, and unless we’ve had a really bad day and just cannot be bothered to fight over a few peas, yet again. On those days we wave our hands in the air and say ‘Fine! I give up! I’m only human!’ But on all other days, apples, bananas, broccoli and peas should form part of every child’s daily diet. Like, duh.)

So we’re all agreed that fruit and veg are important, and we should be encouraging our kids to eat it as much as possible, so that they can all fart their way into good health. Excellent. But where things get just a teeny weeny bit totally enormously astoundingly dumb-ass, is when folk try to take their message too far, and substitute Goodness and Sensibleness for all the things that are naughty, and bad for you and therefore FUN in life.

According to the WCRF’s children’s education manager, it is possible to have healthier alternatives “without losing any of the fun.” To which I say ‘What, none of it? Are you sure? You want to tell that to a normal nine-year-old and see what he thinks about that?’ No. Exactly. A teeny bit of the fun is indeed lost, the moment the carrot peeler comes out.

Good grief, you should have seen the look on my 6-year-old son’s face when I did the test on him and suggested carrot sticks instead of a bowl of Haribos. It wasn’t sadness, nor disappointment, nor anger. It was pity. Pity that I could be so pathetic as not to allow them to let their well-brushed hair down once in a while and go ape. Pity that anyone could have lost their sense of fun to such a degree.

And he was right, of course. That was kind of my point to begin with. Kids are kids, and more fool the parent who forgets this and plays the Holier-than Thou, Rules-based Parent card 365 days a year. Because sometimes you need to lighten up dudes!! Sure, there are more and more ‘special days’ when a saccharine-fest is called for, and we have to keep a tab on all of this, and say ‘no’ sometimes. Crikey, I am constantly having to say ‘no’ to one or other of my children’s requests. Buying a Halloween costume, for example, was given the thumbs down, because I just cannot let myself be so wholly taken in by the hideous commercialism of the whole event now. So we make our own witches hats and ghost costumes. But a bit of trick-or-treating at friends’ houses and a giggly, girlie sleepover was approved. (Note to self: sleepovers are a nightmare!! Think twice next time….)
But there are other times – important, sanity-saving times – when we should say ‘Oh what the hell – off you go and have fun with your friends.’ Tomorrow they can eat celery and tomatoes. Today is a day for fun.

And having fun is a VERY important part of being a child. Please keep them healthy; please feed them fruit and veg; but please let them have some unadulterated (or should that be ‘adultified…..?) fun too. Thank you.

 On Halloween itself I get a call from BBC News 24, to ask if I could come on the show to give my views again. Here’s the link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_CFo_y_QrY  It’s a little ‘sweet’ for my liking, but if you  bear in mind that I’m looking at a camera, not person, I’m expecting a 2-header with another guest who never appears and my ear piece is falling out, it’s not bad. Feedback, as ever, welcome. Cheers all.

Today, I (well, my Granny and my book, really) was the subject of a big, front-page piece in the Guardian’s family pages. It’s a section I read, and know well – and I was interviewed by one of the best-known and potentially fiercest ladies in the business, Zoe Williams. (I mean this as a compliment, as a certain ruthlessness is kind of part of the job requirements. Nobody employs or wants to read ‘nice’ journos.) So, having sat through an almost 2-hour grilling about my book, my politics, my childhood and my parenting advice, I was understandably nervous all week about what Ms Williams would write – would she slag me off for being a pretty young Mum who writes pretty books about raising kids pretty well? Or would she see beyond the required fluff of my cross-stitch, pink and green book covers, the whole infuriating Yummy Mummy issue, my big blue eyes and bright ‘please don’t crucify me!’ smile, and try to actually understand who I am, and what my books seek to achieve?
I shouldn’t have worried, because in the event she wrote one of the most complimentary and understanding pieces about me and my work I have ever read, and all credit to her for taking the time to actually bother to do so, and to keep an open mind.
As she put it herself: “I had decided beforehand not to like her, and then I liked her.”

It’s a strange thing, being in the public eye, in however tiny, barely-noticeable a way. People feel they have the automatic right to comment on you – not on your work, which is fair game because work is put out there to be criticised fairly, but on YOU. You the person, as opposed to you the author/actress/presenter/artist/director or whatever it is you happen to be to get yourself in the position of ‘person in the public eye’. And comment they do – most often not very kindly. (Some of the comments that have already appeared on the Guardian page beneath the article illustrate this pretty well. Some are fair, and contribute something interesting. Others are downright nasty and pointless.)
It seems to be the rule that if you like something you just like it and maybe tell someone you like about it the next day in the queue at Tescos, but if you hate it you write about it online immediately for all to hate with you.
Nasty, personal comments on your lifestyle, your hair, the way you walk, or talk, or smile are commonplace on web chatrooms, and the truth is that, to the sub ject, they really do do hurt. 

One reason for this is free-for-all, public, on-line flogging is jealousy (she’s written a book and looks half decent too. I hate her); another is boredom (nothing to do? Hey, slag someone off!); and yet another is because it’s so damned easy, and also, making a caustic remark about someone you don’t know but have read something about is a lot easier than taking the time to understand what they do, for yourself. And there’s the problem: about someone you have read something about. Not met for youself, or bothered to see their film/read their book/listen to their music and form an unbiased opinion. Read about. In someone else’s words….Which brings me (almost, ahem) seamlessly back to the journalists.

Journalists, like all the rest of us, have a job to do. They have to earn money, which means they have to get published. And it’s a lot easier to get published if you say somthing a little more scintillating than “I met this really nice author today, who was really sweet and lovely. And she’s written a lovely book. Which I haven’t read, but I’m sure you’d like. Because it looks so lovely.” Much better is to claw your subject to pieces using an armoury of character-busting adjectives, adverbs and telling details about what sort of mood they were in, if they arrived late, what a bizarre chin they have, how skinny/fat/heathy/pale etc they are or if they ate with their mouth full.
That sells copy.
I don’t criticise journalists for painting a dramatic, colouful picture of events, for exactly this reason. But I do mind – a LOT – when they describe something they just haven’t seen at all, or which influences the reader’s opinion hugely, simply because it makes a dull story better. Why write, ‘Liz entered the room and shook my hand’ when you could instead write, as happened to me once a few years ago (I forget the exact words but this is pretty much them) , ’Liz breezed across the lobby, designer glasses in her glossy hair, skinny jeans beneath and expensive-looking denim jacket and a mega-watt, perfect smile.’
The first is factually correct. The second is a slanted, catty embellishment, written because he or she wants to portray me as a stuck-up, glamorous ‘Yummy Mummy’ ,as they perceive the term, with pots of money and manicurist. It’s not actually incorrect (I do often have glasses in my hair to keep the darned stuff out of my eyes!) but it’s not necessary to the story, and it clouds thre reader’s judgement.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of nonsense a fair few times, and I’ve learned to laugh it off. (Mostly!) But it’s a real pleasure to read an article written by somebody with enough intelligence and care for her work that she can admit when her preconceptions were competely wrong, and who can say
 ’Fraser totally turned me around….Talking to [her] has unsettled, even destroyed, my understanding of the cultural trope.’ 
Who can admit that she hadn’t read any of my books before meeting me, (one does wonder though, why a leading national newspaper assigns the job of interviewing an author whose books the journo knows nothing about other than what she’s read from other, err, other journos, and whose subject  – parenting – she has so very, very little experience of, but that’s for another blog…) and who can learn something new about being a parent, have their eyes opened to a new idea and do so while keeping her own ideas in tact. Oh, and have the sense to realise that not turning into the back end of a bus after having a baby is not the worst thing a woman can ever do, and doesn’t automatically mean she should be chastised for it!
Reporting the truth, especially if it’s not what you wanted to find, takes courage, and shows a genuine interest in your subject.
I was proved wrong too: I didn’t want to dislike Zoe at all, but I expected her to be pretty tough going, and not my cup of tea at all. Tough she certainly was, but also funny, and human, and beneath the Rottweiler exterior (which melted into an almost cute puppy at times) I found someone I wouldn’t actually mind spending a good deal more time with, and wished I could have met under different circumstances.
She was doing her job, and so was I.
And, though she’d deny this I’m sure, she has many of the hallmarks of Yummy Mummy-dom herself: she is undoubtedly attractive, very intelligent, she works hard, exercises (she arrived on a bike – good on her!), admits her failings on the parenting front and is just doing the best she can for her child, while keeping the ‘pre-maternity Zoe’ alive. That, my friends, is a Yummy Mummy.

Ms Williams for your honesty, wit, brains and ability to see deeper than my foundation, I salute you! If you keep this up I think you’ll make a very good Mum indeed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/14/best-child-rearing-techniques

OK, so this is a very “Oh, what is the world coming to?” posting, but when you read it you’ll see why.
Below is what appears on a letter brought home from school by my lovely children today. Before you read, please head this warning: you may find yourself crying, tearing your hair out or using such unattractive phrases as ‘political correctness gone mad!’ and ‘in my day….’. Hopefully you will, like me, only laugh at the sheer idiocy of it, but truly, it is no laughing matter, as we shall come to shortly.
Here goes, and I quote:

“This year we have decided to hold an Easter egg hunt for all children to participate in.” So far so good and Eastery. And fun. It goes on…
“We appreciate that there may be come concerns regarding children given chocolate during school time without supervision and agreement of parents.” Ummm, well, not really, but anyway. Go on.
“We will, therefore, be giving children tokens,” tokens??, “after they have completed the hunt and, at the end of the school day, the children can come with their parents, select their chocolate egg outside their classroom and pay 50p.”
Whaaaaat???!!

So, let me get this straight: you want a bunch of excited, chocolate-hungry kids aged between 5 and 11 to run about the school grounds excitedly finding as many eggs (gluten and nut-free ,of course. mmmmm…) as they can, and then you plan to take them all AWAY from the children and put these gluten and nut-free oefs in a big box till after school when Mummy gets dragged to the school office, cash in hand, to BUY an egg for each of her kids. And ONE each – are you kidding me?
I have just written a book about the sad loss of childhood in the UK today and how to put it back again, (in case you missed it somehow it’s called A Spoonful of Sugar, and it’s out now!) and it’s my great regret that I didn’t have this pathetic letter to hand while I wrote it, as I don’t think I could have found a better way of illustrating the problem.

Kids LIKE chocolate! They like finding it, and, believe it or not, they also like eating it. Lots of it. Yes, it’s bad for their teeth and their waist-lines – but it’s also bloody good FUN, and that’s what is so woefully, miserably, desperately and dangerously missing in this country. Next thing you know they’ll be banned from playing on the climbing frame before school in case anyone hurts themselves- oh hang on, that’s been banned already. OK then, they won’t be allowed a plaster if they cut their knee, in case they are allergic to it – oooops, no, that one’s been taken as well.

Seriously though, the more we deny kids all the things they need to experience as kids – like falling down and getting hurt, being told off when they are downright rude, being allowed to walk all the way to the end of the road without a police escort or eating too much chocolate once in a while on a special day - the more damage we do them because they have no sense of what the real world is really like, and they can’t have the fun and the freedom they need to have.

They are CHILDREN. Let them have a proper childhood and do childish things!

My children will be doing an Easter egg hunt this year, and they can eat as many of the chocolate lovelies as they darned well like. Otherwise, what’s the world coming to, eh?

Family life is nothing if not changeable. What looks a dead cert at 9am on Moday is cancelled/delayed/forgotten about by midday, and plans – even the best laid ones – gang aglay faster than my allegedly waterproof marcara dribbles its black way down my cheeks every time I brave the local swimming pool.
My strategy for getting by without losing every single hair on my head (though the grey ones could happily go, if they want to….) is to make very, very rough plans, and then be prepared to change them ooooooh, about every two hours, at the present rate.
A case in point is the looming Easter holidays. There are people out there, I’ve heard, who plan, book and organise their holidays not weeks but months, and even in some serious cases YEARS,  in advance. I am not sniffy about these people at all – I am in awe of their organisational skills. But when I even attempt such impressive forward-planning and then throw 3 kids, 2 jobs, 1 husband, no dog but a small and needy hamster into the mix I get what could safely be described as a complete cock-up.
Here’s my latest one: we had planned to go to Scotland for the first week of the Easter hols this year. The accommodation is booked, Granny is beside herself with excitement and we are counting down the days. And then what happens yesterday? My daughter announces that her dancing competition final (for which she has been training twice a week before school for 3 months, and her excitement about it is now reaching fever pitch – ie we are NOT going to miss it!!) is on the day we are due to leave, I am given an important  hospital appointment slap bang in the middle of our planned week away and a job I’ve been waiting for for months crops up for that week as well!
And so we do what all families do in such hectic circumstances: we cancel all plans, and hope to go away the week after.

Families eh – never a dull moment! 

A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR is in the shops NOW -perfect for Mums, Grannies, Dads and friends.

My third book was published today!! This is the glorious moment that all we writers hope and hope will happen to us. A book. On a shelf. In a bookshop. With our name on it. That someone will buy, and read and enjoy! (Obviously that last bit is rarely confirmed, unless someone is kind enough to say so on an online review page. But I do hope people will enjoy it!)
                             The life of a writer can be a very strange one indeed: we are often to be found sitting alone in a room, hunched over a laptop typing away for day after day, week after week, month and month and even year after year, all the while hoping that some of what we’re conjuring up in our befuddled, over-caffeinated brains makes sense to anyone else out there. And then, one brilliant, happy, wonderful day, something happens that makes all the deleting, swearing, sweating, cursing and crying worthwhile: we see our book in a BOOK SHOP!!!! This is exactly what happened to me today when I walked nervously into my local branch of Waterstone’s and Borders, hoping to glimpse  a cover or two (hell, or three or more!) of my latest book, A Spoonful of Sugar. And there it was!!! At such moments the desire to rush across the shop floor, kiss said books and fall the floor crying clutching a handful of the beauties is pretty overwhelming, and but thanks to a radio interview I was dangerously close to being late for, I merely managed a small skip and a jump, a cheesy grin, and I was out of there again.
                                 If you want to join me in my little celebration – and find out how to give your kids a proper childhood while you’re at it – then you can do so by visiting any branch of the aforementioned book shops, as well as Tesco, Sainsburys and of course going onto Amazon, and purchasing your very own copy of the magnificent A Spoonful of Sugar – Old-fashioned Wisdom for Modern-day Mothers. Quite simply the most important book about childhood and parenting to be written for a very, very, VERY long time! Enjoy.
Liz x

Starting Out. « Lizfraser’s Weblog